Freewrite - Prayer Question for Doors into Prayer

What first drew you to prayer? Has that original experience affected your prayer life? Have you been affected by a prayer mentor? In what way?

My original experience of prayer was as a very young child praying that familiar prayer that even kids from non-church going homes prayed at bedtime:

Now I lay me
Down to sleep
I pray the LORD
My soul to keep
If I should die
Before I wake
I pray the LORD
My soul to take.

I remember having several questions about this prayer:
1) Why was I praying about dying at six years old? Do we really all have to die?

It scared me. It was weird to think that someday everyone I loved and cared about would die. 

2) Who was this LORD guy, and why would he take my soul? 

We did not go to church. I knew Christmas was about the birth of Jesus, but I could not have told you what Easter was about. I just wore an Easter bonnet and a new dress went to the home of one of my Swedish relatives and ate ham. I had no clue it was about the resurrection of Jesus. I also did not know the LORD was one of the names for God. I didn't understand the whole "taking a soul" thing. 

3) What on earth is an "A LAY ME"? I did not know it was "I lay me." :)

I remember asking my mom as she was exiting my room one night after one of those prayer times: Do we really all have to die? 

Her answer was direct and to the point, "Yes, Carol. We all have to die."

Then she left, and I did not "lay me down to sleep" very comfortably that night. I was petrified. I did not want my family to die! How horrible.

That was my first memory of prayer. 

Forward to 1969 when I heard a man at Green Oaks Ranch in Vista, CA say that we should be as excited about the Bible as we are when the Sears Catalog Christmas Wish Book comes in the mail because the Bible had the greatest gift God has ever given the world: JESUS. 

He shared a verse:

For the wages of sin is death, 

but the free gift of God is eternal life 

in Christ Jesus our LORD.

Romans 6:23

So there was an answer to two of my questions! (I had already figured out the "A LAY ME" one.) 

"Yes, Carol, we all have to die, but there is eternal life in that Christ Jesus our LORD!"  I got who that "Lord guy" was!

My mom answered the first part, but she did not know how to answer the second part because she had not yet met the "Lord guy."

Long story short, I closed my eyes and had a true encounter with Jesus. I saw a vision of him, hands outstretched, and asking me to come. So I came forward. I prayed that "sinner's prayer" but it was genuine. He had answered all my questions. So, I knew that he answered my sincere prayers. 

I had emergency prayer when I was hiking without ropes and alone (because Tammy had hiked on ahead of me and out of sight or ear-shot) when I was in 8th grade and slipped down into a large crevice (I don't know if this is the word for this - it was a space between a boulder and a large rock wall.) which would have been to my death, but I was caught where both rock wall and boulder protruded. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. No one there to hear my cries. The sun was setting. Would anyone know I was gone? 

So I prayed, and I was stuck for quite some time. But it was almost as if this divine hand had come down and pulled me up and out of that stuck place. I ripped a huge hole in the seat of my pants, but I was alive! This was the "emergency" prayer that Griffin talks about. 

I learned early on that there is a God who hears and that He is GOOD. So, I love talking to him. There are other stories. So many stories. When I told him that I didn't believe that the stories in the Gospels were true, but I asked him to "help my unbelief," and there was an immediate parting of the clouds on a "raining cats and dogs" kind of day in Oregon. 

I had many prayer mentors. I was in a ministry that made prayer a major priority.  (I tell my husband I should have been a nun, but he is glad I am not [not to mention I am not Catholic].)

Prayer was just a natural part of my growing up in the LORD. Days of prayer were just normal for my community. Weekly, early morning meetings with 50 people showing up were also normal (our Korean brothers and sisters said we did not pray enough though - churches were filled EVERY morning for prayer). 

We are in a prayer soaked missional community now. After a hard conversation on the eve of Christmas Eve, my friend, who recently came to Jesus out of Islam, prayed over me because that is what has been modeled to her from the day she met the people in our community, even before she became a follower of Jesus.  

The next day, I was soaked in prayer again, surrounded and hands were lovingly put upon me because that is just part of the ethos of our community. My husband prayed me to sleep that night. 


This got too long, pressing the freewrite button.