Pray, pray, pray

Today was IFES World Student Day, when students in IFES movements around the world stand together in prayer. Being a global organisation means that the event actually goes on for 2 days because of time zones, but we were in the heart of it today. We were following updates online, seeing pictures of prayer meetings from New Zealand to Sri Lanka, South Africa to the Middle East, the Czech Republic to Uruguay, and pretty much everywhere in between! Fantastic to see Peruvian and Russian students, Chilean and Puerto Rican students praying together using Skype, almost 2900 joining the Facebook event, hundreds of Instagram, Twitter posts using the event hashtag #ifeswsd. One of my favourites was the picture of the cake which students in El Salvador had made with the World Student Day logo on it. Videos (well over 60 of them) with prayer requests were posted by students in countries including New Zealand, The Philippines, Madagascar, Gabon, Sweden, the USA, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia... After a lot of hard work, it was amazing to see students from Togo and Indonesia, in the USA using the prayer cards I worked on, with several movements translating them into more than our basic three languages, and students in Mexico making their own additional prayer slides from the PowerPoint resources. We had a prayer meeting at work, then I spent a great evening at a prayer event held in Merton College, one of the Oxford University colleges. This picture is me having a little fun with their shiny reflective new organ. Beautiful building, but the best bit was talking to the students and getting to tell lots of stories!