Way back in 1996, when praying by my bedside one night, the Lord impressed upon me to pray for ‘everyone in the world named John’. That was a considerably tall order, but I prayed as the Spirit led. I knew several ‘Johns’, some from childhood, and some from my adult life, but none of them seemed to ‘fit’. The indication to pray the prayer again never came, and over the years I wondered who the prayer was meant for. Then, back in the fall of 2012, 16 years later, and after asking God to reveal to me who this ‘John’ was, He let me in on the secret.
It was during this time that I was trying to find different platforms from which to launch the blogs I was writing, and I opened up a WordPress account. I sat up until 2am one night setting the whole thing up. By the time I got sleepy enough to go to bed, I had decided that I did not like that platform. Even though I had published one post, I closed the account first thing when I got up the next morning.
Unbeknownst to me, I had an email waiting for me from a man who had read that single post in the approximate 8 hours it had been up. When I saw this email , at least an hour after I had closed the account, it brought a smile to my face.
This man had commented on the post~from my very first blog~that I had written a few months prior. After a few kind words, he gave me his partial testimony. He lived in Canada, was presently retired, but his occupation had been that of a butler to a very wealthy family for twenty-five years. He went on to tell me that he had no living relatives, and had not had any in many years. He told me how he had given his life to Christ seven years earlier, after living a homosexual lifestyle his whole adult life.
As I read all of this, I was overcome with emotion at the sincerity I felt in his words. Then I read two things that made it all make sense. One of the last things he said, in reference to having no family, was that he knew that he had no one that would have prayed for him in all those years before, because he did not know, nor had any dealings with ‘Christians’ until he came to salvation. The second thing was that it was signed “Love, John.”
God had answered a prayer, because the spirit told me instantly that this was the man I had prayed for 16 years before. It warmed my soul to read his testimony, and know that God let me play a part in it.
That being said, whenever a prayer is impressed upon anyone’s heart, pray it, no matter how silly it may seem. It might take sixteen years to get the reason why, but He will reveal His purpose for it!
