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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
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Okay, I haven't written in a few days. I have been wrestling with angels again. Monday in Christian ministries Don Collins asked for prayer requests. I was going to ask for prayer for Granny, and I started crying. That was just a little embarrassing. Monday night Angi talked me into going to this prayer meeting. I had a really hard time. In this meeting, it's open for people to pray out loud if they want to. Someone will start singing, and we all join in. I wanted to ask the group to pray with me, but I was too afraid. Angi knew some of what was going on, and she reached over, took my hand, and prayed with me.
I was really frustrated because I felt like God wasn't listening to me. I wrote in my prayer journal and begged him to lift my spirit. Tuesday night I tried to sing and became even more frustrated. But gradually my spirit started to lift. I started praying out loud to thank God for hearing me, and I started crying again.
The group gathered around me and prayed with me. I have to say that a year ago I would never have felt comfortable in a group like this, but I really do.
Wednesday I went back, and I had finally snapped out of my depression. I had also written a song, so I sang it. There were a lot of prayer requests for broken relationships and unsaved friends. We got in groups of about five or six. A girl named Liz who was in my group asked us to pray that she could let go of the pain from an old relationship.
Last night Liz was doing better. She spoke up a lot, like I had started to do. Last night a girl who is student teaching told us about how unprepared she felt to deal with child abuse. She said she wasn't sure if she really wanted to teach now that she had been student teaching and had to deal with that. So we had a long prayer for the teachers. That, I think, is one of the most important things that has happened this week. We need courageous teachers who will care instead of run. Then a lot of us told about things teachers had done that had influenced us and things we wish they would have done. After that, the girl said she had decided she wanted to teach.
A week ago I wasn't about to go to one of these meetings. I have been in too many similar meetings that were for show. I have met too many people who were insincere. The only reason I went Monday was that I wanted to stay out of my room. Now I am so committed to and dependent on these people's prayers and desire so much to give back to them that I and Angi and Greg announced that we would be meeting tonight in a dorm lobby. The group usually meets in someone's house off campus. It has not been meeting on weekends because there aren't very many people. But the purpose is not and should be to have a huge number of people. It is and should be to pray and worship together, and I need it on the weekends. Angi and I have decided that we will keep this going next year, and we will try to get the staff to give us a big room so that we won't have to depend on people to offer their houses. Right now all the buildings are closed too early.
I have become pretty skeptical of a lot of things since I have been here, and that is wrong of me. I get too hung up on terms like "God's will" and THE Spirit's leading." I have forgotten how much power there is in prayer because too many people who didn't have time to listen to me just told me when I had a problem, "Pray about it. God will take care of it." But this is no fake group. Some of them are very charismatic, but they are real in that. The challenge I give myself is to be as real as they are, to know God as well as they do and to let everything I do reflect what I believe.
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