Pray for anything

Pray for anything! Even for a mate

Have you heard the song where it goes, "everything to God in prayer"? There are passages in the New Testament that refer to praying about all things. Some folks think this is an extreme statement about everything. When I was new in the faith, I heard references to hyper-religious (or hyper-spiritual) people that pray for guidance about what clothes they should wear that day. That kind of praying can be quite compulsive, like someone who gives thanks for the food they are eating before every bite! There are times when I leave the house and suddenly have an opportunity that arises where I wish I had worn something different. Let's say I am on my way to the gym and get inspired to serve the homeless on a cold winter day. Those are days I wish I had asked God what I should wear, and so far, I have never had that happen so I just wear whatever I think I need that day. God gave me a brain, and I try to use it. I can also check the weather to see if I get to wear long johns that day (am I talking about prayer or underwear? anyway, I do enjoy a cozy set of long johns...)

When it comes to praying about all things, "or all kinds of things" is how I like to think about it, its nice to know that we CAN bring anything to God, no matter how small of great. If you are worried about issues with clothes, pray about it. If you are naked, ask God for some threads and then go on with your day. If your landlord is bothering you, or your bank account is messed up, take it to the Lord in prayer. This creates a double blessing, perhaps a triple or more blessing: God delights to give to us and help us, thus drawing closer, you get an answered prayer and you may even get to share to others about how God answers prayers.

Something I have noticed since coming out and integrating my faith into my life being openly gay, is that I find that there are things I have to work at when mending these two identities together. When I was with my first partner, I found that my prayers were amazingly answered when I would pray for him. Then I found that God really would show up in our relationship when we would pray together. However, when I became single, I did not pray much about relationships. It may have been a habit, but even though I believed that God loved me and blessed me as I was, I still in my thinking connected dating with something that was going to take me away from God. For instance, if a date came over for a visit, I would hide my bibles and not mention anything about my faith in fear of loosing a potential lover. I also had guilt when it came to same-sex courting and sexuality that I was overcoming.

Then I realized that being a Christian gay meant that God was a part of my gay life, and all parts of my gay life including meeting other men to date. This has been hard for me because of years of thinking that pursuing men was a sin, now I am getting God Himself involved?! Indeed so. I can ask God to...

Create opportunities to meet someone special
Help me with wisdom in ways to meet others
Be with me when I meet with someone
Give me discernment about who to stay away from
Keep me safe from harmful people
Bless, lead and draw to God the person that I am dating
Open doors that are of God and close doors that are not

I have found that there were times in my single life where I felt drawn to pursue something careless or impulsive and knowing that I was headed for a harmful experience. Even in my blind drive for instant-intimacy and my "urge to merge", I have found myself asking the Lord to intervene. Its easy for guys to meet, men don't often say "no"and its too easy these days for gays to sleep around a lot, but I find it very hard to do so. I am grateful that God interrupts so many of my endeavors and stops my plans. There are even times when I don't even remember praying at all but I can see God's hand working in a situation like this. God really keeps me out of trouble, but I must remember that if I want something bad enough, God will give up fighting me and leave me to my own devices. I sure don't want to be where God's love and protection is not. I want God involved in every area of my life. I don't want compartments in my life that I try to keep from my spiritual life.


"...we ought to act with God in the greatest simplicity, speaking to Him frankly and plainly, and imploring His assistance in our affairs, just as they happen. "
Brother Lawrence - Practice of the Presence of God
Many of us grew up without parents that we could approach about anything and I think we tend to see God in the same ways we view mothers and fathers. It is God's pleasure to "give us the kingdom", which is a lot when I think about it. I love to give but I am pretty limited, but I would feel weird if I had everything and humans were not asking, even the ones closest to me.
So ask God about every kind of need in your life. God likes it! We all get blessed, go for it!

Gay Bears - Guy Stuff and "Prayer Bears"

The following is an article that was on the prayer group, and because of the google groups formatting change, I thought I would post it here to preserve its nifty-ness:

Gay Bears - Guy Stuff and "Prayer Bears"

The "gay bear" movement has been known in the gay community as a group of masculine looking, and many times masculine acting gay men. This reaction against gay male stereotypes can be a positive role in the greater LGBT world. The bear movement seems to be more defined my appearances and sexuality than being masculine. What is there about being a masculine man that goes beyond the skin? Masculinity has many great qualities that postmodern society has been rediscovering, and sometimes even overemphasizing in these newer generations.

