Categories: uncategorized
Date: 11 March 2007 11:42:45
The idea of doing a 24 hour prayer event sounds great - as long as you're not planning to do all 24 hours. Then, it sounds like an endurance feat. For me, an hour of prayer sounds really good. So when our church announced they were having a 24 hour prayer session and needed people to sign up for hour slots - as many or as few as you wanted - I was quite keen to give up an hour for it. Of course, being me, I forgot to sign up. But thankfully, my friend D had the smart idea of signing our cell group up for a slot. Well done, D.
However, when he told us about it last week, I noticed two slight flaws in his otherwise amazing plan. Firstly, he'd put us down for a midnight slot. Not ideal after you've been at work all day, but at least I could still be in bed at a relatively sensible hour. Or, I could have been, if it weren't for the fact that D had volunteered us for 3 hours. "Well, I thought, we're all young, we've got that youthful stamina on our side", he'd explained, in the manner that only a 22-year-old who's doing an MA and thus doesn't really have any strict time he has to get up can explain it. "Huh, well, I'm an old fart and will probably flake out in the middle of it", I thought to myself. But it seemed like A Good Thing To Do, so on Friday night I had a quick nap for just under an hour, and then woke up at 11.30pm to go out and pray.
Part of my concern about falling asleep in the middle was because I'd been fearing that the whole set-up was going to be quite "sit-quietly-in-a-circle", which with hindsight was always fairly unlikely with our church. Instead, there were stations set up around the room for specific areas of prayer - for the world, for the city, and for ourselves and others. The best part of it, however, was having so many folks there from one of our sister churches. That congregation is almost entirely made up of (mostly French-speaking) Africans living in the city, and they hold all-night prayer sessions about once a month, so this was nothing new to them. But their enthusiasm was infectious. Even if the African worship style isn't to your particular tastes, you can't deny that it's lively - and at half two in the morning, that's just what you need. I'd heard some of the songs before when we'd had shared services with them, but there was one that was new to me which was absolutely fantastic. It simply involved them singing, "Jesus is the winner man" and then repeating "the winner man, the winner man, the winner man" over and over. Then for the next verse - yep, you guessed it - "Satan is the loser man... the loser man, the loser man, the loser man". There you have it - the gospel in two lines. And it was quite fun to be calling Satan a loser, too.
Anyway, with all our prayer and worship stuff, everything kind of flowed into the next bit, and 3.00 came and went, and my friends who I was relying on for a lift home asked if I minded if we stayed a bit longer, and - much to my shock - I said no, I wouldn't mind at all. So we stayed and prayed and danced and sang and finally, when they called a brief break at nearly 4.30, we left them to it. I hadn't expected to be able to pray for three minutes, never mind three hours... but it's funny what God can do when you just allow Him to get on and do it.