Out of a mother’s need to see God’s intervention in her daughter’s life came a powerful prayer movement and support for women—Mothers Who Pray.
Cerise Casserly’s daughter Ashley was very ill in 2013, presenting quite a health scare, with the prognosis not looking encouraging. She took her daughter to the United States to get a second opinion.
On her way from the airport to the hospital, a swinging bridge that she had to pass gave her a sense of déjà vu, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been there before. Preoccupied with her daughter’s condition, she soon shook off that feeling.
“I left her at the hospital, and she was admitted. On the way back to my sister’s house, I went back over the same drawbridge, and I said to myself, I have been here before; the next time I am going to the hospital over the drawbridge, the thought came back to me again, and then the memory of it came to me,” she shared with Freedom Come Rain.
It was a dream she had some years ago where she was crossing a bridge like that, which opened up on her with the waters beneath her furiously raging and a voice in her dream instructing her to “keep your eyes on me.” She said in her dream, the car flew over the bridge, landed on the other side, and she started walking around preaching.
“I said, God, this is my drawbridge experience,” she shared after recalling the dream. It has proven to be the glue that held her together, as a MRA test revealed that her daughter had a blood clot in her brain called venous thrombosis, answering the question of why she wasn’t able to complete sentences and not translate things as correctly as she should have because of that block from her brain to the mouth.
That was 2013, and two years later, in December, Casserly said she could not shake the feeling that the Lord had a special calling on her life; she just wasn’t sure what it was. She remembered waking up in the morning with the words on her lips, “mothers who pray.” She shared it with a friend, who told her there was an organisation by that name.
She googled it and got in touch with an international ministry, not the same name, however, and they were very excited about her interest, so they came to Jamaica to meet her.
“They came around and taught us the way to pray under their umbrella, and we did that for a couple of years. I became the Jamaican contact, and then one day, moving forward, as we were praying, one of the sisters said to me, I can’t continue to pray like this, the stifling of the Holy Spirit. One-sentence prayer just was not how she thought that we really needed to be proceeding in our prayer life, and we agreed that we would start to pray differently,” Casserly informed.
She continued ministering to her about Mothers Who Pray, getting to the stage where the Holy Spirit laid it on her heart to launch the ministry. She confessed that she didn’t know what it should look like, but she soon learned that God is strategic. She realised that in the next 10 years, the Lord was preparing her and bringing together the women who would be a part of the ministry.
“He prepared me emotionally and spiritually for the task that was ahead of me because I don’t know if in 2013 I would be the same person spiritually that I was in 2023. We had the launch. The Lord showed us what to do. We registered the ministry.
The team of 12 mothers has now grown to 46—lawyers, counsellors, administrators, public speakers, entrepreneurs—and they have mothers from various professions.
Sharing on the goals for the ministry, Casserly said initially it was to have groups of mothers praying across the length and breadth of Jamaica, like a lighthouse at every corner and every intersection of our island where mothers would meet with regularity and pray for their children, for their husbands, for their marriages, and for the nation.
That was the initial idea, but the Lord had bigger plans as the ministry soon emcompassed mothers from the Diaspora, with them meeting on Zoom and widening to meet with different groups.
“We initially had just one group that would meet on a Thursday, and now we actually have five groups. We multiply and duplicate what we do with new ladies, teaching them the way and teaching them to pray. So that’s pretty much what it was,” she expounded on the ministry.
Sinceits formation, the ministry has been impactful. Mothers who joined the group have expressed how they have learned more about their faith, being stronger in their faith, and even their children coming to them, encouraging them not to miss the meetings as they are feeling the effects of the prayers.
Describing it as an open, safe place for mothers where everyone bring their own way of praying and come together in that corporate way before the throne of God on behalf of families, Casserly said they have seen cases where children have experienced miraculous healing as a result of the prayers.
“My daughter is now at Shortwood Teachers College. She’s doing her final year as a mathematics student and teacher in upper school. She is also on the honours list for all these years in her studies,” she shared, pointing out that another of the sisters in the groups daughter’s blood work came back showing she had severe kidney failure. After praying and engaging in a marathon prayer session, they celebrated the new findings, where God showed up big time—nothing was wrong with her!
The group is not just about praying, as according to Casserly, they foster a sense of community and support by having a lyme every semester, with the semester running from January to July.
Married to the love of her life, Michael Casserly, she is the mother of two adult children who are now married themselves. The prayers never cease, and she continues to join other mothers in covering children—not just in Jamaica but all over the world.