When searching for true manhood, let us remember some of the things that it means to be a man, and how our spirituality fits into this. In the gay and lesbian community, it seems as if the ladies have us beat when it comes to masculine traits! We can all learn something from each other. Spiritually speaking, prayer is the greatest weapon a gay man has, and we can fight the darkness with light if we would take a stand for God, kneel down to pray and lie down on our faces in true deep repentance. Let us find a weak person and be strong for them. Let us find a lost young fatherless person and be a spiritual father.

Let us be "prayer bears" and become Christ's representatives in the GLBT and gay bear communities. How about being a chaplain to a local bear bar or club? Everyone at times needs folks to marry and bury others. Bear events need someone to pray and give a message. Every sub-culture is important to God just as every culture is. Jesus said in Mark 16 to "preach the Gospel to every creature..." also in Matthew 28 He mentions "all nations", all "ethnos" which means every ethnic group. The principal is clear that all people are important to God and need to know this wonderful message of Christ.

We welcome resources for gay bears that have to do with the Christian faith, healthy gay masculinity, self acceptance and other sites that are "clean". Please e-mail at the gmail address under "gaypray" if you have any ideas, links or thoughts.

Here are two great places for Bears to go...

http://community.livejournal.com/bearsoffaith/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/B4CBrotherhood/

...and this is another group my ex boyfriend introduced me to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ChristianBearsGroup/

Lesbian and Gay Run Full Gospel Prayer and Worship

Dear Prayer Blog Readers,

I would like to announce a series of special meetings going on in Oregon for the lesbian, gay, bi, transgendered and straight faith communities. My favorite form of the Christian faith after exploring for several years is what we call the Pentecostal, or "Charismatic" type churches. Some also call them Full Gospel or Apostolic. What ever you call it, we all have crazy stories and jokes about "holy rollers" and the LGBT community is often freaked out by many groups like this partly because so many of them have fundamentalist views. There are, in almost every major US city and worldwide small communities of those who are LGBT welcoming and affirming that are drawn to "spirit-filled" worship services. This type of church is noted as being similar to the New Testament book of Acts style of churches while others just pass these off as being built on emotionalism and sensationalism. Although there have been excesses and harm that have been done (especially to the gay community); my experience for the most part has made a life changing impression on me.

I am drawn to religion that produces answered prayers and allows worshipers to experience God for themselves. I have found that many groups like this can create an atmosphere where believers can sense the Divine and enter in to a powerful worship experience. When I moved back to the Portland area after having been gone for over fifteen years, I found that there was no such place here like this that was welcoming and affirming. Over the last year, I have been meeting believers that have ministered in this local area along this "stream" of Christianity and have made some great connections. Although there is no effort to start another church at this point, there are some regular meetings coming up that I want to get the word out...

The InGathering:

An inspiring interdenominational evening of worship, prayer, and healing for the GLBTS community

First InGathering: Monday August 23 7:00 PM
Caldwell’s Colonial Chapel 20 NE 14th Avenue Portland, Oregon 97232
We will be meeting monthly on the 2nd & 4th Monday evenings

Thoughts On Prophetic Intercession

Thoughts On Prophetic Intercession

The term "intercession" in the context of prayer can simply be explained as prayer for others. The subject of intercessory prayer is vast and much teaching is available for this art. I like the the image of interceding as "standing in the gap" for others. Many Bible teachers say that Jesus is praying for us because the word "interceding" is used (Romans 8:34). I personally believe that the term is used here to indicate more about how Christ stood in the gap between sin and God on the cross and that this "intercession" is forever available for us.

The suffering of the Christian is not in sickness and lack, but in sacrifice. Intercessory prayer is a way to sacrifice time and effort on someone else's behalf. An effective way to pray for others is to pray in a prayer language, which I believe is one of the forms of Biblical "tongues".

Romans 8:26
Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

Prophetic intercession is a type of prayer that is led by the spirit of God to pray for things that we may not consciously know. Many of us have a “prayer list” that is based on needs that we know about. Although there is nothing wrong with prayer lists, either for personal prayer or corporate use, we can be limited and not as effective as we could be. Prophetic intercession is a way to find out needs that go beyond our knowledge by hearing from the Holy Spirit about what to pray for, and even how to pray.

