Meet Dr. Anika Prather. She and her husband Damon are the founders of The Living Water School, located in southern Maryland near Washington D.C. It’s a unique Christian school for independent learners that she somewhat reluctantly launched when God answered her prayer about how to educate her firstborn son, who had one of the worst stuttering problems speech therapists had ever seen.
“I think this is crazy, I think this is impossible and … You understand I’m flat broke,” she argued with God from her prayer closet. “We had nothing! I’m not saying this to be dramatic — we had nothing!”
But Dr. Prather watched as God moved miraculously at every turn. The school was only supposed to be for her kindergarten-aged son and maybe a dozen others, but parents who couldn’t find answers in the public school flocked to her with their children. Retired educators willingly returned to the classroom when they heard about her vision, and she kept having to expand the vision — first to sixth-graders and then to high school seniors.
“In the first year of the school, we went to visit my mother-in-law, and this is how I knew God was at work,” Dr. Prather says. “My mother-law, who was a little suspect about me starting this unique Christian school that didn’t have traditional grade levels, she says to me, ‘Nika, did you notice that Dylan doesn’t stutter anymore?’ I hadn’t even noticed!”
As a result of being taught unscriptural things in her youth, such as that God made one race to be subordinate to another — and this in a “Christian school” — she uses her platform to be an agent of racial reconciliation. She tries to educate people that the road to healing isn’t paved by politics and division, but with love and diversity.
“If you look at the story of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, you see a God Who’s saying, ‘I want diversity! I want diversity!’ What did Peter say in Acts? ‘Of a truth, I see that God is no respecter of persons.’ “
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