Rippling Prayers

I love it when God teaches me something new...granted I prefer it when the lesson comes via words on paper and not hands-on trial, but I really do try to accept the lessons regardless of how they're delivered.

Yesterday I learned something {and maybe this has already crossed your mind, but it hadn't mine!} and loved it so much that I wanted to share it with you.

Ryan let me read a note his friend Shawn wrote to him...and this one particular line leaped from the page and stayed at the very front of my mind the entire day. Shawn was writing about our marriage and the impact it has had on his life, and he wrote these words: No doubt her prayers for you were also helping me through all these years.

Did you see that?

No doubt her prayers for you were also helping me through all these years.

If you've spent much time here at the blog, you know how often and how fervently I prayed for many years for my Mr. Missing. Before I even knew he would be Ryan...I prayed for this man out there somewhere who would be my husband.

Though I didn't know who he was or where he was or what might be happening in his life on any given day, I would pray over it for that day. I prayed for health and protection and his journey with Christ; anything I could think to pray over someone I didn't know...I prayed.

And then I prayed before we started dating...over a relationship that might be...or might not be...and I prayed for his wisdom and direction and leading and decision-making when it came to the two of us.

I confess that in my mind, all those prayers were about two people...and the future.

It never entered my mind that in praying those prayers, I wasn't just praying over Ryan...I was also praying over all the lives he would impact with his life.

Like Shawn.

Have you ever considered it? How the people you labor over in prayer...are impacting others and your prayers ripple out to cover them too, even though you might not know their names.

Shawn's words were a healing answer to prayer as I read them. For all those days I prayed and felt my prayers were going nowhere...God was not only using them to prepare Ryan, but he was using them as Ryan's life in that moment...prepared others.

Only God.