“Our prayers are often misguided simply because we are not omniscient” (The Circle Maker page 64). I know! Right?! It isn’t something any one of us would deny. Yet, I often act as if this is not true. I act as though my momentary situation does merit eternal recognition. My worry and stress and tasks and lists get the best of me. So how do I work through it?
First, I fly. I get on a commercial jet and make sure that I have a widow seat. Once in the air, I get to see the city then the country. I see the houses, the commercial property, and the rolling hills, lakes and rivers. This gives me a bigger perspective. Early in my traveling career, I realized that there are a lot of houses in America. I also realized that 99% of my focus in life was under just one of those roofs. I began to wonder what the people in the other houses dreamed and worried about. It put me and my life into perspective. For illustrative purposes, let’s talk money for a moment. If someone owned just 5 average American homes outright, they’d be a millionaire. Bill Gates net worth is 79.2 billion. The total value of all American homes is 27.5 Trillion! Bill Gates, if all his wealth was in homes, he would only own .2% of the homes in the U.S. And yet, God holds the world in the palm of his hand… forever. How much value to I put on my situation, under my roof, in my lifetime (cause we have only talked today, not yesterday or tomorrow and the situations they hold). While I use flying to gain this perspective, use whatever comes across your path to gain a larger perspective on the world.
This gets me to my second perspective: “You can’t never always sometimes tell.” What do I and Mark Batterson mean by this? We mean that we need to wait and see. The best way to wait and see is to stay where you are. Last night I went to bed during the third quarter of the football game between the Patriots and Broncos, thinking the Patriots had it won. If I had circled that game in prayer (which I don’t usually do for games), I wouldn’t have had the enjoyment of seeing God hand work to give the Patriots their first loss of the season. When you circle something, you need to stick it out. You can’t never always sometimes tell what the outcome is going to be until the outcome has happened. Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Don’t let up. Don’t stop working. Be called stubborn. I was called that often in my days working as a youth pastor at a church. It is because I had clearly defined objectives that I wanted to see happen in the lives of students. What do you want to see happen in the lives of students? Do you want to see every student in your community have the opportunity to hear about how much Jesus loves them? Then circle First Priority. Circle the school(s) in your area. Circle the churches you need to work with in order to accomplish this task. Then do not leave those circles until you see God answering your prayer.
