Prayers4Players Group

*** This is a reprint of our story about a football prayer group. We ask that you use #Prayers4Players when tweeting.
 
Back in 2012, as many of you know, things turned quite sour for our beloved football players. There were so many things that just kept coming at them- Jay's mom died, Coach Chizik's mom died, the fella who was one of the managers died, they had already lost friends earlier that summer- it just seemed the boys had a lot of things going on. I felt led to pray for the players individually, but there was no way I could do it by myself.
 I was curious if anyone was interested in doing it for this year.  If you don't know anything about me, I am a high school special education teacher. I work with tutoring for a lot of our athletes. I get quite protective of my fellas (high school)  and I can't think of a better way than to have a prayer group for them. I have personally witnessed how the loss of a teammate (for the high school where I teach) shredded a team and kids to little bits. 
I know that not all of these players knew Lutz well, but they are all going to need support with prayers. I think that he had an influence on so many that his loss will be felt throughout the team. I got a chance to meet Jay Prosch and a few others this year at the Senior Bowl. I told him that there was a group of us that prayed for them on an individual basis- and he got up and hugged me.

Each week, we would assign a pray- er to jersey #s, such as 1-20 or 21-40, or coaches, etc. We rotated so that we got a chance to pray for different players. If something great happened, we tried to share about it. For instance, Sammie Coates had posted on his twitter that he was baptized, so we shared that with the prayer group. If we knew about anything specifically that was going on with a player, we tried to let that player's pray-we know. Let me tell you, its much harder to be upset with a player if you have been praying for him that week! It is a personal challenge, but I think its something that is worth it. If anyone has a better idea on how to rotate the players, I am open to doing it differently.

This isn't so much about praying for a win or a great game, although I am sure most of us have done that at some time. These guys go through a lot on a daily basis. They need prayers for safety, for schoolwork, or any other issues that might be going on with them. Many of us follow them on twitter and some of them share things on there. It's not like we have inside information on any player, but you don't have to have that to pray for them.  We can rotate players again or keep the same ones. Last time we sort of did it through twitter or on another blog. If you are interested, let me know. You can send me a twitter message @tatershell or you can send an email to christyg1119@gmail.com

It can get a bit tedious but it is worth it.  We only had a small group, so it was a lot to pray for 25 players each week. I hope we can so it so that every player is getting an individual prayer each week. If something especially difficult is going on with a player or coach, that can be shared and more of us can pray for that guy.  If you are interested, let me know and we will figure it out how we are going to set it up.