The Circle Maker_Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears

by Mark Batterson

  Part 3

  The Third Circle —

  Think Long

  Toward the end of his life, Honi the circle maker was walking down a dirt road when he saw a man planting a carob tree. Always the inquisitive sage, Honi questioned him. “How long will it take this tree to bear fruit?” The man replied, “Seventy years.” Honi said, “Are you quite sure you will live another seventy years to eat its fruit?” The man replied, “Perhaps not. However, when I was born into this world, I found many carob trees planted by my father and grandfather. Just as they planted trees for me, I am planting trees for my children and grandchildren so they will be able to eat the fruit of these trees.”

  This incident led to an insight that changed the way Honi prayed. In a moment of revelation, the circle maker realized that praying is planting. Each prayer is like a seed that gets planted in the ground. It disappears for a season, but it eventually bears fruit that blesses future generations. In fact, our prayers bear fruit forever.

  Even when we die, our prayers don’t. Each prayer takes on a life, an eternal life, of its own. I know this because of the moments in my life when the Holy Spirit has reminded me that the prayers of my grandparents are being answered in my life right now. Their prayers outlived them.

  Prayer is the inheritance we receive and the legacy we leave. Honi the circle maker didn’t just pray the prayer that saved a generation; his perennial prayers were answered in the next generation too. His grandson, Abba Hilkiah, inherited the prayer legacy his grandfather left. During droughts, Israel came to his doorstep, and Hilkiah would go up on to his rooftop to pray for rain, just as his grandfather had done.

  When we pray, our prayers exit our own reality of space and time. They have no time or space restrictions because the God who answers them exists outside of the space and time He created. You never know when His timeless answer will reenter the atmosphere of our lives, and that should fill us with holy anticipation. Never underestimate His ability to show up anytime, anyplace, anyhow. He has infinite answers to our finite prayers. He answers them more than once. He answers them forever. The problem, of course, is that we want immediate results. Forever is fine, but we want answers instantly.

  When the Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff immigrated to the United States, he said that the thing he loved most about America were the grocery stores. He said, “I’ll never forget walking down one of the aisles and seeing powdered milk; just add water and you get milk. Right next to it was powdered orange juice; just add water and you get orange juice. Then I saw baby powder, and I thought to myself, What a country!”

  We live in a quick-fix, real-time culture. Between the news ticker and Twitter, we’re always in the know, always in the now. We don’t just want to have our cake and eat it too; we want the instant brand. We want to reap the second after we sow, but this isn’t the way it works with dreaming big and praying hard. We need the patience of the planter. We need the foresight of the farmer. We need the mindset of the sower.

  Because we are surrounded by technologies that make our lives faster and easier, we tend to think about spiritual realities in those terms. But almost all spiritual realities in Scripture are described in longer and harder agricultural terms. We want things to happen at the speed of light instead of the speed of a seed planted in the ground. We want our dreams to become reality overnight. We want our prayers answered immediately, if not sooner. But the key to dreaming big and praying hard is thinking long. Instead of thinking in terms of time, we must think in terms of eternity. Instead of thinking in terms of ourselves, we must think in terms of our children and grandchildren. Instead of thinking in seven-day cycles, we must think in terms of seventy-year timelines, as Honi the circle maker did.

  On the Swedish island Visingsö, there is a mysterious forest of oak trees; mysterious because oak trees aren’t indigenous to the island, and its origin was unknown for more than a century. Then in 1980, the Swedish Navy received a letter from the Forestry Department reporting that their requested ship lumber was ready. The Navy didn’t even know it had ordered any lumber. After a little historical research, it was discovered that in 1829, the Swedish Parliament, recognizing that it takes oak trees 150 years to mature and anticipating a shortage of lumber at the turn of the twenty-first century, ordered that 20,000 oak trees be planted on Visingsö and protected for the Navy.

  That is thinking long.

  For the record, the lone objector was the Bishop of Strängnäs. He didn’t doubt that there would still be wars to fight at the end of the twentieth century, but he was the only one who anticipated that ships might be built of other materials by then.

  One dimension of thinking long is thinking different, and prayer is the key to both. Prayer doesn’t just change circumstances; more important, it changes us. It doesn’t just alter external realities; it alters internal realities so that we see with spiritual eyes. It gives us peripheral vision. It corrects our nearsightedness. It enables us to see beyond our circumstances, beyond ourselves, beyond time.

  It’s not enough to dream big and pray hard. You also have to think long. If you don’t, you’ll experience high degrees of discouragement. Why? Because we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year. Of course, we also tend to underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade. The bigger the vision the harder you’ll have to pray and the longer you’ll have to think. But if you keep circling, it’ll come to pass in God’s time.

  The 2020 vision of National Community Church is twenty locations by the year 2020. This isn’t just dreaming big; it is thinking long. When I get discouraged, nine times out of ten it’s because I’ve lost my carob-tree perspective. The solution? Think long. I have to remind myself of God’s power, which knows no space-time limitations. I have to remind myself of God’s faithfulness to answer my prayers, even after I am long gone.

