The Blessing of Prayer
Dear LTCC Family,
I have to admit when I first heard about “Prayer Triplets” I was a bit confused. Maybe it was a numbers thing. Not that I’m terrible at math, but I needed the numbers to make sense. With how many people am I praying? 2 + me = 3, not rocket science. How many times are we meeting to pray? 10 times. Over the course of how many days? 100 days. Got it, divide 100 days by 10 times and we meet about once every 10 days. Whew, simple addition and division, but it took me a minute!
Then, I questioned the practicality of it. How do I carve out time for another meeting? Who is going to be in my triplet? What do we do when we meet? My excuses were flowing!
What I didn’t question, though, was the need to pray. As one guy in my prayer triplet reminded us, “Prayer accomplishes things.” We don’t exactly understand how or why, but God calls us to pray, and He responds. God is all-powerful and can accomplish His purposes without us, yet He invites us into His work through prayer. Crazy.
I was blessed by the first meeting with the guys in my prayer triplet. It took a few text messages to come up with a time that worked for everyone, but we made it work with kids’ bedtime schedules, work commutes, and a multitude of other time commitments. We maybe didn’t have as much time as we would have liked, but we talked about the “Little Bit” principle. When meeting as disciples, pray a little bit, read the Word a little bit, and catch up with each other a little bit. The “Lotta Bit” principle is even better, but if we don’t start somewhere, (my) excuses will overtake my belief about the need to meet. What was really helpful, though, is we were provided a “Prayer Triplet Guide” that guided us through some time in the Word, what to pray for, and some discussion to get to know each other better relationally. The prayer guide allows you to do a “little bit” or a “lotta bit.”
Our triplet found, I think, that we were blessed to have worked through the barriers to meet. I know I was! One of the verses the prayer guide had us read was Proverbs 29:18:
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
We shared with each other where in our own lives we are struggling with vision to “see” where God is leading us. Then we prayed for clarity for each other. Personally, I felt deeply ministered to as these two guys prayed for me. We also asked the same question about LTCC. Where is God leading us as a church? We prayed for God to help us “see” our role in what He’s doing in our midst. There was a sense that, though we can’t see everything, God is at work, and we are a part of what He’s doing.
The math isn’t as difficult as I tried to make it out to be. I want to encourage you to find two other people and begin meeting with whatever time you can find. You will be blessed as God invites us into what He wants to accomplish in us and through us.
For the elders and deacons,
P.S. It’s not too late to jump into a Fall Bible study or a Prayer Triplet...others may just be waiting for you to ask them to join you ;)
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