FAIRHOPE, Alabama — For 19-year-old Michala Mesler, a computer offers a window into pleading.
At her family’s home in Fairhope, looking at a screen, she scrolls through petitions posted by devotees around the world.
A man has cancer; a child is sick; someone just lost their job. The human drama unfolds.
Pray for me.
The website is the creation of the Mesler family — www.nationalprayerbank.com — launched 3 years ago to create an online spiritual community.
The prayer bank, says Mesler, “touches those who need prayer, but also blesses those who pray.”
“Everyone involved is a volunteer,” says his mother, Marlene Mesler, who explains that the whole family – she, her husband Don and their six children – donate not only their time, but also their various expertise, to advance the mission.
A son-in-law in Birmingham is the programmer.
The family says they don’t charge anything and don’t raise funds. The whole enterprise, for the participants, is free.
“A lot of people want to do ministry,” says Marlene Mesler. And those who are often the most isolated — the elderly, the disabled — also become “prayer warriors,” she says.
Michala Mesler, a sophomore at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, says the prayer bank deepened her own sense of faith.
Educated at home before heading off to college, she majored in music technology at UAB and aspired to be a worship leader.
The fusion of old and new seems natural to him.
“Prayer is the same today as it was in the early church,” she says.
“We didn’t do anything to change prayer, but rather to offer a 21st century way to share prayer requests and encouragement.”
Anyone can go to the site and read the exchange of prayers. A prayer request, however, requires creating an account and logging in. They require site participants to be at least 13 years old.
The list of people who signed up, says Marlene Mesler, is not shared with any other organization.
When people post a prayer request, it is read by the Meslers and other selected volunteers to ensure it is appropriate.
Then it is displayed.
The mom and pop ministry is growing.
By mid-July, the site had recorded 374,874 prayers.
And the requests – for healing, for financial well-being, for the repair of marriages – keep coming.
Just this week, a request was posted by a man asking for prayers for a friend: “His needs are salvation, healing from drug and alcohol addiction, and healing his body.”
So far, this request has received 23 prayers in response.
A woman posted: “My children and I will be homeless at the end of the month. We are in extreme danger where we live and I am trying to relocate my family to a safe place… Our lives are in danger here . . . please pray for God to send help.”
She received 40 prayers.
“Please pray for me that I don’t get cancer,” wrote another.
The answer: 45 prayers.
For a request posted 1/29/11, titled “Cancer on the Skull”, there are 14 pages, when printed, of prayers listed, culminating on June 5 with this response:
“Thank you to all my prayer friends for praying for my son’s healing…the last cycle of chemotherapy ended last Saturday. The next step is to receive radiation…Please, keep praying for a full restoration… Luke 1:37: ‘For nothing is impossible with God.’ God’s blessing.”
With the click of a mouse, one can read the answers to the prayers in their entirety and see how to contact those who made them.
There are also prayer groups, including circles of those who are lucky at work or those who are in prison.
The idea for the prayer bank came about when Marlene Mesler was expecting her sixth child – a high-risk pregnancy.
One of her children, then 11, prayed for her health, she said, and gave her a calendar marked with the days of her requests.
Later, that same son, then in his twenties, cut his hand to the bone and was rushed to hospital. When members of their church, First Baptist of Fairhope, prayed for her healing, they kept a prayer book – church custom, she said – and gave it to her.
These prayer stories gave her heart, she says, and she wanted to create the same effect in an online community.
Such prayer books can be powerful tools, says Ryan Smith, Fairhope Baptist premier to students.
He says his church’s prayer lists come from Wednesday night meetings.
Prayers are offered for those who are sick, those in need, Smith said. Everyone who prays signs a letter addressed to the person who is suffering.
Smith describes the “glimmer of hope” in the eyes of those who suffer when they see that others have supported them in prayer.
Their faith, he says, is strengthened by the “encouragement” of friends.
There are parallels in the national prayer bank, he says, where exchanges take place on a national or even global level.
“When you pray,” says Marlene Mesler, “God releases his resources.”
On the ground floor of the Mesler house, far from the computers, there is another type of keyboard.
Michala Mesler spends time at the grand piano, composing.
“Worship music,” she said, “is what the Lord has put on my heart.”
She has just recorded her first CD, a 10-song album entitled “The Nations”.
When people open www.nationalprayerbank.com, they can listen to the title track of that album.
“God answers prayers,” she says.
