The Power of Prayer

Juan, a man I first met in the Wright County Jail, got out of prison and wanted me to be his mentor and accountability sponsor. I tried to convince him that he needed total abstinence from alcohol and drugs, but he felt he could use them in moderation. I backed off because I didn’t want to lose him, and we talked about setting boundaries.

The first boundary was one drink twice a week. Then he switched to marijuana, and we set the boundary at one joint twice a week. Then I didn’t hear from him for two weeks. I kept calling and he didn’t respond. The men in the Bible study he belonged to prayed for him. I prayed for him. The Monday at noon prayer group in my church prayed for him.

This past Saturday, Juan called me and we met. His told me he had been smoking marijuana more and more and then switched to meth and his life crashed hard. And then something happened that caught his attention. The previous Thursday he had a vision in his room of a man praying in the corner. He called it a wake-up call. He stopped taking any drugs immediately and realized he needed help in a controlled environment. He called the Minneapolis Adult and Teen Challenge and applied for the 13-month program. They said they’d get back to him Monday.

I met with Juan on Monday at 1 p.m., fresh from the noon prayer meeting in which we prayed for Juan’s deliverance. He told me that he’d received a call that morning from Adult and Teen Challenge, and they had an opening for him in three weeks. I was dismayed. He was living in a house where drugs flowed freely, and I didn’t think he’d last three weeks without another relapse. The vision would fade and the call to drugs would be too strong for him to resist.

I sat across from him in the restaurant and didn’t know what to say. Just then the phone rang. It was Adult and Teen Challenge telling Juan that they had an opening for him now and to be there at 11:30 the next morning. I asked Juan to let me talk to the person on the other end of the line and told her this was an answer to much prayer. She didn’t act surprised.

So today, Juan’s boss is driving him to Minneapolis and Juan will be starting a 13-month faith-based program, which is exactly what he needs. He’d been a Christian for less than a year (it happened in the Wright County Jail on one of my sessions with him) and needs to be powered up to be the Christian that God wants him to be.

As for me, I sit here amazed at how God intervenes in lives through prayer, and I feel blessed to have been sitting in that restaurant when that phone rang. Yes, there is power in prayer, and I saw it happen first hand.

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