Colchester Boiler Room has recently sent a team of people off to Turkey. Two of the people from our community have plans to move there in the early part of 2014!

With excitement, anticipation and hope we sent them off as they continue on the first start of this journey.

Those of us left here in good old Colchester held a time of prayer for our Turkey Team. We wanted to pray inspired by the culture and people of Turkey...  in the way they naturally live and are... and then pray they would see Jesus where they are currently at.

Hahaha I wil say that I don't know that much about Turkish culture and I aso didn't have an extensive time to look into it, but the hour of prayer that we had set up went so quickly and was really amazing I thought that I would mention some of it here to help inspire those looking for creative ways to pray.

To begin we started outside the prayer room. We asked people to take their shoes off and as they did to really leave behind all the drama, stresses or worries that might be playing on their mind.

We then went into the prayer room. In Turkey a huge percentage of the population practices the Muslim faith. One aspect of this is to pray 5 times a day. Since we only had an hour we decided to still pray 5 different times through out the hour, which basically meat we set a timer for 10 min intervals and prayed every 10 min! We really loved this because when the timer went off through out the hour we would all stand up and we had chosen a short prayer to read out all together. At first everyone was a bit shy, but by the last few times the timer went off we were all jumping up and shouting out the prayer.

One of the things we really wanted to pray for was Hope. We put a water jug in the middle of the room and went and found little shot glasses (wink wink). We talked about how living lives of hope is about working together, being intentional and sometimes going out of your way to make it happen. So even though there was no water in the room we all needed to grab a little glass and go find water in the house and then bring it back and pour it in the jug until the jug was over flowing.... WITH HOPE WATER!!!

As we started we prayed that as we went out of our way to work together to fill this jug with water that it would be our prayer for the Turkey team that they would be intention, work together and create hope that was over flowing.

This was really great and everyone really got into it and started saying their prayers of hope as they poured their little shot glasses of water into the jug. We also let ourselves be inspired by the activity and prayed for people not to be discouraged by the messiness of gathering hope to over flowing (we did have a few spills of water... my bad!!) ... and also we thanked God for the joy of all working together to  create hope as we started cheers-ing the cups before we poured the water glasses as well!

Then we wanted to create a Turkish Rug!!! we didn't have any classic abilities to weave rugs, but we grabbed some big pieces of paper and cut them in to strips and let each color of paper represent a different person on the Team. we wrote our prayers down for each person and then worked together to weave them altogether.

Before we knew it the hour was over and we were really amazed at how God worked together and we pray that the Turkey Team is blessed and much hope and unity is found and overflowing.