In this talk, given at a February 27, 1974 Christian Growth Workshop, Jeanne DeCelles describes the prayer room ministry that regularly happened after the Wednesday night prayer meeting and relates many stories from her experience in the prayer room.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
JEANNE: Just raise your hand. Okay. Or pull on your ear or something like that. My voice is going to be uneven I’m sure, because I just got over being sick. My name is Jeanne DeCelles, and I’m the head of the prayer room ministry, which is held every week after the large prayer meeting upstairs in the church. How many of you have been to the prayer room and know what I’m talking about?
Okay. If I don’t talk too long, and we have time to break into discussion groups, it would be a good thing if there was someone in each group who had been to the prayer room and you could share, you know, some of the experiences that you’ve had up there.
The prayer room ministry has evolved. . . . Would you mind all sitting more or less in the same area, so I’m not with my back to anybody? [Jeanne chuckles.] My voice isn’t all that great tonight. The prayer room ministry has evolved over the years since 1967 but we always had some kind of prayer room ministry. It was just different things at different times.
When we first started having the prayer meetings, over at Notre Dame in the administration building on campus, we did not have what you’d properly call a prayer room, but we did offer people the opportunity to be prayed with specifically at that time for the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and that’s what you would say the prayer room ministry was used for primarily then.
Now the prayer room ministry is almost never used for that. In fact we really had to be careful because we don’t want to offend people, but the prayer room ministry is not the place to send somebody if they want to be prayed with for the baptism in the Spirit. But at that time, we weren’t praying for, you know, specific things in specific ways, and we didn’t have a Life in the Spirit Seminar. So, [if] somebody wanted to receive the baptism in the Spirit in those first early months of the renewal, they just went and we laid hands on them and we prayed with them for the baptism in the Spirit. We also prayed with each other for healings and things like that.
Later on, the prayer meetings were held in our home. And I remember [Jeanne sighs and chuckles] noticing one night that there was something going on in every floor of the house and in all different rooms. I think including one of the bathrooms was being used [laughter] for some kind of a ministry or somebody praying with somebody. We had what we called explanation sessions in the basement. The big prayer meeting was held upstairs afterwards.
Some people who had had explanation sessions would go in the living room and we would pray with them for the baptism in the Spirit. One of the girls who was living with us was sleeping in my husband’s study at the time, and we used her room—her bedroom, and my husband’s study—for a room to talk with people or counsel with people or pray with people for whatever they wanted. Occasionally there would be an overflow back into one of the other bedrooms. We used everything except the rooms where the children were sleeping—as I recall, we never had to do that—but the hallways were filled with people, and one night a young man had an epileptic seizure on the kitchen floor during the prayer meeting, and we carried him upstairs and we prayed with him up there in our bedroom, and he was healed.
So, even then, the prayer room ministry was a very effective thing, and God was doing very great things. But it was highly disorganized, obviously. We didn’t really know what we were doing.
Later on after we moved the prayer meeting to a local parochial school, we had what we called—I think we called it a prayer room then. We were still praying with people at that time in the prayer room for the baptism in the Spirit and, as I recall, at that time we used the last two rows of seats in the auditorium in St. Joe grade school. And I remember that God worked very powerfully there on several occasions and it was certainly not the ideal prayer room situation.
As more people began to use the prayer room ministry we began to use things like classrooms down there and it was somewhere in that period, I don’t remember exactly, when one of the leaders of the prayer meeting at large said to me one night, “That would be a good thing for you to do. Why don’t you be head of the prayer room team?” And that’s how I happened to be head of the prayer room team today, as far as I can remember.
Later on when the People of Praise took over this large prayer meeting and servicing it completely, I was again sort of recommissioned by the People of Praise to be head of the prayer room team. But that’s basically how it happened.
