Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain
The copyright of following text belongs to Joe,
but as I don't think I could have wrote it any better
and it's partly my story too, read either original
Joe's blog entry from here
or just continue...:
"I jumped when I woke up this morning as the thought raced through my head – I’d slept in – and missed (not for the first time) my shift in the prayer room…slowly, sense crawled itself into my consciousness. “The weekend is over man; it’s Monday” it seemed to whisper. I calmly put my head back on the pillow and, from the comfort of my bed I thanked God for the many highlights during the last 48 hours of prayer…
I remembered:
- thinking we wouldn’t get the hours covered and then having to fight each other (playfully) to find time in the prayer room because of the high demand
- the writing, poetry, painting, using all the senses to worship and spend time with God
- Ella telling her story…“I was walking around the prayer room, and started praying. There was someone else in the room and I found it hard to focus at first, so I sat in the corner, and then lay down. I was praying for lots of things, but then I started to pray and ask God if we could see more of Him, and I asked God to give us a sign – not because we need one, or to show that he’s real – but just to know He was with us. I looked up the tower and the sun had been rising, as it moved I saw the light on the wall from the opposite window. The windows are round. But when the reflection came on the corner of the wall, the shape was not a circle. The room had distorted the reflection into a perfect heart shape. The frame of the window made a perfect cross in the middle of the heart. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I told my friend but he couldn’t see it. The only place where he could see what I had seen was if he lay down in the same spot where I had been lying”
- Andy Freeman and friends from Reading visiting. The hearty lunch and awesome conversation. Praying together. Sheena reminding us about old and new wells, which was great on it’s own, but when you add that to the fact that this theme has been an ongoing source of motivation for the past 7 years, starting when myself and Chris first met some guys from 24/7 prayer, and this one guy prayed the same prayer for us, way back then, and now to hear it again, it is Amazing.
- the youth event on prayer on Saturday night, watching a couple of inspirational 24/7 shorts and the great response to the challenges of living a life of prayer.
- the ‘random’ playlist on the music system strangely following people’s prayers and the scriptures they were reading.
- hugs, laughter, tears, the sense of love and oneness and community amongst believers from different churches
- the depth of the prayers spoken, cried out and whispered to God on the prayer wall in a mass of creativity.
- the challenge to devote ourselves to Christ and to be open and willing to be the answer to our prayers …
… and, I remembered us praying together, arm in arm, as we reluctantly closed the prayer room only a few hours earlier – that this was only the end of a small beginning; a preface for what’s to come. To ‘pray as if it all depended on God’ and now to Go and ‘live as if it all depended on us’ – to keep breathing Jesus in and Jesus out …
I took a deep breath. And as I drifted back off to sleep, I realised I had at first been wrong: the weekend may have passed, but this? … this is far from over."
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