Sitting in a quiet, but highly-decorated Kestin House conference room at 4am on a Wednesday morning had caused to wonder that very thing myself. However, barely 48 hours later, I knew EXACTLY what a difference our prayer vigil for the Houses of Parliament had made!

Here’s the background: I had heard a couple of weeks previously that 24-7 Prayer were organising a week of prayer INSIDE the Houses of Parliament with & for all the MP’s and their support staff. They were asking churches and groups to consider joining with them and praying overnight for one night of the week. I absolutely loved the idea and decided it was too good an opportunity to miss, so I set about trying to get something organised at Crusaders.

Cut to the actual day: We spent the best part of the afternoon setting up our large prayer room in the conference room. John Brassett bought some road maps and started piecing together a huge map of the UK mainland. We had a cross and art materials, all the normal prayer room stuff and even a prayer ‘tent’ with a mattress inside. I knew that a few people had decided to join us for an hour or so but Sharon and I decided we would commit to the whole night.

I’d like to tell you that hundreds flooded in to call on the Lord for mercy on our land but it just didn’t happen like that. At one point, a lot of ladies from our resident church, True Vine, came in and the room was filled with the sounds of everyone praying together and people speaking in tongues. Then, almost as suddenly as it had started, it was quiet again. Over the majority of the evening, there were a few people around – a couple from the office and a few from my church but mainly it was a low-key affair.

A number of pictures were drawn and several Bible passages came to mind, many along the theme of God’s people being humble and having integrity (the focal passage for the whole Parliament event was 2 Chron. 7 v 14). We also prayed together corporately and at one point prayed around the giant road map and even sung songs over it.

At one point during the evening, I wearily started flicking through my One-Year Bible to the passage for that day. Amazingly, it was the part in Kings were God asks Soloman what he wants and Soloman replies that he wants the wisdom to govern the people in the right way (1 Kings 3 : 5 -10, if you want to read it for yourself). I was astonished and had to stop everyone and read it out loud. We also wrote the passage out and stuck it on the wall.

As I mentioned before, there were times (notably when during the early hours, struggling to remember what the previous word you had just prayed was!) when the whole night felt like a foolish and futile endeavour. But God was to show me yet again how much he values obedience over common-sense. 24 hours after we had finished our all-night prayer marathon, I emailed some feedback from our night to the organisers and then headed to Westminster to join one of the 24-7 Prayer walks.

I arrived at the meeting point with a handful of other people and one of the first things I heard was a couple of guys discussing some church group who had created a giant road map (!) for praying around. “Hey, just like we did…”, I thought to myself. We broke up into groups and I went with David Landrum, the overall organiser, who filled me in on some of the things that have been going on during the week.

He gave me a great tour around the whole of Westminster and all the parliamentary buildings and was explaining that it was the very first time that some of the departments had ever prayed together. They had prayed in the Palace of Westminster and the Cabinet office and the War office and there were loads of amazing things happening.

However, the thing that he was most excited about was that he had been reading his Bible that morning, expecting God to speak to him. He started reading about Soloman asking for wisdom in leadership and got very excited about it. Then, he turned on his email and read about a group who had that very same passage overnight (ring any bells?!). It was such a privilege to hear it from him and to see how encouraged he was that we had been giving up sleep to pray for him and the rest of Parliament.

Everyone who was involved was really excited to hear about what we had been doing up here at Kestin House and some of the other stories from the prayer week were very interesting. If you would like to read some more about the whole 24-7 prayer week in Parliament, I suggest that you log on to their website www.24-7prayer.com (and the site for the specific London year of prayer is www.24-7londonprayer.com). The one thing that I personally learnt from the whole experience was that prayer really works and that those times when you pray for something that you are detached from (i.e. praying in Luton for politicians etc in Central London and all around the country), you should really pray with conviction because prayer REALLY works, even if most of the time we are not blessed enough to see the results of our praying

Keep it up

Paul Windo