As we became more aware of the fact that we needed sound teaching before we received the baptism in the Spirit, we did develop Life in the Spirit Seminars, and at that time, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, being prayed with for the baptism of the Holy Spirit was moved out of the prayer room ministry. And the prayer room ministry itself became more of a clearly defined ministry connected with the prayer meeting. And that’s the way it’s been pretty much for the last four or five years I guess. As it became obvious that more and more people were going to need prayer support in asking for healing, and people were needing counseling, people were needing guidance, we began to ask people to make a commitment to the prayer room team. And at the present time we have nine people who are solidly committed to being here every Wednesday and to being upstairs every Wednesday from 10:30 on until everybody is taken care of. Not all nine of us are there every week. We try to give everybody at least one day off from this ministry a month, and hopefully when we add a couple of more in the next six weeks we’ll be able to have more time off.
The prayer room ministry is an opportunity for anybody attending this large prayer meeting to seek several things. First of all, we used to have a custom at the end of a large prayer meeting, especially when they were held in private homes, of just all gathering together and laying hands on each other as people would request it, for a blessing or anything else, you know, that we might want to ask each other to support each other in prayer for. That goes on in the prayer room. And at the present time what we’re doing is we’re asking people who want that kind of prayer, just a brief prayer for a blessing or guidance or something like that, to go to the altar rail. So, if you just want something simple like that, then you should go upstairs and just kneel down at the altar rail and someone will come along and take care of you as soon as possible. There are usually one or two people assigned to do just that, to just take care of people at the altar rail.
If you want to talk more, if you feel like you need to explain your need more fully, or if you want counseling of some kind, or if you need discernment of spirits or something like that, then you should go and sit in one of the pews in the back and you should spread out because some people really like privacy, you know. When they’re being prayed with they don’t like to be surrounded by a whole lot of other people. So when you do that, in charity to other people you should spread out. When you go up there, don’t go away in the back. We might miss you because it’s dark back there, but don’t sit right next to each other. [Jeanne coughs.] Excuse me.
We are not trained counselors. None of us has any degrees in counseling. One person on the team at present time does have an advanced degree in clinical psychology, I believe. I’m a registered nurse, so I’ve had some training in that area. But I don’t think that any of us would call ourselves trained counselors. But we do find ourselves up there giving a lot of counseling. And what we find we have to do is just turn to the Lord and really count on him to pour out in abundance every week [Jeanne chuckles] the gifts that we need to speak his word to the people who come to the prayer room and he has never failed to bless them. In fact when we’re looking for someone to join the prayer room team what we look for is whether or not the person has obvious gifts that are necessary. They may have an obvious gift of healing, for instance, but more importantly they may have a very strong gift of discernment. Or, they may—you may find that people are going to that individual for guidance. People are going to that individual for pastoral care of some kind. When they have a problem, that’s the person they go to, and the person seems to be able to really rely on God to give them the discernment that they need to understand what needs to be spoken to that person’s heart. And that’s what we really look for more than for any degrees. Not that we have anything against degrees in psychology—we don’t—but it’s a spiritual ministry, and that’s what we count on there. We don’t count on some of the gifts that we may have in the worldly sense, which are fine. And we want people on the team to use the intelligence that God has given them. We also count on a very strong gift of wisdom.
We count on an ability to help people be at ease about sharing some of the really deep problems close to their heart and we count on them for toughness. Very often people come to the prayer room and they hear things they don’t want to hear, frankly. If you go to the prayer room and you feel that the advice you’ve been given there is somewhat harsh or difficult, I would recommend that before you just reject it, you really pray it through because no one up there is interested in being harsh and no one up there is interested in doing anything but speaking the Word of God to you as clearly as they possibly can, and with as much love as they possibly can. There’s one thing that you can count on up there, and that is love. You will really be loved when you come to the prayer room ministry. You may not feel like people are saying to you exactly what it was that you came up there to hear. In fact, frequently people will tell you that that’s not your problem at all, your problem is this. Your problem is that you’re not submissive to your husband. Your problem is that you’re not a good head to your wife. It’s not your job. It’s not your children. It’s not, you know, any number of things that you may think you’ve really zeroed in on what’s wrong and that’s what you ought to be prayed with about.
