Archive for October, 2009

My Morning Vision Walk

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

In my last blog I told how I have been praying my vision every morning on my daily prayer walk since February 29, 2000. The other morning I was driving off to help take care of my new grandbaby and (of course) happened to have my camera in the car. As I got to the stop sign where I’ve prayed that prayer for so long, the sun was rising and the ground was still wet from rain. I pulled my car over and got out to try and capture the beauty of the scene. Here’s what I saw.

These October days when I’m praying my vision, this stretch of the sidewalk looks very different from this photo. At 7 AM when I reach this spot it’s still quite dark and the last few stars are slowly fading away in the graying sky. I’ve walked this stretch of sidewalk in all seasons, in darkness and sunlight and rain and fog.

There’s something incredibly comforting about giving your prayers their own special spot to thrive and grow and become real along a pathway you often follow. Someday, maybe after I’ve added another ten years to my vision prayer I’ll stand here and say with awe and amazement, “This is where it all began.”
The Sidewalk Where I Pray My Vision

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How I Traveled via Prayer to the Future

Friday, October 23rd, 2009
First Prayer Igniters Board Meeting

First Prayer Igniters Board Meeting

On my previous blog I wrote about time machines and going back into the past. This week I traveled the opposite direction and journeyed into the strange and mysterious frontier of the future.

My vehicle was a long and involved IRS form for tax exempt status that I needed to fill out for our new nonprofit, Prayer Igniters. Our ministry had its very first board meeting in September. As of yet we have no bank account and no programs running. It should be a cinch to fill out a form for a group that doesn’t have any past and very little in the present to report, right? Wrong. According to the form, we have a future to report!

The form poses oodles of questions like this “Do you or will you undertake fundraising?” If ‘Yes,’ check all the fundraising programs you do or will conduct.” Then they say, “Attach a description of each fundraising activity.” Hmm. And thus the form had me constantly embarking on mental journeys into what we will be doing in 2010 and 2011.

Actually, the IRS didn’t invent traveling into the future. Prayer did. The reason I happened to be filling out a nonprofit application in October of 2009 was because on February 29, 2000 I asked God to give me a mission statement. He gave me these words “The Way of Prayer for Many.” I wasn’t sure what way of prayer I knew that would help anyone else. But I began to pray the vision every day on my prayer walk. I can’t say that much happened for several years, but I kept on praying.

I eventually started speaking on prayer and keeping a log of prayer answers in my journal. Then my elderly father got sick in 2004 and died a year later. It seemed like a huge detour way off my prayer vision route. Only later did I see that Dad’s illness gave me priceless personal experience on how to pray during a crisis and how to pray when things don’t get better.

In 2006 I took a huge step and did a video study series on prayer. All of this time, the nonprofit idea was still completely off my radar screen. It didn’t go “blip” until one spring day in 2008 when I was having lunch with a woman from a huge church. She told me she wished that she could get more people interested in prayer. Bingo! I was meeting my first Prayer Igniter – someone who wanted to light a match to spark interest in prayer but who needed a little help, inspiration and support along the way.

So prayer makes it possible for me to report to the IRS what the future will look like in 2010 and 2011.

This brings us to an interesting question. What will you be doing in the future? In 2010? In 2011? I think I can help you fill in the blanks if you can answer this question. What are you praying as God’s future vision for your life today?

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A Time Machine that Really Works!

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Recently I was flabbergasted to learn that there’s such a thing as a time machine that works! And believe me, at my age I need one. It all started a few weeks ago when my husband Gordon opened the wrong attachment to an email and his laptop got taken over by a big ugly pop-up message that cried “Threat Warning!” in big red letters. It proclaimed that his computer was infected with nasty sounding viruses and the cure was to click through to a website and pay to get rid of them. This message continuously popped up and smacked Gordon in the eyes with repeated warnings meant to instill fear of cyber mayhem. I could hear his cries of aggravation clear from the other room.

This went on for three weeks. Finally our 19 year old son John arrived home from college and came to the rescue. He sat in front of the TV with Gordon’s computer on his lap and fiddled around a while. “Done,” John said. And the mean pop-up virus was gone.

“How on earth did you do that?” I asked John in amazement.

“Simple. I asked Dad when he first started having the problem, then I went back a few days before that and used the restore function to get the whole system to the way it was before the virus.”

“You can do that?” I asked incredulously.

“Yep,” he said, “On an Apple they call it time machine.”

I was dumbstruck. Finally someone had actually invented a time machine that can restore things back to the way they used to be. Not only is it an electronic version of the Fountain of Youth where you can go back to an earlier time, but it also erases any mistakes you made in the meantime and everything is back in order like you never messed up at all. What good news. Of course the bad news is that this time machine only works in cyberspace, not in real life.

Actually, a long time ago God invented the “restore function” when Jesus came down to earth. The most time defying thing that every happened in history was the resurrection of Jesus after He had been dead and buried for three days. Because of that great miracle, each day we can experience small but meaningful restorations. Maybe they won’t erase our wrinkles or make those angry words we said yesterday disappear, but our lives can still be renewed and rejuvenated. Words that start with the prefix re (meaning “to do again”) offer an array of divine possibilities for time travel. Repentance. Reconciliation. Redemption. Recommitment. Reconsideration. Restitution. Rebirth. And that’s the best news I’ve ever heard.

