By a member of SEND’s Diaspora | North America team
“I would like to pray for the food now!” I said as loudly as I could.
It was the mealtime of our annual Thanksgiving gathering with ESL students and families and it was not off to a great start. For the second time, I was almost shouting at the microphone, and just like the first—it had little to no effect on the children. The kids on my left were running wild and basically playing dodgeball in the cafeteria. The young children on my right were arguing loudly over who could or couldn’t put pretend food into the pretend kitchen oven.
I decided to just go ahead and launch into a short prayer of thanks for the food and for God to bless our time together. After the meal, I stood up to try again. This time, I was about to give a Thanksgiving talk, and I wanted to share why we celebrated Thanksgiving Day. I also wanted to encourage everyone that we need to be thankful for God’s blessings.
But the same thing happened as I tried to pray! The noise went on unabated, and it even intensified. A clothes basket full of Duplo pieces was lifted, dumped, and loudly sorted through by a four-year-old just five feet away from where I was standing! I tried to forge ahead but quickly realized that competing with the kids by yelling louder wasn’t the way to go. I abbreviated the talk I had planned, thanked everyone for coming, and went back to visiting people at their tables.
Have you ever had a similar experience? Perhaps you had an event or evening planned out, and it didn’t go the way you thought it would. We had great support from the church that was hosting the dinner. People had set up and organized crafts for the kids and women. Even the tables were beautifully decorated. What surprised us all was the level of noise and the number of kids running around. We had about the same number of adults as the previous years, but this time we significantly had more children. They were also louder and rowdier than before.
It was not all chaos, though. During dinner time, we were able to visit guests table by table and share with them one by one. Even though my “abbreviated talk” was a bust, and the night did not go as planned, we tried to adjust and make the best of it.
When the guests left, we tried to process what happened as we cleaned up. In the two weeks leading up to this event, we had shared Bible stories at the beginning of our ESL classes, both in English and in the student’s local language. We do this to make it easy for a number of the students who were still at beginner English level. Since the responses to the Bible stories were very positive, we had hoped for a similar response to the Thanksgiving talk. But the opposite had happened, at least from our perspective, and I think one of the reasons was spiritual opposition.
We dedicated considerable time to preparing but we spent little time on the most crucial aspect. We spent a lot of time cooking and cleaning and setting up for the Thanksgiving party, but I don’t think we spent enough time praying for the event. I know I could have prayed more than I did. It is important to remember that there is always a spiritual battle going on for the lives of those who don’t know Christ. Sometimes it is more obvious than others—but it is always going on. We need to be prepared to pray for spiritual encounters.
The more people involved in an event, the more prayer warriors we need to enlist to support us. I now know that, before our next gathering, we will be seeking more prayer partners to lift us up. We will also consider having a separate children’s program organized as well!
