Interceding Prayer
For months now I have been praying for people I have never met. The internet can be a beautiful place where we get to connect with people's stories from all over the world. Stories with endings that are as beautiful as fairytales and endings that break your heart in ways that you couldn’t imagine. Praying for individuals that I don’t know always forces me to ask the question “how powerful do I believe prayer really is?”
I’ve recently been following very closely the story of three families: one whose child was diagnosed with the same birth defect my son was born with, a second whose daughter was diagnosed with cancer before she even turned 2, and the third story is of a girl my daughters age who through a freak accident suffered significant brain trauma that has left her waiting for her miracle for the last few weeks in a hospital bed. I spend every day thinking and/or praying for these families, I check their social media pages daily and anxiously await an update that hopefully is filled with news of healing and fairytale endings. Is it strange that I feel tethered to these families? Like there is something in my soul that is believing so desperately that their children will be healed?
My passion for dedicating significant prayer time to children who are critically ill was birthed from my own story with my child whose survival rate was rather grim. Every time I tell the story of hearing my son's diagnosis for the first time, I always make sure to include the story of when we were urgently transported to the emergency room. I’ll never forget that day for many reasons but one of them is this— as I sat there holding my baby in a speeding ambulance, I closed my eyes and said to God “please God, please let someone be praying for us right now.” I was begging God for intercession from strangers (I’ve heard many people say that as they see an ambulance go by, they always make sure to pray, and if that’s you please take this as your confirmation to continue doing just that!).
Here I am over a year later doing the same for the strangers in my life, but what's interesting is that my passion for this came from experience from the understanding of what it is like to suffer as a parent and what it’s like to love a sick child. John 17 ends with this: “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them and I will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” (John 25-26 NIV) Jesus prays for all the believers that will come to know Him and he prays for them from a place of “knowing”, a place of just total understanding of the love of the Father and the power of that. And there is really something about knowing, of getting it in ways that unless you’ve really lived it you wouldn’t understand. THAT to me is the power of intercession, when we KNOW the power of love, when we KNOW the power of Jesus, when we JUST GET IT, we can pray on our knees like it’s us begging for the miracle. So, friends, if you’ve been through something beautiful or if you’ve been through something painful, take that as your cue to intercede, because you have the gift of knowing and there’s a lot of power in that.
Maryann has made a career out of serving youth in some of the poorest neighborhoods in South Florida and Las Vegas. As a first generation American, she has a passion for helping students achieve dreams that they once saw as impossible. She hopes to continue to minister to children and their families for as long as God allows her.Maryann currently lives in Plantation, Florida with her husband and daughter.