Today’s post is written by a guest blogger, Amy-Jo Girardier. I was so taken by her creative and practical prayer idea I asked her to share it with you all.
Celebrating our 15 year anniversary, my husband and I had an amazing opportunity to go to Oahu for a few days. While we were there, we stumbled onto this extremely intriguing and challenging hike called Koko Crater Trail or as the locals call it, “Koko Head Stairs.” The number of steps totaled 1,050 from the bottom to the top of the ridge.
At the very top of the trail, stuck up in the branches of a tree, sat a banged up metal tool box that was locked. It said “Prayer Box.” There were scraps of paper provided and a pen was velcroed to the side. The box was so beautiful to me! I couldn’t get it out of my head the whole way down the trail. Who would put this up there? Does someone actually come up and pray for the prayers that have been put in? And most importantly, does anyone really put in prayer requests?
As we returned from our vacation, I was telling our then four year old son about the prayer box. We wondered what would happen if we had a prayer box in our neighborhood. Would anyone even use it? Would we be the weird neighbors? We had no idea, but we couldn’t shake that this was what we should do.
So we worked together with our friends and family to put together our prayer box.
We listed the instructions and reason for the prayer box on the side so that everyone would know that it was for our neighborhood. Then on Memorial Day weekend, we put it in front of our house. We prayed over it and waited. It took a few weeks before we started seeing neighbors use the prayer box.
Amazingly, when my husband walked around the block with our son, people shouted out that they had a prayer need to put in the prayer box. They wanted to know if he could pass it along.
We realized that we had put a steeple on our house just from placing the prayer box in front of our house. It has been an honor to pray for delivery drivers, amazon employees, neighbors, and visitors who eat at restaurants in our neighborhood and stop by to put something in the Gateway Village Prayer Box. It has been a special experience for our family as we humbly lift up prayer requests on behalf of our neighbors. Our sons get a chance to see that prayer is important, and they participate in loving our neighbors through prayer.
Originally, steeples were designed to cause people’s eyes to look across the skyline and up toward Heaven. What if you began to pray for opportunities to symbolically put a “steeple” on your home with your family? I’m praying for you as your family considers how to use prayer as the steeple in your neighborhood.
If you want to know more about how this prayer box works, check out this video our church made to share our story.
Amy-Jo Girardier is the Girls Minister at Brentwood Baptist in Brentwood, TN. She has been serving in this role for seventeen years and keeps pinching herself that this is what she gets to do for a job! She is the founding editor of www.girlsminister.com, a website created to connect and resource girls ministers, moms, and youth workers engaged in the girls ministry conversation. She is also the author of two bible study and DVD teaching series: Authentic Love and Faithful One.
In addition to ministry, Amy-Jo loves using technology, passing on her love of technology to others, drinking coffee, running, serving on staff with her husband Darrel, and hanging out with her sons Scout and Skylar.