Prayers God answered.

The drought began when Elijah stood before Ahab and said, “As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” In the third year the word of the LORD came to Elijah: “Go, shew thyself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.”

On Mount Carmel, after the prophets of Baal had called on their god all day with no answer, Elijah said to all the people, “Come near unto me.” He repaired the altar of the LORD that was broken down. He took twelve stones “according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob,” built an altar in the name of the LORD, and dug a trench around it. He laid the wood in order, cut the bullock in pieces, and had four barrels of water poured on the sacrifice and the wood, then a second time, then a third, until the water ran round about the altar and filled the trench.

At the time of the evening sacrifice Elijah came near and prayed: “LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O LORD, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the LORD God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again.” That is the whole recorded prayer.

“Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.” When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God.” Elijah had the prophets of Baal taken down to the brook Kishon and slew them there.

The rain had still not come. Elijah told Ahab, “Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is a sound of abundance of rain.” Elijah went up to the top of Carmel, “cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees,” and sent his servant to look toward the sea. The servant looked and said, “There is nothing.” Elijah said, “Go again seven times.” At the seventh time the servant reported, “Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” Elijah sent word to Ahab to prepare his chariot and get down before the rain stopped him.

“And it came to pass in the mean while, that the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.” Ahab rode toward Jezreel, and the hand of the LORD was on Elijah as he girded up his loins and ran before Ahab to the entrance of Jezreel. James later wrote that Elijah “was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.”

The best-known Müller story goes like this. One morning the children were seated in the long dining room, the tables laid, and there was nothing to put on the plates. Müller prayed, ‘Dear Father, we thank Thee for what Thou art going to give us to eat.’ A knock came: a baker who said he had been unable to sleep, had felt the orphans had no bread, and had risen at two in the morning to bake it. A second knock: a milkman whose cart had broken down outside the house, who asked whether the children could take his milk so he could empty the wagon and mend it. That account was told by Abigail Townsend Luffe, who spent time at the orphanage as a small child while her father helped Müller. It was written up by a friend, Grace K. Swanger, in the Sunday School Times and reprinted in the Pentecostal Evangel of 29 May 1920. Swanger herself noted that it ‘does not appear in the biographies of Müller, nor in the narratives.’ It is a recollection, not a contemporary record.

What Müller did record, in dated entries, is very close in substance and less tidy. He had opened the first Orphan House in April 1836 with a stated purpose: ‘that God might be magnified by the fact, that the orphans under my care are provided, with all they need, only by prayer and faith, without any one being asked by me or my fellow-labourers, whereby it may be seen, that God is FAITHFUL STILL, and HEARS PRAYER STILL.’

By September 1838 there were three houses and the money had run out. ‘Sept. 16, 1838. Lord’s day afternoon. We met again for prayer respecting supplies for the orphans... though but one shilling has come in since last evening.’ On the 17th two staff members gave what they had left: twelve shillings sixpence, and eleven shillings eightpence, ‘being all the money she had left.’ That evening Müller, ‘rather tried respecting the long delay of larger sums coming,’ read Psalm 34 to the workers. On the 18th, with one pound eight shillings between them, they bought meat, bread, a little tea and milk for all. ‘Now, however, we are come to an extremity. The funds are exhausted.’ That afternoon a lady visiting from near London, who had taken lodgings next door to the Boys’ Orphan House four or five days earlier, brought over three pounds two shillings and sixpence from her daughter. Müller noted that the money had been sitting next door for days: ‘because he delights in the prayers of his children, he had allowed us to pray so long.’ Writing in 1845, he called 18 September 1838 the one day in seven years of poverty when ‘for the first time the Lord seemed not to regard our prayer.’

The same week goes on in the same key: a sovereign arriving at two o’clock on the 22nd, ‘just at the moment when it was needed,’ to pay the teachers; a worker withdrawing her last six pounds from the savings bank; and on Saturday the 29th the rent falling due at noon with nothing in hand, which Müller honestly recorded as ‘the second, and only the second, complete failure as to answers of prayer in the work’ in four and a half years, and took as a lesson to set rent aside weekly.

The scale of what followed is on record. Arthur Pierson, working from the Institution’s 1898 report, gave the totals: 10,024 orphans received since the beginning; £988,829 spent on the orphan houses; and across all the Institution’s work, close to one and a half million pounds, none of it solicited. Pierson also reported that ‘in fifty thousand cases, Mr. Muller calculated that he could trace distinct answers to definite prayers.’ That figure is Müller’s own estimate as relayed by Pierson, not a ledger count.

By the third week of May 1940, German forces had reached the French coast and cut off the British Expeditionary Force and other Allied troops. Soldiers crowded into a shrinking pocket around Dunkirk, with the sea behind them. The scale of a possible rescue looked desperately small beside the danger. In his subsequent report to Parliament, Churchill said he had thought that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be brought off. Preparations for evacuation began while the fighting continued.

On 24 May, King George VI called the nation to prayer in his Empire Day broadcast. Churches observed Sunday 26 May as a National Day of Prayer; the King and Queen attended Westminster Abbey. The request was for God’s help in a national emergency, including the men facing destruction across the Channel. The German halt order of 24 May had already given the defenders some time before that Sunday service.

Operation Dynamo began on the evening of 26 May. Naval vessels and civilian craft worked together, carrying soldiers from the harbour and beaches or ferrying them to larger ships offshore. Soldiers held the perimeter, airmen fought overhead, and crews returned repeatedly through danger. A rescue on this scale depended on preparation, judgment and extraordinary endurance. Prayer was offered in the midst of that work; it did not replace it.

The weather also mattered. Ramsay’s naval account describes generally favourable conditions for lifting men from the beaches, although conditions varied and the operation remained hazardous. By the last evacuation on 4 June, the eventual total was 338,226 troops. The Imperial War Museums’ memorial records preserve that final figure. Churchill’s speech that day gave a preliminary total of more than 335,000, so the two numbers belong to different stages of reporting. Many vessels were lost, and many soldiers were killed or captured.

Churchill’s Commons statement of 4 June used the phrase ‘a miracle of deliverance’. In the same statement he praised military skill and perseverance and cautioned the House against treating a withdrawal as a victory. A national thanksgiving followed on 9 June. Those who had gathered to ask for help now gathered to give thanks for the lives brought home, even while the war continued and France faced disaster.

The record establishes the public prayer, the evacuation and the public gratitude. It does not isolate prayer as a measurable cause of a particular military order or change in weather. Christians have nevertheless received Dunkirk as an occasion to remember God’s mercy in an emergency. Its invitation is concrete: pray for those with no clear escape, pray for the people working to help them, and remember the rescued with thanksgiving without forgetting those who did not return.

In 1949 the parish of Barvas, on the Isle of Lewis, had a minister and several elders troubled that young people had stopped coming. Faith Mission evangelist Duncan Campbell wrote in 1954 that Rev. James Murray MacKay and his elders had prayed for spiritual renewal for months, often into the small hours. Their meetings joined a plea for their community with self-examination.

Campbell connected that self-examination to Psalm 24, especially its question about clean hands and a pure heart. He also says the group held to Isaiah 44:3, the promise of water for the thirsty and blessing for descendants. These public-domain biblical words, rather than a preserved scripted prayer, supplied the language of their waiting.

The part of the story most people know, the two sisters, is not in Campbell’s 1954 booklet. It appears in his recorded talks years later. There he names Peggy Smith, eighty-four and blind, and her sister Christine, eighty-two and disabled by arthritis. He recalled that they prayed in their cottage on Tuesday and Friday nights from ten until three or four in the morning, while seven men prayed in a barn. His retellings vary on whether those barn meetings had continued for several weeks or several months. Peggy, he said, envisioned the church crowded with young people. In the barn a young deacon read Psalm 24, challenged the group to be right with God, and prayed, “O God, are my hands clean? Is my heart pure?” Campbell connected that prayer with the change that followed, while presenting a participant’s interpretation rather than an independently demonstrable cause.

The booklet says that one person in the praying group envisioned the man who would come. In later talks Campbell identifies that person as Peggy and recounts her confidence that he would arrive within a fortnight despite his initial refusal. His Skye commitment fell through, and he reached Barvas in December 1949.

The next part he put in writing. After a first service that seemed ordinary, the congregation lingered outside until a young man’s intercession drew people back in. Campbell wrote that the meeting continued into the small hours and that some people began praying in their homes before reaching the church. In a later recorded address he estimated that roughly six hundred were at the second service and at least four hundred gathered near the police station. Those are his retrospective estimates, and another Campbell transcript gives different figures, so the safest conclusion is that hundreds gathered across the two sites.

The movement continued across Lewis into the early 1950s. Campbell reported people praying or overcome at home, outdoors and at their weaving looms as well as in church. His later accounts say Peggy and Christine Smith lived to see young people fill the church for which they had prayed.

In the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, the Bible says, “did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them.” Later, hearing that Tirhakah king of Ethiopia had come out to fight him, Sennacherib sent messengers again to Hezekiah with a letter. Its message was direct: “Let not thy God in whom thou trustest deceive thee, saying, Jerusalem shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria.” It reminded Hezekiah what the kings of Assyria had done to all lands, questioned whether the destroyed nations’ gods had delivered them, and named the nations his fathers had destroyed and the kings who were no more.

“And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up into the house of the LORD, and spread it before the LORD.” Then he prayed. He began with who God is: “O LORD God of Israel, which dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth: thou hast made heaven and earth.” He asked God to bow down His ear and hear, to open His eyes and see, “and hear the words of Sennacherib, which hath sent him to reproach the living God.”

He did not dispute the facts in the letter. “Of a truth, LORD, the kings of Assyria have destroyed the nations and their lands,” he prayed, and “have cast their gods into the fire: for they were no gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone: therefore they have destroyed them.” Then came the request: “Now therefore, O LORD our God, I beseech thee, save thou us out of his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou art the LORD God, even thou only.”

The answer came through Isaiah the son of Amoz, who sent to Hezekiah: “Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, That which thou hast prayed to me against Sennacherib king of Assyria I have heard.” Concerning the king of Assyria the LORD said, “He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it. By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city, saith the LORD. For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake.”

“And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh.” Isaiah 37 tells the same events in nearly the same words and adds how it ended for Sennacherib: while he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, two of his sons killed him with the sword, and Esar-haddon his son reigned in his stead.

