Last night I was flicking through the Bible before settling down to sleep, and I was amazed by a verse from Exodus 33. In the Amplified version (why use one word when ten will do?) it reads like this:
“And the Lord said to Moses, I will do this thing also that you have asked, for you have found favor, loving-kindness, and mercy in My sight and I know you personally and by name.”
I must have read that passage before. I know I’ve sat through teaching on it (clearly without assimilating much of it – oooops!). Anyway, last night the words near leaped off the page. God answers my prayers because he loves me and knows me. It’s freeing to realise that it isn’t about what I do. I don’t have to convince him, provide evidence that it would be a good idea, He is interested in who I am.
I guess the biggest evidence I have of this is my own story. So often people ask me how I got involved in this prayer stuff. I think they assume that I was the annoying holy kid in Sunday School, racing to read the Bible passages that day, or that I spent my teenage years holed away somewhere interceding.
It wasn’t like that, so how did I get to be doing what I do? And why do I do it?
Back in 2002, me and a couple of friends from church decided we needed to learn about prayer. It must have been a God-impulse, because we had long-ago learned to avoid the musty, chair-in-a-circle church prayer meetings. So we began, we’d go to our other’s houses, natter for a bit, and then sit down to pray. We didn’t have a formula, we didnt know what we were doing, we just sat down, began to worship, and saw God breaking out in our midst. We started to experience the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we felt impassioned and inspired. It was an exciting time. Gone was our opinion that prayer was some dry routine we were forced to sit through, suddenly we understood that this was powerful stuff.
All of us experienced God calling us to new areas, new things, but for me the insistent nag to go deeper in prayer continued, even as my physical location changed. I spent 8 months reading every book I could find about it, meeting up with intercessory types, experimenting with different ways of prayer and finding out what suited my personality and prayer style. On the surface it looked like the fire and excitement of my earlier experiences had faded, I felt a bit like a fish out of water and missed having people to pray with, but in hindsight I can see that God used this time to deepen my understanding of prayer.
In September 2004 I moved to London. I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that God was prompting me to take a leap into the unknown. I will always remember driving away from my home in tears, not knowing where I would live or work, only knowing a handful of people in London, and armed with just a few dreams I’d had about being part of a Boiler Room. It was a crazy move, but God was in it, and it was the start of an exciting new season for me.
Once in London things moved quickly. I started reading more about prayer, going to more training sessions about it. For a year we met as a prayer school in Birmingham, learning about all the different aspects of prayer. These were forming times.
Then I found myself doing a small slot of teaching at Reading Salvation Army. I was terrified and it was far from polished, but I found myself enjoying it. I was concerned! Things moved quite quickly from then, I found myself learning more things, doing other bits of teaching here and there, reading more books!! It has been an exciting learning curve.
Over the last four years, God has taught me things I never thought possible, and I have seen him move in some awesome ways. He has put some great people around me who I have been able to learn from, and I am grateful for all of these opportunities.
Even this retelling lacks detail though. I’d love to tell you how God has transformed me over the last few years, taking someone who was frightened and insecure and changing my whole life. It’s a story of hope and healing. I am so relieved that God doesn’t only pick those who are qualified, competent, confident or have it all sorted. he uses the lowly, the forgotten, the abandoned. His ways are not our ways.
I don’t know where this journey of prayer is going, but I love all the things I am learning about God’s character. And I love it that he doesn’t listen to my prayers because they sound nice (they mostly don’t!), but because he loves me.
One of the greatest privileges of my job is that I get to meet and chat to young people who are just starting out and finding their feet. Their passion for God and for communicating with him in prayer regularly astounds me. I am so excited to be able to see this, and to be able to work alongside them.
At it’s inception, the Christian church was spread by a group of unqualified and somewhat uncouth disciples. It wasn’t about their techniques, but the fact that they had met and been transformed by Christ. At the beginning of the Salvation Army, a bunch of only-just-saved revolutionaries who went out there and made a big difference. Again this was birthed from a passionate living and breathing life with God.
If my story reminds me anything, it’s that I do not need to worry about how or what or when I should pray, what is correct etc, it’s just about doing it, getting on with that 2-way communication, and the rest is in God’s hands.
