Out of the Blue

For seven years I've been doing Balloon Entertainment at Restaurants. On one (and only one) occasion I had a customer aggressively trying to evangelize me. But never before tonight has anyone simply asked me, out of the blue, whether there was anything they could pray about for me. But tonight -- at a time when my heart has been heavily weighed down with some of the decisions we may be facing (whether to lay off staff, give up our facility, merge with another church, or close our doors entirely) -- someone did.

After asking me for a Texas Longhorns balloon hat, she asked if she could pray. A little stunned, I said, "Well, actually, yes..." and told her about the state of our church. She and the eight or ten others at her table stopped their conversations and prayed for us. They prayed for our finances, for our attendance, for our spirits and our weariness, that the community would look on us with favor, and that God would bless us...

It's nice that people in another church are praying for us. But even more significant to me was this: Given the fact that I've never been asked that before, I have to believe that God either supernaturally prompted her to ask tonight or that she's a person who does that everywhere she goes and God supernaturally provided for her to be there on this weekend when I most needed that encouragement.

What it said to me is this: God still cares about Bridgeway. He has things under control. He didn't send them to pray that we would join them, but to pray that we would make it -- and not just get by, but prosper. I thought I'd been trusting God all along -- but I think He's calling for even more.