Amy Hayes tells us about the prayer week in Portadown

Each evening we had corporate worship and prayer and on the first night around 25 people showed up, both young and old.  We did some rapid fire prayer and almost everyone got involved with that.  After some more worship there were a lot of words coming through about the old and young coming together.  So we moved the chairs out of the way and got the over 30's to pray for the under 30's and then switched it round and had the young peoplpe pray for the older people. It was amazing!

Another night we had a 17year old leading the prayer side of things and she shared what God had said to her about praying for the church. so we all started to pray for the church. A 14 year old who recently became a Christian was sittiing beside me and i asked him if he could pray one thing for the church what would it be.  He said to "make more people get saved". I asked him if he wanted to pray that. His response was "can i?". After telling him that he could he began to pray and named specific people he wanted God to help. There was no stopping him! He even prayed for his brother not to be coming into his room all the time to play donkey kong at the early hours of the morning. He was so real before God and cut the religious jargon that we so often get caught up in; a lesson for us all! It was also amazing to see young people stepping up to lead worship and lead prayer. And not only that, the older people really embraced different ways to pray.  In the "Kids Zone" we had bubbles and the idea behind it was to think of something to thank God for with each bubble you blew.  A 62 year old lady said that the bubbles was one of the highlights of her week.

One afternoon a 5year old girl came in with her dad.  after drawing a picture of what she thought God was like she went to where the cross was and got a chair saying "this chair is for Jesus!" After that she got her dad and another guy who was in the prayer room to hold hands and take it in turns to pray.  Then she began to pray for her sick Granda so that God would heal him! At other times we had people positioning themselves before the cross, crying out to God for the church, placing their hurts and fears in a bottle and leaving them with God and drawing prayers for the town on boxes to build a wall.

On saturday night there were texts circulating in the town about a riot that was going to take place in a carpark to see which side of the community (protestants or catholics) would have control of a bar in the town.  So we prayed and declared that there would be no riot.  Next morning there was no word of a riot on the news as there was no riot!

Sunday afternoon was our last gathering, so we shared what God had done over the week and what He had been saying to us.  At the end, one lady suggested that we go outside and blow bubbles to thank God for the week and to speak blessings over our town.  so we did!

all in all it was an amazing week!

Amy