Did you ever wish you could take back something you said? In my case there was a split second when I wished I could take back something I had just written. I had been working on an article yesterday morning, focusing on Jesus’ call to surrender, to die to self, to follow him. I had just written Jesus’ words in Mark 8:34: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Not even 30 minutes after I’d written that, Julio and I found ourselves in the middle of some very heavy situations. And my thought was, “I take back what I wrote. This is too hard.” There are always conflicts, tense situations, crisis in ministry and in life, but you don’t expect everything to hit at once. It was nothing critical or dangerous, but it was heavy and it was complicated. In the middle of lunch we just had to cry out to God in prayer and ask for wisdom because we just didn’t know what to do next. We reached out to friends and asked them to pray. In that moment we experienced God’s peace and presence in a very tangible way.

It was later that evening our ministry colleagues sent out a prayer update that talked about the difficult day they had, where things just seemed to be off, and how thankful they were for the people who were praying for them on their specific day of prayer in the Covenant prayer calendar. Prayer is such a vital part of our life as Christians and in our life together in community. We recognize the power of prayer and are so thankful for those people who support us faithfully in prayer. We ask you to remember us in prayer as we pursue God’s call to serve here. We ask that you would pray that we would remain strong in the Lord and that we would be a source of God’s love.  And we pray the same for you!