Prayer Ministry Leads to Life Skills
The person who can speak up about issues, yet in a respectful way, has the life skills to go to the top. Among the prayer ministry appointments I do in any given week, there are always some on having a voice versus feeling powerless.
I recently worked in prayer ministry with a college student whose professor was clearly being unfair but he was afraid to go and talk to him. That’s a form of powerlessness.
Another person, Mary (not her real name), went on about how her husband was sarcastic with the kids and not valuing her viewpoint. She felt he took more of a demeaning, punishing approach to discipline than a valuing boundaries approach. Mary felt there was no way she could confront her husband about this, that he would never receive it and would become very defensive.
I, myself, can look back to when a key leader in my life had promised me promotion. It never happened and I never said anything. This cost me. I felt powerless, even selfish. In those days it wasn’t clear to me what the right skills were to talk about a problem like this and I didn’t know how to deal with the issues in my heart toward speaking up properly.
I worked with Mary to discover a number of “powerless” lies she had believed. She loved her dad growing up but there were times he would get angry and she would feel powerless and unprotected. As Mary heard God say that He was with her in those times, that her dad had his own struggles he was dealing with and that his anger was not really about her, she felt freedom.
The next step would be considering what skills Mary would be needing in talking with her husband The skill of standing up for herself yet without demeaning him or backing him into a corner is the most important one. After the prayer ministry we did she felt empowered to take these steps with her husband. Mary reported back that they ended up having a great discussion as she realized his heart was to help his kids move forward and be men. His approach to discipline needed some adjustment, but his intentions were much better than she had imagined.
Most all of us need voice lessons. The ability to bring up issues in respectful ways is one of the primary life skills for growing into all God has for us, yet one of the more difficult ones. There are men who have never had that tough conversation with their bosses, or wives who have allowed their husbands to run roughshod over them for years. There are Christians who have wonderful spiritual gifts but they never step forward to let others know and so they never serve in a meaningful way in their churches or communities. God has so much more.
The quotes below are from Emotional Intelligence in Couples Therapy. This book talks about numerous long term studies done in 
having a voice in life’s relationships.
“New studies in relationship science have identified with a high degree of precision what people who succeed in their relationships do differently than those who fail.”
“All people in lasting intimate relationships feel misunderstood or mistreated at one time or another. At these times, some people respond in ways that make it likely that their partners will treat them better in the future, and some people respond in ways that dramatically increase the odds that they will be even more misunderstood or mistreated.”
“If people want their spouses to treat them better, they need to think and act like people who usually get treated well by their partners. There are specific skills and attitudes involved in knowing how to bring out the best in others, and there is evidence that people who know how to do this are more successful not only in their marriages, but in most areas of their lives.”
Atkinson, Brent. Emotional Intelligence in Couples Therapy. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2005.