The frame of this story is well documented. Mrs Susannah Müller kept a record of her husband’s preaching tours and published it in 1883. On Thursday 23 August 1877 they boarded the Allan Line steamship Sardinian at Liverpool and sailed at seven in the evening, bound for Quebec rather than New York because friends had advised the shorter sea crossing. ‘Off the Island of Newfoundland,’ she wrote, ‘the weather became cold, and the progress of the vessel was retarded considerably by fogs; but on August 30th, the welcome cry of “land!” from the steerage passengers was heard, and when the fog lifted, Belle Island on our right was in full view.’ That evening Müller held a meeting for the sailors and steerage passengers in the forecastle ‘and spoke afterwards in the Chart Room to as many of the cabin passengers as were able to attend.’ The Sardinian reached Point Louis, South Quebec, at half past eight on the evening of Saturday 1 September, and on Sunday evening Müller preached at the Baptist Church, his first sermon in Canada.

The conversation on the bridge comes to us by a longer road. In a public-domain issue of The Elim Evangel dated 9 September 1932, an unnamed writer said he knew the evangelist Charles Inglis personally and printed Inglis’s account. Inglis said that he had crossed the Atlantic with the same captain, who told him what had happened on an earlier voyage. The fog was dense when Müller came to the bridge and said he must be in Quebec on Saturday afternoon. He asked the captain to join him in the chart room, where, in the captain’s recollection, Müller prayed briefly for the fog to lift. When the captain began to pray, Müller stopped him, convinced the request had already been answered. The captain said they opened the door, found the fog gone, and Müller reached Quebec in time.

Several details deserve caution. Mrs Müller does not name the captain, and I could not trace to any early source the name ‘Dutton’ that appears in later retellings. In the Inglis version Müller says he has known the Lord ‘for fifty-seven years’; in August 1877 it had been fifty-two years since his conversion in November 1825, so either the number or the voyage has drifted in memory. Mrs Müller records arrival on Saturday evening, not afternoon, and the first meeting on Sunday. And she, who was aboard, mentions fog and the Chart Room but says nothing of a prayer that cleared it; Pierson’s 1899 biography, written with the family’s help, does not include the episode either.

None of that makes the captain a liar. It means we have a sailor’s memory, told to a preacher, written down by others decades later, and it should be offered as exactly that: a testimony, resting inside a voyage whose fog and timing are a matter of record.

Rees Howells founded the Bible College of Wales in Swansea in 1924. The college understood prayer as part of its daily work, including its responsibility for missionaries’ children. When Europe moved towards war, that work took on a national and international urgency. The college’s institutional history remembers repeated meetings from 1936 to 1945 to pray against Hitler’s plans and for the continued spread of the Christian gospel.

Norman Grubb’s 1952 biography supplies the fuller narrative. He says that after the military crisis in May 1940, the college met every evening from seven until midnight, with a short supper interval, as well as in the morning and often at midday. His chapters on Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain reproduce dated statements from the meetings. These are meeting records as selected and published later by a sympathetic biographer, rather than an independent record of military decision-making.

The requests were specific. In May, the college prayed over the threatened loss of the British army in France and the possibility of invasion. The meeting notes show Howells expressing increasing confidence as the Dunkirk evacuation proceeded. The evacuation did rescue hundreds of thousands, but the college’s prayer should be read alongside the work of sailors, soldiers and airmen and the prayers offered in many other places.

In September, the children living at the college were a particular concern as the air war reached Swansea. Grubb records that no bomb struck the college property during the war. On 8 September, another National Day of Prayer, Howells prayed, ‘May God bring the nation back.’ The request reached beyond military survival to the nation’s relationship with God. The same chapter records prayers for the King and Queen and for London during the bombing.

Britain was not invaded in 1940, and the college’s account presents its own protection as a mercy received. Neither outcome means that every home or family that prayed was physically spared. Swansea and other cities suffered grievously, and the war continued for years. Grubb’s account gives access to how this one community prayed and understood events, not evidence that its meetings controlled the course of the battle.

The enduring lesson is the community’s willingness to keep bringing real needs to God. Prayer did not stop when the newspaper changed, and the children were not merely an abstract national cause: they were people entrusted to the college. A reader can begin on that same scale, setting aside a regular time for a threatened family or community and asking both for protection and for a renewed life of faith.

The revival that swept Wales in the winter of 1904–05 did not begin with Evan Roberts. Through 1903 Joseph Jenkins, the Calvinistic Methodist minister at New Quay, had been holding young people’s meetings aimed at deepening loyalty to Christ. One Sunday in February 1904 he asked the young people what Christ meant to them. A girl of about nineteen named Florrie Evans stood and said, in Welsh, “I love Jesus Christ with all my heart.” The Dictionary of Welsh Biography records that her words “made a deep impression on those present” and “effectively marked the start of the Revival in Wales.”

Through the summer the New Quay young people took their singing and testimony to nearby churches. Seth Joshua, a Forward Movement evangelist, held meetings there in September and then at Blaenannerch, where Evan Roberts, a twenty-six-year-old former collier preparing for the ministry at Newcastle Emlyn, came with other students. On the morning of Thursday, 29 September 1904, Joshua closed a meeting praying “O Arglwydd, plyg ni” (“O Lord, bend us”). Roberts’s own account, printed in D. M. Phillips’s 1906 biography, says that “some living energy or force” entered his bosom, that his legs trembled, and that he fell to his knees crying “Bend me! Bend me!” Joshua noted the meeting in his diary; for years he had prayed that God would raise up a young man from the mines rather than the colleges.

Roberts could not settle to his studies. He went home to Loughor, near Swansea, and on 31 October began meetings at Moriah chapel with a handful of young people. He pressed four things: confess any known sin; put away anything doubtful; obey the Spirit promptly; confess Christ publicly. Within a fortnight the chapels of Loughor were full past midnight, and the Western Mail sent its reporter ‘Awstin’, whose daily columns carried the news across Wales and beyond. Meetings spread through the valleys and northward, often with no preacher: singing, confession and prayer for hours.

The famous figure of 100,000 converts is an estimate rather than a census. Contemporary newspapers compiled district reports, and later historians have produced totals ranging from about 80,000 to 162,000. Christian History’s review of the scholarship stresses that the count depends on what was counted and that not every profession became lasting membership. The evidence securely establishes a widespread movement; it does not support a single exact national total.

Social effects were also reported at the time. The journalist W. T. Stead visited Cardiff and Mardy on 10–11 December 1904 and interviewed clergy, employers, police and others. He reported less drinking, idleness and gambling, and described miners singing revival hymns underground. Later summaries added claims about pit ponies no longer understanding cleaned-up commands; that flourish does not appear in Stead’s 1904 dispatch. Reports of empty court calendars and white gloves likewise should be read as local anecdotes, not proof that crime vanished across Wales.

Roberts preached for barely a year. Worn out, he broke down in 1906 and withdrew to the home of Jessie Penn-Lewis in Leicester. What he asked for at Blaenannerch was answered; what followed was on a scale he had not asked for.

“In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death.” The prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz came to him with a message that left no room: “Thus saith the LORD, Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.”

The Bible records Hezekiah’s response in one sentence and his tears. “Then he turned his face to the wall, and prayed unto the LORD, saying, I beseech thee, O LORD, remember now how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which is good in thy sight. And Hezekiah wept sore.”

The answer did not wait for another day. “And it came to pass, afore Isaiah was gone out into the middle court, that the word of the LORD came to him, saying, Turn again, and tell Hezekiah the captain of my people, Thus saith the LORD, the God of David thy father, I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee: on the third day thou shalt go up unto the house of the LORD.” The message went further than healing: “And I will add unto thy days fifteen years; and I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria; and I will defend this city for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake.”

Isaiah said, “Take a lump of figs.” They laid it on the boil, “and he recovered.” Hezekiah asked for a sign: “What shall be the sign that the LORD will heal me, and that I shall go up into the house of the LORD the third day?” Isaiah offered him a choice: “shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?” Hezekiah answered, “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees.”

“And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” Isaiah 38 tells the same account and records the LORD’s own words for the sign: “Behold, I will bring again the shadow of the degrees, which is gone down in the sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down.” That chapter also preserves a writing of Hezekiah’s from after he had recovered.

Hudson Taylor sailed for China from Liverpool on 19 September 1853 aboard the Dumfries, a small sailing vessel. He was twenty-one. The voyage was slow: calms on the equator, then more calms in the Eastern Archipelago, where a breeze would rise after sunset and die at dawn, so that by day the ship ‘lay still with flapping sails, often drifting back and losing a good deal of the advantage we had gained during the night.’

Taylor tells the rest in A Retrospect, the account of his early life he wrote in the 1880s and published in 1894. One Saturday night had brought them to a point about thirty miles off the north coast of New Guinea. During the Sunday morning service on deck he noticed the captain looking troubled and going repeatedly to the ship’s side. Afterwards he learned why: ‘a four-knot current was carrying us rapidly towards some sunken reefs, and we were already so near that it seemed improbable that we should get through the afternoon in safety.’ After dinner the long-boat was put out and all hands tried, without success, to pull the ship’s head away from the shore. As they drifted closer they could see people on the sands lighting fires. The captain’s book described the islanders as cannibals.

‘After standing together on the deck for some time in silence, the captain said to me, “Well, we have done everything that can be done; we can only await the result.” A thought occurred to me, and I replied, “No, there is one thing we have not done yet.”’ Taylor pointed out that four people on board were Christians: the Swedish carpenter, the steward, the captain and himself. He proposed that each go to his own cabin ‘and in agreed prayer ask the LORD to give us immediately a breeze. He can as easily send it now as at sunset.’

The captain agreed. Taylor spoke to the other two, prayed with the carpenter, and went to his cabin. ‘I had a good but very brief season in prayer, and then felt so satisfied that our request was granted that I could not continue asking, and very soon went up again on deck.’ The first officer, whom Taylor calls ‘a godless man,’ had the watch. Taylor asked him to let down the corners of the mainsail, which had been hauled up to stop its useless flapping. Asked what good that would do, Taylor said they had been praying for a wind and it was coming at once. The officer swore he ‘would rather see a wind than hear of it.’ But as he spoke, Taylor followed his eye up to the royal, the topmost sail, and saw its corner beginning to tremble. ‘No, it is only a cat’s-paw,’ the officer said. ‘Cat’s-paw or not,’ Taylor answered, ‘pray let down the mainsail, and let us have the benefit!’

He did. The tramp of the men on deck brought the captain up from his cabin to find the breeze had come. ‘In a few minutes we were ploughing our way at six or seven knots an hour through the water.’ The wind held, unsteadily, until they were past the Pelew Islands. Taylor added his own conclusion: ‘Thus GOD encouraged me, ere landing on China’s shores, to bring every variety of need to Him in prayer.’ The Dumfries reached Shanghai on 1 March 1854.

This is a first-person memoir written some thirty years after the event, not a log entry; but it is Taylor’s own account, restrained in tone, naming the ship, the officers’ roles and the sails, and it has never been contradicted by anyone else aboard.

