Pray More. WAY More!

It was mid-February of this year when I was in the thick of the Downtown Teen Center renovation, handling unforeseen staff changes, ministry site curveballs, and I was preparing to be gone on sabbatical. I felt like I was treading water, and someone kept handing me bowling balls.

I was thinking to myself, “I already can’t get to everything effectively, and now what am I supposed to do?” My answer is typically “work harder and work smarter.” And when that doesn’t work, I turn inward and think something must be wrong with me, because honestly, I can usually find something wrong with me! You’ve been in a season like that, right?

I noticed something important during that time: I was praying less and less, while worrying more and more. That was a scary realization, and a really common pitfall.

Martin Luther once wrote, “We must see to it that we do not lose the habit of prayer and deceive ourselves into thinking that other kinds of things are more important, when they are not. Then we might become careless and lazy, cold and indifferent when it comes to praying. The devil is neither lazy nor lax in our midst.” Good to know I’m in good company on the prayer struggle bus.

When it comes to prayer, I’m completely convinced of two things: it is powerfully essential, and I’m a complete novice. An ongoing conversation with God is literally His will for us (1 Thess 5:16-18), a way we experience his presence with us (Psalm 145:18), a way God moves in power (James 5:16, Mark 11:24, 1 John 5:14-15), and a precursor to receiving God’s peace (Phil 4:6-7). How many times have you or I rediscovered or re-experienced these truths?

I have seen God move through prayer, time and time again. Just recently, Courtney was trying to meet with these two girls from her Campus Life club over the last couple of years. They were, unfortunately, kind of a tough bunch. But this year, she could tell they were starting to want to get closer to God. For whatever reason, though, every time she tried to get an appointment with them, it just kept falling through.

So Courtney turned to prayer with her prayer team. Two months into praying, Courtney was leaving a meeting with the Bullard administration, on a day she usually wasn’t there, and as she was driving away, she saw the two girls walking home on the street! “Hey, oh my gosh, what are you guys doing?” she called out. They phoned their parents to get permission, and then hopped in with Courtney and went to In-N-Out. There, Courtney was able to share her testimony, and the girls were so encouraged that they signed up for summer ministry and are doing a small group with Courtney. She even got to meet their parents and invite the kids to camp.

Courtney told me, “It’s just amazing because it’s like they have been there since seventh grade, but finally things have lined up for better ministry with them. It took months of praying, but now whatever opposition was in the way had cleared out, and it was such a divine appointment to run into them when I did. I’m so excited to see where God takes it.”

Prayer works. It doesn’t always mean things happen how I want them to happen, or when I want them to happen. But I do think prayer works to invite God’s power, God’s will, God’s plan into the details of our concern and need. If absolutely nothing else, I know prayer helps me get my head and heart aligned with His.

In times of struggle, I need to pray more – way more – not less. I may still be a novice, but I’m gonna toddle my way forward until I walk, and then I’ll walk until I run. And if “the main thing God gets out of your life is the person you become,” then I want God to get someone who knows how to wait on Him and pray before doing the next thing.

Let’s get to praying. Praying for a spiritual breakthrough this summer in the lives of kids that you know. Praying for the kid down the street, the kid in your family, the kid your kid is going to marry someday. Praying that God would bless the ministry of YFC and your local church. Praying that you and I would become more and more a prayerful people.

Praying it all in, together,

Jameson