Regional Prayer Requests
By Fred Schaeffer, OFS
When you need prayer for causes like sickness, hospitalization, etc., you might talk to your Fraternity sisters and brothers, asking them to pray for you. Or, you could ask your Minister to send in a request for a Regional Prayer Request. I don’t mind receiving these requests from individual members, but many fraternities like you to ask your Minister first. To make it easier on you, we have a form on the Regional website, https://www.ffmr-ofs.org/prayer-requests/ Please keep these requests short, and not too much personal detail. This produces a nice, neat form with all the info we need, and I receive these. I do not answer them immediately because I can only do messages to 30+ ‘bcc’ addresses on my laptop. I do laptop work in the early afternoon. My other Regional function is “Contact Person” - that means I receive email addressed to Five Franciscan Martyrs Region (FFMR) in general, particularly messages asking how to become a member of our Order, or, messages by professed OFS’s, who have (or will) move to our region, who are looking for a fraternity. We have a form for that as well: https://www.ffmr-ofs.org/contact-us/
Replies will include the nearest fraternity and contact info. Fraternities then contact the applicant directly. This works well.
I like the forms because they assure we get the necessary information to answer the request. Still, we get requests lacking specifics, and then I need to send a message asking for details. I don’t mind, but it takes more time. Please do not text me with these requests. It is too much of a hassle to copy texts to Gmail. I generally do not reply to these requests by telephone, especially when there is a lot of ‘looking up’ to do.
Prayer request for relatives. We have no problem with those. It would be nice to receive a last name too. Just to keep them apart in my lists. I don’t know what you do, but I pray for new requests daily (unless the situation warrants more prayer) for about a month, then I pray for them weekly. That’s because I have about 250 names on my lists plus my fraternity and personal intentions. I keep a separate list of deceased people (weekly). We don’t get many “praise reports,” but they are very much appreciated.
Thank you and God bless you and keep you.
Fred