Prayer. Rooms. Thoughts. Encouragement
The prayer week was a huge success, not that you can go too wrong with prayer, but people really responded to the pray wall and it was successful in encouraging everyone on the base. I found myself, every morning if I could, stopping by the prayer room on my way to breakfast to see what people wrote. It was so good that I had to think something up to keep it going, to keep the culture of encouragement running. So what I've come up with are these telegrams that people will write on and place in people's boxes. Look forward to seeing how it goes. It's really my heart to leave behind a culture of prayer on this base and to hopefully inspire people to think outside the box.
I must say the role of prayer and worship has really challenged me in my prayer life. It's funny how half the time I'm praying, I don't even realize it. What I'm finding is that I talk to God during the day a lot more than I realize and in different ways too. VBS has kind of indoctrinated this image into our minds as to what the posture of prayer looks like, but our talks with God take on just as many different forms as our talks with people do; we text, we email, we Facebook, Skype, call, visit, and some still mail ;). But think about all the different ways you communicate with God; your thoughts, writing, talking, singing....there's got to be more! If He's the God of communication, the same God that spoke the universe into being, then surely there must be more ways to communicate with Him than on bended knee with hands folded and eyes closed.
Paul says all the time in his letters that he never ceases to pray...., that he always prays.... And I always wondered, "How in the heck is that possible?!" But I think that half the time our mind is not conscious of our soul's conversations with its Maker. Think about when you are crying; you may not be praying allowed in words, but you are communicating with God. And what about when you are angry and maybe even sinning? Do you not also think that that is communicating to God; praying in some way? Prayers are not always reverent and holy, friends. If prayer is just talking to God then we talk to Him a lot more than we realize. I'm reading a book called "Unceasing Worship" and his point is that we are always worshipping something, sometimes it's God, sometimes it's ourselves, sometimes it's the world, but we never stop. I think we, in a sense, are always praying and that it's just a matter of what we are saying in thoughts, deeds and words throughout the day.
Funnily enough that's not at all what I intended to blog about but hey that's good so I'll leave it at that for now. Cheers! (not the drinking "cheers"; they say it a lot here in Australia lol...then again maybe they do mean the drinking cheers....I don't know. We don't speak the same language all the time.)