Jesus invited His disciples to watch and pray in the Garden of Gethsemane and they’d barely started before they fell asleep. Today for us will be different! Armed with a notebook or phone, you’re going to have your eyes peeled for the needs going on around you and pray about each need.
Green: Ask God to open your eyes and ears to His prompting today. Pray a few words each time you sense His nudge.
Amber: Aim to have recorded ten (or more, you choose) needs to pray into by the end of the day and spend some time going through them in prayer.
Red: Record the needs you see today somewhere you can refer back to and commit to continuing in prayer for them.
‘See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?’ (Isaiah 43:19 NIV)
There is no point in denying it: I am getting older. I’m not going to go on about new aches and pains – I’m talking about arriving at the stage of life most parents long for and fear in equal measures. I have entered the phase where my kids are starting to drive.
With excitement, we set out last summer as a family to buy the small runabout that would become the family taxi. We started reading reviews about cars I had previously had no interest in or barely noticed on the roads. Once we settled on the model we were after, a curious phenomenon overtook us: we started seeing this same car everywhere. Every single journey we made after that, we’d shout out as we discovered our world was in fact filled with the same car we had decided to purchase.
Science calls this our Reticulating Activation System (RAS). This is our brain’s mechanism for filtering out unnecessary information and focussing our attention on what is important, like our children calling our name in a room full of noise. You see, those cars were always there; I simply needed my brain’s filter to be calibrated a little in order to ‘see’ them.
In that same way, we are surrounded by needs and opportunities every day. Some we can be the answer for; others we can raise up in prayer to petition God to act. But not if we don’t see them. How many situations have been there all the time that I missed because my senses were already full? Car hunting this summer challenged me again that my spiritual RAS needs regular recalibration too, to filter out the unimportant noise and enable me to focus on the things that God wants me to ‘see’ and has designed me to participate in.
Originally from the USA, Dave spent his early years in the UK working as a worship drummer at Life Church in Bradford. Dave and his wife, Kate, then joined British Youth For Christ as directors of their evangelistic band before founding Nexus Institute of Creative Arts in 1998.
After spending the last 22 years focusing on intense development and discipleship of young musicians, Dave now works as the chief operating officer for The Wall of Answered Prayer.
website: https://www.thewall.org.uk
Today’s charity is: The Wall of Answered Prayer
The Wall of Answered Prayer is a piece of architectural sculpture (a National landmark) built on the outskirts of Birmingham about Jesus and made of a million bricks, with each one representing an answered prayer.