Tonight was our prayer meeting. This is totally unlike prayer meetings I grew up with. It’s more like a small group, with lots of koinonia happening, yet we’re focused around prayer. And it’s not attended by the “church faithful,” as were all the prayer meetings of my childhood, but by an interesting assortment of folks whom I’ve really come to cherish. Since we started in June, we’ve seen a lot of prayers answered. Pretty neat.

Last week Dan, one of our resident felons, came halfway through the meeting and stayed. Tonight he was the first one there. Alan and Carolyn came tonight for the first time (my heart leaped when they came through the door), along with their newborn son, Conner. They aren’t married yet, and live in a house with a lot of smokers, most of whom have consented to restrict their smoking to the outdoors, out of concern for Conner. Alan, who also has a felony conviction, told us he finally landed a job and starts next week. He’s had a tough time finding work. I hope this one pans out. Alan referred to it as an answer to prayer.

We had 13 people there tonight. I think that might be our largest group yet.

We met in the youth center, which is a house next to the church, because a concert was going on at the church. I hadn’t been to one of our concerts (held at least once or twice a month) in quite a while, so I decided to stroll inside and see what was happening. Just under 200 teens and young adults came; at least, that’s how many wrist-bands they had given out. I’m not sure band members get wristbands, and there were four bands, one hailing all the way from California. They were charging $10 per person tonight, so I think they did pretty well.

Lots of kids were on the church steps smoking, so I walked through the haze to enter and exit the church. That would upset the saints in many UB churches. Me–it made me proud. Proud that my church doesn’t get in a snit about it.