“Around comes Friday night: prayer walking time, and everyone in the house has this gloom over them;” writes Shirelle, one of this years Transit students. “So before it’s time to start I go into the prayer room, and ask God for some fresh hope, some rejuvenation for our team. While I’m there I find these dreams. Dreams that we wrote almost at the beginning of the year. Dreams for a change, dreams for hope, dreams for revival and salvation. And I prayed that God would restore these dreams in our hearts, and that God would bring them about in our town.
By the time prayer walking was coming, I was stoked. Stoked to see what God was going to do tonight, because I knew it was going to be amazing. Steve and Mike read out their dreams too, and the atmosphere changed, all of a sudden we were excited, excited to see this new work God was going to do. And then that fresh hope that I had just prayed for, Steve brought it. He had this idea about pennies, and by now I’ve learned that the crazier an idea sounds, the more likely to be brilliant it is. He read us the passage from Luke 15, about the woman with only ten coins to her name, who loses one. She searches and searches everywhere for her lost coin until she finds it, and when she does, she is so excited she tells all her neighbors and friends and celebrates with them. And just like that woman with the coin, that’s how God celebrates when we come to him.
So Steve, finds 100 pennies, and we prayed over them. We prayed that the pennies would be symbols of hope, and light in this town of despair. We prayed that God would use them in ways we didn’t understand. We were inspired to see God change this town, to see God change Corringham. And so with a bag full of change each, we went out. We laid pennies in front of gambling shops, churches and youth hangouts, in front of the park, on benches, down alley ways, on top of rubbish bins and in pizza boxes. Anywhere we wanted the symbol of Gods’ hope to be we put a penny. A heart shaped row of pennies next to the dodgy pub, and a smiley face down a dark alley. Wherever we walked we prayed Gods’ hope would be, we prayed that people’s veils would be removed, that they would see God clearly. Because we knew that if they could see God, actually see what was going on, there would be no stopping the revival in this town.
As we laid the pennies, something awesome happened. We got to tell people about Jesus. Because, walking around on a Friday night laying pennies on the streets is weird, and people want to know whats going on. So they asked, and we told them. We told them, that sometimes this town is dark, and despairing, but we’re praying that hope would fill it, we told them that we care enough about them, and this town, to pray. And we gave them pennies, to put in their houses, purses, schools. Maybe they will forget about the pennies, but my hope is that when they see random pennies lying around, that they will remember the prayers that we prayed, and they will remember that their is hope in Christ.
We got to pray for healing, for restoration and hope. For individual people, for the rough and tough crowd who act so cool, we prayed for those boys, and they were actually keen for it to happen. Man! Isn’t God good! He can do immeasurably more than we can ask think or imagine, so I’m gonna ask for Corringham!”
Shirelle Haugh is a Transit student based at the Stanford Boiler Room. You can check out her blog here
For more information on the 24-7 Transit course or other 24-7 learning options, take a look at the Learning Opportunities section of the website.
