T. D. Jakes - When Women Pray: 10 Women of the Bible Who Changed the World through Prayer

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Crushing

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Instinct

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Reposition Yourself

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The T. D. Jakes Relationship Bible

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On the Seventh Day

Not Easily Broken

So You Call Yourself a Man?

Woman, Thou Art Loosed!

He-Motions

Mama Made the Difference

Gods Leading Lady

Can You Stand to Be Blessed?

Let It Go

S he starts the day the same way she has started every day for years. For decades. Lowering her knees to the compacted dirt of her simple quarters, she sits back on her heels and bows her head toward the ground. In the quiet stillness surrounding her, she quiets the racing echoes of her mind. She wants to be ready for this momentready to speak and listen, to offer and receive.

Ready to pray.

Its 5:00 a.m. and she has much to accomplish. In an hour she will join the other members of her order for morning mass. That will be a respite. A chance to sit unknown and unrecognized among the rows of worshipers in blue and white habits. A chance to worship. A chance to be filled.

Then it will be time to serve. To give of herself. When mass concludes, she will connect with each visitor in attendance, clasping every offered hand in both of her own, wrinkled fingers squeezing warmly. Next, she will walk the streets of her city to visit the sick and the needy. There is food and medicine to be offered. Comfort as well. Along the way, she will search for those cast aside by the rushing world: the sick, the unstable, the unwanted. She will especially seek out those children whose only shelter is the dusty streets and whose only comfort is the occasional scrap of food from pitying pedestrians.

She will find them, and she will bring them home.

In the afternoon, she plans to visit the old railroad warehouse the city government helpfully donated to her order. All she had to do was ask. When she greets the lepers who now reside there, she will touch each of them intentionally. Tenderly. So that they feel her love. So that they feel and know the love of Christ.

Later in the evening she will be swept away to the local airport to begin a long and arduous journey westward. She accepted an invitation to visit one of the orders orphanages in Paris. Or was it the home in the South Bronx, New York? She will need to find out. In any case, all of that is for later. All of that is for the future, which is a mystery to all but God.

For now, in the quietness of this simple morning, she settles in once again to pray. The words come easily, as they shouldshe has spoken them every morning for more years than she can remember:

Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go. Flood our souls with Your Spirit and Life. Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly that our lives may only be a radiance of Yours. Shine through us and be so in us that every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our souls. Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus!

Stay with us and then we shall begin to shine as You shine, so as to be a light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from You; none of it will be ours. It will be You, shining on others through us.

Let us thus praise You in the way You love best, by shining on those around us. Let us preach You without preaching, not by words but by example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do, the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear for You. Amen.

Have you guessed the identity of this mystery woman? Her given name was Anjez Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, but the world knows her best by a different title.

You know her as Mother Teresa.

At the age of eighteen, Mother Teresa began a life of

Mother Teresa lived as a shining example of Jesus command to bless the least of these. Yet her many accomplishments were not based on her own goodness or her own strength, though both were considerable. Instead, she founded her ministry on the rock of Gods goodness and Gods strengtha practice that included daily setting herself before His throne by reciting the prayer offered above.

In short, the woman now revered as Saint Teresa of Calcutta is a testament to what can happen within a community and around the world when a woman prays.

Both today and throughout history, prayer has been a vital foundation for human culture and society.

The forms for that foundation were set when God first walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the garden. From the beginning, humanity was hardwired to live in communication with our Creator. Then, the concrete for that foundation was poured over the course of centuries as God called out a people through which He revealed Himself to the world.

Abraham was a man of faith who lived in constant communication with God; as a result, God promised to bless his descendants by making them a great nation, and that through Abraham all peoples on earth will be blessed (Gen. 12:3). Jacobs name was changed to Israelhe struggles with Godwhen he spent a night wrestling with God, which is a picture of prayer. Moses, perhaps the greatest leader the world has ever seen, was so dedicated to prayer that he regularly met with God face to face, as one speaks to a friend (Ex. 33:11). David, a man after Gods own heart, wrote psalms and prayers to God with such poignancy that we still recite them thousands of years later.