On Tuesday evening we had a prayer training evening, seeking to grow in becoming bolder to pray for others in non church environments. We looked at Jesus being our model for living a supernatural lifestyle and then went out on the streets offering prayer to folks we met. The buzz in the room when everyone came back with amazing stories was amazing! We’re excited about the journey God is taking us on and hopefully some of these stories will inspire you:
-------
Approaching people with the idea of loving them really shifted things for me. I went out with someone who’d not done it before and she was really encouraged to go out and to realise it wasn’t difficult to approach people.
We were walking along and got scared by a dead pigeon as did another lady (!) who started walking along and we got chatting to her and she let us pray for her and she’s already planning to come to GLB (our community event this Saturday), which is good. We also talked to some guy who was coming out of AJ’s shop about faith – he wasn’t up for prayer but we had a really good chat.
------
We went up to a guy – I felt a pain in my back, which sometimes is an indication that the person in front of me has a back problem – we went up and spoke to him for a while and it turned out that he did have a back problem. He didn’t really want us to pray for him but he opened up and spoke about some quite heartbreaking experiences he’d had. We came across another young man who was really open to prayer – the lady I was with was more confident in talking to him and approaching him – just a real natural.
We approached an Asda delivery man who was a Muslim. After an exchange she said “We just want to stand with you and if it’s ok we want to pray with you. We believe that Jesus is the son of God and we want to pray to him, to Jesus for you” to which the guy said yes! So we prayed for him, we prayed a blessing over his life, and for a new job that he was looking for.
We then went a our local barber shop. We prayed for healing for the barber who had pain in his left foot for a number of months and I spoke to a guy who after a chat accepted prayer. Afterwards he said ‘does your church do baptisms? And after saying we did he replied ‘yeah, I’m going to come check your church out’. And then I turned round to see Louis hopping on his left foot essentially, saying ‘my foot is completely better - I can’t believe it, the pain is completely gone!’ So yeah, it was quite an amazing time.
-----
We went out (with someone who was out for the first time our prayer backup standing at a distance) and offered to pray for a couple chatting animatedly in York Gardens. The man was very open to prayer and let us pray for his left blind eye and for fresh hope. He wasn’t healed immediately but was really blessed and thankful. The lady was not as open as him and wanted to share a lot of her painful life story. We listened for a while and then we had a prophetic sense of the name ‘Jonathan’ and whether that meant anything to her. She was quite shocked, and freaked out a bit, and said that her husband’s name was John and her son was Johnny. We explained that God often reveals things like this to let people know that He loves them and knows them intimately. She was much more open to prayer after this and let us pray for the pain she was having and breakthrough in tough situations.
For more stories about praying in our community check out this blog.
