This past week I had the privilege of wishing my 94-year-old grandmother, Verna Gilkey, “Happy Birthday!” In addition to being “sharp as a tack” and an avid Orioles fan, “Gram” is also a committed Christ follower, who rightfully earned the nickname “The Church Lady” from me years ago in my teens.   She is also a true prayer warrior with “a memory like a steel trap.” In the course of our twenty minute conversation this week, she not only questioned me on the status of previous prayer requests I had provided her, but also told me repeatedly, “I pray for you every morning.”

Moments after putting down the phone with my grandmother who was born in 1920, I picked up a devotional book by Henry Allen Ironside, an old Canadian-American Bible teacher, preacher, theologian, pastor, and author born in 1876. As I read his commentary on 2 Corinthians, it was such a wonderful reminder of the daily gift my grandmother gives to the ministry of Empowering Action, my wife and girls and me personally, as she lifts us up in prayer every morning.

Ironside spoke these words in 1939 to Moody Church in Chicago, yet they were as relevant as if he had spoken them to me, as I put down the phone:

“Those of us trying to preach the Word, seeking to do public service for the Lord Jesus Christ, will never know until we get home to Heaven how much we are indebted for sustaining grace to the prayers of God’s hidden ones. My heart always rejoices when anyone writes or says to me, ‘I am praying for you,’ for I need to be prayed for. I am so forgetful about prayer myself; so many times when I should be praying I am busy at something else, and often if there is any power at all in my messages I know it is because somebody at home or in the audience is praying for me. One owes so much to the prayers of God’s beloved people. Was there ever such a man of God as the apostle Paul in all the centuries since? And yet how dependent he was upon the prayers of believers. Go through his epistles and you will find again and again the exhortation, ‘Brethren, pray for us.’ Time spent in praying for the servants of God is not a waste of time or breath. Prayer accomplishes things for God, and God will do in answer to prayer what He will not do apart from prayer.” – Addresses on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians by H.A. Ironside

I too “owe much to the prayers of God’s beloved people.” Thank you Gram for being one of “God’s hidden ones.”