How I got started in the School of Prayer - From My Prayer Closet

LK 11:1 One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us topray, just as John taught his disciples."

God taught and is still teaching me how to pray, but I had observed the discipline of prayer practiced by my father, mother and grandparents long before that. Originally, all I did was repeat words that I had or was taught. My first public prayer was in front of my family kneeling down at a table and repeating the Lord’s prayer really fast, I could not even feel the words ramble from my lips. When I was done, my aunt commented that I had prayed so fast I forgot that there were commas and other punctuation in the Lord’s prayer. I was embarrassed. Prayer then was just a nice repetition of words to me. We did it at school when we repeated the national prayer for our country and leaders, I did not even know we were praying until many years later. I understood it simply as something people did.

Then in 1979 as war raged between Zambia and Southern Rhodesia which is now Zimbabwe, their struggle for freedom cost our country a lot. The greatest cost to us as children was fear that we would be displaced, lose our parents or be hurt en masse if ever we were bombed. And, this was no empty threat because Ian Smith’s army had been pounding our little quiet nation that was home to many refugees and freedom fighters from our non-emancipated neighbors, with bombs, bringing down bridges, buildings, burning villages. A few years earlier, when I was just about 4 the country had lost a well-known Zambian musician by the name of Alick Nkhata who had the misfortune of being caught up in a CROSS BORDER fire between Southern Rhodesian soldiers and Freedom while traveling to his farm in the rural district of Mkushi.

The death of Alick Nkhata was so publicized even as young as I was, I heard of this man’s death and before long, we were singing about him in our songs as kids around the neighborhood. The fight between our two countries would become a great cause of anxiety as I grew older. What I did not know was that it would lead me into the spiritual call that would bring me closer to God. At the height of the war when it seemed that all hell was about to break loose, I held my immediate little sister’s hand, I was about 9 years old and she 7, together we prayed that the war would come to an end, that we would not be bombed and that Southern Rhodesia would stop being a troublesome country to ours.

Of course between 1979 and 1980 the war ended. Zimbabwe got its Independence in 1980. It was wonderful News for all of us in Zambia who had been rallying behind the fight for freedom taking as badly a beating from that war as any nation could take. Many Zambians died during that struggle, we suffered many economic tolls too but to this day what I remember is a Prayer answering God who protected us and brought this war to an end, even if the overall toll on human lives on both sides of the border was worse than I would ever hear all my years till now http://www.newrhodesian.net/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=300

So who is this prayer answering God and what was He doing answering our prayer? Why should we pray anyway?

Growing up I was so aware of God and His desire to forgive the sins of His children that my deeds seemed to be forever in front of Him. I was so sin conscience, I constantly asked God for His forgiveness all the time. I was yet to know God as a God of love and the giver of all good things whom we could trust in and with anything.

When my family moved to the rural district of Mporokoso in Northern Zambia (Zambia map) in 1978, the most wonderful thing that happened to me was that we began having Bible Studies with my parents every evening before we went to bed. This discipline was obviously encouraged by the fact that Mporokoso was very remote. It had no electricity, Newspapers were never seen and one struggled to catch the radio waves on radio. With not much to do, my parents who had spent most of their evenings watching television and socializing with friends and family in Chingola now turned to God for more fellowship and what a wonderful thing it was for us. I believe that God took us to Mporokoso to acquaint us with Himself. We had attended church all our years in Chingola and I remembered a few things that we learnt. The Bible studies with dad as the preacher began to impact me differently, I became conscience of God in varied ways. For example, I began to wonder why there weren’t the same kind of things happening in the Christian community as there used to be in the Bible. My search and faith translated into a seeking that would see results as I grew older particularly at age 12. Not seeing the power of God manifested among his people did not stop me from trusting God to end a war and liberate a nation that was not far from ours.

Our prayer for God to stop the war was a direct understanding that God whom our parents and we (who were learning to pray) prayed to every day to bless our food, preserve travelers, help those in hospitals, give food to the hungry and the list goes on, was capable of stopping a war that the whole world was failing to stop. We trusted that God was capable of preserving our lives, protecting us and all our family that we loved so much. These happenings had made it difficult for us to even visit our grand and great grandparents who lived in Lusaka. It had been a joy of ours while in Chingola that we visited our grandparents every December. But for two consecutive years in 1978 and 1979, we were not able to do that because the Chambeshi bridge had been bombed by Rhodesian soldiers. Even if no one explicitly told us what was happening in the country, we could tell from the tension and talk of war that bad things were happening. It was a harrowing experience because we missed our grandparents greatly and I feared most of the time that the rest of the country that was cut from us because of the bridge would be butchered by mercenaries and we would never see one another again, besides our whole family was on that other side where we were not. In faith, we would turn to God and pray.

Many years later and at the appropriate time, as if to remind me that there was nothing too hard for Him, God would bring those innocent prayers to mind. This time God would be showing me how faithfulness is learnt and how prayer is connected to faith. From the living room studies of those years, my faith as a child grew and I desired nothing more than to see the power of God manifested in our times as it was during the time of Jesus Christ and beyond. Through the years I would realize that most of the things God did were in answer to prayer. I had been admitted into God’s school of faith and it rode side by side with prayer. The first lesson in prayer for me therefore was that when we get to know God through His word, the word we learn begins to open us up to the power and working of the Holy Spirit. Let us start together by electing to stay in the word this season. If we are going to pray, we will have to have faith in God.

PS: In 2006, God burdened my heart to stand in the gap and pray for the nations, for communities around the world and also to encourage His children (Christians) to rise up and pray, and that as we pray, we will impact governments, churches and whole communities. With prayer, we can enter places that we are forbade, we can travel distances that we only dream of, we can cross the oceans and be all over the world in one hour. Prayer will accomplish much. The school of prayer is here to encourage believers and would be believers to learn and embrace the power given to us through the discipline of prayer.