This weekend I had the privilege of going to Ottawa, the capital of Canada (I know, you thought it was Toronto). This was only the third time I’ve been since 1992, when it was our nation’s 125th birthday. I guess another first was that this was the first time I’ve been since the Internet has gone mainstream and you could post your videos and pictures to social networking sites in almost real time.
My brother has moved up there in the last year or two, and whenever I’m back in Canada I stay with my parents in Peterborough and travel out and visit from there. At any rate, he had invited my dad and I to come up and spend the weekend at his place, and of course, naturally, I wanted to go to Parliament. So you can imagine my shock, in pleasant way, that there was a national prayer event going on. Having lived in the USA I have personally attended several ‘The Call‘ events and knew that in Canada there are organizations and networks of Christians who organized events called “The Cry“, but I had never attended one. I felt a bit conflicted because had I known about it, I might have given consideration to attending it, but was visiting with my brother and never knew about it until I happened upon it.
I’d love to hear statistics about how many people organizers believed were there because, it didn’t seem to be that many. Which both saddened and concerned me a little bit. I personally don’t seem to be on any mailing list or social media sites notifying people about it, so I was out of the loop. When I lived in Holland, I was a part of a team that was planning a national day of prayer that took place on 08.08.08 and understand these things take a lot of planning and preparations. If you follow this blog, then you know I’ve been in Peru for over two years now, but with the Internet it’s not hard to stay connected and know what’s going on in the news and with my country’s politics.
So it made me wonder if it was lack of knowledge or lack of interest that led to such a low turn out, but whenever I attended Call events, they had tens of thousands of people. I know the population of our country, and how much less Christian we are as a population plays a part in things like this, but I wonder if the organizers expected or hoped for more. At any rate, I was encouraged and disappointed at the same time. Not that I’m judgmental of others who weren’t there since I didn’t really pray and intercede with them, but took some pics and thought I’d encourage others reading this.
Pray for your country’s leaders. You don’t need to go to events to do it per se, but don’t only pray just in public events like this, but in your own time as well.
Blessings