1 Corinthians 14:15
What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.

We can be Spirit led to use different and new methods as well as prophetic actions. A prophetic act can resemble a ritual or something symbolic in order to accomplish something in the spirit rheum. Prophetic acts are all over the Bible and those sensitive to the Spirit can practice hearing from God and draw closer with these acts of obedience. For more study, read about Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Hosea as well as other Biblical prophets...

One way to have a time of prophetic intercession is to begin with praise and worship which can be done many ways. A meeting where there are musical instruments, musicians can be asked to lead in a few praise and worship songs to set the atmosphere.

2 Kings 3:15
But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the LORD came upon him.

Some worship groups can "flow" prophetically. This is a spirit led worship team and can play spontaneous songs as well as being able to extend worship songs into a new piece.

Psalm 149:1
Praise ye the LORD. Sing unto the LORD a new song, and his praise in the congregation of saints.

Prayers can also be sung and spoken with the music in addition to speaking the prophetic over the music. In a large meeting, this can be a powerful way to create a powerful place of prayer.

(Submitted by Jason T. Ingram, Portland, OR)


The following writings came out of a worship conference in the Seattle area June, 2010. During the meetings, some of the leaders had a time of prophetic worship. It was grate to see ministers in the LGBT community that have such insight into cutting edge subjects like this:


Prophetic intercession is to do what the Word says is “calling things that be not as though it was"; It is praying what God’s Word says about the person, situation or whatever you are praying about. It is decreeing and declaring as FACT what the Holy Spirit says about the situation, or person.

(Submitted by Apostle Dale Jarrett, Washington D. C.)






In and of itself, intercession is a powerful weapon to effect change in a region, a person, place or situation. When mixed with the prophetic and with worship, it takes our prayers beyond standing in the gap, and moves it into a place of decreeing the thoughts and intentions of the Lord into what you are praying about. We use it to not only speak life and victory into our prayers, but to bring the same encouragement, edification and exhortation, that we would use in a spoken prophetic word. As we pray, the Lord opens are eyes to speak into the atmosphere and shake the heavens. We speak under the anointing of the Holy Spirit and build and stir our own faith as we agree with the heart of the Father.

(Submitted by Pastor Debbie George, Seattle, WA area)

Submissions Wanted For Prayer Blog

Submissions Wanted For Prayer Blog

As the moderator of the Gay Prayer Resource I find myself doing all the writing and I want to hear more from our members.

Please consider submitting an article or story about prayer. Here are some ideas:

Testimonies of answered prayer
Denominational perspectives... are you Charismatic? Catholic? Baptist? How is prayer unique in your faith?
Using the Bible to pray with
Favorite books and teaching on prayer
LGBT issues and how they affect prayer
Are lesbian and gay people stuck in written liturgical prayer? What are positive and negative aspects of written prayer?
Catholics: What is mental prayer?
Multi-media... youtube links of your articles
Prayer for the sick
Scriptures on prayer, for instance the prayers of Paul
Encouragement for the LGBT community to pray

Please email suggestions, ideas and submissions to:

gaypray
@
gmail.com

Happy praying and gay bear hugs,

Jason Ingram

God is working with Identity Thieves

God is working with Identity Thieves

Here is a story about how faith is helping me with a performance piece I am working on. "Identity Thieves" is about how I survived the "ex-gay" movement, and the major part of what helped me get through the pain of the religious abuse I had as a result of trying to change my orientation was faith in God.

As an openly gay man recovering from the ex-gay movement, I have my doubts every now and then about the advocacy work I do for the LGBT community. What helps is I take my self-doubt and my inner questionings to God in prayer and I get the reassurance from the Spirit to keep going and to not give up. Another thing that helps me is to remind myself that I spent over ten years believing that being gay was a sin, and years before that trying to be straight. Then I realize that I came out in late Spring of 2006 and it takes a long time to change thinking patterns when I am so used to feeling shame about anything gay related.