Corrie ten Boom, a watchmaker’s daughter from Haarlem, was fifty-two when the Gestapo raided her family’s house on 28 February 1944 for hiding Jews behind a false wall in her bedroom. Her father died in prison within ten days. Corrie and her older sister Betsie were held in Holland, then in September 1944 sent by cattle car to Ravensbrück, the women’s camp north of Berlin, where Corrie smuggled in a small Dutch Bible and a bottle of Davitamon vitamin drops.

In October they were moved to Barracks 28. Corrie remembered overcrowded sleeping platforms and straw alive with fleas. Betsie turned their attention to 1 Thessalonians and its command to give thanks. Together they thanked God that they remained together, that they had a Bible, and that so many women could hear it. Betsie included the fleas. Corrie could see no reason for gratitude for an infestation, but joined the prayer. The memoir presents this as reluctant obedience, not as pleasure in suffering.

The sisters began reading the Bible each evening. Corrie describes the words passing from Dutch through German into several other languages as prisoners translated for one another. They began cautiously, then grew bolder when guards did not interrupt. Later, Betsie learned that a supervisor would not come into their room because of the fleas. What had seemed only another torment had also helped leave space for worship. That connection rests on Corrie’s recollection in The Hiding Place.

Corrie also remembered sharing a small bottle of vitamin drops with Betsie and other sick women. Despite the growing number of people receiving drops, she said the bottle continued to yield more. Betsie connected this with the biblical widow whose oil did not run out. When another prisoner obtained a new supply of vitamins, Corrie recalled that the little bottle finally became empty. This is a personal account of perceived provision, not a measured medical record or a claim that vitamins cured every recipient.

Betsie’s health deteriorated, and she died on 16 December 1944. Corrie was released on 28 December, the date preserved in the family’s museum chronology. Her survival did not erase that bereavement. In 1959, the same chronology says, she learned that her release had resulted from an administrative error. Her unexpected freedom became part of the testimony she carried into a lifetime of speaking about forgiveness and hope.

The sisters’ prayer was larger than a request for comfort. They wanted to remain faithful, to share Scripture and to serve the women around them. Corrie’s later ministry carried that testimony around the world: gratitude and love could still be practiced in a place built to destroy both. Read with Betsie’s death in view, the story encourages prayer and service through suffering without promising that faithful people will always escape it.

When Jim Cymbala took over a struggling church in downtown Brooklyn in the early 1970s, fewer than twenty people came. He has said the first Sunday offering he took was eighty-five dollars, and that on Tuesday nights he sometimes stood in front of two people. Out of that season came the decision that has defined the Brooklyn Tabernacle ever since: the Tuesday night prayer meeting would be the most important meeting of the week. By the time he wrote Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire (1997) the congregation numbered in the thousands, and 1,200 to 1,500 people were gathering to pray every Tuesday.

The story he tells most carefully is about his own family. His eldest daughter, Chrissy, began to pull away in her teens and eventually left home. Cymbala describes roughly two and a half years of failed arguments, offers of money and private anguish while almost no one in the congregation knew. During the same period, Carol underwent surgery and severe depression.

One November, alone in Florida, Cymbala says he stopped trying to control Chrissy’s choices and entrusted the situation to God. He told Carol that he would wait for reconciliation rather than keep pursuing their daughter. Carol remained in contact, and Christmas passed without Chrissy returning.

Then, on a Tuesday night in February, an usher brought him a folded note asking the meeting to stop and pray for his daughter. A later AG News profile dates the event to 1991. Cymbala’s recorded sermon estimates that more than a thousand people were present; AG News gives about 1,700, so the precise attendance is uncertain. He asked an associate pastor to lead. No source preserves the congregation’s exact words, but Cymbala described sustained, urgent collective prayer. When it ended he told Carol that he believed the crisis was over.

Cymbala’s published account gives the interval as thirty-two hours. On Thursday morning Carol told him Chrissy was downstairs. He found his daughter on the kitchen floor asking forgiveness and asking who had prayed for her on Tuesday night. Chrissy later said that during the night she had become convinced of the direction her life was taking and of God’s love for her. This describes her reported inward experience, not something an outside observer could verify.

Chrissy went on to direct music at a Bible school for four years, married a minister, and later told the story publicly. Her father presents the episode as the clearest personal example of why the Brooklyn Tabernacle made corporate prayer central.

Word came to Jehoshaphat that “a great multitude” was coming against him, the children of Moab and Ammon and others with them, already at Hazazon-tamar, which is En-gedi. “And Jehoshaphat feared, and set himself to seek the LORD, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah.” From every city of Judah the people came to seek the LORD.

Standing in the congregation in the house of the LORD, the king prayed. “O LORD God of our fathers, art not thou God in heaven? and rulest not thou over all the kingdoms of the heathen? and in thine hand is there not power and might, so that none is able to withstand thee?” He recalled that God had given the land to the seed of Abraham, God’s friend for ever, and that His people had built a sanctuary there, trusting that in any evil they could stand before this house and cry to Him, and “then thou wilt hear and help.”

He named the enemy, Ammon, Moab, and mount Seir, now coming “to cast us out of thy possession, which thou hast given us to inherit.” Then he ended with plain helplessness: “O our God, wilt thou not judge them? for we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.” All Judah stood before the LORD, “with their little ones, their wives, and their children.”

The answer came in the midst of the congregation, through Jahaziel, a Levite of the sons of Asaph, on whom the Spirit of the LORD came: “Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God’s.” They were to go down the next day, yet: “Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the LORD with you, O Judah and Jerusalem: fear not, nor be dismayed; to morrow go out against them: for the LORD will be with you.” Jehoshaphat bowed with his face to the ground, all Judah fell before the LORD worshipping, and the Levites stood up to praise “with a loud voice on high.”

Early the next morning they went out to the wilderness of Tekoa. Jehoshaphat told them, “Believe in the LORD your God, so shall ye be established; believe his prophets, so shall ye prosper.” Having consulted the people, he appointed singers to go out before the army, saying, “Praise the LORD; for his mercy endureth for ever.” “And when they began to sing and to praise, the LORD set ambushments against the children of Ammon, Moab, and mount Seir, which were come against Judah; and they were smitten.” Ammon and Moab turned on the inhabitants of mount Seir, and when those were destroyed, “every one helped to destroy another.”

When Judah reached the watch tower in the wilderness and looked toward the multitude, “behold, they were dead bodies fallen to the earth, and none escaped.” The spoil was more than they could carry; gathering it took three days. On the fourth day they assembled in a valley and blessed the LORD there, “therefore the name of the same place was called, The valley of Berachah, unto this day.” They came back to Jerusalem with psalteries, harps, and trumpets, to the house of the LORD. “So the realm of Jehoshaphat was quiet: for his God gave him rest round about.”

The idea did not begin with Hudson Taylor. On 16 September 1886 John Stevenson, the mission’s deputy director, wrote from Tai-yuan-fu in Shansi: ‘We are fully expecting at least one hundred fresh labourers to arrive in China in 1887.’ The mission’s official history, written by Taylor’s son and daughter-in-law from his letters, admits that Taylor ‘seems at first to have shared the general impression that this was going rather too fast. A hundred new workers in one year, when the entire staff of the Mission was less than twice that number.’ Stevenson’s answer was simply, ‘with needs so great how can we ask for less?’

At the council meetings in Anking that November the thought ‘could strike root,’ and before leaving Taylor was writing home: ‘We are praying for one hundred new missionaries in 1887. The Lord help in the selection and provide the means.’ Shortly after, dictating a letter at Ta-ku-tang, he repeated the sentence and caught his young secretary looking up with an incredulous smile. The secretary, the history notes drily, ‘was himself to be one of the Hundred.’ Taylor set the mission to definite prayer, including a hymn written for the purpose, ‘Oh send the hundred workers, Lord.’

Then the request was made harder on purpose. Taylor and his colleagues ‘were led to pray for ten thousand pounds of additional income, as necessary to meet the increased expenses; and that it might be given in large gifts, so that the home staff should not be overwhelmed with correspondence.’ The China Inland Mission’s rule was to make no appeals for money and to publish no debts, so this was not a fundraising target. It was a request, with the manner of the answer specified.

Taylor returned to England in early 1887 and spent the year speaking across Britain and Ireland and interviewing candidates. The result, in the words of the mission’s own record: ‘no fewer than six hundred men and women offered themselves to the Mission that year for service in China; that one hundred and two, to be exact, were sent out; and that not ten but eleven thousand pounds of extra income was received, no appeal having been made for financial help.’ And the manner: ‘the whole being received in just eleven gifts, involving little or no extra work to the office staff of the Mission.’ The last party of the Hundred was on its way to China by the end of December 1887.

These figures come from the mission’s own history (1918), which was drawing on Taylor’s letters and the reports published at the time in the mission’s magazine, China’s Millions. They are the mission’s numbers about itself; I found nothing contradicting them, but they have not been audited by an outsider. Taylor’s own gloss on the year was characteristic: ‘We want workers, not loiterers.’

Brother Andrew was born in 1928 in the Dutch village of Sint Pancras, fought as a young soldier in the Dutch East Indies, and came home wounded and adrift. He became a Christian, trained at a missionary college in Glasgow, and in 1955 went to a Communist youth festival in Warsaw. In a Baptist church there the pastor told him that simply seeing a believer from the West meant more than anything he could say. Andrew came home convinced that the churches behind the Iron Curtain were being starved of Bibles, and that someone had to carry them in.

In 1957, with a Volkswagen Beetle given to him by supporters, he set out for Yugoslavia carrying Christian literature. As he approached inspection, he asked God to let him bring the Scriptures to believers across the border. The short petition that became famous was, ‘Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind.’ Open Doors reproduces the prayer in its account of this journey; Andrew told the story in God’s Smuggler, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill in 1967.

By his own account the search was not skipped. A guard poked through his sleeping bag and tent, where boxes of tracts were folded into the corners, then asked him to open a suitcase. Andrew set it on the ground and lifted the lid; the guard raised the shirts on top, and beneath them lay a stack of tracts in two Yugoslav languages. Andrew turned to the second guard and remarked that it seemed dry for the time of year, and began talking about the wet Dutch polders. The first guard closed the lid. He was passed through with everything he had brought.

Andrew also recounted a separate crossing into Romania. The ministry’s account describes a queue in which cars ahead of him were thoroughly searched and their possessions unpacked. Watching this, he expected the Bibles in his own car to be discovered. The published account does not give a precise date for this crossing. Again, he brought the need of the people waiting beyond the border to God.

