Garden Themed Prayer Loft

 This was a Summer Prayer Loft and I had some pretty grand ideas of making a whole bunch of miniature gardens to go with various scripture verses. I managed to get three of them done. I still have boxes with twigs and mosses that I collected while out walking.

One of the wonderful things about my Prayer Loft Partner Laurel is that she can take my gigantic ideas and scale them down into things that can actually be accomplished. To this point it has pretty much been just the two of us with a little help here and there from others.  

This is one of the mini gardens that I created in a watering can. It might be fun to do these little gardens with a larger group or team. Each person taking a bible verse and bringing it to life with Sculpy clay, natural materials, and papers and such.

Candles are almost always included in our prayer lofts. This allows people to pray a prayer and light a candle. Their prayers being like incense rising before the Lord. In this one we used the scattered votive cups.

We had a bunch of paper bird cut
outs that we printed on card stock. The idea was that people could color them and pray about the different prayer topics written on each of them.

It was a cute idea but I probably needed to give it more explanation than I did at the time. We still have a lot of little birds left over.

In this photo you can see the glass stones that have promise verse locations on the back side. They have been a big favorite. People like to randomly select a verse and believe that God is leading them to the verse that will speak to their particular needs at that time. They are a bit time consuming to make. You can by the flat glass marbles at the dollar store. I print a list of of verse locations that I want to use making them tiny enough to fit the stones. I then cut them out and glue them to the stones and paint over them with something like Aleene’s Paper Glaze. 

The big tulip painting was found at a thrift store. I didn't have much budget to work with at the time I found it so I bought it to use in the prayer loft with the intent to eventually hang it in my own family room. 

You can see in the bottom left of this photo we made butterfly verses. We had a punch that made butterflies out of scrapbooking papers. Those were attached to card stock printed with verses about gardens and God's creation.                                                                                                        You can see three small globes in the middle of the photo. We encourage people to hold a globe and pray for various places in our world. 

We have found that a lot of folks have really taken to doodle prayer and coloring. We try to create new drawings with bible verses on cards, book marks or just have sheets of paper.  We provide a cup with pencils and people can take a coloring page back to their table along with some colored pencil. Often you will see people busy coloring during the service. 

This photo shows scrolls that have blessings from a wonderful little book called Daily Spirit Blessings by Arthur Burk and Sylvia Gunter. I have also taken prayers that I have written for my devotional blog and used them in these blessing scrolls.                                                                                                                                   The flowers in the green vase were borrowed from my house to add height and color 

In this photo you can see a framed print with a bible verse to use as an art reflection. You also see little journals where people are able to write down words of encouragement and things they feel the Lord is saying. The pins to write with have big feathers attached to them with curling ribbon.