The Person In The Next Seat

She prays for nations and she is not being grand about it.

She has a map. She has a rhythm. She knows things about places she will never visit that most people in her country could not tell you, and she has been doing this for nine years with genuine tears in it.

She is on two intercession teams. She goes to the prayer meeting that starts at half past six in the morning and she has not missed many.

And in the meeting last month, she sat next to the same woman she has sat next to for about a year and could not have told you her name.

Not because she is cold. She is one of the warmest people in that building and everybody would say so.

It is that her attention has a shape, and the shape is enormous. She has spent nine years training herself to hold whole regions in her mind, and the training worked, and one of the things that happens when you train an attention to be that wide is that it stops registering what is four feet to the left.

The woman next to her has been having an extremely bad year. Several people in that room know this. It has not come up between them, because they pray together twice a week and neither of them has ever asked the other a question.

So let me ask you.

Who was sitting next to you the last time you prayed for a nation?

They stopped, and then they made him stop too

There is a scene at a gate at three in the afternoon and it is the first thing that happens after Pentecost, and I think the choreography of it is the whole point.

There is a man at the gate who has been carried there every day for years, asking. Peter and John are going into the temple. They are, in the most literal sense, on their way to a prayer meeting.

And here is what happens, and it is described with unusual physical detail.

Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, Look at us!Acts 3:4

Notice that there are two movements there and that neither of them is a prayer. You are able to do both of them from a chair, and the Spirit never once come down on a category of people.

Two movements, in order, and neither of them is a prayer.

First: they looked straight at him. Which means they stopped, and turned, and did the thing that everybody passing that gate had spent years not doing, which is to bring their eyes to rest on one face.

Second: look at us. They asked for his eyes back. Not because it was needed for anything mechanical, but because a man who has been asking with his hand out and his head down for that many years has stopped expecting to be seen, and the whole transaction was about to become something other than a transaction.

Only after both of those does anything else happen in that chapter.

And the whole rest of Acts 3 comes out of it. The healing, the running and leaping, the crowd, Peter's second great sermon, thousands more added. Every bit of it is downstream of two men who were on their way somewhere important and stopped to look at one person.

Hear where you stand.

You are not a woman whose praying is too big. Scripture puts the first act of the Church after Pentecost in a look at one face at a gate, and the Holy Spirit has never poured Himself out into an abstraction.

And I want to be careful, because there is a cheap version of this message that mocks intercession, and it is wrong, and I am not preaching it.

Your nine years are not wasted and your map is not a vanity. Somebody has to carry the wide things and most people will not, and God has plainly given you an attention that can hold what other people's cannot. That is a real gift and it is being used.

The correction is not smaller. It is sideways.

The word says power comes so that we will be witnesses, and a witness is always specific: this happened, to this person, in this place. Nine years of holding regions has trained a magnificent wide-angle lens, and there is somebody four feet to the left who has been having a bad year.

And you are not a woman whose praying is too big. Acts 3 puts the first act of the Church after Pentecost in a look at one face at a gate, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people has not once come down on an abstraction.