Fighting on the Winning Team

I just finished watching The Blind Side and was struck like everyone else in America by the courage of Michael Oher's white Mama. She was a Champion for her family, marching into the darkness packing heat (in a quilted Chanel purse, no doubt.)

A week ago I met the Blind Side character's African parallel. She entered the store front Kalamazoo Prayer Clinic after us, walked in and sat down purposefully. Without much small talk she went straight to prayer and started to fight for her son. After a few minutes in prayer, we gathered that her son was having a difficult time in school and the teachers were becoming a part of the problem. Her son was losing confidence in his gifts. She prayed down all his opposition the way Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy confronted the drug dealers of inner city Memphis.

She prayed with passion and directness and a week later I still remember this:

She prayed that Christ's blood would cover her son as a protection. Christ's blood, she said, would remind the evil one of his defeat at the cross and his final defeat at the second coming. (Revelations 12:11)

She prayed against those who would try to diminish her son against the will of God. "He is filled with the Holy Spirit and with fire. I pray anyone who touches him against the will of the Father would be burned, and their work turned to ashes."

She prayed in her great African Alto voice using his long African name (that I could never quite catch) that his character would match his name.

With fervor she did battle in that small back room of the prayer clinic until she was prayed out. Her smile afterward said that she knew her Redeemer had heard and was fighting for her. "And how can we pray for you," she asked us when the hard work had been done.

My prayer partner and I got into the car and looked at eachother with triumph, "That boy is going to be just fine," we said at the same time. How could he not be, we wondered aloud with a mama championing him and confident before the throne of heaven. (Hebrews 4:16 Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. NIV)

I want to be her. I don't want to be caught playing the victim in self-pity or angry and cynical. I want to pray without ceasing.

I recently learned to have my husband's back, to pray for him early, as he walks out the front door, and late as he's falling asleep, my hand on his back. I've learned as another fierce mama I know advised me around Christmastime, to go to his Boss first if we are having a disagreement, then wait for the Holy Spirit to work in his heart or be open for the Counselor's work in mine.

I only hope to become like my own mama. Every morning in high school I would walk past my mama's prayer closet/office to the master bathroom to get ready for school. It was a round brick room which used to be a kiln in southern Ohio and was put back up in the same shape. I believe that many a spiritual plan of God's was fired in that space. As I tiptoed passed, she would be on her knees in her robe before her blue couch crying out to God. Often she would look up and say good morning, with tears in her eyes, the sun rising just outside the huge window beside her, putting her in a backlit profile.

These days I have her and my sister to pray with and there is no greater joy. We spend time enjoying God's presence in adoration, bust down walls with repentance between ourselves and the Lord, and then suit up (Ephesians 6:10-) and join the privilege of partnering with Him in prayer.

"The prayers of God's saints are the capital stock of heaven by which God carries on His great work on earth," says Paul Billheimer in Destined for the Throne. This quote scares the bijeebies out of me. Could it be true? It seems that many who have seen the biggest acts of God in history have lived and prayed as if it were so. (You have not because you ask not. James 4:2)

Sometimes I forget when I wake up to three kids bouncing on me at 6:30 in the morning that I need to approach the day fierce and focused. It requires