Prayer for Al Qaeda

When I was trying to organize "Prayer for Al Qaeda", I kept running into the major difficulty of organizing things on facebook so I decided to postpone it for a week and announce the whole thing at my thursday night bible study. I then wound up napping through the first hour or so and then rushing there on my bike. I was wondering whether or not to make the announcement, since I had been planning to do that at the beginning, when Bob (our group leader) said something that directly related to the prayer conference, perhaps several things if memory serves right, without having ever been told about my plans. I wound up announcing right then and there that I would try to hold a mini-meeting at the end of the bible study that night for the prayer conference to find out what general times worked for people and who was interested. This was only part of the group though, since we divide up based on age after worship, and so I then had to go make the same announcement to everyone else with only fifteen minutes or so left before we had to leave anyway. For an introvert like me, this was terrifying. In fact, no one actually wound up coming to me to discuss times due to the last-minute nature of the announcement but a friend of mine did come to me to invite me into the group's leadership and he recently told me that this was inspired by the willingness to step out there that I demonstrated that night.

In the end, I wound up giving up on the idea of trying to "organize" the prayer conference, having seen God constantly encourage me and yet frustrate all my plans, and decided to simply set a date, put up flyers, and trust God. When the time came, I was the only one there, having been notified beforehand by some people that the time didn't work for them and then learning from other people who had expressed interested that I called up that they weren't able to make it for whatever reason. The friend who had invited me into the leadership later apologized for not making it and told me that he had been working on an essay and lost track of time and when I attended the bible group that same night, we were low on attendance then too as a result of illness and finals. I suppose (though it is possible that some people came to attend, held the conference, and finished up without my ever seeing them since I hadn't met them) that the flyers failed to attract anyone and I noticed that one had been torn down beforehand (which I felt a little proud of).

However, I did not feel discouraged by this. The note that had sparked the whole thing had gotten quite a lot of attention and I think it led to some prayer on its own (in fact, one of my old highschool teachers actually shared it with his class) and the very morning of the conference I got into a discussion on facebook with someone who had seen my note and taken issue with it. In addition to that, this had been anything but a waste when it comes to my own spiritual condition. I had taken risks (something that is absolutely vital to a life of faith), seen my expectations unmet, and reacted by sitting down to pray for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the western church, the underground church of the Middle East, and the anointing of missionaries and witnesses to those in radical Islam with the conviction that if anyone had shown up while I was praying I would have the conference with them and if not I would catch the next bus home. In other words, I had learned an invaluable lesson as an ambassador of Christ and I have been emboldened by my own boldness. At the same time, I trusted in God's promise that faith as small as a mustard seed could move mountains and firmly believed that the Church's desire to reach out to our Islamic enemies was not over and neither was my involvement in it. Somewhere along the lines, I made a commitment to become an apostle to Al Qaeda, whether through direct missionary work, my writings, prayer, financial support to the actual missionaries, or any combination of those methods, and I will continue to pray for my brothers and sisters in radical Islam as well as the saints of the church of the Middle East who regularly risk their lives for their faith. In fact, if God does not tell me to do otherwise I intend to a prayer meeting every May 1st and invite others to do the same until the Church reaches out in love to Islamic jihadists on such a level that all the hatred of the region and the secularization of the West cannot hide it. When that happens, I'll hold a prayer meeting twice every week.