Join us in prayer
In a change to the advertised post 'The 'dream' house, I wanted to invite you to join us in prayer. If you have read even some of my blog posts so far you will know that this is not an ordinary situation. We are planning to move to Camden in a few weeks time with no way of renting or buying a home, with our 3 kids and cat in tow...! Not an ordinary thing to do BUT often God calls us to go against the grain and this can feel uncomfortable.
At different points in the last few weeks, I have been awake in the night and have found myself laying there thinking; I should get up and pray. But then I have fallen back to sleep. Increasingly I have been feeling that we should be 'doing more' in prayer and felt God say to me that we should pray through the night specifically for a house. Hmmm. Tim and I are both cream-crackered at the moment and so I buried that thought as I definitely did not want to pray through the night. But it niggled at the back of my mind quite irritatingly.
Do you recall that I am reading through the book of Isaiah in the Bible at the moment and that I was finding that it was speaking to me very directly about our journey? Well, I am up to Isaiah 62 and read this last Thursday;
I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem...
Ohhh man...God really does want us to pray through the night, but we are so tired. How on earth are we going to do that? So I shared my thoughts with Tim on Friday and he laughed. And we agreed that seemed to be what God was saying but weren't sure we could face being up all night.
And then on Saturday my friend, Sue shared with me that she had been praying for us while we were away in Canada the previous week and felt that they should be doing more in prayer. She said that they were praying for us regularly but felt that more perseverance in prayer was needed and that she had even thought that we should pray through the night! OK, OK, God, I am listening now!! I was also with Penny and Ann and Penny pointed out that the first line of the Isaiah passage talks about watchmen on the walls - and how do watchmen function? Well, they would have taken shifts to keep watch through the night...so rather than us needing to stay awake all night ourselves, we could invite others to take shifts. Amazing!
Can you see how clearly God has spoken to us about this? First He nudges me and then when I don't listen, I read it in His word and then when I still don't do it, He gets someone else to tell me!! Amazing!
So, the long and the short of it is that we will be praying this coming Friday from 8pm until 8am Saturday morning. I have broken the night into half hour slots. I stood up and shared this at our church on Sunday morning and had produced some sign up sheets in case there were people who wanted to do it. I was very touched and overwhelmed that over 30 people signed up to pray at different times through the night for us. Amazing!
Do you fancy it?
Here's the thing...if you have been reading my blog posts over the last few weeks (thank you!!) you may feel stirred to join in with us on Friday night. This is how it works;
- There is absolutely NO pressure to join in and pray
- If you do want to, simply copy and paste the link below into your browser and put your name against a timeslot
- It doesn't matter how many people pray in any time slot
- We are praying for one thing and one thing only - that God would provide us with a house in the Borough of Camden.
- If you feel God has given you a picture, word, encouragement of any kind when you pray, just send a Facebook / Twitter message to me.
Here's the link;
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vYrbEvqlRXqm85AnW3BuVcqwg0C4jrN2DdlsnQM6crI/edit?usp=sharing
How to pray
If you are unsure how to spend half an hour praying for one thing, here's some suggestions...
- If you are a Christian and you have the gift of a spiritual language, you can use that to pray
- If you haven't done a lot of praying before, it's just like having a conversation. Short simple prayers are just as effective as long-winded ones; 'Lord, please provide Tim and Annice and their family with a house in Camden' is just fine.
- I have previously shared how God spoke to me about an Isaiah 35 house - you could pray some of those things
- Reminding God of all of His promises to us so far and thanking Him for all He has done so far is often a good place to start.
- 'Pushing through' in prayer can feel a little hard sometimes...when you start to feel like you can't pray any longer, keep going a bit longer and that's the pushing through bit!
I hope you hear the heart behind our plea for prayer! I have had to get over my qualms about not feeling important enough to ask. We really feel that this call to pray through the night for a house has been prompted by God, so that's what we're doing. Simply being obedient to what we feel He has said.