It starts today.

A five-week prayer experience leading up to Easter, April 4.  A little over a month of prayer.

Yesterday I asked the Gathering Church to make a commitment to pray five minutes for five people, five days a week for the next five weeks. 

5/on/5.

Check out the instructions and the prayer card on this page.  You can do it too.

One of the ways we want to learn how to love people incredibly well is through prayer.  And in this experience we are choosing to be present to God on the behalf of others. 

I’m excited about it!

I’ve been doing something like this for a number of weeks, although not restricting myself to five minutes or five people.  I have to admit, it’s made me wonder about how well I’ve loved (or not loved) people before being more deliberate to pray for them, more disciplined. 

Usually, we pray defensively for people, responding to a need, praying for relief, help.  That’s great.  But, our best examples of praying for people in the New Testament are proactive prayers – not waiting until an emergency to care for someone.  Instead, caring for them because you can imagine something about God’s vision and love for their life.  For example, the apostle Paul prays a powerful and proactive prayer for the Colossians, people he has never met.  He asks God to fill them up with everything they need to know about God’s will so that they can live the life that Christ had in mind.  Colossians 1:9-14

So, like I asked everyone else to do yesterday, I set an appointment with God for this morning.  Once I made that decision, all I had to do was show up.  Except, my appointment got obliterated when I had to get to the school where we meet to retrieve some baby stuff that we had forgotten in the library.  But, God was pretty flexible and willing to reschedule our appointment.  So, we did meet.

Join in this prayer experience yourself. Listen to the podcast to get the ‘Training Session’ from yesterday, and click onto the 5/on/5 on this page to get started.

If you started today, way to go!