They were short a few people for some of the afternoon slots, so I volunteered to do the 5pm half hour, especially considering that I needed another form of prayer for my 40 days, 40 ways challenge. I was at work at the time, so I sent some arrow prayers up during the time I was supposed to be praying, and postponed my in-depth God chat until I had more mental attention and capacity.
I was tasked with praying for the Reading Uni CU, the students who were participating in the 12 hour challenge with me, and for Asia, and was surprised by how easy and quick the prayer time itself was, as soon as I'd started! It didn't seem like more than 5 minutes max until the clock read half an hour later.
I started with a short opening prayer, asking for wisdom, insight and ability to usefully spend the 30 minutes, and closed with a prayer of thanks. For the vast majority of the time, I named a country in Asia that I remembered (going alphabetically through them as much as possible) then named the situations I was aware of in those countries, people I was concerned about from those countries, and asked God for his blessing, strength and help, being as specific as I could.
I barely got through half of the countries, when I just named the remaining countries whilst recreating a visual image in my mind of my involvement with each country I was naming.
I believe the prayer was so quick and easy, as I was just praying for my homeland (in a way), and have a lot of passion, love, hope and concern for many lands in Asia. I would like to be able to dedicate the time at some point to pray in more depth for the remaining countries that I only had time to name. And I would also like to be able to give myself the freedom to pray for places that I love, not just places that are in the news at any particular time.
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