Last week I wrote about Ferdi and the unexpected blessing that our church's online meetings have been to him.
Today I want to share about another person who has benefitted from the online meetings of a church.
Me.
As both a mother of little ones and as a cross-cultural worker, I'm limited in being able to attend church prayer meetings. But the move to video chat prayer meetings has been an unanticipated silver lining of lockdown. This week my husband and I were able to join our Turkish church's virtual prayer meeting, and our UK sending church's prayer meeting.
Our Turkish church's weekly prayer meeting is early evening because young people (including those in their 20s who are unmarried and so still live at home with parents) are typically required to be home in evenings or by dark. That time slot coincides with the hour that I really need to be at home to nurse and get to bed a tired and clingy baby. When he was smaller, I could take him to the prayer meeting and I'd rock him in the carrier or someone would happily hold him. That's not a feasible option now he's out of the tiny baby phase, so we'd accepted that for this season my husband would be the one going to the prayer meeting.
And even when I can start going to the prayer meeting again, L and I will be alternating going. Like many other parents of small children around the would whose churches have evening prayer meetings where it's not practical or loving to bring the children, one of us will stay home with the children while the other goes out to the prayer meeting. Then we'll switch the next week.
But then our prayer meeting became a virtual prayer meeting. So Wednesday night we rearranged our evening routines, and we both got to join the prayer meeting. What a blessing!
Later on, once the children were in bed and asleep, we logged in to a different video chat application for our UK home church's prayer meeting. As workers who have been sent overseas, we're fairly used to making a brief appearance in the prayer meetings of our supporting churches. Usually they are all gathered together in a church hall or someone's living room, we appear on the screen and give an update and there's a few minutes of conversation and somebody prays for us. It's a great benefit of technology. But they are all there in person together, and we're the odd ones out appearing on a screen. We are guests in those prayer meetings.
Yet this week we were equals. All of us were sitting in our homes sharing prayer requests and praying over the Internet. Not only did both L and I get to join, but we got to pray with a group of people we know and love in English. Just as Bible translators talk of the way that God's Word resonates in a person's 'heart language', praying in your native tongue brings with it a freedom and a naturalness that doesn't come so easily in your second language.
Real life prayer meetings are better than video chat prayer meetings. But video chat prayer meetings are better than missing out on prayer meetings.
