My Prayer Notebook

In April of 2020, I finally understood what the Lord had been trying to show me for quite sometime, that I needed to write down my spiritual growth. Early April, my friend walked in and said, “I took the covid test, and they said they’d text me back within 24 hours.” While he was speaking *DING* “Uh… I have covid!” That night, I realized I too contracted covid. I have an autoimmune disease and I already read reports of what horrible effects it had on this particular autoimmune disease. Unlike these people, who just let it run them over like a truck, I decided to stand and fight back in the spiritual realm. My first night knowing I had covid, tormenting thoughts kept coming to me in bed while I was trying to sleep. I went outside for fresh air at 3:00am to pray. “Tell me how to fight this,” I asked the Lord. This scripture from Revelation 12:11 bubbled up in my spirit,

 “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony…”

“HA! I got MANY of those!” I thought to myself, with my revived bold confident attitude. I knew I’d win. I thought of a great testimony and went on to the next one. It just didn’t feel right, it seemed flat, so I became quiet for a moment. The thought came to me, “Say them out loud!” Right! I told the first one out loud, as I walked back and forth in the cool night by a giant wall of yard long beans. I said the second one… third one… fourth one… and then I drew a blank. “Oh no!” I exclaimed to the Lord, “I forgot.” I quickly repented for forgetting what great things the Lord has done for me. I asked the Holy Spirit to please remind me. Testimonies started rolling out of my mouth again. I ended up beating covid, walking back and forth by those beans day and night, standing firm against tormenting thoughts. I remember having a barely scratchy throat for two days, and refusing to cough when one tried to come on me. “No!” I’d say as I stood firm, ran out to the path I permanently pounded down in the grass, and started saying my testimonies all over again. The urge to cough subsided just as fast as that scratchy throat. In the end, for me, there was no hospital, no doctors, no medicine.

After it was all over, I couldn’t shake the awful feeling how I forgot what the Lord has done for me. How disgraceful! I was so ashamed. I said to myself when I received answered prayer, deliverance, miracles, finances, teachings, wisdom, knowledge and more, “I’ll never forget!” Oh, but I did, especially under pressure! The important lesson I learned is that I needed to rehearse my testimonies. Just like a weightlifter practices the same lift over and over so it’s perfect for competition when they’re under heavy pressure, I too needed to be ready to perform perfectly under heavy pressure. Like a golfer practices the same swing, with the same club over and over at the driving rage, I needed to practice reciting all my testimonies in a no-pressure environment over and over. Just like they practice to build muscle and muscle memory, I needed to keep building spiritual muscle, but this time build spiritual muscle memory. As I sorted through this problem, I also came to the realization I had forgotten Biblical revelations I prayed for, Holy Spirit quotes, victories and testimonies from others. “Holy Spirit quotes,” you ask? Yes, that’s what I call inspirational words the Holy Spirit speaks to our spirit. For example, one of my all-time favorite modern-day quotes, “What would Jesus do?” A man in the late 1890’s wrote a book with a part of the title being, “What would Jesus do?” In the early 1990’s a youth pastor had read the book and began saying it to her youth group encouraging them to live this way. It spread around the world and sparked a revival. It doesn’t matter if a Holy Spirit quote has spread around the world and was meaningful to me too, or it came from the Holy Spirit just to my own heart for me, these are important to remember too!

The Bible says in 1 Samuel 2:30 that if we honor God, He will honor us. In the Old Testament, they set up rocks to honor the Lord as memorials. Here in the New Testament, we don’t physically have space to set up rock memorials to the Lord, but we can set up memorials to honor God in our own hearts. That’s what this blog is all about, encouraging you to write down what the Lord has done for you, spoken to you and taught you, so your memorials are set in stone in your heart to honor the Lord by remembering His goodness. Also I hope that sharing some of my prayer notebook will encourage you to work on your next victory and erecting your next memorial to the Lord so you can inspire those within your reach to work on their victories and memorials.

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