Living and Leaving a Legacy of Prayer!
Hi, I’m Molly Garibaldi, the founder of Throne of Grace. I’d love to take a moment to tell you the story of how this ministry started!
Well...I didn’t set out to start a business by any means! I was an elementary school teacher for many years before I quit to stay home with my first baby. He was VERY colicky the first year and I spent many hours up with him in the middle of the night. I wanted to use that time productively – and there’s not much you can do at 3 am – so I decided I should use that time to pray over him. There were many prayers I had been praying for him even since he had been in my womb but in the middle of the night, this sleep-deprived mama would end up praying the same prayer over and over or be falling asleep in the middle of my prayers! I decided that I should write my prayers down on index cards and then I wanted to look up scriptures to write on the cards to tie my prayers to God’s Word. That way, I would know my prayers were God’s will for my son. I could use the cards to help me stay focused in my prayer time and could flip through them a few each night.
Since making prayer cards wasn’t high on the to-do list of a new mom, they actually never got made until my daughter had come along. I had a friend who was having her first baby and that was my incentive to make them for her as a gift, then make myself a set in the process! My friend’s baby shower was the weekend before Mother’s Day so I ended up making 6 sets of prayer cards in all – one for my friend and several others for the moms and grandmas in the family as Mother’s Day gifts. I had “How to Pray for Your Children” and “How to Pray for Your Grandkids” – and that was going to be it!
God had other plans though and those 6 sets of prayer cards turned into 15 orders for more! As my husband watched me doing this all by hand with my little scrapbooking scissors and crafty paper and then taking them to Staples to be laminated in big sheets and then cutting those all out by hand, he decided God was leading us to a new ministry. For our anniversary a few months later, he gave me a most nontraditional gift – a professional laminating machine! He also created digital templates to get me started designing prayer cards on the computer. I began getting requests to create other titles – a friend wanted “How to Pray for Your Husband” for her anniversary and another wanted a set of scripture cards to help her through labor and delivery. That last set became “God’s Word for a New Mom” and our line of Bible verse memorization cards was born!
A few months later I opened my Etsy shop and began selling at local boutiques. The business has now grown to more than 40 prayer card and scripture card titles, as well as prayer journals for adults and kids, plus a number of additional products! The longer I do this, the more I see a hunger for God’s Word from people in all stages and seasons of life. I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity to partner with God in this work of helping others live and leave a legacy of prayer!
