For many years, we laid hands on the walls at 205 F Street, praying that God would give us 201 F Street. When God answered those prayers, we laid our hands on the other side of those walls. We climbed down twenty-foot ladders and held a prayer meeting in the concrete foundation of our coffeehouse. We didn’t just lay hands on those walls; we circled the promises of God by writing them on the walls. Those walls are primed with prayers and prophecies. We have long since covered them with acoustic treatments in our performance space, but they are ever present.
Spiritual Priming
One of the summer jobs I had during college was painting, but it didn’t last long because, quite frankly, I wasn’t very good. I got fired in less than a week. I did learn one thing before I was deservedly downsized: priming is an important part of painting. If you don’t have the right primer, you’ll be painting forever. If you’re painting the wall a light color, you need a light primer; if you’re painting the wall a dark color, you need a dark primer. It may seem like the primer is unnecessary. It may seem like a primer takes more time and more work, but it actually increases quality while decreasing the quantity of work. Hold that thought.
Over the last few decades, New York University psychologist John Bargh has conducted priming experiments on unsuspecting undergraduates. One of the experiments involved a scrambled-sentence test. The first test was sprinkled with rude words like disturb, bother, and intrude. The second test was sprinkled with polite words like respect, considerate, and yield. In both cases, the subjects thought they were taking tests measuring intelligence. None of the subjects picked up on the word trend consciously, but it primed them subconsciously.
After taking the five-minute test, students were asked to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment about their next assignment. An actor was strategically engaged in conversation with the experimenter when the students would arrive. The goal was to see how long it would take students to interrupt.
Bargh wanted to know if the subjects who were primed with polite words would take longer to interrupt the conversation than those primed with rude words. He suspected that the subconscious priming would have a slight effect, but the effect was profound in quantitative terms. The group primed with rude words interrupted, on average, after five minutes, but 82 percent of those primed with polite words never interrupted at all. Who knows how long they would have patiently and politely waited if the researchers hadn’t given the test a ten-minute time limit.
Our minds are subconsciously primed by everything that is happening all the time. It’s a testament to the fact that our minds are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” It also testifies to the fact that we had better be good stewards of the things we allow into our visual and auditory cortices. Everything we see and hear is priming us in a positive or negative way. That’s one reason I believe in starting the day in God’s Word. It doesn’t just prime our minds; it also primes our hearts. It’s doesn’t just prime us spiritually; it also primes us emotionally and relationally. When we read the words that the Holy Spirit inspired, it tunes us to His voice and primes us for His promptings.
A few years ago, two Dutch researchers did a similar priming experiment with a group of students by asking them forty-two questions from the Trivial Pursuit board game. Half of the subjects were told to take five minutes to contemplate what it would mean to be a university professor and write down everything that came to mind. The other group was told to sit and think about soccer for five minutes.
The professor group got 55.6 percent of the questions right.
The soccer group got 42.6 percent of the questions right.
The people in the professor group weren’t any smarter than the people who were in the soccer group. And if watching sports decreased intelligence, I’d be an idiot. Especially during football season! The professor group was simply in a smart frame of mind.
What does that have to do with prayer?
Prayer is priming. Prayer puts us in a spiritual frame of mind. Prayer helps us see and seize the God-ordained opportunities that are all around us all the time.
Larks and Owls
Daniel was so primed with prayer that it didn’t just sanctify his subconscious; it gave him supernatural discernment to prime the subconscious mind of King Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel discerned the king’s dream because he could read his mind. It’s almost as though prayer gives us a sixth sense.
Somewhere near the intersection of science and spirituality is a paradigm-shifting principle best seen in the priming exercise practiced by King David:
In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.
One of the reasons that many people don’t feel an intimacy with God is because they don’t have a daily rhythm with God; they have a weekly rhythm. Would that work with your spouse or your kids? It doesn’t work in God’s family either. We need to establish a daily rhythm in order to have a daily relationship with God. The best way to do that is to begin the day in prayer.
The most important ten minutes of my day are the ten minutes I spend reading Scripture and praying with my kids at the beginning of the day. Nothing even comes in a close second. It sets the tone for the day. It opens the lines of communication. It gets us started on the right foot.
I realize that there are larks and owls. Owls are just getting started when the rest of the world is winding down; larks are way too happy way too early. But whether you’re an owl or a lark, you still need to begin the day in prayer for the purposes of priming.
For what it’s worth, one of the defining paragraphs in my own personal reading came out of a biography of D. L. Moody. Page 129 is dog-eared and underlined. Moody said he felt guilty if he heard blacksmiths hammering before he was praying. Somehow that imagery converted me from an owl into a lark. I felt like my destiny would be determined in the early daylight hours. Moody was an amazing preacher, but he was an even better pray-er. In his own words, “I would rather be able to pray like David than to preach with the eloquence of Gabriel.”
I love the determination in David’s voice: “In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice.” That’s what it takes, doesn’t it? It’s hard to get up early, but that is what makes praying hard so hard. It’s the same determination that I see in Daniel.
