Prayer on a ride-along

0:00Hi there and welcome to the Christian Science Daily Lift. Today we'll be hearing from Nancy Harrison from Chattanooga, Tennessee. She's a Christian science practitioner and also a volunteer chaplain for her local police department. I was on a ride along when a call came in that there was a man being a radic and violent. He was screaming at people and kicking indoors and as we were going, the officer that I was with was looking really grim and when you're running hot with the lights and sirens going, it's a quiet attentive time but the atmosphere just felt denser than usual and he said something along the lines that this is a bad situation. I was already praying but that really woke me up and I just reached out to God for what I need to know in the situation and the Bible verse and it's in a hymn in our Christian

1:02sense hymn as well, everlasting arms of love came to mind and so I just hung on to that and I was just applying that the everlasting arms of God are around this officer, is around all the police protecting them, it's around all this community protecting them and it's around this man protecting him. We get there, he's being a radic and violent and the neighbors all up on their porches all around it was this green area in this real dense housing situation and they were yelling at the officers to give them something and filming with their phones and there was a woman standing off to one side being real quiet and I walked over to her and we looked at each other and I just said I am praying for this young man as if he were my own son. She looked at me and she said I am too and so we were just united in prayer I felt. Well one of the officers was finally able to grab this man and just held on and it took three or four of them to get him into the back of our police car.

2:03We took him to the hospital, there's a bunch of a standing outside this room with a window watching as they get him calmed down and the police don't think of me as a police officer. I'm not and never will be, there's a division there. But as I stood there in this crowd, three, four or five of them came up to me over and over again they told me I knew this was going to go bad. It's going to be a dog pile, a gun's going to get into the wrong hands. It's going to go badly and I took that as their recognition. I mean they came up to me as the chaplain since that time it marked a turning point in my relationship in that volunteer position. It's been different ever since. I've had the opportunity to pray with officers and they've opened up to me more. I had an officer I had written with her three years earlier and she said now you're a Christian

3:05scientist aren't you? So it just opened up these opportunities, anything can be healed and we'll always have the opportunity to share it and it has to bless others. Thanks for joining us. We hope you'll join Nancy and me on this week's Sentinel Watch Podcast. You can find the link right on the daily lift page. We'll see you there. This podcast is produced by the first church of Christ scientists in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Copyright, 2026.