One of my favorite writers and pastors in the country is Mark Batterson. He leads a stellar congregation (with the help of my friend, Heather Zempel-who you’ll hear from in upcoming months), in Washington D.C. Known as Theater Church.
To date, Mark has been known for his best-selling, In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day, but he recently hit the New York Times Best Seller list with his latest release: The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears. He has the popular blog, www.evotional.com.
Throughout this year, I want to introduce you to some of my friends. People whose voices I know, respect, and appreciate. Their words often challenge me in my thinking and faith. I hope they’ll challenge you, too! So enjoy this guest post from Mark Batterson:
If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear. Mark 4:23
Praying isn’t about talking as much as it is about listening. Prayer is the way we tune into the still small voice of the Spirit. Call them holy hunches. Call them God ideas. Call them prayer promptings. When you get into God’s presence, you’ll start hearing that inaudible yet unmistakable voice of God.
Last year I spoke at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama for my friend, Chris Hodges. While I was there, I toured their Dream Center in downtown Birmingham because we are on the verge of launching a Dream Center in Washington, DC. They have an amazing outreach to pimps and prostitutes. They mentor kids. They feed the hungry. You name the need and they are meeting it.
One of the women working there is a former journalist named Lisa. She had a good job with a good salary, but she quit because she knew God wanted her to work at the Dream Center. Lisa is one of those people who exudes joy, exudes life, exudes energy.
During our tour, Lisa talked about their daily dependence upon God to meet the overwhelming needs in their community. It’s takes hard work and hard prayer. Then she told me about one of the miracles she had experienced. One day, as she was circling the Dream Center in prayer, she felt the Holy Spirit prompting her to take her woolly socks with her to work. She thought she was losing her mind. It was one of the strangest promptings she’d ever had, but she couldn’t shake the impression. So she grabbed her woolly socks, put them in her purse, and headed downtown. When she got there, a prostitute was literally passed out on the doorstep. Lisa opened the door, carried her inside, and just held her on the floor until she regained consciousness a few minutes later. She was so cold she was shaking. That’s when Lisa asked her: “If you could have anything, what would it be?” Without hesitation, the woman immediately said, “Woolly socks.” Lisa about lost it. As she told me the story she started tearing up. Then I started tearing up. Lisa then told her, “Look what I have.” She pulled out the woolly socks, and the woman said, “They even match my outfit.”
God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him. God is great because nothing is too small for Him. A sparrow doesn’t fall without Him noticing and caring, so it shouldn’t surprise us that he cares about a woman who wants woolly socks. God loves showing his all-encompassing compassion in little ways, and if we would learn to obey His promptings like Lisa, we’d find ourselves in the middle of miracles a lot more often.
The reason many of us miss the miracles is because we aren’t looking and we aren’t listening. The easy part of prayer is talking. It’s much harder listening to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. But two-thirds of praying hard is listening and looking. Then we need to obey those prayer promptings.
For free resources or to purchase The Circle Maker, visit www.thecirclemaker.com. Follow Mark on twitter, here. Check out Mark’s blog, here.
