Cobblestones. Bus. Orange Traffic Cones. Hard Rock Cafe. Worship. Man playing guitar. Just Do It…
No, this isn’t a word association test. These are the words and images God spoke to 19 college students as they listened for his voice last Tuesday night.
This was their second day learning about listening prayer. It was still new, somewhat weird, and their confidence was shaky. They courageously spoke out what they heard, and their boldness grew as their words were confirmed by someone else. By the end of prayer, they felt God gave them a collective vision: go out on a street corner, worship, and get prayer requests from passerby’s.
As we all left the church, the apprehension and excitement was thick. Non of us knew exactly what God was going to do. We headed down to the river, and as we walked it progressively started to rain. This would not be good for what we had planned. People wouldn’t be walking around downtown, which meant no one would be around to pray for. So we did only what we knew to do in that situation: boldly asked God “Stop the rain.” In a matter of 3 minutes the rain had almost completely stopped and we were able to continue to our destined street corner.
We only had a general idea of where we were headed, but as we neared the corner by the Hard Rock Cafe, we saw a cobblestone path, orange 
construction cones, and someone saw a bus parked down a street. We were at the right spot.Once we were settled in, we pulled out our prayer request jar and sign, got the guitar tuned, and started singing worship songs. Some people looked at us, some wanted to give us money commenting on our singing, but there were many who earnestly wanted us to pray for them: brothers and sisters with cancers, lost jobs, peace, direction.
Once we were back at the church, we debriefed the experience. Everyone was amazed to what God did, from stopping the rain, to meeting people with real needs. But I think the real plan of God’s was to reveal how simple his love really was. It’s not always about talking to people, serving them, or doing construction work, sometimes it’s just about being the presence of God on a street corner in Nashville.
