I never knew that someone could pray for five hours a day until I experienced it for myself during my week in Germany. I was with a group of sixty other students who had all signed up to do the same thing I was - travel overseas to Germany for a ten day mission trip. None of us expected the experience that would be taken back home.

All of us students were split into teams of eight to ten people. I was on the green team, and we were assigned to Boking Park where we would spend our days plowing the soil through prayer walking and looking for opportunities to share Christ with lost souls. We prayer walked in the park for five hours each day during rain or shine, hot or cold and on dry or muddy soil. Most days in the park were rainy, but on those days I just had to bring my umbrella and try to keep my focus despite how I was feeling. There were times when I wondered if all this praying really mattered; if God was really going to use it somehow to make a change in this world and bring glory to His name.

I wasn't the only one who struggled with these thoughts. Sometimes the other members of my team wondered the same things I did. Some days we became more distracted than others and it took more effort to get our focus on Father and not ourselves. Most days there weren't a lot of people in the park to have a conversation with, which made the doubtful thoughts linger a little longer.

One thing that helped me through the struggles was when we had our Simple Church time. Before and after prayer walking, our whole team would sit together in a circle under this canopy of trees to talk about things we learned through our reading that morning or maybe something we were struggling with. This was always an encouraging time to lift one another up again. So when the partner I was walking with or myself began to feel distracted or discouraged in some way, we would pray for focus and encouragement for each other and the rest of the students on the team and those spread out in the other areas of Cologne. I always found that we were able to get back on track when we took a moment to remember our teammates, or when we stopped and read a few verses of Scripture, or when we reminded ourselves of how great and mighty God is and that he does use our efforts somehow, even if we don't always see them.

I returned home after my week in Germany without seeing anything extraordinary happen. I prayer walked most of the time at the park and only had a couple of conversations that didn't lead to the places I would have liked them to, but that was okay because I knew that I was being obedient, and that is the most important thing to do on missions is be obedient to Father.

About a week and a half after I returned home, I received an e-mail from our team JSI (summer intern/team leader). The second group of students were already there and doing the same things we had been doing. Caleb, the green team's leader, wrote that a man from Cambodia accepted Christ in the same park we had just been prayer walking in for all those many hours. It was the first day that the second group of students were there when this man came to them seeking truth about Christ. This was the extraordinary event that I didn't get to see but that happened because of all those prayers we voiced up to heaven. Father heard and he moved in the park and rescued this man from Cambodia. And so I learned through this experience that prayer really does change things, and even if we don't always see the results of the hard work we put in, the results will always happen somewhere and somehow in God's perfect timing.

Sarah Smith grew up in Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Central Oklahoma with an English degree. She loves being a child of God and serving in missions. She has gone on trips to Germany and London and served a recent term of five and half months in London as a missionary intern. She recently applied to seminary and is looking forward to attending Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in the fall to study Christian Counseling.