By Catherine Haws, Contributing Writer
Between midterms, fall break and Sleep Week, stress and busyness have inundated campus. With the semester over halfway over, Worship Him all the Time (WHATT) Week of Prayer has fallen at just the right time.
From the kick-off Sunday night Oct. 23 to Saturday, Oct. 29, Hughes Auditorium will be open 24 hours a day for prayer.
Psalm 46:10 has appeared often this year, perhaps because stillness has become a foreign concept. The verse reads, “Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
Senior Judah Robinson is coordinating this year’s 24/7 WHATT Week. “We desire to seek the Lord together as a community to continue cultivating a culture of prayer on this campus,” Robinson said. “We will be coming together not just for our own personal communion with God, but to be in prayer for our nation, the world and so much more.”
Prayer events like this are not new here at Asbury, as students heard about in chapel on when Colombian missionary Jeannine Brabon spoke to the student body about her own experience as an Asbury student in the 1970s.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.[/perfectpullquote]
“Asbury is a university that’s known for revival and for sending out people that are well-educated as well as well-discipled,” Robinson said. “I think that those things are impossible without prayer.”
WHATT Week is an invitation of stillness, a time to pause and recharge. As with the annual Fall Revival, WHATT Week is an opportunity to connect with God’s existing presence here on campus. While the essence of revival is spontaneity, opening up time and space to intentionally welcome revival as a collective body is in itself a beautiful picture of our readiness for God to move in and around us.
Chapel speaker Dr. Doreen Dogen-Magee spoke on the “power of pause” in the midst of our “snapchat culture.” She emphasized the importance of reclaiming what we have lost as a culture: the ability to just be still.
Robinson hopes the impact of the prayer week will continue. “Prayer is something we can always be a little more steeped in,” Robinson said. “I hope to see this as not just as an opportunity for one week, but to help bring a lot of momentum and be a big step for students understanding the importance of prayer in their personal lives and as part of a community.”