10 Days of Prayer

Each year before Good Friday our churches in Jefferson and Lebanon spend 10 days together, asking God to draw many people to himself during our Good Friday outreach. We write the names of as many pre-believers as we can think of on cards. Then we pray for them to come to Good Friday, to enjoy the meal and the worship service, and to eventually give their hearts to the Savior. During our prayer time we also spend time worshipping God in song, in reading scripture together, and in silence before Him. We always have great times together in God's presence and the 10 days of prayer is everyone's favorite time of year.

In these two churches we have very few believers but they have a heart for the lost and a strong belief that God answers prayer. In all we can identify only 25 believers in the two churches, including children. The low number is in part because we just sent 11 believers back to their town in Mexico to start a new church there (see our last post).

Each year we try to pray as many "man hours" as we can. One "man hour" of prayer is one person praying for one hour. That means that with only 25 believers, if we are going to pray 500 man hours of prayer each believer in the church would have to spend 20 hours in prayer during the ten days. In order to reach 1000 hours each believer would have to average 40 hours during the ten days. Adults work and the children go to school, so having any kind of high average is very difficult. Of course, we also have a few pre-believers spending some hours with us which helps reach a higher total. Well, we just finished and we were able to pray a total of 1625 hours! Praise God!

But that's not all! Our new church in Negritas, Mexico also had their own ten days of prayer. They wrote the names of every single person in their small town on cards and prayed for them to come to know Jesus. Only 11 believers managed over 1130 man hours of prayer. Now, THAT is commitment to prayer.

We are looking forward to seeing what God does!