In the Romanian account he asked for help beyond his own ability to conceal the books. He put several Bibles beside him in plain view. When his turn came, he said, the guard examined his documents and waved him onward after a very brief stop. Andrew understood this unexpected passage as God’s provision for the people waiting for Scripture. It was a report of one encounter, not a promise that every later crossing would be easy.

The organization that grew from these journeys became Open Doors. Its history dates the first visits to Eastern European believers to 1955 and the publication of God’s Smuggler to 1967. Andrew died in 2022, aged ninety-four. The border stories survive through his memoir and the ministry that knew him; independently checked customs records are not supplied by these accounts. Their spiritual invitation is to remember believers whose worship is restricted and to pray concretely for their encouragement, fellowship and access to Scripture.

In August 1949 Billy Graham was thirty years old and not sure he believed the Bible. His friend and fellow evangelist Charles Templeton, now studying at Princeton, had been telling him he was fifty years out of date and that people no longer accepted the Bible as inspired. Both were speakers at Henrietta Mears’s College Briefing Conference at Forest Home in the San Bernardino Mountains. Graham described what happened there in his 1997 autobiography, Just As I Am, so it is his own recollection nearly fifty years on.

Graham says he walked into the woods, laid an open Bible on a stump, and acknowledged questions he could not solve. He then prayed the short statement preserved in the prayer field below. Henrietta Mears later said his preaching carried new authority the next day; BGEA reports that about 400 people responded. The prayer is Graham’s recollection in his 1997 autobiography, written nearly forty-eight years later.

Weeks later he opened a Los Angeles campaign prepared by sustained prayer. Christ for Greater Los Angeles had engaged Armin Gesswein and revival historian J. Edwin Orr roughly nine months ahead. Historian Grant Wacker and Christianity Today report hundreds of prayer groups by the campaign’s eve, while the Billy Graham Library describes an adjacent prayer tent where some people prayed through the night.

The tent opened at Washington Boulevard and Hill Street on 25 September 1949 for three planned weeks. Radio star Stuart Hamblen met and prayed with Graham on 17 October and publicly professed faith soon afterward. Newspaper coverage then expanded rapidly. Graham was told that William Randolph Hearst had ordered his papers to promote him, but no directive survives and Hearst’s son disputed the familiar wording. The coverage is documented; the slogan is hearsay.

The campaign was extended week by week to eight, closing on 20 November. The tent was enlarged (sources give 7,000 to 9,000 seats) and crowds stood outside. Among those who went forward were Jim Vaus, a wiretapper for the gangster Mickey Cohen, and, in the fifth week, Louis Zamperini, the Olympic runner and prisoner of war. Across 65 sermons the aggregate attendance was about 350,000 (Wacker: 350,000 to 400,000). Those who came forward number about 3,000 in BGEA materials and approximately 6,000 who “committed or recommitted their lives” in Wacker’s account; the difference is whether recommitments are counted.

Graham put the two things side by side: a prayer prayed alone over a Bible on a stump, and a city that had been praying for most of a year before he arrived.

“Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.” Seeing that it pleased the Jews, he took Peter too, during the days of unleavened bread, and put him in prison under four quaternions of soldiers, “intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.” One verse holds both sides of what followed: “Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him.”

On the night before Herod meant to bring him out, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, with keepers before the door. “And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell off from his hands.” The angel told him to gird himself, bind on his sandals, cast his garment about him, and follow. Peter went out after him, not knowing that what the angel did was real, “but thought he saw a vision.”

They passed the first and the second ward and came to the iron gate that leads to the city, which opened to them of its own accord. They went out and along one street, “and forthwith the angel departed from him.” Only then did Peter come to himself: “Now I know of a surety, that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews.”

He went to the house of Mary the mother of John, whose surname was Mark, “where many were gathered together praying.” He knocked at the door of the gate, and a girl named Rhoda came to listen. “And when she knew Peter’s voice, she opened not the gate for gladness, but ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate.” The people who had been praying for him told her, “Thou art mad.” She kept insisting it was so. “Then said they, It is his angel.”

“But Peter continued knocking: and when they had opened the door, and saw him, they were astonished.” He motioned with his hand for them to be quiet and told them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. “Go shew these things unto James, and to the brethren.” He then departed to another place. When day came there was “no small stir among the soldiers” over what had become of Peter. Herod searched for him, examined the keepers, commanded that they be put to death, and went down from Judaea to Caesarea.

John Hyde went to India in 1892 and served in the Punjab under the American Presbyterian board. He was partially deaf, a slow language learner, and by his colleagues’ account an unusually persistent intercessor. In 1904 a small Punjab Prayer Union was formed, and the same year the first Sialkot Convention was held, an annual gathering for Indian Christians and missionaries that came to be associated with all-night prayer rooms. Hyde was at the centre of those rooms.

The account of the covenants comes from Francis McGaw’s Praying Hyde (1923), a short book compiled from the testimony of men who knew him, chiefly R. McCheyne Paterson of Sialkot and J. Pengwern Jones, along with others named in its foreword. Of the 1908 convention it says: ‘It was about this time that John Hyde laid hold of God in a very definite covenant. This was for one soul a day, not less, not enquirers simply but a soul saved, ready to confess Christ in public and be baptized in his name.’ He went back to his district and, the friend writes, ‘By the end of that year more than four hundred were gathered in.’ The same friend describes his method: he would engage a man in conversation, put his hands on his shoulders, ‘and soon he would get the man on his knees confessing his sins and seeking salvation. Such a one he would baptize in the village, by the roadside, or anywhere.’

At the 1909 convention, ‘Again John Hyde laid hold of God with a definite and importunate request. This time it was for two souls a day.’ At the 1910 convention: ‘The eight hundred souls gathered in since last year’s convention did not satisfy John Hyde... He at length got the assurance of four souls a day.’ A colleague recalled Hyde telling him ‘that in those days if on any day four souls were not brought into the fold, at night there would be such a weight on his heart that it was positively painful, and he could not eat nor sleep.’ He would then, by his own account, look for the fault in himself, and said he usually found it was a lack of praise.

By 1910 he was being called to help in meetings across India, and the physical cost was visible. A doctor found his heart displaced in his chest. He left India in 1911 and died in the United States in February 1912; he was buried at Carthage, Illinois. He was forty-six.

A word on the numbers. ‘More than four hundred’ and ‘eight hundred’ are round figures reported by friends writing a decade after the events, out of love and after his death. They are consistent with one another and with the covenants described, and no one has disputed them, but I could not check them against the Presbyterian mission’s baptismal statistics for the Punjab, and they should be quoted as his colleagues’ testimony rather than as an audited count. What is beyond dispute is the shape of the thing: a man who asked for a specific daily number, and whose friends watched him treat any shortfall as a matter between himself and God.

Louis Zamperini ran the 5,000 metres for the United States at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was expected to challenge for the mile before the war took him into the Army Air Forces as a bombardier. On 27 May 1943 his B-24, the Green Hornet, lost power on a search flight and went into the Pacific about 850 miles south of Oahu. Eight of the eleven men aboard died. Zamperini, the pilot Russell Phillips and the tail gunner Francis McNamara climbed onto two small rafts with a few chocolate bars and some tins of water.

They drifted west for forty-seven days. McNamara died on the thirty-third. Sharks circled the rafts and a Japanese aircraft strafed them. Zamperini had not been a praying man, but on the raft he prayed constantly. Years later he described those prayers in his own words: ‘God spare my life through the war, and I’ll seek You and serve You.’ He said he prayed it, in one form or another, thousands of times, on the raft and then in the camps. On the forty-seventh day, having drifted some two thousand miles, the two survivors reached the Marshall Islands and were picked up by the Japanese.

What followed was worse than the sea. At Omori and Naoetsu a guard, Mutsuhiro Watanabe – the Bird to the prisoners – singled him out for beatings through 1944 and 1945. He came home in the autumn of 1945, married Cynthia Applewhite in 1946, and began to drink. Every night, he said afterward, he dreamed of the Bird, and once woke to find himself strangling his wife in his sleep. Cynthia had begun divorce proceedings when, in the autumn of 1949, a young evangelist named Billy Graham pitched a tent at the corner of Washington Boulevard and Hill Street in Los Angeles.

The crusade ran from 25 September to 20 November 1949. Cynthia attended and persuaded her husband to come. In his later testimony, Zamperini described resisting the message, then remembering the prayers he had offered at sea and in captivity. He understood his survival as God’s mercy and recognized that he had turned away from the promise to seek and serve God. Instead of leaving again, he went to the prayer room and confessed faith in Christ.

He reported that the recurring nightmares stopped that night and that his hatred of the guards gave way to forgiveness. These are his own descriptions of recovery, not a controlled medical finding or a treatment promise for other survivors. In 1950 he returned to Japan to speak to former captors and offer forgiveness. Watanabe was not among the men he met. The change Zamperini emphasized was a new direction for his life, including service to young people and a willingness to love those he had wanted to harm.

Zamperini continued telling the story in books and interviews until his death in 2014. In his telling, rescue from the sea had not ended his suffering: captivity followed, and his return home brought its own crisis. The remembered prayer became part of a later turning point. Readers can pray both for survival in immediate danger and for the long work of healing, reconciliation and faithful service afterward, without treating a promise made in distress as a bargain that obliges God.

Asbury is a small Christian college in Wilmore, Kentucky, a town of a few thousand people, and it has a habit. Its own archives list revivals in 1905, 1908, 1921, 1950, 1958, 1970, 1992 and 2006 before the one the world watched in 2023. Two of them stand out.

On Tuesday, 3 February 1970, academic dean Custer B. Reynolds was scheduled to speak at the ten o’clock chapel in Hughes Auditorium. Asbury’s account says he invited personal testimony instead and notes that many on campus had been praying for renewal. Students came forward to confess and testify, and the gathering continued beyond the scheduled hour. The university records 144 hours of continuous activity, one week of cancelled classes, and about 2,000 witness teams later visiting churches and at least 130 campuses. These are institutional figures rather than independent counts.

Fifty-three years later, on Wednesday, 8 February 2023, Zach Meerkreebs preached from Romans 12 at a routine chapel. When the scheduled service ended, a small group stayed to sing and pray, and others joined them. Published accounts differ on whether eighteen or nineteen students first remained, while Asbury’s own account does not give a number. The careful claim is simply that a small, student-led gathering continued after chapel.

For sixteen days Hughes Auditorium hosted continuing worship, prayer and testimony. Asbury reports half-mile lines, visitors from Russia and Japan, and students from hundreds of colleges and universities. The university ended open public services as crowds strained the small town, and held a concluding student service on 23 February. President Kevin Brown estimated about 50,000 visitors in a contemporaneous Inside Higher Ed report; this was an estimate, not a turnstile count.