The whole Barber family last Christmas on computers

The whole Barber family last Christmas on computers

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Miracle Answer to Prayer in Afghanistan

Monday, October 12th, 2009

On Sunday in the church hallway I asked a friend about her grandson was is serving in Afghanistan. Her eyes got a little dewy as she said, “We almost lost him.”

She hurriedly went on to say that he and a handful of fellow soldiers had been in a remote outpost that was suddenly attacked by a much larger force of Taliban fighters. While in a gun battle, her grandson had his hand on his ammo magazine when it was hit by a bullet. In that split second he threw the magazine and it exploded.

My friend explained that she’d gotten this story from her grandson’s wife who lives on the West Coast. Yet even without the chance to ask her grandson any questions, one wonderful detail came through the grapevine loud and clear. Her grandson attributes his miraculous survival to God.

I’ve been praying for this young soldier for 3 years, ever since he entered the service to find a way to make a difference in his own life and in the world. There’s a maple tree on my prayer walk that belongs to this young soldier who’s really our young soldier because he’s serving us all. Of course our young soldier doesn’t really own the tree in my neighborhood. I just decided to adopt the tree as a signpost, as a place to remember to pray for him as I walk by every day.

One fall day a few years ago I picked up a red fall leaf and pressed it into my Bible as a prayer reminder when our young soldier finished basic training and deployed to Iraq. During the winter it was dark in the mornings and the tree was bare, but I’d picked the tree well because it was right under a street light and I could always see it. One day several of his comrades were killed in the line of duty. I prayed for God’s help and comfort for our young soldier. I’m sure it must have been hard, but he continued to serve faithfully.

Then there were times of thanksgiving for the good news by the prayer tree for our young solider. He came home safe and sound from Iraq, more mature and wiser than ever. He met a lovely young woman. They married and welcomed into the world the cutest baby you’ve ever seen.

Then this past summer it was back to vigilant prayer work for our young solider as he deployed again, this time to Afghanistan. Again prayers under the tree were for his safety and now also for strength and support for his wife and little one.

As many of you know, our own son Chris also served in the U.S. Army. He’s out now and doing well. While in, he deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq. We were worried, but we were able to get through because we were the recipients of innumerable prayers. No prayer is ever too small when your own young soldier son or daughter is in harm’s way.

And so on Sunday, even though we were in a busy church hallway, I stepped aside with my friend and we joined hands and bowed our heads and I said a prayer of thanksgiving to God right there on the spot for hearing our prayers for our young soldier.

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Like Bamboo Growing in Coastal South Carolina

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

This past weekend Gordon went in with a chain saw to do battle with a thick stand of bamboo at our beach house on Hilton Head, S.C. Let me begin with a disclaimer that we weren’t the ones foolish enough to plant this nuisance. Blame that on a former owner.

Sure, it’s pretty green stuff and gives a tropical get-away feel to the back yard. But it grows like crazy in the long growing season in the maritime forest ecosystem on Southern sea islands.

We don’t mind it when it stays about 15 feet tall. But a few renegade stalks always decide to shoot for the stars. Why not 20 feet? Why not 30? They get tangled up in the oak trees and get unstable and then flop over into our pool. And then there’s the thicket issue. A raccoon once died in there, probably trying to find his way out. We didn’t know it until the smell got really compelling. And then there’s the whole invasive issue. Bamboo puts out wandering shoots capable of taking over the whole yard. I’ve read that the only way to keep it contained is to bury a deep cement wall all around it underground.

So this weekend I stood on the back deck while Gordon ventured into our private jungle and started shaking stalks to identify which ones were the towering, pool-flopping ones. When he shook the right ones, I yelled and he marked the stalks with duct tape. (Make a note if you’re a guy collecting ideas on how to use duct tape.) Then Gordon revved his chain saw and cut the stalks. But they didn’t fall. Nope. Too tightly packed in the thicket. We had to pull and yank like the dickens to untangle the cut stalks and get them out.

Some of the stalks were as big around as my arm. We went to work clipping off the foliage. I started thinking that Robinson Crusoe could have made a good raft out of that big fat bamboo. Suddenly the bamboo didn’t look like such a nuisance after all. You could probably make something out of it, at the very least tomato stakes to use back home in Atlanta. So we laid a stack of long, green bamboo poles in the woods to dry out.

Gordon found a use for one pole right away. Earlier he had bumped his head on a low hanging oak branch he didn’t want to cut. So he took one of the fattest bamboo poles, drove a short pipe into the sand, stuck the bamboo hollow center over the pipe and propped the pole under the branch. He then drilled a hole through the top of bamboo and fed a wire through to attach it to the branch. Presto! Low hanging branch solved.

Today when people talk about “going green” bamboo is a true media darling. They call it a renewable resource because it grows so fast. You find it stubbornly creeping its way into flooring, into bed sheets and even into clothes.

So I’ve changed my mind about bamboo. In fact, if Jesus was around bamboo, he probably might have said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a stand of bamboo. It grows tenaciously and abundantly and soon the whole earth is covered with it.” Renewable. Inexhaustible. Growing. The perfect “green” words to pray for the kind of evergreen spiritual life I want to live.

Our private back yard jungle

Our private back yard jungle

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