  Chapter 12

  Long and Boring

  I recently had the honor of giving the invocation at the annual benefit for the International Justice Mission at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, DC. My friend, the founder of IJM, Gary Haugen, shared the story of a thirteen-year-old girl who was miraculously rescued out of a brothel in the Philippines. It’s hard to hear about the horrors she endured, especially when you have a thirteen-year-old daughter. Then Gary showed a picture of her smiling face. Only God.

  He is the God who heals hearts and restores smiles.

  Like many girls enslaved in the utter darkness of sex trafficking, she wasn’t allowed outside. Ever. Imagine not seeing the light of day or feeling the warmth of the sun for years on end. Then, through the legal efforts of IJM, she was rescued.

  I’ll never forget the way Gary described it. He played a Sara Groves remix of Peter Gabriel’s song “The Book of Love” and pulled a line of lyrics from it. The melody is catchy, but the lyrics caught me. They’ve been echoing in my auditory cortex ever since. It may seem like a slam, but I think it’s a celebration of “long love.” The longer you’ve been in love the more it will make sense.

  The book of love is long and boring … It’s full of charts and facts and figures … But I love it when you read to me.

  Gary then used the phrase from those lyrics — “long and boring” — to describe the process of rescuing the young girl out of that brothel. It took fifty long and boring trips to a courthouse twelve hours from the IJM office. It took 6,100 long and boring billable hours of filing and refiling paperwork, which of course, the young girl couldn’t pay a penny of. And who knows how many long and boring prayer circles were drawn around that brothel and around that girl.

  Praying through is long and boring, but it is the price you pay for miracles. And no matter how long and boring it is, you can’t put a price on a girl rescued from darkness and brought into the light. There is nothing boring about that, but very few of us are willing to love that long or pray that hard.

  IJM is the catalyst for hundreds of long and boring miracles every year, and I think I know why. I made the discovery when I sat in on
one of their staff meetings. It should have been called a prayer meeting. It was simultaneously convicting and inspiring. It was convicting because they prayed with far more intensity and intentionality than we did, but it inspired me to make prayer our top priority. I’m not talking about the kind of prayer that is the first thing on the agenda; I’m talking about the kind of prayer that is the agenda. Since our staff meetings have turned into prayer meetings, I’ve come to the conviction that one prayer can accomplish more than a thousand plans. I can’t help but wonder what would happen if more staff meetings turned into prayer meetings. I’m guessing those long and boring meetings would result in many more exciting miracles.

  Like any good lawyer, the lawyers at IJM know how to work like it depends on them, but they also know how to pray like it depends on God. This is a lethal combination when it comes to fighting injustice. If you’re willing to dream big and pray hard and think long, you might just brings kings to their knees and shut the mouths of lions.

  Stop, Drop, and Pray

  One of my favorite paintings at the National Gallery of Art is the larger-than-life portrait of Daniel in the Lions’ Den by Flemish artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Daniel is ripped, to the point of steroid suspicion (and who knows, maybe it’s an accurate depiction), but far greater than his external physique was his internal fortitude. His persistence quotient was unparalleled, as evidenced by his habit of getting on his knees three times a day and praying through an open window toward Jerusalem. Even when King Darius outlawed prayer, Daniel continued to stop, drop, and pray three times a day.

  Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before.

  Few people prayed with more consistency or intensity than Daniel, and what makes his persistence so remarkable is that he knew his dream of rebuilding Jerusalem wouldn’t be fulfilled during his lifetime. He prayed toward the city that he knew he would never see with his physical eyes, yet he saw it with his spiritual eyes. Daniel prophesied that it would take “seventy years” for the desolation of Jerusalem to come to an end.

  Is it possible for man to dream continuously for seventy years?

  Daniel did just that. He never stopped dreaming big or praying hard, because he was thinking long. That is what prophets do. He wasn’t just looking beyond the Babylonian captivity to the restoration of Jerusalem; he was looking even further into the future to the first and second coming of Jesus Christ. Daniel was thinking in terms of millennia. His prayers and prophecies were the seeds of our salvation, and we reap these blessings until Christ returns.

  The thing that impresses me about Daniel is that he knew his prayers wouldn’t be answered for seventy years, yet he prayed with a sense of urgency. As a procrastinator, I would have been tempted to wait until the last week of the sixty-ninth year to even start praying. Not Daniel. He had the ability to pray with urgency about things that weren’t urgent. That is an important dimension of thinking long.

  Drawing prayer circles often feels like a long and boring process, and it can be frustrating when you feel like you’ve been circling forever. You start to wonder if God really hears, if God really cares. Sometimes His silence is deafening. We circle the cancer. We circle our children. We circle the dream. But it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. What do you do? My advice: Stop, drop, and pray. Keep circling. Circle for seventy years if you have to! What else are you going to do? Where else are you going to turn? What other options do you have? Pray through.

