I run into the triplets at their school bus stop many mornings on the vision part of my prayer walk.  One minute I’m praying for Jackie with a vision for a comfort blanket ministry and the next minute I’m watching a private reality show starring six-year-old triplets and their sainted mom. 

The triplets – two boys and a girl – started out the school year in August in a free-for-all of early morning mayhem as they pushed and jostled and protested, “I was here first!” trying to be first in line at the bus stop.  I witnessed some amazing sprints on six year old legs from the garage door up the driveway to the bus stop with school bags bobbing like parachutes on their backs.        

On one memorable day I was treated to a perfect ten performance of a defiant child.  One little girl and one boy were standing sober as judges at the bus stop while Saint Mom dragged the final little boy up the driveway literally kicking and screaming.  He was stiff legged, wailing, “No! I don’t want to go!”  On that particular morning I believe I witnessed one of Saint Mom’s finest moments.  The school bus pulled up.  Kerplunk, Kerplunk. A little girl’s feet hit the high bus steps.  Kerplunk, kerplunk.  A little boy’s feet hit the high bus steps.  Suddenly all sound was sucked out of the triplet who had been kicking and screaming.  As he faced the inevitable yawning abyss of the open school bus door he felt his mother’s no-turning-back presence squarely behind him.  “Oh,” his face read, “Other children on the bus are watching.”  Kerplunk, kerplunk.    He got on the bus without a further whimper.

The weather has changed and so have the triplets.  Most days they actually walk to the bus stop.  They stand in a 1-2-3 line ten feet back from where the bus halts.  They do not budge from this spot until Saint Mom declares that the bus is at a complete stop and it is safe for them to file toward the door.  Order has slowly been fashioned out of chaos.

I used to think that the triplets were an interruption to my vision prayers, but now I see that they’re really messengers.  In my past blogs I mentioned my big vision I’ve been praying for 9 years.  Sometimes things seem to be going way too slow and I want to run as fast as I can to get on the bus.  Then I get discouraged.  Isn’t it my turn to be the very first one in line?  Other days, I’m back there kicking and screaming about doing the  necessary nuts and bolts work that I hate doing.  In the Kingdom of God, just like at bus stops, order and maturity matter.  The key is to keep on growing one day and one prayer at a time.  And order will be fashioned out of chaos.

Karen Barber

www.personalprayerpower.com     

On my previous blog I wrote about time machines and going back into the past.  This week I traveled the opposite direction and journeyed into the strange and mysterious frontier of the future. 

My vehicle was a long and involved IRS form for tax exempt status that I needed to fill out for our new nonprofit, Prayer Igniters.  Our ministry had its very first board meeting in September.  As of yet we have no bank account and no programs running.  It should be a cinch to fill out a form for a group that doesn’t have any past and very little in the present to report, right?  Wrong.  According to the form, we have a future to report! 

The form poses oodles of questions like this “Do you or will you undertake fundraising?”  If ‘Yes,’ check all the fundraising programs you do or will conduct.”  Then they say, “Attach a description of each fundraising activity.”  Hmm.  And thus the form had me constantly embarking on mental journeys into what we will be doing in 2010 and 2011.

Actually, the IRS didn’t invent traveling into the future.  Prayer did. The reason I happened to be filling out a nonprofit application in October of 2009 was because on February 29, 2000 I asked God to give me a mission statement.  He gave me these words “The Way of Prayer for Many.”  I wasn’t sure what way of prayer I knew that would help anyone else.  But I began to pray the vision every day on my prayer walk.  I can’t say that much happened for several years, but I kept on praying.   

I eventually started speaking on prayer and keeping a log of prayer answers in my journal.  Then my elderly father got sick in 2004 and died a year later.  It seemed like a huge detour way off my prayer vision route.  Only later did I see that Dad’s illness gave me priceless personal experience on how to pray during a crisis and how to pray when things don’t get better. 

On the set in our house filming my prayer study video

In 2006 I took a huge step and did a video study series on prayer.  All of this time, the nonprofit idea was still completely off my radar screen.  It didn’t go “blip” until one spring day in 2008 when I was having lunch with a woman from a huge church.  She told me she wished that she could get more people interested in prayer.  Bingo!  I was meeting my first Prayer Igniter – someone who wanted to light a match to spark interest in prayer but who needed a little help, inspiration and support along the way.