What began each time was small: a dean who declined to preach, and a handful of students who did not want to leave. Asbury’s campus pastor, Greg Haseloff, said a year after 2023: “Two realities are true at the same time. The Outpouring of the spirit of God was beautiful. And we are still figuring it out a year later.” The university is careful with the word revival; it calls 2023 an outpouring, and says the fruit is still being counted.

“In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a thing was revealed unto Daniel, whose name was called Belteshazzar; and the thing was true, but the time appointed was long: and he understood the thing, and had understanding of the vision.” Daniel tells what it cost him: “In those days I Daniel was mourning three full weeks. I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth, neither did I anoint myself at all, till three whole weeks were fulfilled.”

On the twenty-fourth day of the first month he was by the side of the great river Hiddekel. He lifted up his eyes and saw a man clothed in linen, his loins girded with fine gold of Uphaz. His body was like the beryl, his face “as the appearance of lightning,” his eyes “as lamps of fire,” his arms and feet like polished brass, “and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.” Daniel alone saw the vision. The men with him did not see it, “but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves.”

Left alone, Daniel had no strength left in him: “my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength.” When he heard the voice he fell into a deep sleep with his face toward the ground. A hand touched him and set him on his knees and the palms of his hands. “O Daniel, a man greatly beloved, understand the words that I speak unto thee, and stand upright: for unto thee am I now sent.” Daniel stood, trembling.

Then came the explanation for three weeks of silence: “Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.”

The messenger had come for a purpose: “Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the latter days: for yet the vision is for many days.” The prayer had been heard on the first day. The answer took twenty-one days to arrive, and the rest of the chapter, with the two that follow, records what Daniel was then told.

Herrnhut was a settlement of Protestant refugees from Moravia and elsewhere on the Saxon estate of Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf, founded in 1722. By 1727 it was close to splitting over doctrine and personality. That summer Zinzendorf went from house to house, and on 12 May the community accepted a set of brotherly agreements. In early August Zinzendorf found an old copy of the discipline of the ancient Unity of the Brethren and read extracts to the people. Then the pastor at Berthelsdorf, Johann Rothe, invited the whole community to come together to communion on 13 August.

The Moravian historian J. E. Hutton, writing in 1909 from the church’s records, describes the walk down the slope to the church, quarrelling neighbours making covenants of love on the way, and then, during the service, ‘all present, rapt in deep devotion, were stirred by the mystic wondrous touch of a power which none could define or understand.’ They came home convinced that ‘on them, as on the twelve disciples on the Day of Pentecost, had rested the purifying fire of the Holy Ghost.’ David Nitschmann’s own summary was plainer: ‘From that time onward, Herrnhut was a living Church of Jesus Christ.’ The community kept 13 August as its spiritual birthday.

‘The next step was to see that the blessing was not lost.’ On 27 August, Hutton records, the Brethren ‘arranged a system of Hourly Intercession. As the fire on the altar in the Jewish Temple was never allowed to go out, so the Brethren resolved that in this new temple of the Lord the incense of intercessory prayer should rise continually day and night.’ Leslie Tarr, drawing on the Moravian sources, gives the numbers usually cited: ‘On August 27 of that year twenty-four men and twenty-four women covenanted to spend one hour each day in scheduled prayer.’ Others joined, and the watch spread to daughter congregations.

How long did it last? Hutton, a Moravian himself, wrote only that ‘It is said to have lasted without interruption for over a hundred years.’ The historian Jared Burkholder, writing in 2024, is more exact: the practice ‘was officially discontinued in 1818, nine years short of a century,’ and as it spread it ‘would have become decentralized,’ so that ‘especially during night hours, there were gaps in the chain.’ The Moravian Church revived the hourly intercession in 1957, and it continues today. The honest summary is: a continuous prayer watch was begun in 1727 and maintained in some form for about ninety years, and the round figure of ‘a hundred years’ is a tradition, not a record.

What the praying produced is better documented. At three o’clock on the morning of 21 August 1732 the potter Leonard Dober and the carpenter David Nitschmann stood outside Zinzendorf’s house; the Count had spent the night in prayer, drove them as far as Bautzen, knelt with them by the roadside, and they walked on toward Copenhagen and a ship for the Danish island of St Thomas, to preach to enslaved Africans. Tarr notes that by 1791 this small community had sent out some three hundred missionaries.

One more thread. In February 1738 a young Moravian, Peter Böhler, arrived in London on his way to America and was introduced to John Wesley, then a discouraged clergyman back from Georgia. Böhler pressed him on whether he had saving faith. On the evening of 24 May 1738 Wesley went ‘very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine... I felt my heart strangely warmed.’ The line from a Saxon village’s prayer watch to the Methodist revival is not a straight one, but it is real, and Wesley himself acknowledged the Moravians’ part in it.

In 1955 five missionaries began seeking contact with Waodani communities in eastern Ecuador: Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully and Roger Youderian. Encounters between Waodani people and outsiders had often involved violence, and the men knew the danger. Saint, a Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot, flew over a settlement while gifts were lowered on a line. Gifts also came back from the ground. The missionaries prayed that these beginnings would open a way to communicate the Christian gospel.

Their purpose and prayers are remembered in the accounts of the mission and the families. They wanted people they had not yet met to know Christ, and they accepted personal risk in pursuing that hope. The Waodani had families, a language and a history of their own. Friendships would require patient communication and trust. The missionaries could initiate a meeting, but they could not determine how their gifts or intentions would be understood.

On 3 January 1956 the men established a camp on a sandbar in the Curaray River that they called Palm Beach. An early visit from three Waodani people seemed encouraging. On 8 January, Saint radioed for prayer as another meeting appeared imminent. His expected later contact did not come. All five men were killed. Their wives waited, and a search confirmed the disaster. Any telling of answered prayer here must first acknowledge that the men were not rescued and that their families bore a real, enduring loss.

Nate Saint’s sister Rachel had been learning from Dayuma, a Waodani woman living outside the community. Dayuma later helped make renewed contact possible. In 1958, Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot, with Elliot’s young daughter Valerie, went to live among Waodani families. Over time some of the men involved in the deaths became Christians. The families understood that later response to the gospel as an answer to what the missionaries had sought, although the first encounter had ended so terribly.

Mincaye became especially close to Nate’s son Steve Saint and to Steve’s children. In Steve’s own remembrance of Mincaye, published by ITEC after his death on 28 April 2020, he describes an affectionate family relationship with a man who had helped kill his father. This is a concrete account of reconciliation from someone who lived it. The relationship extended across generations, as Steve’s children also came to love Mincaye as a grandfather.

The invitation is to pray for reconciliation without pretending that grief is small or that a death becomes good because something good follows it. In the families’ testimony, prayer continued through unanswered questions, patient language learning and daily life together. For a person praying on the wall today, that can mean asking God to open a conversation, sustain a bereaved family, or make possible a friendship that injury and fear have made difficult to imagine.

In January 1990 Duane Miller, then senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Brenham, Texas, developed a severe voice disorder after a flu-like illness. By his account, nerve damage left him able to produce only a strained whisper. He says that sixty-three specialists and their teams, more than two hundred physicians in all, examined him without restoring his voice. These numbers and diagnoses come from Miller; no medical chart or named specialist was located in the public sources. He resigned the pastorate in 1991 and moved to Houston.

He did not stop teaching altogether. At Houston’s First Baptist Church he taught a large adult Sunday school class called the Catacombs, speaking into a microphone held close to his lips so the room could catch the whisper. The class recorded its lessons, as it always did, for members who were absent. On Sunday, 17 January 1993, the lesson was Psalm 103.

A recording of the class was made as part of its normal practice. It begins with Miller speaking in a laboured whisper. While he discusses Psalm 103:3–4 and reaches the word pit, the audible quality of his voice changes abruptly, and he continues in a clear speaking voice. Miller later described the pressure in his throat as suddenly gone. The recording documents an audible change at that moment; it cannot establish the diagnosis, physiological mechanism or cause.

Miller later reported that physicians found the scar tissue they had monitored was gone and could find no evidence of his prior voice problem. He also said before-and-after video documentation existed. Those claims appear in his testimony and ministry interviews. I did not locate a named examining physician, publicly accessible chart, imaging, or peer-reviewed medical report, so the post-event medical conclusion must remain a patient-reported claim.

Miller went on to speak publicly and found a ministry. His account says he had lived with the disorder for about three years and was teaching the work in front of him when the change occurred. It offers a testimony of hope and persistence, not a formula, a guarantee of recovery, or a reason to delay medical care.

Elkanah of Ramathaim-zophim had two wives. “Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.” Each year the family went up to worship and sacrifice to the LORD of hosts in Shiloh, where Eli’s sons Hophni and Phinehas were priests. Elkanah gave Hannah “a worthy portion; for he loved Hannah: but the LORD had shut up her womb.” Her rival provoked her sore, year by year, “therefore she wept, and did not eat.” Elkanah asked her, “why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? am not I better to thee than ten sons?”

After they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose up. Eli the priest was sitting on a seat by a post of the temple of the LORD. “And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore.” She made a vow: “O LORD of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thine handmaid a man child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head.”

As she kept praying, Eli watched her mouth. “Now Hannah, she spake in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard: therefore Eli thought she had been drunken.” He said, “How long wilt thou be drunken? put away thy wine from thee.” Hannah answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunken neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD.” Eli said, “Go in peace: and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition that thou hast asked of him.” She went her way and ate, “and her countenance was no more sad.”

They rose early, worshipped, and returned to their house at Ramah. “Elkanah knew Hannah his wife; and the LORD remembered her.” In due time she bore a son and named him Samuel, “saying, Because I have asked him of the LORD.” She stayed home from the yearly sacrifice until the child was weaned; then she brought him to the house of the LORD in Shiloh with three bullocks, an ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, “and the child was young.”

They slew a bullock and brought the child to Eli. “Oh my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the LORD. For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition which I asked of him: Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD.” And he worshipped the LORD there. Then Hannah prayed again, this time in praise: “My heart rejoiceth in the LORD, mine horn is exalted in the LORD: my mouth is enlarged over mine enemies; because I rejoice in thy salvation. There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God.”

Jeremiah Lanphier was a merchant in his late forties when the North Dutch Church on Fulton Street hired him, on 1 July 1857, as a lay missionary to the lower wards of Manhattan, a district emptying of residents and filling with warehouses. Samuel Prime, editor of the New York Observer, read Lanphier’s private journal in 1858 and printed its opening lines: ‘Be not weary in well doing.’ He was, Prime wrote, ‘left to do all the good he could, very much in his own way.’

