Our Pastor at Summerdean has been preaching a series on prayer over the last few weeks and he brought up a point that had never occured to me. He was preaching on Luke chapter 11...
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray..."
I have read this verse many times but it never occured to me that this was the ONLY thing they asked him to teach them. That struck me as really odd...I mean, if I had the opportunity to ask Jesus to teach me something, ANYTHING...sadly enough it would probably not be how to pray. They could have asked him how to perform miracles, how to heal people or raise them from the dead, how to evangelize...they could have asked him anything but they asked him to teach them to pray. Pastor Stafford pointed out that when Jesus prayed to God, AMAZING things happened and the disciples had seen this! Now, I definately believe that! I believe that God performed miracles over 2,000 years ago when people prayed and I believe that he still does because I have seen it! We have such an AMAZING priveledge of talking to God through prayer but I don't think we always believe he answers us. So our Pastor challeneged us to pray for something over a two week period and to see what God does...so immediately two prayers came to my mind. I prayed for a woman at our church that has been sick. I am not particularly close to this woman but God has really laid her on my heart lately so I felt like he was asking me to pray for her. I also prayed that God would provide the money that we need to complete this adoption. We were praying we would get a referral for a child soon but we did not have the money to accept a child so my prayer was that God would provide the money. So I prayed everyday for these two things and God did something AMAZING!
The next Sunday, I went to Sunday school class and our teacher announced that next week's Sunday school offering would go towards our adoption. I was so excited!!! And I kept praying...
I was almost through the second week of praying and Adam, Eva, Eli and I were out on a Friday afternnoon and ran into the lady I had been praying for. This is first of all exciting because for awhile she was not leaving her house except for doctor's appointments so I was really surprised to see her out and not going to see a doctor! The next thing she told me was that she could feel my prayers working! Now she has not been completely healed yet and she said she still has some more testing to go through but I am praising God that she is feeling so much better and that she knows it is because of God! I am continuting to pray for her healing!
On the following Sunday, two weeks to the day that I had started to pray for the adoption money, our treasurer at church, David, walked up to me and handed me an envelope with a check in it. I didn't even look at it right away because I had turned in a receipt for some cirriculum I had purchased for the church so I just assumed that was what the check was for....but when I opened it, it was written to Adam and I for $1,010! That was a little more than the cirriculum cost (ha ha) so I ran to catch up with David and asked him what that was for and he said, "someone donated it to you guys for the adoption." Tears just started to run down my cheeks and I asked him if he could tell me who it was and he said, "I was told to tell you it was a gift from God."
Later that morning, Pastor Stafford was preaching on prayer again and he said that if our prayer had not been answered yet, KEEP PRAYING! So I kept praying this past week that God would heal her and provide the money that we need.
So I went to church yesterday and I was talking to a few ladies when David walked up to me again and handed me an envelope. This time he stuck around for a minute because I am sure he knew what was coming :-) I asked him what the envelope was and he said, it was the offering from our Sunday school class. Let me just preface this with the facts, we are not a very large class. There are on average 9 families represented in there and all of them are right around my age. Most of them have small children and none of them are wealthy (I hope no one in my class takes offense to that! We are all blessed with everything we need but I would not consider any of us to be wealthy by American standards.) So I had not thought about how much money would be in that envelope but looking back if I had to guess, I would have said probably around $300-$400 would have been a very generous amount. So I opened up the envelope and the check was for $2,880! I cannot explain to you how astonished I was! I began to weep because I do not know who gave all of that money but I know that each dollar that was given, was given sacrifically.
I am in awe of my God. We now have more than enough money to accept a child when the referral comes :-) I cannot wait to hold that little person in my arms and tell them how much our God loves them and that He performed miracles to bring them home.
We had $1,700 to put in our adoption fund in May when all of this started. We have prayed and prayed that God would provide everything we need to complete this and in less than six months, we now have $26, 308. I am going to keep praying because God still performs miracles!
