Why?

A few years ago, I went to a men's retreat and realized that prayer was the weakest discipline in my faith. When I got home, I asked to be put on the prayer chain so I would have things to pray for and would strengthen my habit of speaking with God on a more formal basis. I spoke quick one sentence things to Him, but not very often was there more too it.

This developed into a wonderful habit that led to getting up to pray in the middle of the night regularly. I began keeping track of prayer requests on my phone, but sometimes, I would get notifications or texts while I was praying and it proved to be distracting at times.

When the prayer chain organizer at my church got sick, I took up the task of managing the prayer chain to help out. I would receive emails, edit, and resend them to the group. Sometimes, I would be at work and would not get the opportunity to send out as quickly as I wanted to. Other times, emails got missed until late in the evening when I was cleaning my inbox. This got me thinking about a better way to run the prayer chain.

I thought that an app would do a much better job and would allow people in the group to send prayer requests to the group without having to go through an administrator. This would eliminate the lag between receiving emails and sending them out.

This got me thinking more about sending out prayer requests and the idea came that prayer requests could be sent to everyone that has the app. Imagine if you had cancer and wanted to have literally hundreds of thousands of people praying on your behalf. This is really powerful. God doesn't hear us more based on the number of people, but there is something powerful about God's people coming together on a single concern.

The final reason I started the Prayer Pals app is to keep track of what God has done. He has done so much that gets forgotten over time. The memory fades as we move through life. I thought that having the ability to mark prayers as answered and share that with others would be encouraging. I hope you will find the app does everything intended and becomes an encouragement to you as well as helps you improve on the discipline of prayer.