Praywith us.

Gary's life turned in the one place no program could reach him: alone, in a cell, on a night he still calls the work of the Holy Spirit. So this is where we begin too. Here is how we are praying. Six things we carry, and ask you to carry with us.

A prayer guide · Read it here, or take the printable version with you below.

For the harmed.

For the ones whose lives were changed in a moment they did not choose. For the families who set a table with an empty chair. We do not pray past them to reach Gary. We begin here, because they were here first.

For the children.

For the children being taught, right now, that violence is just the water they swim in. Born into a home or a block with no door out, and no means of their own to find one. That the odds written over them at birth would not be the last word.

III

For the ones who get there first.

For the work that reaches a boy before a cell does. The mentors and the ministries, the after-school rooms and the outreach workers doing the quiet, unglamorous work of interruption. That it would be funded, and staffed, and multiplied.

For the men inside.

For the men still on the compound carrying the torch, planting churches, teaching classes, discipling the young ones, and doing it under a sentence with no end in sight. That they would not grow weary. That someone, somewhere, would remember their names.

For the ones at the gate.

For the people who wait at the gate. The families and churches, the counselors and community partners who meet a changed man on the day he walks out and will not let him walk out alone. That the net would hold.

For provision.

For open hands. For the plain kindness of people who understand that a life is not remade on its own, that it takes prayer, and structure, and the steady generosity of strangers. That what this work needs would come, and keep coming.

Pray it in your own words, as often as it returns to you. This is the first way, and the one everything else is built on.

Take it with you.

One page, printable, made to keep by the coffee pot or in the back of a Bible. Tell us where to send it, and it's yours.

It's on its way to your screen.

If the download didn't start, get it here. Thank you for praying with us.