Praying for This Beast Called Isis

We’ve all seen ISIS in the news and we wonder how it fits into our days, our days of meal planning and starting businesses and paying bills, and driving to playgroups and playdates and thinking that the families over there being displaced and terrorised would just love to be living ‘normal’.    Knowing that if it were me over there I would so want someone from over here praying and doing something, and desparately wondering why they weren’t. 

We’ve seen it and we just don’t know how to process it, how to fit it to our prayer times, it’s huge and our prayer times just aren’t.    I just want to scoop up a family and build them a home and give them a new life, but I can’t because I don’t even have money for my own home and my budget is stretched now.   I have big dreams for them, for me.

I knew things were bad, but somehow Ann Voskamp just words it so it can sink into our souls.  It sunk in deep and hard and nursing the baby to sleep for her midday nap I prayed hard, and I didn’t even know where to start.   What do you pray for when a beast this large is rising and clawing people in bloody massacres, wounded hearts and all hell and gunfire broken loose?  Because these little girls that are being taken as child brides are 9 and they're pregnant, and they are ripped open by men and discarded. 

God's using Ann Voskamp in this hour from her platform to call us awake, and He's asking me what I'll use my platform for.

God, how do I pray?  And an answer came from heaven, just quietly.   ‘Just choose one thing.’  I remember years ago at our old Baptist Church, one lady sharing how she was just praying protection over street children and asking God if her prayers were doing any good, and Him showing her Jesus hovering over a little group of children, protecting them, and she’ll only really know in heaven the full impact. 

So I choose one thing, my one thing is to pray protection over little girls, that God makes them invisible to the men, that He makes hiding places.

Can you pray for one thing?   What will it be?  

That families can stay together, they don’t have to be split and mothers choosing which children to take?

That they find miraculous provision of food and water?

God knows, ask Him your one thing, but if we all pray one thing, it makes a pile and we can make a difference one child at a time, because when it’s a sea of faces it overwhelms us, but when it’s one face . . .

And if you want to give money practically . . .