As I’ve mentioned, when visiting or volunteering in another church, I love to explore. I search the sanctuary and Sunday school rooms for ideas and inspiration. I am always drawn to bulletin boards. This week, I found the images in the photo accompanying this post.

“I need more of you, Lord.”

Certainly, there is nothing I can write to amplify that prayer. Every church should have it displayed in prominent places. Isn’t that why churches exist, to help each other find more of Him?

On the opposite corner of the same bulletin board, I found directions for finding more of Him, and it began with this notion: pray daily. I would have suggested “pray throughout the day,”

I liked some of the insights the prayer nugget, written by the Rev. Melissa Stoller, a Pittsburgh-based administrator for the Evangelical Lutheran church, offered:

“Prayer helps us understand God and the good things that God has planned for us. Prayer also opens us up to understanding each other and God’s creation..“

Since the beginning of the school year, I’ve urged church family to pray for schools, to pray for students, their teachers, counselors, administrators and families. Choose a student. Choose a school.

I’ve put together a prayer list that begins with some college students I love dearly, includes the youth group friends I love dearly, and finishes with the Sunday school children I love dearly. I pray for the students, their friends and classmates, their school communities. I say their names, I see their faces, I glimpse a little portion of the paths that God has provided for them.

And, through my prayer for them, I am changed. I am not a man who teaches Sunday school for an hour each week and fades into traffic, into the workplace, into groceries and laundry and explorations of empty churches. I am connected and contributing to this flourishing garden of students and schools, this breathtaking corner of Creation. I am a stem in the bouquet that surrounds “I need more of you, Lord.” I am a pencil stroke in the portrait of Jesus.

Pray for students and their schools. Pray for neighbors. Pray for co-workers. Pray for family and friends. Pray for the people you serve, and the ones who serve you. Pray for the people you meet in church, or see in the grocery or the gym or the library. When we pray for each other, we become part of the portrait.

Maybe it’s not “I need more … “ that should be posted in each church. Maybe if we prayed “we need more of you, Lord” we could see the connections more clearly.