Your Prayers Matter!

August 30, 2013

By Esther Schaeffer, serving in Burkina Faso

I want to encourage you with two examples of how God answers when you pray for Alliance workers.

Recently, my husband and I attended a funeral in our community. After the service, we drove several people to the gravesite, including a pastor from another district. When we decided to go home instead of attending the traditional meal served by the family of the deceased, I realized the visiting pastor would miss the meal as well.

Wanting to give the pastor some money to buy something to eat when he returned to the church where he was staying, I reached into my purse for some change. There was nothing.

I dug until I found a bill to hand to him and was a bit taken aback when I realized it was quite a large bill. I’m sure my husband was, too. I handed the pastor the money, and we dropped him off at the church.

Prayer in any Language

As we drove away, one of our passengers told us an interesting story. She said that the visiting pastor had received a call on his cell phone. Assuming she wouldn’t understand him because he was from a different people group, he had responded to the caller in his language: “No, I don’t have any money. I don’t know what I am going to do.”

Our friend immediately began to pray that the Lord would provide the money needed—likely for a return bus ticket to the pastor’s village. We realized that it was during this friend’s prayer that the Holy Spirit prompted me to give the pastor some money.

The Spirit Knows

The second incident took place in the women’s prison where our team has begun a new ministry. When one of our members, who had planned to share a biblical meditation, didn’t show up for a recent visit, the task fell to me.

I had several minutes to prepare. When I opened my Bible, it fell to Ephesians 6: “Put on the whole armor of God.” This is more of a passage for Christian women, I thought.

I began looking at some notes in the back of my Bible and found some scribbles of mine—on Ephesians 6.

I am going to talk about Peter being freed from prison, I determined. But when I looked for the appropriate passage, Ephesians 6 again came to mind.

Following His Lead

Suddenly, it was my time to speak to the group. I read Ephesians 6 in Jula, praying for the Holy Spirit to bring to light what I should share from the passage. That’s when I read the translation for verse 12: “We do not fight with people.”

I stopped and asked the group: “You aren’t fighting with people, are you?”

I went on to explain how Satan confuses us into thinking that people are our enemies and concluded my talk by describing how Jesus wants to free us from sin. When I finished, there was silence.

Finally, one of the more challenging inmates, who had told the others not to listen to us, broke down and said, “Please pray for us. This morning two of the women got into a fist fight, and the guards had to be called to break it up.”

Then she looked at me and said, “It was like you knew exactly what happened here today and what we needed to hear.”

One of our team members quickly explained that it was the Holy Spirit who had given me the message. She told the women that they, too, could experience this same Holy Spirit in their lives.

It was a breakthrough for which we had been praying since beginning this ministry. Thank you. Because of your continued prayers, the Lord is using us in ways that we could never have imagined!