Please Stop...I Want To Pray With You!

On April 12th the Mount Airy Charge started the "Pray With You" project. The idea is real simple. You put up a banner asking folks to stop for prayer, put out some chairs, then sit and wait for people to stop for prayer as they drive by. Its a ministry being done by churches of the Lynchburg District of the UMC. Well actually, there are over 90 churches in the district and only 20 are doing this. We are 3 of the 20 and I am immensely pleased with response of our 3 congregations. There is a web site that lets folks who didn't stop to contact the church by email for prayer. Check it out at http://www.prayforyou.org/
We started the project at St. Andrews UMC. We will be doing the Saturdays, from 9:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the evening, in the month of April here and then moving to the Republican Grove UMC and Providence UMC for the month of May.
Our first day was cool and overcast, we got some rain (with a touch of thunder and lightning) for a few hours in the morning. It all seemed to start when Betty Jo and Heidi arrived and it tapered off when they left. You can draw your own conclusions.
The afternoon dried out and cooled down, but the wind was blowing hard enough to lift the canopy up off the ground. Emma Jean and Judy could have done some nice kite flying. It was in the afternoon that we had our only person to stop for prayer. She said she had driven by and then turned around and came back.
It may be that we were there all day simply for that one person to stop and ask for prayer. We may never know. We may find that each Saturday will be like this one, with more waves from passersby than people stopping. But folks now know that there is a church that believes in prayer on Route 40 and that church walks in what they believe. By the end of May they will also know there are churches on Java Road and Leda-Grove Road that believe the same.