Journée de Prière - Fête ou de Chapelure

Day of Prayer – Feast or Crumbs

Prayer is not foreign to me; I am comfortable with prayer and find myself praying aloud and to myself in many situations and many times throughout a day.  But I have to admit I was not looking forward to a whole day of prayer.  Note: This is not a day to pray, it is a whole day of prayer.  I am now an advocate for “a day of prayer.”

The Wycliffe people have a longstanding tradition of making November 11^th a day of prayer.  This tradition, I am told, began many years ago when the Wycliffe people were trying to start bible translation in Mexico.  They were stopped at the border and instead of giving up, they prayed for things to change right then and there.  God worked.  Thus, the day of prayer was started.

Some people here decided to make the day a bigger deal this year by inviting all of the churches in the area to join them in the morning.  Then in the afternoon, all of the SIL people would pray together for other SIL/Wycliffe people around the world.  We started at 9:00 and ended at 5:00 with a two-hour break in between.  We have to have our nap as you know.

The theme of the morning was Philippians 2:9-11: … “that every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord…”  The morning included great music and singing, led by a very professional group made up of three local college kids, a skit that showed how missionaries need to speak the language of a people before they can really communicate the God who loves them (SIL came to be because a missionary in Guatemala was asked by a Cakchiquel Chief, “if your God is so great, why can’t He speak my language?”), an explanation of SIL’s work in translation, video talks by several Wycliffe people, and of course, prayer.  But what was most special to us was when individuals stood up and read Rev 5:9 in their own language.  There were 45 people there and 15 different languages spoken.  Here we are in a country that is 98% Muslim and in this small group there were 15 different language groups professing Christ as Lord.  Jesus is alive; He is here, in Niger.

Sally played a big part in making the center and conference room welcoming.  She made a cross with the Philippians verse and “Jesus Christ is Lord,” in each of the languages on it – and on languages that were not present but are in our world.   She displayed the verse in a large frame and the local languages being worked on by SIL translator teams in smaller frames.  They had never done that before and people seemed to really respond to it.

Translation Team

In the afternoon 16 of us met in another room that had five stations.  Each station contained individual prayer requests from Wycliffe/SIL groups in a particular part of the world.  We would rotate from station to station in groups of four and turn each prayer request into a prayer so that there were 16 prayers at each station by each group.  You would pick up a short prayer request, say from Indonesia asking God for protection from the unrest there, and turn it into a specific prayer.  The cumulative effect was very impactful.  People from all over the world are thanking God for what he is doing in their area or asking God to guide them in the work they are doing.

One request I had was a prayer of thanksgiving from Rufus.  Rufus told a bible story to his nephew and his nephew asked if he would tell the story to some of his friends.  When Rufus showed up to tell the story there were 69 people there to hear it, most of those now go to his church.  Another theme centered on travel restrictions.  These are bible translators and they can’t translate if they can’t get to the people and hear their language.  But they were giving thanks because it was forcing them to involve locals in their work. 

As noted before and reinforced by this day, God does indeed speak in many languages and our understanding of the need to help people be able to worship God in the language closest to their heart is much more real to us now.   It really hit home when the President Emeritus of Wycliffe gave a very emotional video talk and I quote”

Feast or Crumbs

“I can’t go before God and honestly ask Him, Lord, you’ve given me the whole Bible and I have multiple versions.  I’ve got more versions than  I know what to do with.  But what about that poor guy out there?  He’s one of a little group of 300.  He’s got nothing.  What should I pray for him?  Give him some crumbs?  I can’t pray that.  It chokes in my throat.  I can only ask that God give him the same as He’s given me.  How can I ask for any less than what God’s given me for every other man?  I am not better than they.

I hope that no one will be able to say in heaven ‘they stopped before they came to my language.’”

God indeed has blessed us in many ways.  How can we not want any less for all people, everywhere?