Friday, November 11, 2022

In the School of Prayer

Friday, November 11, 2022

Dear brothers and sisters, we can’t help but thank God for you, because your faith is flourishing and your love for one another is growing. 

So we keep on praying for you, asking our God to enable you to live a life worthy of his call.  May he give you the power to accomplish all the good things your faith prompts you to do.  Then the name of our Lord Jesus will be honored because of the way you live, and you will be honored along with him.  This is all made possible because of the grace of our God and Lord, Jesus Christ.  2 Thessalonians 1:3, 11-12

Every November 11th I remember Juanita “Granny” Parker.  We weren’t related by blood, but she was my sister in Christ.  This is her birthday.  She was born in 1911, which, numerically-expressed, is 11-11-11.  Today she would have been 111 years young.  It’s been 111 years since 11-11-11. 

I’ve written before about Granny[1] and how she was like Paul to me.  Granny was the “praying-est” person I ever knew.  She was intellectually-challenged, and raised on the same farm she lived her whole life.  She was undereducated in many ways, but a PHD when it came to prayer.  In that church it was customary for the pastor to call on a lay person to lead the final prayer.  I would sometimes call on Granny to end our worship service.  There was never a prayer she offered that didn’t convince me I was short-changed in the praying genes department.  She could pray Heaven down like no other man, woman, child, or preacher.  In many ways Juanita Parker was a mentor to me, of connecting with God on the simplest, and best level…honesty, compassion, and unselfishness.  

I miss her to this day.

In an honest look-back, I have to confess that my pastoral visits to Granny (who lived next door to the church, because she’d given the property to build it), were more likely beneficial to the pastor than the parishoner.  No matter what else was going on in Granny’s life, children, grand-children, great-grands that were living with her, and she was helping to raise…everything stopped when the preacher arrived, and we’d “set-a-spell” on the front porch.  We’d never sit on the back porch, because (I suspect) it was the scene of too many gruesome encounters with that mean rooster.  (But that’s another story for another day).

As a young-ish minister, with less than 3 years under my belt as pastor, I was still too green to recognize the tower of strength sitting nearby.  As a depression-era saint, who’d faced more physical, mental, financial, and relational challenges than I’ve had to navigate, now in my fifth-decade of ministry, Granny was tougher than Muhammed Ali in the boxing ring, Ghengis Kahn on the battlefield, or a crazed rooster in her backyard.  But with God, she was a child, tender, dependent, soft, and faith-filled.  It seemed she melted like heated plastic in a mold…to the shape of the most faithful saint.  No matter how I tried to steer a conversation with Granny, or move us to prayer, she was always ahead of me, and she was the one who took the initiative to end our times in prayer – for me!  I always left her little house shining brighter, and a lot stronger, than when I’d arrived.

For You Today  

Everyone needs a Granny Parker in their corner (especially would-be preachers, discouraged preachers, and sometimes a know-it-all preacher).  If you’ve got a praying saint in your life like Granny, you know it – and you probably treasure that relationship.  And if you have one like my praying, 111 year-young on 11-11 Granny Parker, maybe it’s time you become one.  Because there’s always someone who needs one.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

       Paraclete   and   Hitching a Ride

Images: Title image Pixabay.com Images without citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©  

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