Whisper a Prayer-Thursday's devotional

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Junior high school. There is not enough money on the entire planet to make me go through those three years of my life again. But despite all the pain and the tears and the embarrassing moments (just to name a few) that I endured and lived to talk about, I can look back and see where God was beginning to mold me into the person that I am today. I can also create a long list of friends that are an intricate part of my life as a direct result of the time I spent in those 50-year old red-brick buildings. And along with those friends come some great memories! There were the sleepovers where we stayed up all night talking, playing Donkey Kong and Pacman on the Atari, and painting each other’s toe nails. There was the weeklong feud leading up to the football game against the cross town junior high school: our biggest rivals. There were band and choir trips; birthday parties; Friday night school dances, and a certain young man who boiled two eggs about three times as long as they were supposed to and allowed them to explode all over the home economics kitchen ceiling. Which promptly earned our entire cooking team an F and a lunch period scrubbing egg off of light fixtures, cabinets and walls! I moved to a new school in the middle of my 9th grade year and because it was pre-cell phone and computer age, I lost touch with most of the girls whose junior high memories are intertwined with mine . But in the last few months; with the help of the internet and cell phones; I’ve been able to reconnect with some of my closest friends from that era; many of them I hadn’t seen or spoken to in more than 20 years. We’ve been e-mailing and texting, trying to catch up and learn about lives as adults. And we’ve spent a lot of time asking each other “Do you know what happened to _______”? My friend Tammy was the blank in that question in more than one conversation. We’d lived just a few blocks from each other, rode the same bus, had many of the same classes and spent the night at each other’s houses more than a few times! Last night, I got an e-mail from Tammy, who is now living several states away. At the end of her message she told me that she had thought of me often all these years, and had always said a prayer and asked God to keep me safe. I responded with something about how nice that was and she said “It was my pleasure. It only takes a few seconds to breathe a name and Thank God for my friends ”. WHAM! God’s 2X4 hit me right between the eyes! See, somehow I had created this idea in my head that in order to pray, I had to have time to sit down and have a heart to heart talk with God and to think about all the blessings He had given me that day. I needed time to recall each and every request that had come across the prayer chain, even when only one of those names was being brought to my mind at that moment. When in reality what God really wants, is for Paula to do just as Paul did for the church at Philippi: Philippians 1:3-4 I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy As I was researching for the devotion…I came across this interpretation of the verse from The Message. Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. It is my desire that I will take this and use it as a daily reminder of the joy that comes from praying for others.