For instance, it was sort of like today on a bike ride. It looked like a sunny day and I took off without a jacket and in the second half of my trip, it began to pour down rain so hard, I began to get so cold, exhausted and wondered if I should stop. But if I stopped, I would have gotten more cold so I kept biking through the rain to keep my body temperature up. It helped to listen to some encouraging music I put on my phone's music player and a few prayers later and several city blocks toward home, the rain stopped and the sun came out and began to warm me up. I am glad I just kept going, and enjoying the exercise and the music (like a song I have where Josh Groban sings "don't give up"...) the cold Oregon rain did not seem to bother me. What may seem cheesy really is true about what they say about storms in life. Sometimes dark rain clouds blow away quite quickly! In Oregon, rain clouds can stay for a week or two, but its great to see them blow away in ten or so minutes.

This reminds me of the many times I gave up working on the Identity Thieves project. Early Summer of 2008, I had put down the project for months after a very parlous trip getting footage and feeling like there was no moral support to continue. Then I saw this local show about film makers and something got a hold of me. I took it to prayer and found that I had stepped out of God's plan. With the discouraging pressure of film school, pressures at home and feeling lonely and uninvolved, I gave up working on the very reason that I was going to film school: to raise awareness about the ex-gay movement. The Spirit of God really got a hold of my heart that day and I got inspired to go over the footage and start capturing much of the video from tape to digital files.

That was nearly two years ago, and I have put down and taken up this project several times since then. Last Winter, I decided to work on the project whether I get any moral support from anyone or not, and it looks like my preparation met opportunity and I started getting places to perform. Now, back to my story about April 8th, 2010...

As I got home, I decided to take the rest of the day off. I was pretty exhausted with dealing with stuff about the premiere of the performance piece and some other pressing personal issues. Sometimes, especially with my mental health, I need to be sensitive and know when to back off. After a nap and watching some TV, I lost my remote and thought I would check on my DVD project and try to make it work again. The last few days have been so frustrating getting the second half of my show's multi-media material to work. The disk with the second act video clips was not authoring a DVD because of broken links to picture files. After I fixed the files the program was still not working and I was going to have to do the project over again.


I decided to pray that God would help this project and I opened up the program without changing anything and I was shocked when it started working! I just sat there with my mouth open, stunned; and yet, I do think that I should be amazed when prayers do not get answered. God is so real and can work in our lives every day if we only talk and let God be God. I will explain a little more. The application iDVD was not doing this project even the last few times I opened it and tried burning the disk, I would get error messages every time no matter if I restarted the program and even shut down the computer all night, it would not work the next day. The only thing I did different was to pray, and when I went to burn the DVD, it just worked. Amazing. But there are also a lot of things that have been coming together in ways I can't explain without me even specifically praying for things to work out. Producing a multi-media one-man show requires a lot of work with electronic equipment and musical instruments.


I have been listening to this station called Way-FM and have been encouraged by some of their music. This song in particular stands out, What Faith Can Do By Kutless, where part of the song acknowledges even "silent" prayers. I think a silent prayer reminds me of Psalm 37:4, "Delight thyself also in the LORD: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart."

"I've seen dreams that move the mountains
Hope that doesn't ever end
Even when the sky is falling
I've seen miracles just happen
Silent prayers get answered
Broken hearts become brand new
That's what faith can do"

Pray for, Pray with, Pray to and Pray at

(Native Alaskan Jesus Drawing by Jason Ingram)

Pray for, Pray with, Pray to and Pray at

If you pray for your bible, it still may fall apart
If you pray for the devil, he may act
If you pray for God, He will wonder why you think He needs your help
If you pray with the devil, he will confuse you
If you pray to people, they may attempt to be the only ones trying to answer your prayers
If you pray to the devil, he may think he is your god
If you pray at people, they may get confused and even very upset
If you pray to a bible, it will not do anything
However...
Pray for people, they will get blessed
Pray with a bible, you will get faith
Pray to God, He will answer you
Pray at the devil, he will flee from you in terror
In other words...
Pray for people and compassion rises up in you
Pray with a bible and wisdom comes
Pray to God and He shows up
Pray at the devil and he may not be able to tell the difference between God's authority and God's boldness in you
Pray in the Spirit, and the devil won't tell the difference between you and God
Pray for people and you get to partake in their blessings
Pray with a bible and it will help your mind not to wander
Pray to God the Father in the Name of Jesus, in His name and in His will
God will answer your prayers
Pray for people
Pray with a bible
Pray to God
Pray at the devil