  We live in a culture that overvalues fifteen minutes of fame and undervalues lifelong faithfulness. Maybe we have it backward. Just as our greatest successes often come on the heels of our greatest failures, our greatest answers often come on the heels of our longest and most boring prayers. But if you pray long and boring prayers, your life will be anything but boring. Your life will turn into the spiritual adventure it was destined to be. It won’t always get you where you want to go, but it will get you through.

  Sleepless Nights

  The night that Daniel spent in the lions’ den had to be the longest night of his life. He didn’t sleep a wink. Going into it, it seemed like the worst thing, and last thing, that would ever happen to him. Coming out of it, it proved to be the best thing that ever happened to him. His faith didn’t just shut the mouths of lions; his faith brought a king and kingdom to its knees. Plus his picture wound up hanging in the National Gallery of Art.

  We love a good night’s sleep, but sleepless nights are what define our lives. If you’re going to bring kings to their knees or shut the mouths of lions, sometimes you need to pull an all-nighter. I’m more and more convinced that the biggest difference between success and failure, both spiritually and occupationally, is your waking-up time on your alarm clock. If you snooze, you lose. But if you pray through, God will come through as surely as the sun will rise.

  Some of the longest nights of my life were some of the sleepless nights when Parker was a baby. He had a bad case of colic that caused him to cry incessantly for no discernible reason. The joy of having our first child was quickly displaced by sleep deprivation. He cried harder than hard, making those nights longer than long. The only thing that would calm his crying was running the bathtub. I remember going into the bathroom, turning on the faucet, and holding him for hours on end. Our water bill was so uncharacteristically high that the water company actually thought there had been some kind of mistake. Nope. Just a crying baby!

  When you’re holding a baby who won’t stop crying, you can’t stop praying. It’s all we knew to do. Parker must be one of the most prayed-for babies in his generation. That’s the reason I’m grateful for his colic. That’s the reason I believe God will use him in great ways. We wrapped our arms around him and prayed circles around him every time he cried. Those were some long and boring prayers, but now that we’re seeing them answered in his life as a teenager, we wouldn’t trade those sleepless nights for anything in the world.

  How You Get There

  Along with caring for a newborn baby, I was trying to pastor a newborn church. That caused some sleepless nights too. We had one member in particular who needed a lot of crisis counseling, and it was always in the wee hours of the morning. One time he called my home phone at four in the morning, genuinely concerned that he was Jesus. No kidding. I reassured him that I knew Jesus, and he wasn’t him. I told him I’d be happy to give him a few good reasons after a few more hours of sleep. Of course, Parker started crying right after I hung up!

  When I was starting out as a church planter, I didn’t want it to be a long and boring job. I wanted to pastor a thousand people by the time I turned thirty. When I was starting out as an author, I didn’t want it to be the slow climb of an unknown writer out of obscurity. I wanted to write a New York Times bestseller. I’m a typical Type-A personality. I want to get where I’m going as quickly as possible. But as I look back on my journey, I am genuinely grateful that National Community Church didn’t grow as quickly as I wanted it to. I’m not sure I would have survived if the church had thrived too soon. I am genuinely grateful that it took a dozen years and a half dozen unfinished manuscripts to finally publish my first book, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. If I had written it at twenty-five instead of thirty-five, it would have been all theory and no substance.

  I love what God is doing at National Community Church right now. Miracles are happening right and left. There is more momentum than we know what to do with. God is touching thousands of lives week in and week out. And I love every second of it. But I wouldn’t trade the days when our monthly income was $2,000, when we would start services with six people in attendance, or when we met in a school cafeteria without air-conditioning. Those difficult days taught us to pray hard and forced us to think long.

  Every once in a while, I need a no-agenda day with nothing to do, but those aren’t the days we’re goin
g to celebrate at the end of our lives. We won’t even remember those days. What we’ll remember are the days when we had everything to do, and with God’s help, we did it. We won’t remember the things that came easy; we’ll remember the things that came hard. We’ll remember the miracles on the far side of “long and boring.”

  Hiking the Inca Trail is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It took four days to traverse a trail that was breathtaking because of its beauty and breathtaking because of its elevation. It was nearly dawn on the fourth day when we finally arrived at the Sun Gate and got our first glimpse of Machu Picchu. It has to be one of the most spectacular places on the planet to watch the sunrise.

  We had already hiked close to thirty precipitous miles over three days. The last leg of the journey, from the Sun Gate to the mountaintop city of Machu Picchu, took about an hour. By the time we arrived, the city was already swarming with tourists who had taken a bus to the top. It was easy to smell who was who. We looked and smelled like we had just hiked four days to get there; the tourists looked like they had just eaten over-easy eggs washed down with a cup of coffee.

  At first I felt sorry for myself—we had to hike four days to get here! Then I felt sorry for them. We saw it through “Inca eyes” because we got there the way they did. We walked their trail. Ancient ruins shouldn’t be arrived at easily. Neither should ancient truths. That experience taught me something that is true in all of life: It’s not just where you end up that’s important; it’s how you get there.