New Zealand: 'we're ruined for the ordinary' - 29 Nov 2004

It's a strange experience sitting in the dark praying and sharing a Red Bull and breadroll communion, Kate Dugdale writes from Lower Hutt, New Zealand, just north of the nation's capital.

"When you've been praying and working towards the fulfillment of a vision, there's a moment when you realise that you're sitting in the middle of that vision. I think for Michelle and I that hit last night, somewhere between 1 and 2am. 12 of us, aged between 16 and 23, just had an incredible couple of hours of worship and prayer for our city and each other, which moved into a time where we turned the music off, turned the lights off, and sat listening to God while the candles burned.

It's strange, yet so awesome, to realise that we actually managed to pray all night last night. We had originally planned to roster on and off and get some sleep, but it worked well with some of us staying awake the whole night.

....We knew that the one thing we wanted to do most was to hang out with God - to encounter Him. We had heaps of different ideas and suggestions, but what we didn't want to do was to reproduce another prayer room that meant things had to be a certain way, or done at a certain time - we wanted something that allowed us to be flexible during the night as it developed.

There were 3 of us young people at the start, and we set up a couple of different stations. We wanted these to be flexible, as they changed focus during the night. One of these was a table of little tealight candles - people lit these on behalf of people/places that they were committed to praying for for a new encounter with God.

Once more people arrived, we turned out the lights and worshipped along with our CDs by candlelight which was awesome.

Another station was loosely based around the idea of a 'graffiti wall' for creativity, except we left the paper and pens on the table, and then people blu-tacked whatever they did to the wall. It was an awesome thing to do and a lot of what people felt on their hearts came out in their writing/drawings....

At about 10pm, a couple more people turned up, and then around 11pm we ended up with 12 people. I think there were people from 5 different churches across the Hutt Valley....One of the things that we found was really good was that we took short breaks between each slightly different prayer focus - this worked well in terms of focusing. It was also cool to meet each other because we didn't all know each other - information about these things gets passed around by email a lot.

Both of us would say our highlight was definitely from about 11pm - 2am....We decided to start with a couple of worship songs from the CDs, and followed where it went from there. It's always hard to describe encountering God - but we encountered God.

We moved between worship and prayer/intercession - combining these worked really well. While we were focused as a group, we all encountered God in individual ways as well, which was the whole purpose of spending the night praying. There were a couple of words and stuff, and as a group we took part in communion (Red Bull and breadrolls...)

One of these was the passage at the beginning of Jeremiah (Chapter 1, v 5-10) where the Lord speaks to Jeremiah about the fact that despite his youth, he still had to go wherever God commanded him to go, and say whatever God told him to say.  We ended up by just having a massive time sitting in the silence, soaking in His presence, having turned the music and lights off, just hanging out with God....

Perhaps our focus could be summed up as this (as written on the graffiti wall.): "Let's keep going until we are ruined for the ordinary. Pushing through into something that goes beyond us, beyond a call that we've heard, beyond our dreams. Let the cry for our generation be "Lord, encounter our generation!" Break out - ruin us - disturb us - encounter us!"