The Big Apple

Finally the Big Apple! After delays, diversions and waiting 11 hours in our hotel for our bags to arrive from the airport, we set out to explore Manhattan.

It was a surprise when the Lord told me to imbibe some of the spirit of free enterprise. It had never occurred to me that it was a good thing and I realised He was rearranging my mindsets. Free enterprise. I looked up the definition. Free enterprise refers to an economy where businesses are free from government control. It sounded good to me. We take these things for granted, but in the context of our trip, which was to continue across countries oppressively steeped in communism, it was a strategic consideration.

As someone who the Lord had called to live by faith, I was used to all my needs being met—transport, food, clothes—everything arrived supernaturally and on time. I had given up my home and agreed to be available to go wherever the Spirit led me and connected me, and for twelve years God provided all my needs. I hadn’t given much thought to things like economic systems or profit margins. In fact I think my thinking was coloured by the religious idea that it is wrong to make money and business is a second rate activity, next to ‘serving the Lord.’ I began to see that God has other ideas. He sent me to the exclusive store of Macy’s to buy something and I chose a pen!

Undertaking a prayer journey is not travel with a bit of prayer as you go. It requires the daily discipline of worship and listening for direction. There is the cost of not necessarily going where you would like to go, but the joy of seeing how the journey unfolds under the watchful eye of the Almighty. In New York our first meal was at an Irish pub and we kept meeting Irish people—not surprisingly given the huge numbers that arrived in the mid-nineteenth century when they fled from the Irish potato famine—but for some reason my heart was touched and my eyes leaked tears. They were obviously on God’s heart. Unlike the Dutch traders who settled Manhattan, the Irish were not the ones who established New York as a centre of commerce. They were often poor and underprivileged. We prayed for them in St Patrick’s Cathedral. We decided to see Riverdance on Broadway—a brilliant show full of the indomitable Irish spirit.

Apart from praying for the Irish, we prayed for the Jews. We looked towards the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and prayed for the gates to be open for them to leave. America has been a wonderful refuge for the Jews, but we knew the time was coming when they would need to undertake aliyah to Israel. With an alarming rise in anti-Semitism, that time has now come.

There must be many people like us who look back to a visit to the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and marvel that they are there no longer. It was a good place to look out on the city and pray for its population, which numbers the same as the whole of Australia’s. I would like to say that we foresaw the destruction of the twin towers and prayed to prevent it, but we were as shocked as anyone else when six months later they were so violently destroyed. The city of free enterprise was challenged. I had been touched by a quote on the wall of the top floor—The city of right angles and tough, damaged people. I had to agree. It was at least a small comfort that we had prayed for it.