If after praying and really seeking God’s discernment there, the person on the prayer room team says that they think, in fact, what’s going on there is that you need to be more submissive to your husband or you need to lay down your life in a better way as the head of your wife, you ought to listen to that, even if it’s not what you wanted to hear. And you ought to really try to do what that person recommends. Now that isn’t to say that you should never question what you hear. You should, especially if you don’t understand the advice you’ve been given. You should question it and you should find out what that person is trying to say to you if they haven’t made it clear.
The procedure that we use in the prayer room is that most of the time we pray by twos. Sometimes that’s not possible. Sometimes I wind up with an uneven team up there and so when I’m making assignments, if someone’s ill or something, like I wasn’t there last week, and so things were kind of uneven. Someone may have to work alone, but we really feel strongly that it’s for our own protection and for the protection of the people we’re praying with, that it’s much, much less risky if there are two people praying.
The reason for that is that if I’m praying with you and let’s say we go out in twos and one person is always the leader of the team, which means that the other person is in submission to the leader of that team of two, and we move that around. Like, I really find it very, very good to be submissive to someone in the prayer room ministry. It’s a very good thing for me to do every so often. That is the check on my discernment. It’s a check on what’s going on with me there. So I mix it up a lot, you know. When a person first starts to work in the room, obviously they’re not going to be head of a team, but eventually they will be asked to do that when they feel comfortable doing it. They’re sort of in charge and I’ll explain more the reason for that later.
They will listen to what you have to say, pray with you, do whatever the Lord seems to be leading them to do. The other member of the team is there to be primarily a prayer support, to be praying all the time that you’re talking. You know, if you’re really pouring your heart out, you can be sure that there’s at least one person who’s listening very closely and praying but listening too and another person who’s just praying, who’s just literally taking you to the foot of Jesus’ cross and putting your problem squarely there at his feet where it belongs. That person is supporting the team leader and that person is supporting you in your prayer because when you come to the prayer room, you’re coming for a lot of different things, but you should be coming to pray and what you’re asking for basically is for people to support you in that prayer.
You’re asking for two or more to be gathered in the name of Jesus for the sake of you. That you can find the answer to whatever it is you need to know. And it may not be some big hairy deal. You may just want to know, should I go to college next year, should I go to graduate school or should I do this? Should I start looking at community more closely? I’m having a problem getting along with my mother or my husband or my children. It, you know, it may be something big. On the other hand, it may not be something so big. You don’t need to wait to come to the prayer room until you need something really, really big.
Another reason that we find it’s good to have two people with a clearly defined leader of the team is so that there won’t be confusion. In fact, that’s the primary reason. Sometimes in the prayer room we deal with the problems of the world. Sometimes we deal with the problems of the flesh and very frequently we deal with the problems of Satan, the enemy.
We don’t believe that every single problem that comes up to the prayer room ministry is the work of Satan. But on the other hand, we have learned over the last six or seven years that a lot of the problems that we have are, in fact, the work of Satan. And we’re not a bit afraid of him, because he’s just damned and he can go to hell, and that’s what we tell him to do. And we deal with him a lot in the prayer room. And whenever you’re dealing with Satan, one thing that you want to be sure and avoid is any kind of confusion. So, when we pray with you up there, we might say to you, “Now, I really, I discern that there is a spirit of confusion or anxiety,” or doubt or lust or hate or theft or whatever. The prayer room team leader will say to you, “So and so, I want you to renounce the spirit of confusion.” Now what we mean when we ask you to do that is we want you to do it right then, and we want you to do it out loud. And it’s important that you do it out loud. We don’t care how loud you do it. We don’t care if you stand on your head while you’re doing it. All we want is that you should say out loud, “In the name of Jesus, I renounce you spirit of confusion.” We do not ask you to bind that spirit or cast that spirit out or deal with that spirit in any way, we just ask you to hate his guts, and we want you to really concentrate on hating his guts and renouncing him with all your mind, your heart, and your will.
You see, most of us are not accustomed to the idea that God said we have to love him with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, our whole will and all our strength. And at the same time, we have to hate Satan exactly the same way. You should pour as much strength into hating Satan as you do into loving God. And it’s really important that we understand that because some people have this mentality that he’s a cute little rascal, and he’s nothing of the sort. He’s abominable, he’s filthy, and he’s out to kill you. So when we urge you to do that, don’t be spooked by that. Don’t be afraid of that. Just renounce whatever it is with all your will, with all your strength.
