Twice each year in Colorado Springs is the Couples Morning of Prayer at Glen Eyrie. This is a half-day event (usually 3-4 hours on a Saturday morning) with the primary focus on just encouraging couples (married or engaged) to pray together. This past year my wife and I were asked to start facilitating these events and we have seen clear evidence of E squared.
We have never done anything like this as a couple before so it was a little overwhelming at first. Who were we to encourage others couples to pray? Our marriage had definitely seen its ups and downs over the years but both of us undeniably know that without prayer we wouldn’t have made it. To help us get ready for this event and since I’m somewhat of an analytical guy I decided to do some research and found some statistics that I thought were pretty compelling. It is widely known that nearly 1 in 2 of “Christian” marriages today will end in divorce but it’s interesting that less than 1 in 10 of Christian couples pray together on a regular basis. But for those couples that pray together on a regular basis the divorce rate dramatically drops to under 1%! I’m not a guy that likes to gamble (not anymore anyway) but you’ve gotta like those odds!
Considering this and reflecting on our own prayer life we had to admit that while we agreed that individual pray time each day was important to us we admitted that our weekly scheduled time for prayer together wasn’t working out so well – just as we viewed our individual prayer life it became clear to us that we needed to be more intentional to be praying together each day (if even for just a few minutes).
This past August we had 18 couples register for the event. We had a wide range of couples, one couple has been married for over 50 years while another couple was just recently engaged. In this size of a group it was evident that there were some that had never really prayed with their spouse and, it was made known to me that a few of the spouses had not yet come to know Christ as their Lord and Savior. I didn’t really consider it before but it became clear to me that God can use this type of venue for planting or watering seeds of faith and an opportunity for the believing spouse to encourage their unbelieving wife or husband in and through prayer.
We wanted to find a simple way to encourage couples in prayer. After the group discussion we decided to have the couples pair up with another couple that they did not come with and just share a few prayer requests of their own. While we wanted to keep this time short (between 10-15 minutes) it was obvious within the first few minutes that it was going well so we didn’t worry about the time as much, then gathered back together as group after about 20 minutes. We then promptly ended the group meeting so the couples had a few hours to either talk/pray with other couples or just get some time on their own for the rest of the morning. The feedback we received was positive but it was clear that some couples felt uneasy praying with another couple they did not know but all admitted it was a good way to help break down some of those barriers that kept them praying together as a couple. Based on God’s Word we are best served do to whatever is necessary to remove anything that is preventing us from praying each day with our wives – you just can’t beat the odds.
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