So prayer makes it possible for me to report to the IRS what the future will look like in 2010 and 2011.   

This brings us to an interesting question.  What will you be doing in the future?  In 2010?  In 2011?   I think I can help you fill in the blanks if you can answer this question.  What are you praying as God’s future vision for your life today?

Karen Barber

www.personalprayerpower.com    

A Time Machine that Really Works!

Recently I was flabbergasted to learn that there’s such a thing as a time machine that  works!  And believe me, at my age I need one.  It all started a few weeks ago when my husband Gordon opened the wrong attachment to an email and his laptop got taken over by a big ugly pop-up message that cried “Threat Warning!” in big red letters.  It proclaimed that his computer was infected with nasty sounding viruses and the cure was to click through to a website and pay to get rid of them.  This message continuously popped up and smacked Gordon in the eyes with repeated warnings meant to instill fear of cyber mayhem.  I could hear his cries of aggravation clear from the other room. 

This went on for three weeks.  Finally our 19 year old son John arrived home from college and came to the rescue.  He sat in front of the TV with Gordon’s computer on his lap and fiddled around a while.  “Done,” John said.  And the mean pop-up virus was gone. 

“How on earth did you do that?” I asked John in amazement.

“Simple.  I asked Dad when he first started having the problem, then I went back a few days before that and used the restore function to get the whole system to the way it was before the virus.”

“You can do that?” I asked incredulously.

“Yep,” he said, “On an Apple they call it time machine.”

I was dumbstruck.  Finally someone had actually invented a time machine that can restore things back to the way they used to be.  Not only is it an electronic version of the Fountain of Youth where you can go back to an earlier time, but it also erases any mistakes you made in the meantime and everything is back in order like you never messed up at all.  What good news. Of course the bad news is that this time machine only works in cyberspace, not in real life. 

Actually, a long time ago God invented the “restore function” when Jesus came down to earth.   The most time defying thing that every happened in history was the resurrection of Jesus after He had been dead and buried for three days.  Because of that great miracle, each day we can experience small but meaningful restorations.   Maybe they won’t erase our wrinkles or make those angry words we said yesterday disappear, but our lives can still be renewed and rejuvenated.  Words that start with the prefix re (meaning “to do again”) offer an array of divine possibilities for time travel.  Repentance.  Reconciliation.  Redemption.  Recommitment.  Reconsideration.  Restitution.  Rebirth.  And that’s the best news I’ve ever heard.      

 Karen Barber

www.personalprayerpower.com

This past weekend Gordon went in with a chain saw to do battle with a thick stand of bamboo at our beach house on Hilton Head, S.C.  Let me begin with a disclaimer that we weren’t the ones foolish enough to plant this nuisance.  Blame that on a former owner.    

Sure, it’s pretty green stuff and gives a tropical get-away feel to the back yard.  But it grows like crazy in the long growing season in the maritime forest ecosystem on  Southern sea islands.

We don’t mind it when it stays about 15 feet tall.  But a few renegade stalks always decide to shoot for the stars.  Why not 20 feet?  Why not 30?  They get tangled up in the oak trees and get unstable and then flop over into our pool.  And then there’s the thicket issue.  A raccoon once died in there, probably trying to find his way out.  We didn’t know it until the smell got really compelling.  And then there’s the whole invasive issue.  Bamboo puts out wandering shoots capable of taking over the whole yard.   I’ve read that the only way to keep it contained is to bury a deep cement wall all around it underground. 

So this weekend I stood on the back deck while Gordon ventured into our private jungle and started shaking stalks to identify which ones were the towering, pool-flopping ones.  When he shook the right ones, I yelled and he marked the stalks with duct tape.  (Make a note if you’re a guy collecting ideas on how to use duct tape.)   Then Gordon revved his chain saw and cut the stalks.  But they didn’t fall.  Nope.  Too tightly packed in the thicket.  We had to pull and yank like the dickens to untangle the cut stalks and get them out. 

Some of the stalks were as big around as my arm.  We went to work clipping off the foliage.  I started thinking that Robinson Crusoe could have made a good raft out of that big fat bamboo.  Suddenly the bamboo didn’t look like such a nuisance after all.  You could probably make something out of it, at the very least tomato stakes to use back home in Atlanta.  So we laid a stack of long, green bamboo poles in the woods to dry out. 

