Hump Day
Hey, everyone!
Wow! What an awesome, beautiful Hump Day! I'm writing this on Wednesday afternoon out on my porch and I think "Hump Day" is a new way people say "Wednesday". I guess the idea is that if you were sliding down the back of a camel, and it took a week to do it, Wednesday would be the day you go "over the hump". So they're starting to call it "Hump Day". But for Tina and me, since we generally take Thursday as our day-off, Wednesday is the end of the week. We started the week (at the nose of the camel) on Friday, the first day of our week. I guess that makes Monday our "Hump Day" and Wednesday is the day we get to the end of the week and slide off camel…or "Rump Day"!
Lately, I've been loving how we close out Mondays! A bunch of us have been getting together to just "pray it up!" We've been trying to focus our prayers on our town and Triple C, interceding and asking God to do the things only He could do. But when we start in on our missionaries all over the map, sometimes our hearts just burst for folks all over the world!
I read the weirdest thing the other day…
Seems this pastor in Jersey City, NJ had folks in his church write out their prayers to God in letter form and stick them in envelopes. Then, they were supposed to give them to him, for some reason. Some of the prayers were pretty goofy. One guy asked to win the lottery…twice! First, he wanted to win the $50,000 and then the $1,000,000 one.
Whatever.
One asked God to make a certain someone "leave me alone and stay off my back."
But lots of the prayers were really…real. From the heart.
Many were from people asking God to help them with folks in their lives and families who were struggling with addictions. One needed prayers from someone they loved who couldn't stop gambling. Some were from broken hearts who needed God to change someone who was being untrue to them...One unwed mother wrote that her baby was due in four weeks, and would God "make the father fall in love with me and give our baby a dad"…A teenage girl poured out her heart on yellow lined paper in curlicue pencil handwriting, begging God to forgive her and give her a second chance…"There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the mistake I made…"
Then the pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church died. And no one knew what had happened to all those written prayers.
Until hundreds of them washed up on the beach of Atlantic City many months later in a plastic bag.
Unopened.
Unread.
But the Father knew all about their soggy words. And the tears behind them. And the pain in each heart. And the answers He would bring. There is an awesome place in the Book of Revelation where the prayers of God's people are gathered by angel and put in a golden ball, specially used for incense before the altar of God in Heaven. Then John tells us that the angel took the censer containing all those prayers "and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake!" (Rev 8.2-6)
Awesome! Literally!
The prayers of God's people…even the dripping wet forgotten ones…become an explosion that makes the earth tremble! To gather with the people of God to intercede for others and for the advancement of the Kingdom of God in our town and in the world, is the most powerful way you could spend your time! Prayer, as they say… "It's the bomb"!
Join us on Mondays at 6:30 if you want!
And if you're reading this on Friday, Happy Rump Day!