written by Scott Erickson

 

A year after college I headed to Europe for a spiritual journey through backpacking and bible school.

I spent many months at Capernwray Bible School up in northern England and had a variety of experiences that have shaped my life til today.

 

One winter day I came across a fellow student collaging a book together. It was for her boyfriend…. and she had made a book filled with photos, drawings, and words about her life in England. She deeply missed him and loved him, and instead of just emailing him, she wanted to make something personal. I remember thinking then (as a single guy) “I wish I had a girlfriend who would make a book like that for me.”

 

At that moment I heard the Spirit whisper to me “I wish you would make a book for me.”

Hmm. This was an intriguing idea. I was studying the Bible 5 hours a day so morning devotionals felt kind of routine since I was already consuming so much scripture. So I decided to take the challenge and spent the next three weeks constructing a book for God during my morning quiet times.

 

 

That experience was one of the most profound spiritual lessons for me . It helped me see that prayer is so much more than words (script, language) on a page or uttered from my mouth. It’s about what we create. What we see. What we feel and experience in this world. What we wrestle with in the depths of our soul. That invaluable encounter opened up a door in me that has shaped my spiritual life since. Especially when I started pursuing art full time two years later, it helped me to see that at the heart of creating is a union with the Divine. Creating is a divine activity… and it naturally leads us into a deep inner prayer.

 

On Monday, here at World Vision headquarters, we are taking a day to pray together as a staff. We believe that prayer is at the center of all we do. As an organization, our staff across the world have dedicated every October 1 (the beginning of our fiscal year) to prayer. We want to corporately listen to God and bring to Him all that seems burdensome for us, so we spend this day praying for the families that we serve, our supporters and their requests, and our fellow staff around the world.

 

One of our main focuses at ACT:S is YOU. We love you and are big fans of the plans God has for your life.  As we enter into that time of prayer, we would love to know what to pray for you about. But instead of just having you email us words, we want to encourage you this weekend to create a visual prayer.

 

I’m a big fan of the PostSecret books, where I have found some of the best models for honesty with God I’ve ever seen. Here’s a few I found….

 

Inspired by these, I made a few…

These are a few of my prayers currently.

 

What are yours?

 

Over this weekend, we invite you to share your visual prayers with us.

Go to: http://www.worldvisionacts.org/challenges/visual-prayers for instructions on how to make your own prayer piece and how to upload your image onto our platform.  Mondays blog post will be some of the images that were created over the weekend.

 

We hope that you will join us in praying for our work this year. All of us are going to be apart of some exciting and difficult work this year. Let’s join each other in unity of prayer and seek clarity, strength, and hope from the One who holds all things in His hands.