Gordon found a use for one pole right away.  Earlier he had bumped his head on a low hanging oak branch he didn’t want to cut.  So he took one of the fattest bamboo poles, drove a short pipe into the sand, stuck the bamboo hollow center over the pipe and propped the pole under the branch.  He then drilled a hole through the top of bamboo and fed a wire through to attach it to the branch.  Presto!  Low hanging branch solved.

Today when people talk about “going green” bamboo is a true media darling.  They call it a renewable resource because it grows so fast.  You find it stubbornly creeping its way into flooring, into bed sheets and even into clothes. 

So I’ve changed my mind about bamboo.  In fact, if Jesus was around bamboo, he probably might have said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a stand of bamboo.  It grows tenaciously and abundantly and soon the whole earth is covered with it.”   Renewable.  Inexhaustible.  Growing.  The perfect “green” words to pray for the kind of evergreen spiritual life I want to live.     

This past Monday after I called my husband Gordon at work in Atlanta telling him that my flight had been delayed indefinitely at Midway Airport in Chicago, I got to wondering about modern marriages.  Here we were miles apart and who knew when we’d ever have a chance for quality time together.  I wondered what it takes to stay close to your spouse these days when there’s so much else to do during the day and you spend so much time apart.    

Monday was a very bad day to be flying into Atlanta.  Maybe you heard about the torrential rain we had that caused major flooding on a scale we haven’t seen in decades, if ever.  Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta was completely closed down, meaning a whole planeload of us strangers were waylaid for hours at the gate at Midway wondering when we’d ever get home.

Sitting there I had a long time to observe the strangers around me.  One young couple    didn’t realize that the way they were snuggled up next to each other  proclaimed, “We can’t get enough of each other.”  The young man had his arm around the dark-haired girl’s shoulders.  He pulled her close to him.  He rested his cheek on her hair.  She rested her head on his shoulder.  He smiled.  She looked up and smiled back.  They didn’t seem to mind the delay because they were together.    

Then I studied another couple with a ten year old girl sitting between them.  This couple was equally totally unaware that their body language was saying, “We’re not sure what we have in common any more.”  The man was absorbed in reading a book.  The woman was staring at an I-phone screen.  Occasionally the woman got up to wander off somewhere.  The man didn’t look up or notice.  The woman didn’t lean over to tell him where she was going.  They seemed like two planets in very different orbits.  Neither smiled.  They seemed disengaged from each other.  Distant.  Did that eventually happen to all married couples?

We finally boarded the plane at sunset.  As the plane gained altitude a man one row up on the aisle held a crossword puzzle up in his small individual spotlight.  Suddenly a simple memory of my own parent’s marriage flooded over me.  Crossword puzzles.  My parents weren’t really much alike in any way.  Dad was from a Midwestern city, Mom was a rural farm girl from South Carolina.  Mom had an artistic bent and could sketch with delicate sympathy the tiniest wildflower.  Dad worked as a budget analyst for the government and actually liked it.

My parents were two totally different people who could have been on individual orbits if it hadn’t been for the crossword puzzle in the daily paper.  Every night after dinner Dad would fold the paper until the crossword puzzle was a small square.  Mom found a pencil. Then they would sit down on the sofa together and put on reading glasses and begin putting their heads together.  “What’s a four letter word for great lake?”  “How about Erie?”  Mom would write it down and they’d continue to collaborate on clues.  After they’d spent half an hour or an hour together on the sofa, the puzzle would be mostly completed, but of course, looking back, I now see that wasn’t the point.   

I read somewhere that solving crossword puzzles is a good way to keep your brain sharp as you age.  But on Monday night I uncovered another benefit of crossword puzzles, or at least small shared things like them, for keeping husbands and wives close in a marriage.  Those puzzles created a little hallowed spot of time for my parents to be together every day, working  together on something small that didn’t have to do with household chores or raising children and didn't have a deadline.

When I finally arrived home that night, I found out that Gordon had recorded Dancing with the Stars.  So we sat down and watched it together, commenting to each other on the dances.  (Even though neither of us can actually dance ourselves!) 

So what’s a four letter word that’s the secret to closeness in a marriage?  T-I-M-E.  Even just a little bit.  Every day.

P.S.: Our home wasn't affected by the floods, but many throughout Atlanta were.  Please pray for these families.  

Karen Barber www.personalprayerpower.com