Walking his rounds, Lanphier had an idea: ‘that an hour of prayer, from twelve to one o’clock, would be beneficial to business men, who usually in great numbers take that hour for rest and refreshment.’ No one would be required to stay the whole hour; people could come and go. He printed a handbill. In his own words: ‘at twelve o’clock noon, on the 23d day of September, 1857, the door of the third story lecture-room was thrown open. At half-past twelve the step of a solitary individual was heard upon the stairs. Shortly after another, and another; then another, and last of all, another, until six made up the whole company! We had a good meeting. The Lord was with us to bless us.’ Prime adds that the missionary ‘prayed, though the first half hour alone.’

The second meeting, on 30 September, had twenty. The third, on 7 October, had ‘between thirty and forty,’ and was ‘of so animated and encouraging a character, that a meeting was appointed for the NEXT DAY.’ From 8 October the meeting was daily. On 14 October Lanphier wrote: ‘Over one hundred present, many of them not professors of religion, but under conviction of sin, and seeking an interest in Christ.’ He added, ‘This is a cloudy, rainy day.’ It was also the week the New York banks suspended specie payments in the financial panic of 1857, and Prime is candid that ruined men came to the room. By 23 October Lanphier was calling on the religious editors to notice what was happening; the secular press followed in the new year.

By the early months of 1858 the church had opened three rooms at noon and the John Street Methodist church two more. ‘It was estimated that two thousand persons attended upon these services daily,’ Prime wrote, ‘and yet hundreds would go away, unable to get into any of them.’ Theatres and halls were lent for prayer. The Fulton Street rules held everywhere: five minutes per speaker, no controversy, requests for prayer read aloud and prayed for on the spot. Talbot Chambers, a minister of the same church, published his own account in 1858 and traced the spread of noon meetings ‘throughout the whole land’ to this room.

On numbers, the contemporary sources are careful. Prime wrote in 1859: ‘We have made no attempt to reckon the number of converts in this revival.’ Later historians were less shy. Frank Beardsley (1912) reported that ‘various estimates of the number converted range from three hundred thousand to one million persons,’ that ‘conservative judges have placed the number of converts at five hundred thousand,’ and that at the height ‘fifty thousand persons were converted weekly throughout the country.’ Kathryn Long’s modern academic study places the revival and its numerical claims in their historical setting. The range is wide; the six men on the stairs are a matter of record.

The Fulton Street noon meeting continued daily for over a century.

Ernest Gordon was a Scottish officer captured by the Japanese in 1942 and held during the building of the Thailand–Burma railway. In his memoir he describes becoming critically ill in captivity and expecting to die. Two fellow prisoners, Dusty Miller and Dinty Moore, nursed him, found food and cared for his damaged body. Their Christian faith was expressed through practical attention to a man who could offer little in return. Gordon slowly recovered, and their kindness unsettled his unbelief.

Men came to Gordon and asked him to lead discussions about Christianity. He began studying the New Testament as he prepared to teach. His own convictions changed as he read and as he remembered the care he had received. In the community he describes, prayer and worship took their place beside nursing, teaching and sharing scarce resources. The prisoners built a simple church and organized classes, creating places where men could be treated as neighbors with minds and hopes, not only as forced laborers.

In Gordon’s account, Christian discussion and worship helped change relationships among the prisoners. Men organized care for the sick, shared knowledge and found ways to help one another in conditions that encouraged desperation. The changes did not remove disease or the violence of captivity. They gave the men another way to live within it. Gordon later described this growth of sacrificial love as the work of the Spirit, a judgment drawn from his experience rather than something he could measure.

The men who cared for Gordon did not all survive the war. His memoir remembers Miller and Moore with gratitude as people whose actions brought Christian faith into view. Gordon himself was ordained in the Church of Scotland in 1950 and later served as dean of the chapel at Princeton from 1955 to 1981. Princeton’s obituary records his captivity, ministry and account of spiritual renewal among the prisoners. It supports the outline of his life, without independently verifying every episode in the memoir.

Prayer at Chungkai is not preserved here as one exact sentence followed by a dated rescue. Princeton’s later account describes prayer and ethics groups, while Gordon’s memoir tells how Christian faith grew in the community. The reported answer was sustained life, compassion and a changed understanding of other people across the months of captivity.

For someone interceding today, the request can be just as practical: ask for caregivers to reach an isolated patient, for endurance in a place of cruelty, and for strength to serve even when circumstances remain harsh. Gordon’s testimony gives particular weight to the people who become part of an answer. His recovery involved food, nursing, companionship and time, and his faith grew as he received those gifts.

Barbara Cummiskey grew up in Wheaton, Illinois. Accounts differ on whether her symptoms or diagnosis began at fifteen or nineteen. Christianity Today’s 1983 report says she had multiple sclerosis for sixteen years and had not walked for two; later physician recollections say seven. By 1981 she was reported to be breathing through a tracheostomy with supplemental oxygen, receiving nutrition through a tube, living with bowel and bladder paralysis, and nearly blind. Craig Keener’s 2021 account reproduces statements attributed to surgeon Harold Adolph and internist Thomas Marshall describing severe respiratory and muscular impairment.

By the spring of 1981 Dr. Marshall had taken over her palliative care. He told the family the next infection would probably kill her, and they agreed not to hospitalise or resuscitate her again. She was sent home to die. For more than four years she had been unable to attend her Wesleyan church in Wheaton, though her pastor visited every day.

Someone phoned a prayer request to WMBI, the Moody Bible Institute’s radio station in Chicago. About 450 cards and letters arrived through her church. On Pentecost Sunday, 7 June 1981, two women began reading them at her bedside. Barbara alone reported hearing a voice say, “My child, get up and walk.” Christianity Today’s near-contemporary account calls the voice calm; Keener’s later retelling describes it as authoritative and booming. That difference should remain visible rather than be harmonised.

Before they came back she got out of bed and found herself standing on feet that had been too curled to wear slippers. Her hands hung open at her sides, and she could see them. She unhooked the tracheostomy tube from the oxygen, pinned her catheter bags to her clothes, and walked out of the room. Her mother, arriving at a run, stopped in the doorway: “Barbara, you have calves again!” The muscle wasting of years of immobility was gone. A friend, an occupational therapist, chased her down the wheelchair ramp with the oxygen tank, trying to take her pulse. Barbara ran out onto the driveway.

The next day, the accounts say, she walked into Dr. Marshall’s office. Keener reproduces physician statements reporting restored breathing, expanded lungs on X-ray and the removal of tubes that did not require surgery. WMBI broadcast her testimony that week, and Christianity Today published a reported account in December 1983. These are named medical witnesses describing what they observed, not an independently adjudicated medical study.

The evidential limit matters. Keener says he interviewed Barbara in 2015 and received confirmation and details from Adolph and physician Scott Kolbaba. No primary medical chart, imaging series or peer-reviewed case report is publicly available, and the diagnosis predated MRI. The sources report that Barbara later trained as a surgical technologist and had no recurrence over subsequent decades. The record supports a striking reported recovery with physician corroboration; it cannot by itself prove its cause, promise the same outcome to anyone else, or replace medical treatment.

In Philippi, as Paul and his companions went to prayer, “a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination” met them; she brought her masters much gain by soothsaying. For many days she followed them crying, “These men are the servants of the most high God, which shew unto us the way of salvation.” Paul, grieved, turned and said to the spirit, “I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And he came out the same hour.”

When her masters saw “that the hope of their gains was gone,” they dragged Paul and Silas into the marketplace before the magistrates, charging that these Jews “do exceedingly trouble our city” and taught customs unlawful for Romans. The crowd rose against them; the magistrates tore off their clothes and ordered them beaten. After many stripes, they cast them into prison and charged the jailer to keep them safely. He put them in the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.

“And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one’s bands were loosed.”

The keeper of the prison woke, saw the doors open, drew his sword, “and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here.” He called for a light, sprang in, came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas. He brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to everyone in his house. That same hour of the night he washed their stripes, “and was baptized, he and all his, straightway.” Then he brought them into his house, set food before them, “and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house.”

Finney did not want to go to Rochester. He wrote that ‘Rochester seemed to be the least inviting’ of the places calling him, and that he had all but decided on New York City when the objections themselves persuaded him he was being steered by comfort. He arrived in September 1830 and stayed about six months. The revival that followed ‘commenced and made their first progress among the higher classes of society’: lawyers, merchants, physicians and their wives. ‘The great majority of the leading men and women in the city,’ he wrote, ‘were converted.’

Then he turns to a man almost no one in Rochester saw. ‘And here I must introduce the name of a man, whom I shall have occasion to mention frequently, Mr. Abel Clary.’ Clary had been converted in the same 1821 revival as Finney and licensed to preach, ‘but his spirit of prayer was such, he was so burdened with the souls of men, that he was not able to preach much, his whole time and strength being given to prayer.’ Finney learned he was in Rochester only when a farmer living about a mile west of the city called on him: ‘”he is at my house, and has been there for some time, and I don’t know what to think of him.” I said, “I have not seen him at any of our meetings.” “No,” he replied, “he cannot go to meeting, he says. He prays nearly all the time, day and night, and in such an agony of mind that I do not know what to make of it. Sometimes he cannot even stand on his knees, but will lie prostrate on the floor, and groan and pray in a manner that quite astonishes me.”’ Finney answered: ‘I understand it; please keep still. It will all come out right; he will surely prevail.’ Clary ‘continued in Rochester as long as I did, and did not leave it until after I had left. He never, that I could learn, appeared in public, but gave himself wholly to prayer.’

In the same passage Finney names the better-known intercessor of his earlier years: ‘Father Nash, as we called him, who in several of my fields of labor came to me and aided me, was another of those men that had such a powerful spirit of prevailing prayer.’ Daniel Nash had prayed alongside Finney in the upstate campaigns of 1824–26. Popular accounts often put Nash at Rochester too; Finney’s Memoirs do not, and Nash died in December 1831. It is Clary whom Finney places in that farmhouse.

On the results, Finney is specific where he can be. ‘The change in the order, sobriety, and morality of the city was wonderful.’ Years later a lawyer converted in the revival, who had since become the city’s district attorney, told him: ‘I have been examining the records of the criminal courts, and I find this striking fact, that whereas our city has increased since that revival, three-fold, there are not one-third as many prosecutions for crime, as there had been up to that time.’ Lyman Beecher, once Finney’s opponent, told him that ‘one hundred thousand were reported as having connected themselves with churches’ across the country in the year that followed, and called it ‘the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival of religion, that the world has ever seen, in so short a time.’

Two often-repeated claims are not in Finney. The lines about Rochester’s only theatre becoming a livery stable and its circus a soap and candle factory come from later secondary accounts attributed to an unnamed pastor; I could not find them in the Memoirs or trace them to a contemporary document. The district attorney’s statistic is in Finney, but it is one man’s recollection of court records reported decades later, and has not been checked against surviving court dockets.

