Well, our aging bodies had only 2 days’ rest before we set out today, so we went in faith that we would make it 😂 Spoiler alert – we did! We changed direction again today, and we had only left home about 15 minutes when we bumped into someone we hadn’t seen in a long time. They began to share about some difficult health issues happening in their family, so we had the chance to pray for healing right there in the department store car park – lap 5 was off to a faith-filled start.

We had to get a quick march on as we were meeting people along the route today. It was so great to join with two wonderful couples who are a part of our church and also our prayer team as well. We walked, we chatted, we prayed, and we ended up drinking tea and being treated to lunch as well – this prayer walking thing is working out well! We prayed a lot today for wisdom from God regarding how we create community in this area that is filled with diversity. God created us all in His image, which means that there isn’t another human alive who doesn’t bear some resemblance to the God we love and serve. That means that everyone is loved and valued by God regardless of creed, colour, and class. It is vital that we learn how to honor each other even in the midst of our differences. God kept highlighting to us that we should pray about this on many occasions as we walked around the three towns today. We believe we need to glean from God’s designed blueprints in order to create a Kingdom community, so we prayed He would lay it out for us as clearly as He did for Moses and the fledgling Israelite community we read about in the early books of the Bible. Come Holy Spirit!

Some people have asked us how we pray as we walk. Do we have a list we go through? Do we have a different focus each day? Do we pray for the whole time? The short answer is no to all three of those questions….let me explain. We pray as we feel led by the Lord when we are walking. Sometimes ‘we pray what we see.’ So for example, we will pray for our education system as we walk past a school, our tourism trade as we walk past caravan parks, our health service as we pass the hospital, etc. Other times, a certain person will pass us or honk the horn, and we begin to pray for them and others who are in similar situations. There are times we notice patterns or things that keep cropping up as we walk, and we lean into praying for that. Sometimes the Holy Spirit just drops stuff into our mind, or we sense a particular thing for a specific area, so we pray into that. It’s become a very natural thing for us, and as we lean into it more, it just happens – we never seem to run out of stuff to pray about, and there are even certain occasions we end up singing as we walk as well (that’s usually in a more country location!) 😂 In terms of how long we pray…… well, we aren’t praying every single second we are walking, but we try to ensure that it isn’t just a walk and chat for the two of us. When friends join us, we tend to chat a bit more, though. All in all, the walk, without stops, takes us 4 and a half hours, and we reckon we must be praying for at least 3 and a half to 4 hours of that time. Over the 7 laps, that will mean we’ve spent in and around 24 hours praying! I’m not sure that if we’d been sat at home praying, we would have achieved a full day.

We’re discovering over this year that prayer walking is such a great way to meet with Jesus, meet other people, spot things about places we never would have previously, and get to pray for the land He has called us to live in. We are enjoying it a lot and are learning more, although I’m not sure we will do it for 15.8 miles per day once we are done at the end of the week. We’ll be heading out again tomorrow—just don’t tell our bodies—and then we will get a wee break until Sunday when we will finish the Triangle prayer walk 🙌🙌🙌