Prayers for the Persecuted

Both my daughters are napping and the silence during the daytime is kind of magical...couple that with the fact that I'm in a hotel room in which I did not have to make the bed or wash the folded towels and I feel even a bit giddy. Being away from the daily duties of life has given me time to enjoy my family, actually talk to my husband, and give clarity to some things that have been foggy. The reason for our trip is to represent our ministry to the persecuted church at a missions conference. I am mainly taking care of the girls while Brian talks with students, but both Brian and I came to an interesting conclusion yesterday. All the other missions vendors here represent ways for students to GO and serve. This is huge...such a NEEDED thing for young people to grasp and get a hold of. Living out the gospel can be done in so many ways and through so many organizations and never before has our world been more reachable and connected than it is today. Our ministry is something alltogether different though. While we have dozens of ways for people to get involved in helping minister to and assist the persecuted through financial giving, our main purpose is to create awareness to their plight and ask Christians to pray....and that's it. I have wrestled with this to be honest...I am such a task oriented person...I want to DO something. Buying a goat for the wife and children of a martyred believer or sending a wife or daughter to a vocational school feels sooooo much more important than getting on my knees and asking God to give them courage and safety. Frankly, people ONLY respond to our ministry once we start talking about what we're doing rather than just how they can pray and so we often find ourselves ignoring this huge aspect alltogether. This is especially true when we're conversing with people about how our personal fundraising is going...my brain asks, "who wants to give each month to us financially when our primary job is to create awareness to this massive issue and then pray?" My thoughts have been challenged this week however by the ever wise Oswald Chambers. He said "We lean to our own understanding or we bank on service and do away with prayer, and consequently by succeeding in the external, we fail in the eternal, because in the eternal we succeed only by prevailing prayer." I was pondering that statement this morning and it just smacked me over the head. Yes, there are so many ways that we American Christians can GO and BE and DO and Make a Difference and those things are vital to the gospel. However, if we are not praying about every step...if we're not praying for every person affected by the things we see and hear...if we're not wearing out our knees by falling on them to petition our God; our work is done in vain. Yes, Brian and I have been called to connect American believers to those being persecuted around the world by giving them something they can do, but shame on us if we ever again see that as being more important than asking people to pray. And it is any wonder that prayer is such a difficult and neglected task??? Surely satan knows this but that blog post will have to come at a later time...my girls are awake ;)