From the archives of Oral Roberts
As a teenager, I told my parents I was leaving home and going out on my own. Some young men might be ready to leave home at that age, but I was leaving with the spirit and attitude of a runaway. By leaving, I was declaring my intention to run my life according to my own desires instead of God’s or my parent’s.
Mama put her arms around me and kissed me. She wet my face with her tears. She said, “Oral, I’m putting a covering of prayer over you. Every night I’ll be praying. You’ll never get away from my prayers.”
For five months Mama walked the floor of our little house and called out my name to the Lord. “God, bring him home at any cost,” she prayed. The night I collapsed during a basketball tournament and fell unconscious, hemorrhaging from the mouth, my coach brought me home and laid me on my parent’s bed. She looked at me and said, “Oral, I didn’t know the price would be so great.”
Even when the doctors told Mama that I had tuberculosis… even as I wasted away, coughing and bleeding… she kept a prayer cover over my life. She literally refused to quit praying. She prayed over me every day until I was saved… and then until I was healed… and then until I had fully recovered… and until I began to preach… and for my life and ministry until the day she died!
Mama believed in the power of prayer as much as the psalmist who wrote, I call on you, O God, for you answer me; give ear to me and hear my prayer (Psalm 17:6 NIV). Are you holding on in prayer for a loved one? Keep raising that prayer cover every day ― miracles come through holding-on prayers!