prayer at moran park

My time as the pastor at Moran Park continues to be a learning experience.  God is doing some incredible things.  The other week I was getting ready Sunday morning to preach.  I was feeling a lot of distraction and couldn't get my thoughts together.  When the service started and we began singing, I kept feeling this sense of distraction among the people there.  I wrote it off and kept singing.

When I got up and began to preach I felt an even stronger sense that something was going on and prayed to myself as I started talking.  All of a sudden the mic cut out.  I quickly changed mics and continued talking for another minute or two.  Then the mic cut out again.  It was like God was trying to get my attention calmly and then had to cut out the mics twice becuase I wasn't getting it.  I shared that I didn't think I was supposed to be preaching that morning.  My first thought was, "Oh crap, but now what are we going to do?"  I explained to the faith community that I was going to pray and then invited anyone who wanted to come up front to pray to do so in the microphone.

As I was praying, I thought there was no way anyone would come up front and actually pray in front of everyone else.  To my suprise, when I finished praying there were 5 people in line to pray.  The doubts in my mind kept coming as I thought, "Oh no, I just gave an open mic to random people that i don't even know."  Despite my fears, the prayers were beautiful.  Powerful, raw prayers of a variety of struggles and praise came from the mouths of those who shared.  When the line got down to one or two people, a few more individuals would get up to pray.  This went on for 45 minutes.  If I would have waited, it probably could have continued all afternoon. 

I was going to be teaching on faith - how we are to go to God for more faith as he is the one who gives it, but that was demonstrated by those who came up to pray.  I was going to talk about how we need to be open and honest with our doubts and struggles so we can encourage one another towards deeper faith, but that was demonstrated too. 

God showed up in a powerful way and demonstrated what I was going to be teaching on.  It was unbelievable.  We have new people at Moran Park every week so I made a comment at the end, "If you are new to Moran Park, I'm not sure what to tell you.  I guess you never know what to expect here or how God will work."

God continues to teach me here to trust him, to listen to him, and to let him take control.  Pretty amazing things tend to happen when we do.