October 3, 2005 - Sustained!

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Sustained!
Prayin' Mamas
By Leann Guzman
October 3, 2005

Can’t I Pray from Here?
The other night I woke up from a sound sleep and found myself wide awake. There was a feeling in the house, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. “Get up,” the Lord told me. “Go to your daughter’s room and pray.”

Have any of you mothers ever experienced that feeling? I took a poll of my friends at church, and every single one of them have felt the same feeling to get up in the middle of the night and go pray for their children.

According to my informal poll, I did what most of us have done at some point, and said, “How ‘bout I just pray from here? It should work from here, right?” So I stayed in bed, said a little prayer, and promptly fell back asleep.

Later that week, our marriage-based Bible study group met on Saturday night. The women in the group started talking about that feeling to go pray in the middle of the night. Annette, our resident mentor (a nice way of saying she’s a little older than the rest of us, but also more wise and experienced in spiritual warfare), spoke up. “Oh, you’d better get up and go pray when you have that feeling.” And she proceeded to tell us why she could speak this with such conviction.

“Encapsulate My Children”
Years ago when her teenage son was about three years old, her family lived in a mobile home in a nice, safe area of town. On the Friday night before Easter, she woke up drenched in sweat from a horrible dream where bullets were flying in her son’s room. She couldn’t understand what it meant – was it nightmare or was God trying to get her attention? Should she go pray for her son?

She did what I did, and instead, she fell back to sleep. But she had the dream again. After she woke up, she felt very strongly to go to him. She went to his room, and picked him up to take him to his sister’s room. They had just started sleeping in separate rooms, and neither one of them had wanted to be separated, so she thought it wouldn’t be a problem. But for some reason, he started fighting her and didn’t want to leave his room. God spoke to her and said, “Trust me.” So she took him back to his room asking, God, why his room? The answer came clearly: “Don’t question me.”

Once back in his room, she began praying and travailing, weeping over her son. She told the Lord, “I can’t go to bed until You give me peace.” She began to pray again, and this time it was as if the Lord was giving her the words.

Here was her prayer: “God, encapsulate my children with Your blood. Protect their bodies, their mind, their soul, and their flesh from harm and man and death, in Jesus name I pray.”

Immediately, she felt a warm feeling of peace from the top of her head to the bottom of her feet. She got up, walked out of the room, and went to bed, filled with assurance that everything was going to be OK.

The Miracle
The next day it was the Saturday before Easter at about 2:30 in the afternoon. The neighborhood was bustling with activity, with everyone out of the house running errands, doing yard work and visiting friends and family. Annette, however, was inside with her young children trying to get them to take a nap. Her daughter was asleep, and she went in to check on her son in his room. There he was, not in bed like he was supposed to be, making faces in front of the long mirror on the antique armoire that sat across from the wall to the outside.

Annette told him, “Go to bed, and take your nap.” As she walked toward him, he walked away from her, and they traded places in the room. As soon as her feet touched the spot where his feet had been, she felt a warm, hot sensation on her back, and this pressure that threw her against wall. The pressure wasn’t painful, but rather felt like a humongous palm of a hand.

She went to step back to where she had been, but she felt a muscle spasm through her whole body, and went against the wall again. She stepped back again to the place she had been, wondering what was going on, and was there more coming? Then, she stepped on something hot, looked down and found her bare foot had stepped on a hot bullet.

At this point, she went over to her son, checked him, looked all around the room, at the mirror, at the ground, and at the air conditioning vent. Where did this thing come from? She decided the only logical thing was that it had fallen from the air conditioning vent. Her husband was a police officer and she promptly went to call him to gripe at him for leaving his stuff out. As she was talking to him, he said, “Tell me exactly what happened, and go walk back through it.” When she went back to her son’s room, she saw a bullet hole through the outside wall.

God Hears Our Prayers
At that moment, all the pieces fell into place and she started realizing the whole picture. Then, as any mother would do, she started getting a little hysterical. Her husband said, “Call the police right now, and call the landlord.” The landlord thought she was going to sue him, but she told him that she was OK, she wasn’t going to sue him, she just wanted him to know what the Lord had done for her, and that she had to call the police to the premises. A few minutes later, the landlord called her back to say he had since gotten other calls from people in the neighborhood that their trailers had been shot, too, and it appeared to be gang-related drive-by shootings.

When the police came, they thought she’d lost her mind. One of them maintained eye contact with her the whole time while the other one kept going behind her to try to see her back. The two policemen and Annette were standing outside on her little deck and the neighborhood started gathering around. Annette said she felt like a preacher or apostle or something as she loudly and calmly proclaimed what the Lord had just done for her.

The police officer maintaining eye contact with her seemed to be staring into her soul. Finally he said, “Lady, I don’t know who you know, but whoever you know, is taking care of you because every single drive by shooting that I’ve been to, there’s a victim. And you’re doing something right because this is amazing.”

Ballistics on the three houses that were shot all showed the same thing. The gun was a 35mm Magnum, and each bullet went in to each mobile home 36 feet, tearing up walls, china cabinets and curtains until it lodged on the opposite side of the double wide trailer. But at Annette’s house, the bullet went in three feet and stopped because it struck her spine, yet caused no injury to her. If she had not traded places in the room with her son, he would have been standing in front of the mirror, and he would have been shot in the head.

I don’t think I need to say much else other than God hears the prayers of a prayin’ mama. Next time you get that feeling to get out of bed and go pray for your children, do it. It’s for a reason.

ninetyandnine.com

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Leann Guzman is ninetyandnine.com’s “Family / Work Issues” columnist. If you have suggestions on topics to explore, email her at Family@ninetyandnine.com.