From : Dennis Owen
My friend Tom McLeod trains people to prayer walk in our city. In one of our multi-church prayer walking training sessions, he had taken a couple from another church in support of another church’s target neighborhood. Having divided up all the streets in the neighborhood and parceled out the maps according to 2×2 pairings (see Luke 10:1), our “sent out” ones were a mix of practiced prayer walkers and the newly trained. There was a lot of uncertainty still. Having emphasized that we were going to be doing a lot more “talking to God about our neighbors” than any “talking to our neighbors about God” there was confusion and doubt as to our effectiveness. We were to trust God and look for men and women of peace.
As a trainer, Tom took his pair of the un-officiated and led them off to find their target streets… praying along the way with declarations of God’s peace over houses and addresses. He pointed out and demonstrated that, what we could see about each home could be incorporated into our prayers. A yard with bicycles strewn about could include prayers for the children and their education and “being trained up in the way that they should go”. Trees ripe with fruit could elicit prayers with gratitude and thoughts of sharing with neighbors (no not us). Houses that were in disrepair fostered prayers that focused on potential needs and connectedness. It’s easy once you start, and the Lord opens our eyes and hearts to all manner of people’s needs….physical and spiritual.
We were intent on not creating our own introductions, but trusting that the Lord would initiate (beyond the “hi and how are you’s and other similar friendly greetings”. So we were trusting that those whom the Lord would lead, would respond and initiate on their own. What we didn’t expect was to be chased down the street.
One man we noticed we noticed was standing and talking in a group next to a house we passed by in silent prayer. He was heavily engaged in conversation with his arms moving in concert. We made it half way down the block when we were startled by yelling and hollering from behind. As we turned we realized that this man was now running after us intent on catching up before we rounded the corner. He called out again, “Hey!! Are you guys praying?” We hadn’t meant to be so obvious. He caught up the rest of the way and breathlessly announced that he needed prayer himself. He had recently wrecked his truck and he needed God to replace his vehicle. He asked if we knew of a well-priced match for his needs. We answered his questions and listened for a while before we prayed to the Lord on his behalf. We exchanged some contact information and went our way to complete our prayer walk. The two trainees were now convinced that God knows what he is doing. In the debriefing, we had several similar stories of cars stopping and people asking for prayer seemingly out of the blue.
The follow up to this story is that there is a follow up. The man’s name is Donnie and as it turns out he has been a fixture in the neighborhood for the better part of two decades. He and his wife had provided foster care for over 300 children before settling on raising five adopted children. Donnie was going to need that prayer more than he realized. His wife suddenly passed away unexpectedly only a few weeks later. Donnie was not the more grounded of the two and was quickly breaking down under the weight of responsibility.
Many people from our local church were able to reach out to Donnie and the kids and in the process, Donnie accepted the Lord as I walked him through the four spiritual laws. He joined our discipleship group (for men only) and soon he had many men pouring into his life. 30 days of sobriety turned to 80, 90 and 100. In that time also, my wife led the second oldest daughter to the Lord on our front porch swing and has been working with the other girls teaching them to cook healthy meals. Donnie’s oldest daughter (16) is now very interested in Jesus and wants a relationship too. The youngest children have joined the church’s Say Y.E.S. program for kids and are getting loving involvement and character training. Yes…..Donnie is very glad he ran us down that day…and we are too. And it all started with prayer and trust.
>>>KEEP SCROLLING for RELATED CONTENT & COMMENTARY, RESOURCES & REPLIES