Wednesday, April 16, 2008

A Mississippi Interfaith Prayer Meeting

My daughter attends the same school I teach at. It's a secular private school that is based on Christian principals. That basically means that prayer is okay within the class, they have devotionals, and faith can be discussed openly. But it's not corporate. And there are a good many non-Christian students.

Noelle is in K5, and her best buddies are Navarn and Tanya, children of Indian immigrants, and Wondeful, a Chinese immigrant. They are Hindu and Buddhist respectively. We were having a discussion this morning on prayer, and Noelle informed me that she, Wondeful, Navarn and Tanya had a prayer meeting on the playground yesterday, and that they have prayer every day at lunch. I was curious and asked her to explain:

At lunch, Noelle apparently blesses her food every day and ends her prayer with the phrase, "and don't let me throw up in Jesus name." Her friends have noticed the prayer, and since she has never thrown up after lunch, they decided to pray it too. (I have no idea why any of them expect to throw up.)

They gained such faith by the evidence of not throwing up after lunch, that when a caterpillar crisis erupted yesterday on the playground, they had a plan. One of the other children, Thomas Daniel, had thrown a handful of caterpillars he had collected into a puddle, and said caterpillars were struggling for survival. Noelle and her friends "rescued" them from the puddle, but apparently, they thought the caterpillars were still in distress. So, Noelle led them in prayer for the lives of the caterpillars - she pled the blood of Jesus over the puddle-drenched caterpillars. And pretty soon, Nevarn, Tanya and Wondeful were pleading the blood of Jesus too.

I had to try really hard, but I didn't laugh when my daughter told this story, because she was wonderfully serious about the whole thing. The caterpillars survived, and she's convinced it was the blood of Jesus that did it. I'm not sure if Jesus' blood literally saved the caterpillars, but I know that it left an impression on four little girls praying on the playground.

And for one moment in the world, in Central Mississippi, there was a prayer meeting of one Apostolic, one Buddhist and two Hindus where all four were pleading the blood of Jesus. My own prayer? That it will be a seed in the hearts of those children that God will nurture into something bigger than we can imagine.

Sometimes God can use foolish things to confound we who feel so wise . . .

1 comment:

-atomik kitten said...

I love this story more every time I read it!