The Meerkat anointing

I just keep coming back to Dutch Sheets' book Intercessory Prayer again and again. It's shaped my praying life in lots of different ways these past six years or so. I was a bit sluggish though, in response to the riots. Maybe I was still on a I'm-just-back-from-a-week's-camping-at-New-Wine-and-not-really-following-the-news thing. Then things kicked off in Manchester too. And we're off to Manchester this weekend (and London next week). So it was clearly time to pray. So we set aside the best chunk of the evening to pray for our cities and all the strands we could discern within that mess.


In his book, Dutch Sheets uses a few animal images to illustrate the different aspects of intercession in the Old and New Testaments - the she-bear anointing, the butterfly anointing etc. And I was really focusing on the chapter about Watchmen, and how that's connected with cities, and so the next day I thought I'd try to unpack that a bit in a way my children could understand. And we got researching meerkats, because they seem to encapsulate the watchmen characteristics of alertness, watchfulness, urgent communication.

Gotta dash - just spotted a Martial Eagle.

p.s. Praise God that it was a quieter night. I just loved turning on the news to hear that, err, nothing had happened. And that it had rained (there had been loads of specific prayer about that.)