Sitting around the dining room table, my mother unrolled a large roll of bright yellow butcher paper. With a large black marker, she wrote in capital letters PRAYER LIST. My mother told her ten year-old twins to write down everything we were in need of… which was pretty much everything from toilet paper to food, gas to a car. We asked for food. We asked for clothes. We asked for simple needs.

But mother pushed us to not just ask for what we needed, but what we wanted deep in our hearts. We wrote down my grandfather’s name and Salvation in parenthesis. We didn’t just write down a car, we asked for a specific car that we saw on a billboard off the freeway. We even asked for the dog seated next to the car on the billboard. At the end of our time together we prayed over what seemed to be like a long list of impossibilities.

Slowly but surely dark lines began to scratch through our requests as they were answered. Neighbors would drop by extra food that they didn’t want to waste, boxes of clothes and bags of food mysteriously appeared on our porch, and we thanked God for His provisions and answered prayer. God didn’t just give us necessities—He gave us our heart’s desire. We never starved, we never lost the home, and we had clothes on our back. But what’s greater is Grandpa is in heaven, we got the exact car we dreamed of (same color, make, and model), and even though we didn’t get the labrador featured on the billboard, we did end up with a crazy mutt who we loved!

Lately I’ve been feeling like Mister Rogers trying to sell Belief in a bottle. Buy this book, drink this drink, memorize this scripture and you too can have the life you always wanted! If anything else I’m sharing hope. Hope that things can change because seasons change, hearts melt, and time heals. In the midst of our trials we knew that prayer changed things. Not that was got what we wanted from prayer but that our hearts changed to accept whatever we were dealing with and yes, even with what I currently dealing with.

Prayer changes things.