Text Messages
At our Spring Leadership Overnight, we spent an hour in prayer with our student leaders. As one of our prayer exercises, we asked students to make a list of 5-10 friends that they wanted to pray for consistently this semester. We took some time to pray for these friends, and then “surprised” students with this follow-up assignment: we asked them to immediately send a text message to each friend that they had prayed for, letting the friend know that they had just prayed for them. Since many of our students had put non-believing friends on their list, this was a bit of a scary task! But students were bold to follow through.
Our prayer was this step of faith would help spark spiritual conversations back on campus. Here is a story of a conversation that arose as a result Candice’s (of one of our SIUE student leaders) text messages:
“While I was doing the “text message” training from Leadership Overnight this past weekend, something incredible happened that I just had to share with you.
I texted a friend who I knew from high school and while I was on facebook she messaged me saying that it was nice. She expressed to me some issues she was facing at home with parents being confined to a wheel chair with Cerebral Palsy. I told her to pray on it and she responded by saying that she didn’t like praying for real. She said that she felt as if she was losing her strength, faith, and other things. So as I give her advice, I suddenly get the urge to tell her about the gospel. Through facebook, I did my best to summarize and share with the Four Laws. After that she decided to bring Christ back into her life and we prayed the prayer in the back of the Four Laws Booklet.”
Facebook has an instant-messaging feature, and it was through this that Candice was able to share the Gospel with her friend. The “Four Laws” is an evangelistic tool that we use to share the Gospel on campus. Click here to check it out. The prayer that she refers to is an example prayer in the booklet—it is a prayer that expresses the desire to accept Christ. Praise God with us for Candice’s boldness, and pray for her friend, Ashley, that she would begin to grow in her faith.