PIU Day of Prayer

The  PIU annual day of prayer last Friday began early in the morning as a small group of students, faculty and staff braved the wind, cold (for Guam – note the sweatshirts everyone is wearing) rain and nasty vermin (trying to get away from the high waters) to meet for prayer in the pavilion in the center of campus.  We got to spend an hour praying for each other, the school, the islands, the community, missions and for the supporters of PIU. After the hour of prayer students and faculty headed to class and I headed to the office.

The next event was the Prayer and Worship Chapel. Michael Owen organized the chapel (one of his responsibilities is mentoring the worship team and I appreciate the fact that it really is a worship team – not just a music group) The theme for prayer chapel was based on the “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 5-7 so the worship, music, prayers and speakers were all organized around that theme. The chapel began with music interspersed through scripture readings from the Gospel of Matthew.

Mike asked a few members to share some thoughts during the chapel. My job was to summarize the Sermon on the Mount in 3-5 minutes. Jesus summarized it much better than I could when He said that He had fulfilled the law and that we fulfill the Law when we follow His command to “Follow Me!” Sarah Brubaker spoke on prayer and shared powerfully about how God had worked in her life in direct response to prayer.

Joyce shared from scripture and from her experience how, when you understand how big God is and how much He loves you, that there is just no reason to worry. As you can see she had a little help from Serenity who, as Joyce finished her talk, tripped over Charles’ guitar cord.

We then divided up into groups and prayed through several prayer requests

And sang a few more songs

In the evening we had one more prayer gathering led by Samantha. All week she had been collecting prayer requests on cards from the PIU family so we could pray for them for two hours on Friday night. We shuffled and re-shuffled into small groups and worked our way through all the prayer cards. In addition Sam organized some creative activities that helped us pray for all the leadership of the school, unreached peoples of the world, and for each other.

One of my favorite activities was the “prayer circle” in which we rotated to pray for the board, administration, faculty and staff of PIU

My favorite part of the evening was was when everyone gathered together to pray for me. That was so encouraging! It is nice to be reminded that so many people pray for me. This has been a difficult year for us in many ways but we serve a good and Almighty God!