The Prayer Of A Friend

The Prayer of a Friend

Pray for each other. . . . The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. James 5:16

“I just start to feel like I’m ‘all prayed up,’” a young woman shared with me, “and then Sunday night a friend asks me to pray for her mom, who’s in cancer treatment. Another woman needs prayer because her teenage son is driving her crazy. Someone else e-mails me three prayer requests. As the needs pile up, I feel guilty when I forget to pray.”

When we’re busy, it’s easy to lose the sticky note on which we wrote a friend’s prayer request or simply to forget because there’s so much to do. One of the best gifts we can give our friends is to pray with them the moment they express a need or prayer request. Five little words—“Could I pray for you?”—may make a big difference in a friend’s life. They did in mine.

A few weeks after my mother died, life had returned to “normal.” The kids had gone back to school, Holmes had returned to work, and I had resumed my part-time teaching. But I couldn’t get rid of the painful memories of how cancer had devastated my mom’s body. Those sad images weren’t the way I wanted to remember Mom, but they flooded in whenever I thought of her. I hadn’t been able to explain this to anybody, but God knew.

One day I got out of the car as my friend Patty was coming out of her natural-food store. This busy woman came over and put an arm around me.

“Cheri, how are you doing?”

She must have seen the tears welling up as I tried to explain how bogged down I was feeling.

“Could I pray for you?” she asked gently. Then Patty asked God to do something simple yet profound—to wrap his love around my memories of my mom. He did just that, bringing a healing touch as my friend Patty prayed for me in the parking lot. People all around us are longing for someone who cares enough about them to ask, to listen, and to pray for them right then. Will you stop and do that for someone today? —CHERI

Lord, help me to be sensitive to the needs of others and to stop and pray on the spot when that would be a blessing to a friend.

The best thing one woman can give another is a prayer from the heart and a warm hand of understanding. —CHERI FULLER