What if… God were to call on women to gather together to pray for their family, their friends, the people in their lives, the people they love?

What if…

God were to call an army of women to engage in intense, purposeful prayer?

What if…

hundreds of women answered that call and came together all at once to pray in one massive all-at-the-same-time gathering?

What if…

every daughter, son, husband, friend, neighbor and work associate of every one of those hundreds of women got saturated in prayer?

What if we prayed all night?

What would happen?

Several years ago a group of ordinary women set out to find out what would happen if we had enough faith and determination to venture out of our comfortable beds and pray all night for the people in our own circles of influence.

We were excited, a little nervous, and filled with the hope that God would show Himself to us in tangible, powerful ways.

In ways that made sense to us, in ways  that we could understand.

And He did!

Since that first Night in Prayer, nine years ago, the number of women who come, pajama clad, with pillows and goodies and hearts full of faith, has snowballed.

Women want to come! They bring burdens too great to bear alone: people they love who need Jesus, messy relationships they cannot fix, co-workers who are cold to the Gospel, teenagers taking terrible risks.

We walk in the door, every one of us, with a great burden to see hearts rescued by the Redeemer.

We have seen those Impossible Prayers answered.  Really! We have seen our own minds and attitudes and thinking changed dramatically. We have seen healings of bodies and perhaps even more miraculous, healings of relationships.

More than anything, we have experienced Jesus in a way we never understood possible.

This year would you join us?

We are gathering at midnight on April 4^th, through 6 A.M. the next morning to pray all night together… for those we love, for ourselves, for God’s kingdom to come crashing into our messiness here and now.

We’ll be gathering both on the Westside and at Bridgetown and at Sunset this year. I’ll be leading on the Westside and Tammy and her team will guide you at Bridgetown, while Carmen and her crew oversee the women at Sunset.

Will you join us?

I love the LORD because He hears and answers

My prayers.

Because He bends down and listens,

I will pray as long as I have breath!

Psalm 116:1,2

(NLT)

Filled with His hope,

Diane

Click Here to sign up.

P.S. If you’ve been to a Night in Prayer in the past, would you leave a comment here? I think your stories might just give some women the courage to come…

On our journeys around the globe this week and next, I’m writing letters home to my girls about things I wish I’d packed and prepared for this life-long journey of marriage. These are four things I wish I’d known right from the beginning that would have better prepared me for this strange and exhilarating task of loving a man for the rest of forever.

Read #1 here.

Dear Girls,

Years and years ago I read a newsletter (this, before the era of blogs) in which Elisabeth Elliot challenged her readers to go one full week without complaining.

I couldn’t do it.

I’ve always considered myself a positive person. I don’t whine, I don’t complain… or so I thought. But I couldn’t manage even one 24-hour period without a negative complaint slipping out of my mouth. I just kept starting over every day until finally giving up.

What struck me is how ridiculous most of my complaints were.

I love rain… yet made complainy fill-in statements about the rain.

I was healthy and rested and well… yet made complainy fill-in statements about being sleepy or achy or something really inconsequential.

I absolutely loved being a mom at home with four great kids… yet made those mom-like complainy statements about how hectic or messy or stressful my life at home was.

Words, I have learned, are powerful definers of how we feel.

And yet we use them so carelessly at times, tossing out complaints just to fill in the space of silence.

What if we took seriously the weight of our words?

What if we decided to choose to guard our mouths and speak only lovely words?

What if we stopped complaining? Permanently?

“Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth

but only such a word as is good for edification,

according to the need of the moment.” Ephesians 4v29

What would happen if we did that?

My dear girls, I think it would make all the difference in the amount of joy we squeeze out of this life God has for us.

I think it would make all the difference in the amount of love we were freed to lavish on our husbands and friends and children.

And so, PACKING LIST ITEM #2 is simple.

Be Careful What You Say.

Because after a while, what you say is what you feel…

and then you become convinced of the untruth that you should never have said in the first place…

and eventually all this saying and believing can really wreck havoc with what you say… and what you feel.

It really is a matter of purposing not to say certain things, of putting a muzzle over our mouths, of choosing every one of our words carefully and wisely.

We have the ability to choose to speak only the Spirit-filtered truth because we are Spirit-filled people and that ought to make a difference in what comes out of our mouths.

I wish I’d known that when I married Phil. I’m trying to learn it now.

From my heart,

Diane

P.S. Are you learning the power of your own words? Have you noticed how hard it is not to complain? Do you know someone who is really great at using words to bring courage instead of carnage?

We’d all love to hear your stories.