Praying for your Church Plant - Jeff Leake

A Time for Intercessors Is there a Better Time to Pray.

                 
           

                 
Photo by Olivia Snow.




           

             Is there a better time to pray?

                     Recently with a worldwide pandemic more of us had time to stay at home, slow down

                    take some time away from our regular jobs, and consider our priorities. People reported
                 
                    that the air seemed to be cleaner, the streets quieter, and they had time to reflect.

                    Naturally in the midst of all these people were anxious, confused, and in economic crisis.


                   Churches closed, we missed our friends, our services, and our liturgy. What many people
                   
                    came to realize over time was that we could still pray at home. We could pray on Zoom,
           
                   we could pray in our prayer closets, we could pray in our yards, and gardens and
   
                   balconies. The connection of Christians all over the world felt smaller when we realized

                 others were praying. When you are feeling really anxious and dealing with a totally

                as the popular term is a precedented event you need structure to keep you from flailing off
             
                off in all directions. Prayer provides us with this kind of bookend structure to the day, as
             
               well as stepping into the timeless readings of the Psalms which seems to have seen depths of
       
              struggle well before our particular issue arrived. The Psalms give us perspective.


             We may not think of ourselves as Intercessors. When I think of Intercessors I think of these

             powerhouses of women, who you just know are prayer warriors and not the person like me

            who still might drop a ## when I drop something, stumble or become irritated.


           I wanted to be one of these women, but I was also quite frankly from some bad experiences

          with let's say Haiti and its spiritual warfare, a bit nervous about hanging up a spiritual shingle a

        and coming out with a label I could in no way represent. So because at the time I was a busy

        working Mom in pre=COVID days, I found periodically I would get dropped with a burden for

       one person and cart them around something like a donkey carting a load up the mountain. They

      simply show up for prayer, as if assigned and it could be a few days, a week or a month or a

     season. When the time was over, the burden would lift, like a donkey arriving at a location

   and being relieved of a load, and there would be a long rest time before the next one. As this had

   occurred for family members from a fairly early age, it was simply a shift over into others.


 It didn't sound like Intercession to me. It was more like being a Prayer Donkey. Doing a bit of

reading on it as I was more familiar with lighter, just awareness that someone might need prayer

like we all due in just about any church on the planet, where prayer is offered, it was one person

at a time. One load up the mountain, or around the grainer mill. Not elaborate, not fancy, not even

what I would call super-spiritual because it was very distinctly labor. Load sharing. Then gone.


Doing some reading it seems that there are different kinds of intercession and intercessors along with

models and people who we identify with as people of prayer over time. There are Biblical Types and t

there are historical types.


Think for a moment about some prayer role models you have;

Biblical, Church History, or Personal.   Maybe it was your Granny, maybe someone in your childhood, maybe someone down the street, perhaps someone in a story or scripture.

List 3-5 you would like to reflect on.

What made them memorable, why did they influence you, what did you notice about their relationship with God.