5 Min Read
15 December 2021
For the past few summers, the 24-7 Prayer team in Czech Republic have been travelling around their nation in a prayer caravan, offering to pray for people and giving free hot beverages.
Sarka from the Czech team shares this incredible update from summer 2021…
“Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes.”
Isaiah 54:2
This verse that talks about growth and multiplication came to me a couple of times at the beginning of this year. Little did I know how accurate it would be for our prayer caravan ministry. One of God’s names is Jehovah Jireh – God who provides – and this is indeed what we experienced in 2021.
By the end of the last year, we realised that our caravan wouldn’t be able to travel across the country, so we decided to use it locally in Silesia. Our original plan was that it would be used in Český Těšín, but God exceeded our expectations! More than 70 volunteers helped us to take the caravan to seven different places regularly from May until December. We encountered more than 300 people who experienced God’s love, encouragement, prayer. Amazingly, ten of them gave their lives to Jesus for the first time!
We met many people who had believed in God, but then became disappointed and left Him and the church. Many were struggling, hungry for answers and seeking for help. One lady who came to us wanted to put her life in order. As we talked and prayed with her, she experienced relief from her struggles and found hope for her life.
Another man approached us and was interested in getting a New Testament. I chatted with him and he shared his story with us. He had given his life to Jesus when he was a child, but his current situation was so complicated that he was thinking about committing suicide. After chatting, he was very grateful for meeting us, and saw God’s hand in it.
This isn’t even the whole story of our summer; in fact it’s only half! God met our needs and we were able to renovate a second van to travel across the whole nation. We’ve also been blessed with a new colleague on our team. This meant we could visit 12 places with our new van; many of them for the first time. We met more than 350 people, sharing God’s love and praying with many of them. Sometimes, we “only” blessed people with free coffee, but many times, people shared their lives with us, which meant we could pray with them and share the hope that we have in Jesus.
In every town, we prayed that God would send people who would be ready to be prayed for and talk about Jesus. Our experience is that God always answers this prayer. Sometimes, we were not even able to talk with everyone as there were so many people and at other times it was quiet and we needed to be patient and wait.
One time, it was quiet and so we started to pray that God would bring the right people to the caravan. Even before we’d finished praying, a man approached us. He had been seeking God on his own. He spent a couple of hours in a deep conversation with our volunteer and accepted Jesus as his Saviour at the end. Another time, we met a lady who had moved and didn’t know many people in her new place, which she found really challenging. As she met us, something moved in her; she could be herself once again and she experienced God’s love and relief in her situation.
We are astonished when we see what God is doing; reaching the lost and needy; inviting His people to come out of their church buildings to work together and reap; for the harvest is plentiful.