This morning as I was worshipping the Lord, he told me to write about how prayer changes lives. As I sat there, and asked him how, he said, ‘tell your story’.
In 1987 when my oldest daughter entered kindergarten, I met a wonderful Christian lady named Joyce. There was something different about her. She was always saying ‘praise the Lord for this and that’. Frankly, I thought she was a little ‘wacky.’ She invited me to Bible Study, to Church. I wasn’t interested in God; I kept saying ‘no thanks.’ I think I went to a pancake breakfast once. She shared her life with me. All the while she was praying for me. She actually had several ladies and her Pastor praying for me as well. I wanted nothing to do with God, but there was still something about her….
At the end of the school year, Joyce moved several states away from where we were living at the time. I still wanted nothing to do with God. Then about a year and a half later, my life began to fall apart.
My husband and I became increasingly unhappy and were thinking about separating. We had 3 beautiful daughters at the time and things looked very grim. One fate-filled night in April of 1989, or should I say ‘faith-filled’ night, as I sat on my living room floor, sobbing, I cried out to a God I wasn’t sure even existed, “Okay, God if you are really out there, save me, save my family!”
The very next day, I met Jesus Christ!
I had a phone call from my husband, and then an encounter with the Holy Spirit right in my kitchen! I was overwhelmed with a peace that I knew came from God. I knew that the phone call from my husband was an answer to my prayer, it was God responding to my cry. I called my sister, who was a Christian and asked her “how do I get Jesus?” She told me about asking Jesus into my life, so I hung up the phone and asked him to be a part of my life then and there. I was so impacted by the encounter with God in my kitchen, that I went from a skeptical, non-believing, Christian mocking woman, to someone who knew that Jesus Christ was the son of God. This was a Monday, and I couldn’t wait to get to Church the following Sunday to find out who this God was who had so dramatically entered my life and, literally, my home.
When my husband and I went to the Church on Sunday, I chose my friend Joyce’s Church. It was the only one I knew about, it was right around the corner from my house and there was just something different about Joyce.
God spoke to me in the Church service and as we were leaving, I introduced myself to the Pastor as he was standing outside greeting everyone. He asked me how I came to be here and I told him I had known Joyce. He remembered. He said that he and a group of others had prayed for me for months.
I met Jesus Christ because people were praying!
Joyce and the ladies in her Bible Study group were praying for me, the Pastor of the Church and some others were praying for me, my husband who hadn’t prayed for many years began to pray and ask God for his help, and I cried out to a God that, at the time, I wasn’t sure even existed and He answered!!
Deuteronomy 4:7 says “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him?”
Jesus Christ saved me and saved my family all because people prayed.
Tell me something, when was the last time you prayed for Jesus to visit people in their homes through the power of the Holy Spirit?
When was the last time you prayed for people you know and even those you don’t that God would answer the desperate cries of their hearts and they would know it was him?
Is there someone you know either in your family, at work, at school, perhaps in your neighborhood that seems ‘unreachable’?
No one is unreachable when it comes to our Lord. He is great at reaching the hard hearted and stubborn. No person, no problem is beyond His reach.
I have walked with Jesus for almost 18 years now, not as long as some but longer than others. My husband and I will celebrate our 30th anniversary this year—all praise to God! I love to pray. I love to pray for the impossible and see God answer. Nothing is impossible for him and I am living proof of that.
Let me encourage you, keep praying and don’t give up—people’s lives will be changed!
