I wanted to throw out a prayer request in your direction for tonight’s coffeehouse. We have invited a lot of our friends and are anticipating some new faces. Tonight’s theme is a Hawaiian Luau. It should be fun. I don’t know if we have grass skirts, but we do have some good music! Anyway, this is one of our main programs of outreach for our church and it is a great chance for us to get to know (on an informal level) the people we talk with on a day to day basis. Also, could you be praying for the upcoming convention at Harding University’s satellite campus in Florence? I will be leaving for that on Wednesday and returning Saturday evening. I am excited to get to reconnect with the people I met at last year’s meeting. August is almost over, which means so is the vacation season for Italians, and the ghost town that I live in is slowly starting to have inhabitants once again. My prayer is that as the fall kicks off, we will be able to meet lots of university students coming in for another semester.

To encourage you in your prayers to God for the in-breaking of His rule into our world, I want to share with you this quote:

“Petitionary prayer, therefore, is in part the struggle to admit our dependence. It is the struggle to overcome our human blindness and pride. It is the struggle to realize and acknowledge our deep need. And this acknowledgment is precisely what lays hold of and releases God’s resources … In short, prayer is a crying to God for help, based on an awareness of dependence on God. It is the cry for the kingdom voiced by persons who realize that only the in-breaking of God’s reign can remedy the challenging situations we face.” (Grenz, Prayer, p48)