The prayer room leader will then deal with the spirit and the other person will pray. If you’ve got this person binding a spirit of confusion and that spirit [sic] binding a spirit of anxiety, and the person who’s being prayed with doing something else, you’re going to have all kinds of confusion. And if there’s anything that Satan loves, it’s confusion. He really can work powerfully there. So we just keep everything very, very much in order and the leader will deal with the spirits and cast them out or bind them and all you have to do is just hate their guts [Jeanne chuckles], and count on the Lord to do the work, and the other person will just pray.
Now, if while you’re being prayed with you discern that there is a spirit at work in you, then you should call that to the attention of the leader. Just say, “You know, I think maybe there’s a spirit of such and such. Would you deal with that?” And then we’ll do that. Or the other prayer partner may say, “I think there’s a spirit of such and such,” and then the leader will deal with that. But it’s important that everything be done in order, and the best way to do that is for one person to lead and the other people to pray. So that’s the way we do it.
In fact, order in the prayer room is really important. And that’s why, if you’ve ever come up there with someone to pray with them, we ask that if you want to go up and just pray privately with someone, it’s very helpful to us if you would go over to the other side of the church, because it causes confusion in the prayer room ministry. People don’t know who’s on the team and who isn’t on the team and what’s that person doing there, you know. Or we have had visiting prophets come to the prayer meeting, and then they come up to the prayer room and they start running around laying hands on people, praying with people for all kinds of things. They may be very powerful in their gifts. I’m not saying that they aren’t or that, you know, we’re the only ones that have got it. Nothing like that at all. But this is the way our prayer room ministry is set up, and we ask that everybody who comes up there observes that order in order to eliminate any confusion or any, you know, disruptiveness—particularly people who just come in and start kind of praying at random with people. It just can be terribly, terribly disruptive and on at least one occasion it has done some harm. It has caused an individual a great deal of difficulty and harm. That’s why not just everybody comes up and works on the prayer room team. There is a definite team, and those people are committed to be there every week, and they have recognized gifts that have been recognized over a long period of time, gifts of discernment.
Now one of the most important gifts in the prayer room is discernment. So I’d like to talk just a little bit about that. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about discernment. I think some people think of it as some kind of a magic wand. You know, I’ve had people come up to me and they say, “Well, I was here several weeks ago and this person had a discernment about me. She discerned me in the head or she discerned me here,” or something like that. And there’s just confusion, and I don’t mean to make fun of it, but I think it’s important that we do understand what discernment is. It’s not magic. But it is true that when God pours out his Spirit, he gives us the ability to tell what is of his Spirit and what is not of his Spirit and what is of the flesh and what is of the world, and that’s basically what discernment is.
There’s nothing, you know, very immediate—it’s not always a vision. Sometimes it is. There’s one person on the team, for instance, who very, very frequently will in fact have a vision when she prays with someone. The Lord will really give her not only a strong word of knowledge about that person and the needs of that person’s heart, but will also give her some kind of a vision. She has a very, very strong gift in that area. Not everybody in the prayer room team has that strong a gift.
My gift does not work that way at all. I don’t—very rarely. I may have more prophecy about people, for instance, than I would have a word of knowledge straight from the Lord about, you know, this person needs to forgive her sister, for instance; but that will happen. With at least one member of the team, it will happen frequently that she will have really strongly from the Lord, “This is not this person’s problem, what she’s telling you. Rather, the problem is that she’s never forgiven her sister for something her sister did, and that’s what she needs to hear.” Now of course that kind of thing just unjams all kinds of things in a person and unblocks a lot of things so that the Lord can deal with them and can heal them and can pour out his healing love on that person. And it’s very, very powerful and very effective, and we really thank God for it. But not all discernment works quite that way.
Some discernment may be just praying for a passage in Scripture, for instance. Generally when we pray for a passage in Scripture, if the passage we get is very harsh, or if it speaks to a very touchy problem, if we think it will embarrass the person, we might ask the other member of the team to leave for a minute so that we can talk to them privately because we don’t want to embarrass anybody.
