What I Really Do
So, the way I live my life now is more different than I ever have before. Since I was four years old I have always been studying. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College…read textbooks, listen to teachers, do homework, study, and take tests to prove that I did all those other things.
Now, I sit in a single room for eight hours a day talking to God. And some other stuff. So here’s a sample day out of the crazy life I’m living 🙂
——————————————————-
6:15 a.m. I wake up. I live with three other girls in a big basement bedroom of a duplex. I am the ‘first’ shower, so I get up before anyone else. We have to rotate because we all share the same bathroom. Then I eat breakfast and pack a sack lunch for the day. Usually it’s a bagel with ham and cheese, haha. 😉 I always try to fill a water bottle and drink a lot because we fast (eat nothing) every Tuesday, and it’s really important to stay hydrated.
8:00 a.m. Practising piano is one of my new favorite things to do. My piano is by a window, so I look out into trees and birds in the new morning light. I love playing songs I already know and then taking their sounds and making them different or new to express how I feel. There’s something really lovely about making your own music 🙂
8:15 a.m. Martha, Kayla, Kristin, and I jump in the car to leave. Sometimes we have to rearrange the entire drive-way beacuse there are eight girls living in the house; six of us have cars to park in the driveway. I have gotten pretty good at moving cars that aren’t mine without getting a scratch on them, haha. We love rolling down the windows on our way to the International House of Prayer: we spend hours in the same room that has two little windows that don’t even open. I love air-conditioning, but one can only take so much ‘processed’ air.
8:45 a.m. We put our lunches in the community fridge and hurry to sign-in to the Prayer Room. It is a big room full of rows and rows of chairs and a few tables. I like sitting in the front row near the musicians because it is easier to focus. I bring my Bible, a journal, colored pencils, my laptop, lots of different flavors of chewing gum, a bottle of water, plenty of pens, and a few books to study (Knowledge of the Holy, Seven Longings of the Human Heart, etc.).
10 a.m. This is the first intercession set of the day. A full team of musicians come onstage and lead the whole room in several worship songs. Then people in the Prayer Room take turns praying on a mic next to the platform. After each prayer, the singers create a spontaneous chorus using phrases from the prayer, and the whole room joins in. This way everybody gets a chance to intercede on the same page for current events like the hurricanes and upcoming election or the Church around the world or the local community, etc.
12 p.m. We break for lunch. I get thirty minutes to eat, check emails, and make phone calls. Usually, lunch is a lot of fun because everyone is eating and talking together. We tell lots of stories and trade lots of strange foods. One day another intern was running late and only grabbed a raw red pepper for his lunch; he ate it bite-by-bite like an apple!
12:30 p.m. Most days we all go back into the prayer room. Usually in the afternoon, there is one musician on stage for two hours at a time. They play quietly on their instrument–guitar or piano usually. Everyone in the room reads or studies quietly. I like to pace in the open space at the back of the room while I think so that I can stay awake. The music and singing is so peaceful and relaxing, that if I have been up late the night before, I could fall asleep, haha! These afternoon sessions are some of my favorite times to sing quietly to myself. I love making up new songs using verses from Scripture. It helps me think about all the different meanings in each verse and allow the music to help the truth encounter my heart. Often I will get an idea and sit down and draw pictures representing the relationship between my feelings and my new revelation about the heart of God, etc. I have almost a fourth of my journal filled already 🙂
4 p.m. Everyday there is another intercession set at this time, but some days I help take care of the little kids while their parents are in the prayer room. Last week I got to take care of the 1 to 2 year olds–they are so precious! I am not really good at interacting with babies, and this is a chance for me to allow God to enjoy me in a setting that I feel really weak in. It is so humbling to be prayed for by a little child!
6 p.m. Two days out of the week, I take a class in the multi-purpose room at this time. We are taking Life of David and Sermon on the Mount as an internship. These classes are fascinating and challenging; I always have tons of notes in the margins of the outlines they hand out. My heart comes alive to see the Scriptures woven into a well-taught idea that I can take back to the prayer room and talk out with the Lord. 🙂 We are really tired by this point in the day, but there are other people from the community (not in an internship or on-staff at the Prayer Room) in the class, and the presence of new people helps bring energy to the room again.
8:30 p.m. We ladies go home and cook dinner together usually. We talk about our day, experiences we had in the prayer room or class, and joke and laugh. 🙂 I can’t cook, but Martha and Melissa are excellent cooks, and sometimes they will treat us to dinner. Usually we are really, really talkative because we have been quiet all day in the prayer room. We all firmly believe that females have a certain quota of words to speak everyday before they feel satisfied, lol 😛
11 p.m. By now we have cleaned up and moved downstairs, talked and joked and shared about our lives before and after this internship, planned the next day, done some laundry, played on the exercise ball, rolled around in the desk chair, rearranged our notes, listened to some new music or teaching from IHOP, and repeatedly complained about how tired we are. At least we don’t stay up until 3 a.m. like the guys 😉
11:15 p.m. I love reading a little bit of Les Miserables before I got to bed every night. I love the story and characters. Often I find in each section something related to what I was thinking about in the prayer room that day. I am reading it slowly, but I don’t think it will take me six years to finish like the first time I read it, lol!
This Is A Me 
Leave a comment