Each Saturday during Lent, we will take some time as a church family to practice a different spiritual discipline or spiritual practice together. Today, we are practicing Prayer Walking with Christina Winrich.
What is Prayer Walking?
Put simply, prayer walking is talking with God while you walk and walking while you talk with God.
How to practice Prayer Walking:
There are many ways to practice prayer walking. For this year’s Lenten practice, I would like to suggest a pattern used by one of my favorite authors, Adjith Fernando. During the height of the civil war in Sri Lanka (Fernando’s homeland), he found he was overwhelmed with all of the death and destruction around him. He began taking long walks with God each day. He would leave his home and walk in one direction, pouring out his heart to the Lord: his fear, anger, and anxiety. At some point, usually after about an hour, he would feel a slight shift in his spirit, a slight lightening of his load; then he would turn around and head back home. On the walk back he would intercede for his family, friends, and nation.
This Lent, why don’t we try a similar pattern? As we head out on our prayer walk, we can start by simply talking with Jesus and pouring out our hearts before Him. This can include gratitude and praise, confession and repentance, and sharing all of our emotions with Him—the positive and the negative. It can be a time when we wrestle with Him in our spirits and ask Him why He’s allowing a certain situation, or a time when we ask for guidance and direction.
Mid-way through our walk, we can shift from this time of personal prayer to intercession. We can pray for the community we are walking through, for our city, nation and world. We can pray blessings and the promises of God over the people and situations God puts on our hearts. We can be open to the Spirit to have eyes to see and ears to hear what He desires to do in these areas.
Some practical tips:
- Pray before setting out, offer the walk to God and ask for His guidance in how to pray.
- Keep your spirit open to hear what God may say to you on your walk.
- Pray with your eyes open. 🙂
- If you have the chance to talk with someone while on your walk, take this as a divine appointment. Ask God how you can bless this person.
- End your walk with a closing prayer, thanking God for this time with Him and leaving everything in His hands. Practice. Review your text daily at first. Once you are ready, share it with a friend or relative who can read along and note corrections.
Led by Christina Winrich
Caring for Your Plant
ABIDING
Prayer walks remind us that the simple action of resting and being with the Lord leads to our own personal growth. Not everything with our spiritual walk is big and dramatic, just as not everything with plants is a grand milestone. Our plant needs us to tend to its simple needs just as it needs us to tend to its big needs.
This week, check on your plant. Observe it. Has it changed since you received it? Are the leaves looking full? Is there new growth? Does it look status quo from last week? How much water has it utilized from its soil? Noticing these little details may seem mundane, but work to turn it into a practice and a reflection. What little details did you notice around you during your prayer walk? Maybe you have new neighbors, maybe you saw a family out playing in the snow, maybe an elderly neighbor could use help with some yard work. These quiet moments of noticing God’s natural world and His people around us allow us to grow in love and the ability to provide personal care and nurture, whether for our plant or our neighbors. If the top inch or so of your plant’s soil is dry, give it some water.
Led by Juliann Roedl
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