Music will save your life. That’s what choir director James Cleveland told Aretha Franklin as a child and later as an adult when she was struggling with her self-described demons. He encouraged her with the power of prayer to face down those demons and take back her life. Whether you call them life’s unexpected curveballs, challenges, demons or darkness, sometimes we only remember to turn to God in prayer when we need help. I struggle with this as well. My hope is to use our prayer beads to remind me to keep in constant prayer during all times of life. This includes when I feel God’s blessings shining on me as well as the difficult times when I am lost in the darkness.
The idea of praying without ceasing throughout each day can seem overwhelming, so try to remember there are many ways to lift things up to God. Prayer takes many different forms – it can be a song, it can be a kind act or good deed, quiet reflective time, holding a string of beads/prayer knots, or whatever prayer means to you. I’m going to challenge myself, as well as you, to look at prayer in a different way and embark on a commitment to making it part of your daily routine (if it’s not already).
We all know God answers prayers and does so in several different ways. A few days after I’d already submitted my first draft of this article for the eBlast, God provided me with yet another example of how sometimes our prayers are answered unexpectedly. During my Friday morning prayer time (again not always a routine of mine just yet), I asked God to help me say the right things for a work presentation due that day. Within a few minutes, a completely new set of work-related circumstances popped up leaving me panicked and stressed. In the end, God was able to help guide me through the situation and helped me realize God knows what we need and provides that, despite the fact it might be different from what we think we need or from what we might ask for through prayer.
We have some amazing prayer warriors in this church family and whether you know it or not, they’re constantly doing what Aretha Franklin tells us in her hit song, “I Say a Little Prayer (For You).” It reminds us how important prayer is throughout our daily lives, from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep at night. In James Cleveland’s final days battling heart failure, respiratory problems left him unable to sing and made it difficult to talk. On the last Sunday before his death, he told the church, “If I don’t see you again and if I don’t sing again, I’m a witness to the fact the Lord answers prayer. He let my voice come back to me this morning to praise with you all.”