By 1588 Philip II of Spain had resolved to end the Protestant regime in England and cut off English help to the rebellious Dutch. His fleet – about 130 ships carrying nearly 30,000 men – left Lisbon in late May and, after regrouping at Corunna, entered the Channel in the last week of July. Its task was not to fight the English fleet but to escort the Duke of Parma’s army, waiting in Flanders, across to Kent.

English parishes were directed to use special prayers during the invasion emergency. A printed form was circulated in July under Archbishop Whitgift. The petitions belonged to a country afraid of conquest and to the religious conflict of the age. Dutch Protestants, resisting Spanish rule, also saw their future at stake. Catholics prayed as well: the existence of prayer on opposing sides makes it especially important not to turn the later English thanksgiving into a universal rule about whose faith wins a war.

The English fleet fought running actions up the Channel. When the Armada anchored off Calais to await Parma’s forces, English fireships disrupted its formation. Battle followed at Gravelines. English naval action, difficulties of coordination and Dutch opposition to Parma’s movement all mattered to the failure of the invasion plan. The Armada was then driven north and had to attempt a long return around Scotland and Ireland.

Storms and shipwrecks made that return catastrophic. The surviving ships carried men who had suffered battle, hunger and exhaustion. English Protestants celebrated deliverance, and public thanksgiving followed during the autumn. Royal Museums Greenwich preserves a manuscript song attributed to Elizabeth I for the thanksgiving of 24 November 1588. These records tell us that people publicly addressed God in gratitude; they do not require us to ignore the human suffering on the Spanish ships.

The best-known words about the wind survive on a Dutch medal made in 1588 by Gerard van Bylaer for Prince Maurice of Orange. The National Maritime Museum catalogues it as MEC0012. Its obverse depicts fleets below the divine name in Hebrew and a Latin inscription translated as ‘He blew and they were scattered’. The reverse shows a church on a rock amid stormy seas. This is a surviving object from the year of the events, not merely a phrase supplied by a modern sermon.

The medal should not be described as an English medal commissioned by Elizabeth: its origin is Dutch. Nor should the storms be made the only explanation of the invasion’s failure. The artifact records how Dutch Protestants interpreted their deliverance, while English thanksgiving records a related response across the Channel. For Christians reading today, the prayer lesson is to ask for protection in a crisis, support those doing the necessary work, and give thanks afterward with humility and compassion for everyone who suffered.

On the last night of 1738 a small religious society met in a room in Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street in London, to keep a love-feast, a Moravian custom of a shared meal with hymns, prayer and testimony. It was seven months since John Wesley had felt his heart “strangely warmed” in nearby Aldersgate Street, and the society he and Peter Böhler had founded that May was the centre of his life. George Whitefield had landed from Georgia at the beginning of December. Now the two of them, with Charles Wesley, Benjamin Ingham, Westley Hall, Charles Kinchin and John Hutchings, all of the old Oxford circle, kept the feast with about sixty others and prayed through the night.

Wesley’s whole account is one entry in his Journal for Monday, 1 January 1739: “Mr. Hall, Kinchin, Ingham, Whitefield, Hutchins, and my brother Charles were present at our love-feast in Fetter Lane, with about sixty of our brethren. About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of his Majesty, we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.’” That is all he wrote. There is no sermon and no interpretation. The words they broke into are the opening of the Te Deum, which every one of them knew from the Prayer Book.

Later writers have called it the Methodist Pentecost. Wesley did not; but what followed in 1739 makes the name understandable. Within seven weeks Whitefield, shut out of the pulpits of Bristol, walked out to the coal-mining district of Kingswood, where there was no church, and on Saturday, 17 February preached in the open air to the colliers, “upwards of two hundred,” as he wrote in his own Journal. “Blessed be God that I have now broken the ice!” Within a fortnight the Kingswood crowds were counted in thousands. When he had to leave he wrote urgently to Wesley to come and take his place.

Wesley did not want to go. The Fetter Lane society argued the matter and in the end cast lots; the lot said go. He reached Bristol on Saturday, 31 March, and admitted to his Journal: “I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields ... I had been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.” Two days later, on Monday, 2 April: “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.” By the following Sunday he was preaching to about 1,500 on Hannam Mount in Kingswood and about 5,000 at Rose Green.

The rest of the century followed from those months: societies, class meetings, lay preachers, hymns, a movement that at Wesley’s death in 1791 numbered tens of thousands in Britain and America. Wesley never draws the line from the night in Fetter Lane to the fields of Kingswood in so many words; he simply records the one and then the other. But the men who fell to the floor at three in the morning on New Year’s Day were the same men who, within a hundred days, were standing on hillsides preaching to crowds no church could hold.

The king of Syria was at war with Israel, and each time he chose a place to camp, “the man of God sent unto the king of Israel, saying, Beware that thou pass not such a place; for thither the Syrians are come down.” The king of Israel saved himself there “not once nor twice.” The king of Syria, troubled, demanded to know which of his own men was for Israel. One servant answered, “None, my lord, O king: but Elisha, the prophet that is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest in thy bedchamber.” Told that Elisha was in Dothan, the king sent horses, chariots, “and a great host: and they came by night, and compassed the city about.”

Elisha’s servant rose early, went out, and saw the host with horses and chariots around the city. “Alas, my master! how shall we do?” Elisha answered, “Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.” Then he prayed: “LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.”

When the Syrians came down to him, Elisha prayed again: “Smite this people, I pray thee, with blindness. And he smote them with blindness according to the word of Elisha.” Elisha told them, “This is not the way, neither is this the city: follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek.” He led them to Samaria. There he prayed a third time: “LORD, open the eyes of these men, that they may see.” Their eyes were opened, “and, behold, they were in the midst of Samaria.”

The king of Israel saw them and asked Elisha, “My father, shall I smite them? shall I smite them?” Elisha refused: “Thou shalt not smite them: wouldest thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive with thy sword and with thy bow? set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink, and go to their master.” The king prepared great provision for them, and when they had eaten and drunk he sent them away to their master. “So the bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel.”

Adoniram and Ann Judson reached Rangoon on 13 July 1813. They spent the first years learning a language with no English grammar or dictionary. On 26 August 1817 Judson wrote to Dr Baldwin in Boston: ‘I have no doubt that God is preparing the way for the conversion of Burmah to his Son... I know not that I shall live to see a single convert; but, notwithstanding, I feel that I would not leave my present situation to be made a king.’

In April 1819 he opened a zayat, an open-fronted shelter on a public road where passers-by could stop and talk. On 30 April a man named Maung Nau came in, sat quietly, and came back. Judson’s journal, printed by Francis Wayland in 1853, follows him day by day through May, and on 22 May the Judsons took him into their house. Then he wrote them a letter, unprompted: ‘I, Moung Nau, the constant recipient of your excellent favor, approach your feet... I believe that the divine Son, Jesus Christ, suffered death, in the place of men, to atone for their sins. Like a heavy-laden man, I feel my sins are very many.’ He asked for baptism. They waited a few weeks until a hostile viceroy had left the city.

‘June 27, Lord’s day. There were several strangers present at worship. After the usual course, I called Moung Nau before me, read and commented on an appropriate portion of Scripture, asked him several questions concerning his faith, hope, and love, and made the baptismal prayer... We then proceeded to a large pond in the vicinity, the bank of which is graced with an enormous image of Gaudama, and there administered baptism to the first Burman convert. O, may it prove the beginning of a series of baptisms in the Burman empire which shall continue in uninterrupted succession to the end of time!’ A week later, on 4 July, he served the Lord’s Supper in two languages for the first time, ‘a privilege to which I have been looking forward with desire for many years.’

What Judson had asked of God he set down much later, in a letter to his mother and sister from Maulmain dated 1 November 1835. ‘I used to think, when first contemplating a missionary life, that, if I should live to see the Bible translated and printed in some new language, and a church of one hundred members raised up on heathen ground, I should anticipate death with the peaceful feelings of old Simeon.’ He then reports: the Burmese Bible was expected from the press by the end of that year, and the Burmese church in Maulmain, of which he was pastor, ‘contains ninety-nine native members,’ not counting ‘several hundred Burmans and Karens baptized at different stations.’ In between had come the war of 1824–26, twenty-one months in the death prisons of Ava and Oung-pen-la, and Ann’s death.

The Karen were not in his original prayer. Ko Tha Byu, a Karen who had been Judson’s servant, was baptized at Tavoy by George Boardman on 16 May 1828 and became the evangelist of his people; Judson himself made three preaching tours into the Karen jungles in 1831–32. Wayland’s summary is fair: he ‘only asked, as his reward, that he might gather a church of a hundred members from the worshippers of Gaudama, and see the Bible translated into their language. All this, and more than this, was granted, and the Karens also were given to him.’ I found no distinct recorded prayer of Judson’s for the Karen; the record is that they came beyond what he asked.

Today the Myanmar Baptist Convention, descended from Judson’s mission, reports 5,494 churches and 1,723,500 members (Baptist World Alliance listing, from the convention’s 2025 census). The Karen Baptist Convention within it reports 1,940 churches and 337,682 members (its own figures, 2026). Judson died at sea in April 1850.

Lazarus of Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha, was sick, and his sisters sent word to Jesus: “Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.” Jesus said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” The Bible then says plainly that Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus, and that when He heard Lazarus was sick, “he abode two days still in the same place where he was.” Only then did He tell the disciples, “Lazarus is dead. And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him.”

When He arrived, Lazarus had lain in the grave four days. Martha went out to meet Him: “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee.” Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?” She answered that she believed He was the Christ, the Son of God. Then Mary came and fell at His feet with the same words: “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” Seeing her and the Jews with her weeping, Jesus groaned in the spirit and was troubled. He asked where they had laid him. “Jesus wept.”

“Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.” He said, “Take ye away the stone.” Martha objected: “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.” Jesus answered, “Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?”

They took away the stone. “And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me.” The prayer was thanksgiving, spoken before anything had visibly happened, and spoken aloud for the sake of the people standing there.

“And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.”

In the month Chisleu, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, Nehemiah was in Shushan the palace when his brother Hanani arrived with men from Judah. He asked them about the Jews who had escaped the captivity, and about Jerusalem. “The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire.” Nehemiah writes: “And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven.”

His prayer confessed the sins of Israel, “both I and my father’s house have sinned,” and held God to His own word to Moses: “if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence.” It ended with a specific request: “prosper, I pray thee, thy servant this day, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man. For I was the king’s cupbearer.”

