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By: Donnamy Steele

The Covington Baptist Association is planning a day of prayer for teachers and students throughout the county.

Otis Corbitt explained why he feels motivated to shower the community in prayer at this time.

“We are very concerned about our community, our teachers, and our students. All of our churches have kids going to school, parents, and many of our churches have teachers and other school personnel involved. We just want to pray for the upcoming school year,” Corbitt said. “It’s a very unusual time in our country. We’ve never done this before and we just want to pray that the Lord will bless the schools, watch over them, keep everybody safe, keep everybody well, give wisdom to everyone, a spirit of cooperation, and an understanding of judgment.”

Although praying over local schools is a common occurrence, Corbitt wants to expand the support this year.

“Many churches will pray for our schools anyway. As an example, I know that there is a group of churches in Opp getting together to pray for the schools and they are having a meeting or rally and other churches are going onsite to pray for the different schools,” Corbitt said. “We’ve done that for churches around here for many years, but we had a request from one of our church members who wanted an emphasis for this school year. We want to try to get all of our churches to pray more intentionally on that Sunday. Everyone can do it as they want to, whether that be individually or to have a prayer and worship service, but it’s just a suggestion to try to bathe our schools, children, parents, and teachers in prayer.”

The event is being held online to prevent potentially spreading the virus, said Corbitt. “Now is not the time for us to have any kind of big, large meetings. We have had meetings like that before and we do that regularly, and on the national day of prayer at the courthouse in Andalusia. This year probably isn’t the time that we need to bring everyone together from across the county, unnecessarily. Our churches can pray right where they are. God is everywhere and he hears from their churches just as well as from a group on the courthouse steps,” Corbitt said. “We would love to get together, but now is probably not a good time for that.”

The uncertainty that clouds the upcoming year leaves churches and school systems with difficult decisions, according to Corbitt.

“There’s no playbook for this year or for the coronavirus, and the school systems are the same. We’ve never done this before, so we can’t look back and say that this is how we do it and do it well,” Corbitt said. “Different school systems are going to come up with different plans, just like different churches will. It just depends on what they need to do. My concern is the unknown. It’s like walking through your child’s bedroom in the middle of the night and hoping you don’t step on a lego and wake the kid up. That’s the thing, we don’t know. I’d like us to have the ability to forecast what exactly is going to happen, but we are all walking in the dark and trying to move forward safely.”

Corbitt will be holding the event online through Facebook live on Sunday, Aug., 16 at 8:00 am.

“I will try to go on Facebook live at about 8 and have a time of prayer before churches start. Being a person of faith, I believe there is power in prayer. I’m not a great theologian in prayer, but I know that we are supposed to pray. We believe God hears us and he is going to respond to help us,” Corbitt said. “We also want to encourage local churches to maybe adopt a local school to pray for during the school year. “We’re not experts in this area or in education

about the virus, we just love our county and our schools, teachers, students, leaders and we just want to lift them up, that’s all.”

For more information about the Day of Prayer for Our Schools event, visit the Covington Baptist Association’s Facebook page.