Sermon Illustrations
Website Architect Turns to Prayer in Overwhelming Challenge
On his website, Craig Larson shares the following story about the power of prayer:
Last night a woman in our church told how God had just given her success on a large, important project at work. She is a website architect working for a big downtown bank. She was hired specifically to upgrade their site's interface for those with disabilities. But everyone with whom she directly worked told her: You can't do this. You will fail. You don't have the necessary intelligence for this. She agreed. She didn't know how to do it.
No one knew how to do what the bank was asking. One technician told her he could not do in a year even part of what the company was asking to be done in six months. These were uncharted waters. She feared what would happen if she failed. That she would lose her job and have to move away.
So she called out to God. All day long, every day, she prayed fervently over every detail, every web page, every line of code. She literally wept and prayed. She felt small and vulnerable, but she also had fierce conviction that God was great enough to help her with an impossible job. She kept crying out to God day after day, planning functionalities, writing code, telling her team of developers what to do. Day after day she received wisdom for one piece of the project after another. Every step and idea was a discovery.
Week after week, one piece, one page, one functionality of the website after another came together. Months passed and the progress continued. The hand of God was upon her, and he blessed her entire team. With the deadline approaching they were ready to release their work. They were ready to go live with approximately eighty new web pages of cutting edge technology. On the day of release they discovered one minor problem, just one easily fixed bug. But everything else worked flawlessly.