November 3 is a day set aside for Baptist women across the globe to unite in prayer, and the women of Pickens Baptist Association (PBA) are committed to doing just that.
“I hope it is an event that can bind us all together,” Vickie Ezelle, associational Women on Mission leader for PBA, said of the Baptist Women’s Day of Prayer, an annual observance sponsored by the Baptist World Alliance women’s department. “It is just a different opportunity to get ladies to focus on prayer and encouraging them to pray for one another.”
While Baptists across Alabama will hold a variety of events to observe the day, PBA will host its prayer meeting Nov. 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the associational office. PBA will emphasize this year’s theme, “Seeing With New Eyes: God’s Care,” with a special prayer focus on the region of the South West Pacific.
And the PBA women are taking a creative approach to the call for prayer with the 7-Up Challenge, incorporating “7-Up” in each element of the meeting from the refreshments to prayer stations.
The seven prayer stations — titled Fess Up, Make Up, Pray Up, Look Up, Stand Up, Free Up and Wise Up — are intended to encourage the biblical ideals of confession, forgiveness, prayer, steadfastness and wisdom.
Ezelle, who has been involved with PBA’s day of prayer for four years, anticipates this year’s event to be bigger than before.
“Each year, it just grows more and more — and not just with Baptist women,” Ezelle said, explaining that the association seeks to engage women of all denominations in prayer for women across the world.
At this year’s meeting, greetings from Christian women overseas will be read and information about those women distributed to attendees so they can share it with their churches’ Woman’s Missionary Union groups.
Ezelle also plans to use the testimony of Ja’Rawng Lasi, a senior psychology major at Judson College in Marion and native of Myanmar (formerly Burma), and the prayer-inspired words and paintings of artist Mitchell Tolle, of Berea, Ky.
“The more you educate people, the more aware they become of the problems those ladies (in the South West Pacific) are facing,” Ezelle said.
“We don’t realize these women are a part of us as Baptists,” she added. “And [this day] brings reality to us that they’re studying and doing the same things we’re doing in the United States. They are just in a different country.”
For more information about the day of prayer, visit www.bwawd.org.
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