Article April 14, 2003 Issue

Insights on prayer for a world

By Lyle Young—Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

In 1983, I was a new reader of the Bible and Science and Health, studying international relations and Latin American history in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I adopted a prayer regimen.

Each week I took a newspaper, read through every article, and prayed for every situation described in each section—politics, economics, business, fashion, sports, entertainment. I was discovering that prayer is a tremendous power for good, and that, through it, anyone can contribute directly to the world's well-being. That year, like many other people, I prayed almost daily for the Argentine elections, which happened smoothly that December, bringing democracy back to Argentina and giving a strong democratic impulse to all of Latin America.

This prayer regimen changed me and guided me. In 1985–86 I was one of ten university graduates chosen for the Canadian Parliamentary Intership Programme. We each worked half a year for a government Member of Parliament, and the other half for an opposition member. We visited three provincial capitals, and traveled to Washington, D.C., Great Britain, and West Germany, where we were hosted by the national governements of those places, each for a week. The EU and NATO also hosted us in Brussels for five days. We did all this with an eye to comparing the Canadian political system with those of the other jurisdictions.

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