The day came in the month Nisan. Nehemiah was serving wine, and the king noticed: “Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? this is nothing else but sorrow of heart.” Nehemiah was very sore afraid, but he told the king that the city of his fathers’ sepulchres lay waste with its gates burned. “Then the king said unto me, For what dost thou make request? So I prayed to the God of heaven.” The Bible records no words for that prayer; it fits between the king’s question and Nehemiah’s reply.

Then he asked: to be sent to Judah to build the city; letters to the governors beyond the river so that they would convey him through; and a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, for timber for the gates, for the wall, and for the house he would live in. The king asked how long the journey would be and when he would return, and Nehemiah set him a time. “And the king granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me.”

The building was done under threat. When the wall stood with no breach left in it, Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem the Arabian invited Nehemiah to a meeting in the plain of Ono, “But they thought to do me mischief,” and he did not go. “So the wall was finished in the twenty and fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty and two days. And it came to pass, that when all our enemies heard thereof, and all the heathen that were about us saw these things, they were much cast down in their own eyes: for they perceived that this work was wrought of our God.”

After Peter and John had spoken to the people in the temple, the priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees arrested them, “Being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead,” and held them overnight. The next day the council “commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus.” Peter and John answered, “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” After further threats the council let them go, finding no way to punish them because of the people.

“And being let go, they went to their own company, and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said unto them. And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord.” The prayer began with God as maker: “Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is.” It recalled what God had said “by the mouth of thy servant David”: “Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things?” And it read the recent past through those words: Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, had gathered against God’s holy child Jesus, “For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.”

The request that followed was not that the threats be removed. “And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word, By stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus.”

“And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness.” What they asked for is what the same verse says they received. The chapter goes on: “And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.”

Jonah had boarded a ship for Tarshish to flee from the presence of the LORD. When the storm came, the sailors, at his own word, threw him into the sea. “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” From there, the Bible says, “Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish’s belly.”

His prayer is spoken in the past tense, as one already heard: “I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.” He describes going down: “thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.” And further: “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God.”

In the middle of it is the turn. “Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple.” And: “When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.” He says that “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy,” and vows, “But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD.”

“And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.” The answer rescued Jonah, but it also returned him to the commission he had fled. The next chapter opens with the word of the LORD coming to Jonah a second time, sending him to Nineveh. Deliverance did not erase obedience; it made renewed obedience possible. That pairing keeps this prayer from becoming a charm for escape. Jonah was saved by the LORD and then sent again by the LORD.

Abraham entrusted his eldest servant, the man who ruled over all that he had, with a family-defining errand. The servant was to travel to Abraham’s country and kindred and find a wife for Isaac, while never taking Isaac back there. Abraham grounded the commission in God’s promise and said that the LORD would send His angel before the servant. Still, the servant had to make the journey, ask careful questions, and allow the woman to choose whether she would come.

He took ten camels and reached the city of Nahor at evening, when women came out to draw water. Beside the well he prayed, “O LORD God of my master Abraham, I pray thee, send me good speed this day, and shew kindness unto my master Abraham.” He asked for a sign that tested more than coincidence: the appointed woman would give him a drink and also volunteer to water his camels. The request sought guidance through a visible act of generous character.

The answer began before the prayer ended. “And it came to pass, before he had done speaking, that, behold, Rebekah came out.” When he asked for a little water, she quickly gave him drink and said, “I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done drinking.” She ran back to the well and drew for all of them. The servant watched in silence, still discerning whether the LORD had made his journey prosperous. Only after the camels had finished did he ask whose daughter she was. Her answer placed her inside Abraham’s own family, and she offered lodging and provisions as well.

The servant bowed his head and worshipped. He praised the LORD who had not left Abraham destitute of mercy and truth, saying, “I being in the way, the LORD led me to the house of my master’s brethren.” At the family table he refused to eat until he had told his errand. Laban and Bethuel answered, “The thing proceedeth from the LORD: we cannot speak unto thee bad or good.” Yet the chapter also records Rebekah’s own consent. When they asked, “Wilt thou go with this man?” she answered, “I will go.”

The journey ended with Isaac receiving Rebekah as his wife and loving her; he was comforted after his mother’s death. The prayer did not replace responsible action or Rebekah’s will. It gave the servant a way to recognize providence while he traveled, observed, asked, listened, worshipped, and reported honestly. Christians can bring a concrete decision to God in the same spirit: asking for guidance, remaining attentive to character, and giving thanks when the way becomes clear.

Daniel had been preferred above the presidents and princes because an excellent spirit was in him. His rivals searched for an accusation in his government work, but the text says they could find neither occasion nor fault because he was faithful. They concluded that any charge would have to concern the law of his God. Their plan persuaded Darius to sign a thirty-day decree: anyone who made a petition to any god or man except the king would be cast into the den of lions.

Daniel knew the writing had been signed. He did not create a public spectacle, and he did not suspend his worship until the danger passed. He went home, where his windows were open toward Jerusalem, “he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.” Scripture does not record the words of those prayers. It records their settled direction, posture, frequency, gratitude, and continuity.

The officials found him praying and making supplication, then forced the king to enforce his own unchangeable decree. Darius labored until sunset to deliver Daniel, but finally Daniel was cast into the den and a sealed stone was laid over its mouth. The king told him, “Thy God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee.” Darius spent the night fasting, without instruments of music, and sleep fled from him.

Very early in the morning the king hurried to the den and cried with a lamentable voice. Daniel answered, “My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocency was found in me; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt.” He was taken up, and “no manner of hurt was found upon him, because he believed in his God.” Judgment then fell on the accusers, and Darius issued a decree declaring that Daniel’s God lives, endures forever, delivers, rescues, and works signs and wonders.

Daniel’s prayer life was not an emergency technique invented at the mouth of the den. It was the faithful habit his enemies already knew they could use to identify him. Christians facing pressure can take courage from that continuity. Keep the appointed meeting with God, include thanksgiving even when consequences are real, and entrust the outcome to the One whom Daniel served continually.

Solomon had inherited David’s throne, but the temple had not yet been built. At Gibeon he offered sacrifices, and the LORD appeared to him in a dream by night with an extraordinary invitation: “Ask what I shall give thee.” Solomon began with mercy already received. He remembered God’s kindness to David and acknowledged that his own kingship was a gift, not a possession he had mastered.

He then named his limitation without pretending to be older or more capable than he felt: “I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in.” He saw himself in the midst of God’s chosen people, a multitude too great for him to judge by unaided instinct. His request was precise: “Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?” He asked for wisdom in order to serve people who belonged to God.

The speech pleased the Lord. God explained why: Solomon had not asked for long life, riches, or the life of his enemies. “Behold, I have done according to thy words,” the answer came; God gave him a wise and understanding heart. He also gave riches and honor that Solomon had not asked for, while the promise of lengthened days was stated conditionally on walking in God’s ways. The text preserves both generosity and responsibility.

The next case made the gift public. Two women stood before the king, each claiming the same living baby after one child had died in the night. With no witness offered, Solomon ordered a sword and proposed dividing the living child. The true mother immediately begged that the child be given alive to the other woman, while the rival accepted division. Solomon gave the baby to the woman who chose his life. Israel heard the judgment and feared the king, seeing that the wisdom of God was in him to do judgment.

This prayer encourages Christians to ask beyond private advantage. When responsibility exceeds experience, confess that plainly and ask for the understanding needed to serve the people God has placed within your care. Wisdom answers prayer by shaping judgment in concrete, sometimes painful cases; it must be practiced with attention to truth, mercy, and the good of another.

Elijah was lodging with the widow of Zarephath during the drought. Earlier she had shared the last handful of meal and little oil she expected to prepare for herself and her son. According to the word of the LORD, the barrel of meal did not waste and the cruse of oil did not fail. Provision had become daily experience in that house. Then a different grief arrived: the widow’s son fell sick, and his sickness became so severe that no breath remained in him.

The mother spoke from anguish, asking whether the man of God had come to call her sin to remembrance and slay her son. Elijah did not rebuke the question. He said, “Give me thy son.” He took the child from her arms, carried him to the loft where he stayed, and laid him on his own bed. Then Elijah brought the bewildering sorrow to God: “O LORD my God, hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?” Scripture allows the question to stand inside faithful prayer.

Elijah stretched himself upon the child three times and cried again: “O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him again.” The answer is stated without embellishment: “And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.” Elijah carried him down from the chamber, delivered him to his mother, and said, “See, thy son liveth.” The boy is not named, and the passage supplies no elapsed interval or medical explanation.

The widow answered, “Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in thy mouth is truth.” The restoration confirmed God’s word in the same household where His provision had already been tested. For Christians, the story gives permission to pray honestly when a new loss seems to contradict yesterday’s mercy. Bring the person you love before God, name the pain without polishing it, ask plainly for life and healing, and leave the outcome with the LORD who heard Elijah’s voice.

While Moses was receiving the covenant on Mount Sinai, Israel pressed Aaron to make gods to go before them. Aaron fashioned a golden calf, and the people sacrificed, ate, drank, and rose up to play. The LORD told Moses that the people had corrupted themselves and turned aside quickly. He spoke of consuming them and making a great nation from Moses. At that moment Moses’ prayer was not self-protection or acceptance of personal advancement. He besought the LORD for the people who had sinned.

Moses appealed to God’s own work, reputation, and promise: Why should wrath burn against the people God had brought from Egypt with great power? Why should Egypt say that God brought them out for destruction? He asked God to remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel and the sworn promise of multiplied descendants and an inheritance. Exodus then says, “And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” The announced destruction of the nation did not fall.

Intercession did not pretend the calf was harmless. Moses descended, broke the tablets beneath the mount, destroyed the calf, confronted Aaron, and called for allegiance to the LORD. About three thousand men fell, and the LORD later plagued the people. On the next day Moses returned to the LORD and confessed, “Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold.” He offered to be blotted from God’s book if forgiveness were refused. God’s answer held each sinner accountable and commanded Moses to lead the people onward.

A further crisis remained: the LORD said He would send an angel but would not go in their midst. Moses prayed at the tabernacle outside the camp, “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.” The LORD answered, “I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken: for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name.” Moses then asked to see God’s glory. Sheltered in a cleft of the rock, he heard the LORD proclaim His merciful and just name.

When Moses again bowed and asked the Lord to go among a stiffnecked people, pardon their sin, and take them for His inheritance, God declared that He would make a covenant. New tablets were written, and Moses came down after forty days and nights with his face shining. The answer was neither denial of guilt nor freedom from every consequence. It was preservation, continued presence, revelation of God’s character, and covenant renewal.

This account teaches Christians to intercede with moral seriousness. Confess the wrong truthfully, appeal to God’s name and promises, ask for mercy for others rather than advantage for yourself, and prize His presence above forward movement. Moses’ prayers show that love can stand close to guilty people while still taking holiness seriously.