Or if it seems harsh . . . Usually if I get a passage that’s very harsh and I’m not real sure about it, I’ll pray a little more and test it. And then I’ll tell the person, and then you can tell, you know. But all the gifts have to be tested and I’m not trying to imply that you should never test the gifts that are used in the prayer room. You should. But on the other hand, you should not just flatly reject some advice that you get up there because it’s not what you came to hear. If you’re only coming to hear what you want to hear, then you don’t need the prayer room ministry anyway. But if you can listen, God can speak very, very powerfully to your heart up there and can really unblock a lot of things.
All of the prayer room ministry involves a great deal of teaching and most of the teaching—all of the teaching in fact, in the prayer room ministry will be teaching of the People of Praise, and I don’t mean to make that sound so high-flown. Basically, what I mean by that is that over the last couple of years, God has taught the People of Praise a lot of things, particularly in the area of relationships with other people: how to be forgiven, how to seek forgiveness, how to seek reconciliation, how to forgive people [Jeanne coughs] and how important it is to forgive people in order to be delivered of a lot of the things that are really weighing us down, really dragging us down a lot.
Teaching about headship and subordination within the family and within other relationships—the Lord has just really given us a lot of good teachings about that. And in the prayer room ministry those are the teachings that you will get if you come up to the prayer room. It’s not necessarily particularly Catholic teaching. Most of the people on the team are Catholic because most of the people in the People of Praise are Catholic, but that’s not by design or desire, and we’re really eager to expand the ministry to include more people who are not Catholic. But occasionally you may get some advice that seems to you peculiar, you know, peculiarly Catholic. And if you have difficulty with that, or if you think the person praying with you is not aware of the fact that you’re not a Catholic, and therefore that kind of language may be or that approach to things is, you know, uncomfortable for you, then you should tell them, you know. They may not know that you’re not a Catholic.
One thing that I think it would really be useful to learn from the prayer room ministry is how to pray with each other. You know, we should all be able to pray with each other for anything at the drop of a hat, literally day and night, and we’ve learned that the way I just described to you is a good way, you know, eliminating all confusion, making clear, you know, making sure that there is no confusion allowed to enter in. Not seeing Satan behind every tree, but understanding that some of these problems that we have are a matter of repentance. Sometimes we just simply have to change our mind. We have to decide to behave differently or we have to give up an opinion or an idea. And that’s not Satan, that’s repentance that we need to do ourselves. Being able to see those things is really something that I think God wants for all of us, not just for the prayer room team. And you should be able to pray with each other in your homes or at work or wherever you are with other Christians. If you need something, you know, if you need somebody to support you and pray with you, go and do it, you know. It’s a good idea to pray in twos for the reasons that I mentioned. But everything that I’ve told you about the prayer room ministry you could, you know, reasonably be expected to do with each other whenever you need it.
If you want to send someone to the prayer room ministry . . . other than the things I’ve mentioned, such as healing and counseling and blessing and guidance—if you have, if you know somebody who’s got a really serious problem and you will take them to the prayer room, you know, that ought to help. If you bring them up, and we ask you to leave [Jeanne chuckles] while we pray with them, please don’t be offended. That person may need to hear something from the Lord, and they may need to hear it without you there, and don’t be offended. We really have to protect people’s privacy there. Everything that is said to us in the prayer room is confidential. Someone on the team may come to me and say, “This person came to the prayer room and they had this problem, what should I have done?” or “Did I do the right thing?” or “Should we enter into an ongoing counseling relationship with this person?” or something like that. They might share that with me, but by and large, we try to share relatively little even with each other on the team about what is said to us up there or about any problems that come to us up there, because we want people to feel really confident and secure, that they can really bare their heart and their soul up there if that’s what’s needed. And it’s not going to be the topic of conversation at dinner the next day. You really want people to be sure of that. So if, for instance, you bring somebody up to the prayer room, and we ask you to leave while we pray with them, I beg of you, please don’t be offended. In fact, if anything happens to you in the prayer room that you don’t understand, please come and tell me.
