You Want Me to Pray for Her??

I've just got to share with you what happened to me after joining in with our prayer ministry group at their October meeting! We started with a short devotion, about praying for difficult people. The reading was from Exodus, 32:1-35, where Moses prays for the Israelites in the desert after they worshipped the golden calf in his absence. These were a "stiff-necked" people, but still Moses asked God to forgive their great sin. "If not," Moses said, "then blot me out of the book you have written". Yes, he really said that! I don't know how quick I would be to pray that. To be honest, I couldn't even remember the last time I had in fact prayed for a difficult person. I'd been praying for all kinds of people that I happen to like, but... After the devotion, our group's leader, Betty, asked us to think of a difficult person and pray for him or her every day for the next week. Then we began to pray for those in need. Great meeting, but a difficult assignment. And as I began to carry it out later that week, I realized why - because it went against my preconceived notion of prayer as championing the cause of deserving people. Pray for a difficult person? Why would I want God to bless someone like that? Well, I did it anyway. I prayed for the most irritating person I knew, every day, simply asking God to bless her. And do you know what? An amazing thing happened, praise God! I discovered something new growing inside of me - compassion for that difficult person - and I began to really mean those prayers. I also realized that I had myself been, and can still sometimes be, a difficult person, someone hard to pray for - the wandering sheep that our Good Shepherd laid down his life to find, the sinner for whom He died on the The Cross to save. So now I am inviting you to pray. Think of a difficult person in your life, and pray for that person.  God will bless you in it!