Helping people pray in a pandemic
The irony of life in lockdown has been that it’s precisely when needs are at their greatest that we’ve felt the least able to help.
The needs nationally are obvious and overwhelming. Yet for those of us who aren’t key workers, medics or politicians, there’s been little that we can do to help. We’ve been stuck at home! The solutions are out of our hands. All we can do is keep washing ours.
The needs in your personal circle may feel just as overwhelming, and just as impossible to meet: exhausted parents you’re not able to watch the kids for, grieving friends you’re not allowed to hug, lonely people you can’t welcome into your home. Your heart goes out to your struggling friends, but you have to stay in.
For those of us who pride ourselves on being one of life’s ‘do-ers’, this crisis has been a humbling experience. We’ve been sent to the bench to watch the match, when what we really want is to get back on the pitch. We feel so… useless. It’s incredibly humbling.
And yet in God’s economy, humble people are the most useful people to him. Because it’s humble people who are in the position to do the most practical, most powerful thing possible right now: pray.
Searching for help
With all the grief, fear and uncertainty caused by COVID-19, it’s perhaps not surprising that more people have been turning their minds to prayer. Google searches for ‘prayer’ increased by as much as 50%, with more people looking online for help to pray in March 2020 than at any other time before.
Some of these, no doubt, are people who have never prayed much before. But anecdotally, it’s also clear that many Christians have been struggling to know what or how to pray in the face of such perplexing realities. We sense that it’s important to pray at a time like this, but it’s hard to know where to start. Yet throughout Scripture, God promises to work in response to the prayers of his people.
It was driven by this conviction that The Good Book Company published Five Things to Pray in a Global Crisis in April. The Five Things to Pray series was already a proven and popular format, with other books in the range being used by tens of thousands of believers to pray deeply and meaningfully for their church, loved ones, world, city, kids and more. This new addition was conceived, written, edited, designed, proofed and sent to print in the space of two weeks! It was an exciting and very satisfying project to be part of—the rapid process and pressing need really brought out the best in TGBC’s publishing operation.
Like the other books in the series, Five Things to Pray in a Global Crisis works through twenty-one different prayer themes, taking a passage of Scripture and turning that into five short prayer prompts for each person or area of concern.
This little guide helps you to pray for your own heart, asking God to help you in the midst of your fear, loneliness, uncertainty and frustration.
It helps you to pray for loved ones—whether they’re sick or vulnerable, under your roof or far away.
It helps you to pray for those on the front line of fighting this virus: our government, healthcare system and key workers.
And it helps you to pray for your church family and your community during this unique season, as we ask God to do what only He can— to work through this crisis to grow His kingdom and bring glory to the Lord Jesus.
Can you imagine what God might do in our church, our community and our nation, if His people earnestly asked Him to be at work? And then consider that He is the one ‘who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work in us’ (Ephesians 3:21)!
We’re not powerless to help in the face of this pandemic. Well actually, we are. That’s part of the point. But we have the ear of the One who is not, and we are invited to come to Him in prayer.
Other books in the 5 Things to Pray series...
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