Really silly misunderstandings arise sometimes. And they’re very trivial, but it is basically a misunderstanding, and usually there’s a very reasonable explanation for it. I mean, everybody up there is tired at 10:30 on Wednesday, and they are not going up there till midnight in order to do something to harm anybody. We’re really there for only one reason, and that’s to serve you and to serve the Lord. And I don’t think there’s one of us that doesn’t have to go, well, we usually leave during the last hymn, because we have to go and just be alone for a while with the Lord. And I think basically the prayer that every one of us makes is, “Look, I haven’t got a thing to give any of those people, and if you want anything done tonight, Lord, you’re going to have to do it because I’m really beat.” And the Lord really blesses that, and when we come out of the prayer room, we’re usually, as a matter of fact—I kid about it, in fact—I’m usually so built up and so exhilarated by what God has been able to do that I have to overcome a terrible temptation to go out and have a pizza with my husband and stay up too late and be too tired the next morning, after having gone up there at 10:30 positive that I could not put one foot in front of the other. I think we’re all attacked a lot too by the enemy on Wednesday nights about 10:30. I think he’d like us to be too tired to go work in the prayer room, [Jeanne coughs] but if you send someone up there, don’t build them up to expect some magic power, you know, that’s going to just take care of everything. God can do that and sometimes he does. We have had healings of a really miraculous nature in the prayer room and we expect them and we expect it to happen more, not less. But on the other hand, a lot of, in fact I would say 75% of the problems that came to the prayer room in the first four years that I worked in the prayer room were marriage problems, frankly. And almost all of them were unequally yoked wives whose husbands did not want to be the spiritual head of the family or wouldn’t come to the prayer meeting, you know, or wouldn’t pray with them or things like that. That was really the big problem. Well, obviously, one session in the prayer room is not going to heal that problem. A lot of times the most we can say to a woman is, “Go home, be submissive, convert him through your love and your generosity and your holiness and come back next week if you want to, and we’ll pray with you some more.” [Jeanne chuckles.] And sometimes that’s all we can do.
We can’t solve those problems. We’re not marriage counselors, but we do a lot of marriage counseling. We talk to an awful lot of people with marriage problems and it’s clear, I’m sure you can see, that those things are just not going to be healed after 10 minutes in the prayer room. We can help people forgive each other, you know, but we hardly ever see both partners in a marriage. We prefer it that way, and sometimes we have to say to people, we will not talk to you again unless you bring back your spouse next time. We’re not going to talk to you anymore about your marriage. We have done that, but don’t give them the impression, you know, that everything’s going to be fixed up just really super.
Sometimes that happens, and praise God when it does, but a lot of people’s problems just are not, you know, that kind of problem. And a lot of what we can give people is ongoing support, ongoing help and a firm promise that there will always be somebody up there in that church on Wednesday night if they just want to pray. So bring everybody up, but don’t give them the idea that it’s magic. What time is it?
MAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible]
JEANNE: Okay, I think rather than break up now, it might be helpful if you all would tell me if you have any questions about the prayer room ministry.
MAN’S VOICE: . . . your chances that like if I wanted to pray with somebody there . . . [inaudible]
JEANNE: I think if you really go to the Lord and tell him that you’re really counting on him, and beg him for, you know, discernment or wisdom or light or understanding or whatever you need, that you needn’t worry about that. I think Christians have a right and an obligation to pray with each other, like I said, at the drop of a hat. Now, when it comes to long term counseling, you might want to think that over more. You might want to send them to somebody more experienced and when it comes to dealing with Satan, just a simple, you know, “In the name of Jesus, I command you to depart from this servant of the Lord and go to hell and don’t bother him anymore.” You can do that. No reason why you can’t do that. But—you might not be able always to identify spirits accurately. You don’t necessarily need to, you know, just tell them all to go to hell. [Laughter.]
