Last week I met three different people in three different situations, some strangers, some friends, all not full-on Christian as far as I’m aware. But in each situation I found myself saying, ‘Oh, lets pray about that’. Within a second I had prayed for their situation and God had moved in their lives in powerful ways.

The first was as I dropped a friend to the train station. She told me she wasn’t looking forward to going back to work the next day and was in fact very miserable about the whole work thing. She’s a very successful executive and very good at her job so I was surprised to hear this. As I drove I said, ‘Well let’s ask God about this - I’ll pray now.’

She’s not a church-goer and praying publicly like this is not something she does as far as I know, but I didn’t stop to think about the PR of it and just started to pray something short and matter of fact like this:

‘Dear Lord Jesus, I pray that she has a great time at work this week and as it seems a difficult work situation, Lord take her out of this and bring something else along for her.’

I was driving as I prayed, eyes on the road, so I was surprised when I glanced over to find her in tears. ‘Gosh, it’s really powerful when someone prays for you,’ she said, sounding a little overwhelmed. Clearly the Lord had touched her.

One week on I got a very excited message from her. She’d had a great week at work. Along with that she’d had a random meeting out of the blue and without a hint that it was coming where she’d been offered a new job in a perfect situation, better financially, better position, with old friends and all to take place in a week if she wanted it. She put this amazing turnaround of events down to God and that prayer. ‘You’ve got a hotline to God,’ she said. She had no doubt it was a ‘God’ thing.

A couple of days later I was at the kitchen table with a friend I hadn’t seen in months. The phone rang and there was a telephone sales lady on the line pushing a new contract. I was in a rush to get off the line but in the middle of the conversation she stopped talking and started to moan in pain. I asked if she was OK. She had suddenly been hit with paralysing tooth ache. And then it slipped out of me:

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, ‘I'd better pray for you.’

So there I was praying for a total stranger from a call centre on the phone with tooth ache in front of a friend staring at me, and yes, I was feeling embarrassed. But it just overflowed out of me and God healed her tooth ache!

Later that week I was dropping some things to a Jewish neighbour a couple of doors down. As we walked out she said, ‘You strike me as a very spiritual woman - I wonder if I could ask you something. Do you believe in ghosts?’

Ten minutes later I was back in her house, bible in hand, praying out loud through the psalms and claiming God’s peace and presence in her home.

In all these situations I didn’t have to think much, I just did what came naturally.

It’s been said that the church is the ‘training place for the market place’. We don’t think twice about praying for people in church for things in their lives. Yet we often don’t think to come to God for people when outside church and to bring his power to them in their time of need.

But the more we do in church the more it overflows out of us as second nature to turn straight to God and to pray for people outside church. And people that don’t know Jesus are more often than not overwhelmed and touched by someone stopping to care and pray for them.

If this is something you’d like to do more of I’d encourage you to get doing more of it in church. Maybe join a prayer ministry team, or regularly pray for those in church, and before long you’ll find you are so used to praying for others that it becomes unforced and natural to pray for anyone that you meet.

The exciting thing is that God longs to touch and help these people , whether they know him or not, and it almost seems as if what he does outside of church is more dramatic than what we see him do in church.

As God fills us in church, overflow out.