We huddled in the middle of a neighborhood road on a cold, February morning. To an early riser peeking out a window, we must have looked strange: five women clad in winter coats, hats and gloves, heads bowed, staying in the same spot for an hour or more. This is where we started praying together, in the predawn darkness of a pandemic-related shutdown. 

It’s been a couple of years since those early days of our prayer group, and we recently passed a milestone of 100 consecutive weeks of gathering to pray. Family strife, job changes, health scares, parental struggles and church frustrations have been met with prayer. Songs of praise have risen from grateful hearts. Faith has been tested, nurtured, and stretched. And our ways of praying have changed. 

We say, “thank you,” more than, “please.” We spend less time talking and more time listening. When we seek God’s presence, we do so with a bit more assurance that we are already in it. 

Also, we wrestle with more hard questions: prayers that we thought were answered ones tucked away unravel into familiar battles, lack of “progress” with deeply-seeded, holy desires gives us uncomfortable pause and we ponder what it really means for Jesus to be “in” us.  

When Paul describes his call in Galatians, he says that Jesus was revealed “in” him (1:16). So often, we pray for God to be revealed “to” us. Perhaps we forget that He is also in us. Maybe we get stuck in familiar language. Perhaps we are disconnected from such a great possibility: God within us. It’s a curious thing that something so wonderful can be so difficult to grasp. 

But, by the grace of God, we will keep trying.