But I think basically most Christians should be able to do this with each other. At the same time, I think God has really gifted the prayer room ministry in a very, very special way. People in the People of Praise who are living in households expect to be ministered to and to minister to each other in the way that we do in the prayer room; but at the same time, we also encourage people in the People of Praise who are in households to use the prayer room ministry, you know, when they feel like that’s what they want to do rather than do it in the household. Ideally we should be able to deal with these things in our households no matter how tricky they are or how difficult they are, but maybe you’re having trouble relating to somebody in the household. And you’re gonna have to pray it through with them eventually, but maybe you need to go up there first and get some help with it and then go back to the household and pray it through. But I think we all ought to be able to pray with each other this way.
WOMAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible]
JEANNE: Sure if you want to. A lot of people do that. We stay there as long as there are people coming. We don’t go home till everybody’s taken care of, and we don’t want anybody to be afraid to come, no matter what. And if you come up there and you open the door and it’s packed, that’s all right, don’t worry about it. If you can wait, we can do it, but you may have to wait; and that’s one big heartache to me is that a lot of people come up and they’re impatient or maybe they have other reasons, but they don’t stay. I feel very badly about that. I hate to see somebody get up and leave, but we do the very best we can and we have a pretty big team now, so you shouldn’t have to wait very long. But you shouldn’t be put off or think that you’re troubling us or being a pain in the neck or anything if you have to stay till midnight, you know. We don’t mind. Not a bit. If you want to come, we’ll take care of it—or, the Lord will. [Jeanne chuckles.]
WOMAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible]
JEANNE: When I pray for a passage, I ask the Lord to give me something—and that it be the first thing that I find on the page, you know. When I pray for a passage I just open it. Very rarely the Lord will tell me a passage, but I’m a well-educated Catholic, and I don’t know the Bible very well. [Laughter.] So if the Lord says to me, “Romans 152,000,” or something, it’s not gonna mean anything to me, you know. We kid about that around the house: “Remember what it says in Ephesians 4!” There are very few passages that I know that well—that the Lord would not, I think, ordinarily deal with me that way. There are some people that he does, you know—he says, “Philippians 4,” or something like that. But basically when I pray for a passage, I just ask the Lord to give me something, and it will be the first passage that I get when I open the book. And sometimes I have to test that.
WOMAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible]
JEANNE: Ah [Jeanne sighs] the strongest kind of example I can give or something like that is that one time, this has happened twice, in fact, in the prayer room, I’ve [sic] been praying with somebody, and the Lord has told me very clearly that the person had a problem with lust. When I, you know, it’s very hard to say to this innocent, sweet looking little housewife that she’s got a terrible problem with lust. [Laughter.] “Oh, I can’t say that, Lord. There’s no way I’m going to be able to tell this girl that.”
So, I’ll pray for a passage and if the passage confirms it, then I’ll go ahead and minister that word to [sic] the Lord. Now, that’s happened to me twice that it’s been somebody that I just, “Oh, I can’t do that, Lord. Oh, no!” [Laughter.] So the first time it happened, I got alone with her, first of all—somebody had come up with her. At that time there were four of us, I think, on the team. So we didn’t pray in pairs. We couldn’t. So I was alone with her, and I ministered that word to her and her face just—it was just like a gift from God to me. She just beamed and she said, “That’s exactly what it is, and I’m so glad you told me. Let’s pray about it.” [Laughter.] And so we did, and we dealt with it, and praise God, it was really good.
MAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible] . . . why don’t we recognize it?
JEANNE: I don’t know. I don’t know. We kid ourselves sometimes that—she wasn’t involved in any adulterous affairs or anything like that. She was just being assaulted by a spirit of lust, and that’s the way we dealt with it. It was obvious to me that there was no sin involved, but that she was really being attacked. And she was very much relieved.
