PRAYER TOWER

By: Betty Motsinger

I was asked to design a little, intimate prayer place.

I went into the smallest room in the house and sat on the floor. It seemed that the place of prayer should be round, with participants facing one another rather than in formal rows. Also, the windows should be high up so that they would not look out on the world, but at the treetops, the clouds and the sky. It would be like a jug, a stockade made of upright timbers, a silo or a stone tower. These all had meanings such as the "wine of life", projection or provision! WOW!

Then I thought of Proverbs 18:10 - "The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it and is safe." So I planned a tower.

There must be a little entrance vestibule so people could lay down their burdens, with shelves on one side. On the other side would coat hooks so they could take off their wrappings. Then they would find themselves in the arms of Jesus. The arms would from the backs of the seats, so that we could lean into them. But isn't there some requirement before we are received by him? Yes. We must receive the message of the cross. I would put a cross on the door through which we enter into His presence,

The alter would be on the north and the entrance on the south. Above the shoulders to which the arms are attached there must a round window representing the "Sun of Righteousness", as Malachi calls Him.

In meditation concerning how to enter into my strong tower I decided it must be through the jagged hole in His pierced side. This is why I left the inner door of unfinished stone rather than using a door frame like the one on the outside.

The name of the Lord. This would require a point of focus. I would design a tower with an altar scene opposite the entrance with the dome of the sky above it. JEHOVAH's name would be spread across the sky, the name of JESUS coming down from the JEHOVAH to us. I decided to let it percolate for a while.

One morning, as I was in prayer, I had no special place to begin, so I just repeated the name of Jesus over and over. Suddenly I realized that He proceeded out of the Father, so the "Je" must be attached to the Father and presents Him, and the "J" of His name is a shepherd's crook. The "u" and "s" at the end can stand for us, and the "s" in the middle is the grappling hook that binds us to the Father!

I originally pictured the letters of Jesus' name hanging, each one hooked onto the one above. The proportions of such a small tower were all wrong for that, so we had to string them together with the scarlet cord of salvation. This also caused us to elongate the "s" in the middle, which makes prefect sense, because He was stretched to the utmost in order to get "u" up out of the pit. He also had to get into the mire to get "u" out. We tried to make it look as if He came up dripping mud as He lifts "us" up out of the miry clay.

The fortieth Psalm had become my testimony, so I added to the altar scene a pit and a large stone, with the second verse of psalm inscribed on a plaque.

He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry day, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.

When we dug the footing and looked down on it from the bank above, we saw that it resembled the shape of wine bottle!

The mason did beautiful rock work with stones from the land, but he kept leveling off too soon and I would have to tell him to keep going higher. On the day we decided on the width of the kneeling step, and John built it in, my housekeeper came to me and asked if we could use a kneeling pad. She said they were giving one away at a yard sale. I went down and got it and found it to be the exact width of the step we had made! No building supply place had a round window but one of the sons of the family which lived on the place made one and surprised me with it.

We found that the wildlife loved the place. In fact, some young ground hogs moved right into a box of trash and had to be run out repeatedly before we hung the door.

When we got to the dome of the sky, we had trouble getting anything but a flat look. Cy Jordan, an architect and a budding artist did the sky, the arms and the windows. He marked the arms on red wood with chalk, and his sons cut them out with a power saw!

In the fall of 1975 the Tower was finally finished and dedicated. During the Christmas season the light from the round window struck directly into the darkness of the horrible pit!

The Prayer Tower is a refuge, open at all times for those people who go in the name of the lord, and find safety.

290 Kings Highway / Burnsville, North Carolina 28714
Phone: 828.682.3138 / Fax: 828.682.7386 / contact@highpastures.org