Now, on the other occasion, I tested it by waiting to see if my prayer partner would confirm it. I asked my prayer partner to confirm it. I had a really good prayer partner that night, and I trust her and she trusts me. [Jeanne chuckles.] Neither one of us would do it! Neither one of us would say it. The girl left the prayer room, and I turned to my partner and I said, “You know, I think I may have just blown it. I think that person has the spirit of lust and I think we should have dealt with it,” and she said, “I know we should have dealt with it.” So fortunately we had kind of an ongoing relationship with this girl, so I went and got her and came right down here, followed her, [with laughter in her voice] went over into a corner with her, and we prayed about it right then and there and dealt with it. But I really felt like I’d been rebuked by the Lord. You know, I really felt that I had blown it and my prayer partner had too. The two of us sat there on that word of God, you know, because we didn’t want to say that. [Jeanne sighs.] So we don’t do that very often.
WOMAN’S VOICE: Sometimes when you become aware of . . . in your own mind . . . you can
. . . deal with it yourself and say the name of Jesus . . . [inaudible].
JEANNE: Yes, you certainly can, but I think—it’s really a good idea to seek another Christian to pray with you. I think it safeguards you against, you know, being deceived and it’s a good and healthy thing to do, and especially it’s a good and healthy thing to do because if there is one thing that Satan can’t stand it’s being brought out into the light, you know. He just simply cannot abide it.
It’s like in the Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius recommends that the way we deal with Satan is like a wife who is called on the telephone and propositioned. And so she goes directly to her husband and tells him and by doing that it’s brought into the light and is absolutely undone. [Jeanne chuckles.] What can the guy do? You know, the next time he calls, her husband’s gonna answer the phone and say that he’d appreciate it if he didn’t do that again, because she’s brought it out into the light. If she shoves it under the table and gets all panicky and upset about it and doesn’t tell her husband, then it’s kept in darkness, and she’s compromised twice because when he calls back, he’s going to say, “I see you didn’t tell your husband, you must be interested.” So then she’s really compromised.
WOMAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible] . . . you agree.
JEANNE: Right! That’s right. Yeah. So it’s much less risky—you should bring everything you can into the light. Satan simply cannot abide the light and just can’t tolerate it. And if it isn’t Satan, if you’re wrong in your discernment, the person may be able to help you find out, in fact, what is wrong.
WOMAN’S VOICE: How often do you find [inaudible] a basic problem [inaudible]?
JEANNE: Quite frequently. In fact, whenever we go through any extended forgiveness with people, we always include that. We always urge them to forgive themselves
. . . all that garbage, get rid of it all. [Jeanne chuckles.]
MAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible] partners come to the prayer room, it might be an obvious question
. . . like a husband and a wife . . . [inaudible]
JEANNE: You mean in a marriage situation?
MAN’S VOICE: Yeah. Or in a bad relationship . . . [Inaudible]
JEANNE: We don’t so often recommend it in a bad relationship. Maybe that’s a good idea. You may have just given me a good teaching. We do in a marriage, if possible, but frankly, it’s almost always impossible, because usually the marriage problems that we get are people who are what we call unequally yoked, and so the other partner won’t come. The other partner won’t have anything to do with the prayer meeting much less the prayer room.
But we have had some occasions where both partners do come to the prayer meeting pretty regularly, and they have really deep problems. And frankly, you just have to hear both sides of the story before you can really give any intelligent advice to people. When you come to the end of discernment, when you’ve told them everything that you know how to tell them, you’ve given them all the sound teaching that you can, you may have to get them both together or at least get him together with someone in the prayer room and her together with someone in the prayer—maybe the same person won’t talk to both of them at once, but we like to have both of them come.
WOMAN’S VOICE: [Inaudible]
JEANNE: Oh yeah, we do that a lot. Yeah. We don’t think there’s anything magical traveling across the miles or anything, but a lot of people come up and say, “You know my sister is dying of cancer in Minnesota. Could you pray with me that she’ll be healed?” Basically what we’re doing there is supporting that person in—two or three agreeing, you know, in the name of Jesus, to claim that healing or whatever. We don’t always claim a healing, we really try to be led by the Lord there, because sometimes we pray with people and they’re not healed. And we just have to seek what is God’s will there. But most of the time, if a person comes to me and says, “I want God to heal me, will you pray with me for a healing?” I do it. When a person asks me, you know, that’s enough of a sign from the Lord for me to at least pray with them. Sometimes they’re healed, sometimes they’re not.
[Recording ends here.]
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