Then David declares, “I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.” Most of us just wait; David waited expectantly. There is a big difference.
Our biggest shortcoming is low expectations. We underestimate how good and how great God is by 15.5 billion light-years. The solution to this problem is prayer. Prayer is the way we sanctify our expectations. Laying his requests before the Lord was David’s way of circling the promises of God. I’m not sure whether they were written requests, but they created a category in David’s reticular activating system. After laying his requests before the Lord, he was primed and ready.
One way I’ve put this principle into practice is praying through my calendar instead of just looking through it. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when I pray circles around the people I’m meeting with. It turns appointments into divine appointments. When you go into a meeting with a prayerful posture, it creates a positively charged atmosphere.
Laying his requests before the Lord was David’s way of tipping his hat to the Waldorf. It was his way of opening his window toward Jerusalem. It was his way of praying through the calendar.
We don’t know what he did with his daily requests. Maybe he posted them on the royal refrigerator; maybe he stuck them to his throne with a sticky note. What we do know is that they sanctified his expectations.
Idiosyncrasies
Like everyone else, I have my fair share of idiosyncrasies. I don’t know why, but I always set my alarm clock to an even number. An odd number would totally mess me up. I always start shaving on the right side of my face. I never drive off after pumping gas without checking my left-hand rearview mirror because the last time I did that, I pulled the gas hose that
was still in my gas tank right off of the gas pump. And I always take my shoes off while I write.
Even Jesus had idiosyncrasies. He loved to pray early in the morning, even after a late night of ministry. And He must have felt a special closeness to his Father when He hiked mountains and walked beaches. He gravitated to those places because proximity is an important part of prayer, but it goes beyond geography; I think it also has to do with genealogy.
One of my idiosyncrasies is that I occasionally do devotions out of my grandfather’s Bible. In fact, I started this year in the book of Daniel because I was doing a Daniel fast. Toward the end of his life, my grandfather suffered from a medical condition that caused his hands to tremble so that his writing was virtually indiscernible. But based on the number of underlinings, Daniel was one of his favorite books. I actually know it was because I’ve heard stories of him and his brothers and cousins sitting around the table for hours on end talking about prophecies in Daniel. They were long thinkers and long talkers.
Seeing the verses that my grandfather underlined is powerful and meaningful because it helps me get into his mind and his spirit. I hope that the promises I have circled in my Bible will help my grandchildren do the same thing.
One important dimension of prayer is finding your own ritual, your own routines. Just like Daniel, you need to find your open window toward Jerusalem.
I’m sure Honi the circle maker prayed in a lot of different ways at a lot of different times. He had a wide variety of prayer postures. But when he needed to pray through, he drew a circle and dropped to his knees. His inspiration for the prayer circle was Habakkuk. He simply did what the prophet Habakkuk had done:
“I will stand upon my watch, and station me within a circle.”
Where do you dream big? When do you pray hard? What helps you think long?
You need to identify the times, places, and practices that help you dream big, pray hard, and think long. When I want to dream big, I hang out at the National Gallery of Art. When I want to pray hard, I climb the ladder to the rooftop of Ebenezer’s Coffeehouse. When I need to think long, I take the elevator up to the sixth-floor observation gallery at the National Cathedral.
It takes time to discover the rhythms and routines that work for you. What works for others might not work for you, and what works for you might not work for others. I’ve always subscribed to a sentiment shared by Oswald Chambers: “Let God be as original with other people as He is with you.”
One of the great dangers in writing The Circle Maker is the application of these prayer principles without any thought. It’s not a formula; it’s faith. It’s not a methodology; it’s theology. It honestly doesn’t matter whether it’s a circle, an oval, or a trapezoid. Drawing prayer circles is nothing more than laying our requests before God and waiting expectantly. If walking in circles helps you pray with more consistency and intensity, then make yourself dizzy; if not, then find something, find anything, that helps you pray through.
Prayer Experiment
We have a core value at National Community Church: everything is an experiment. And because we value experimentation, our congregation feels empowered to practice ancient spiritual disciplines in new ways.
Several years ago, I officiated at the wedding of David and Selina. During premarital counseling, Selina told me the backstory to their love story. It was a prayer experiment that led to wedding bells. Selina had a friend who used to organize prayer circles by recruiting ten people to pray for one thing for one person every day for thirty or forty or sixty days. The net results were amazing. That prayer experiment planted a seed in her spirit, and a few weeks later, she adapted the idea and came up with her own prayer experiment.
Selina recruited nine friends, and together they formed a prayer circle. They covenanted to pray for each other every day, and they decided to focus their prayers on their greatest struggles — the men in their lives. Not everybody in the prayer circle knew each other. In fact, not all of them liked each other. But as they started praying for each other each day, God began to bond them. They would often call each other if they felt prompted to share what the Lord was impressing on them during prayer, and it was amazing how often their prayers were perfectly targeted or timed.
At the end of forty days, the group decided to renew their prayer experiment for another forty days. The first forty days were full of spiritual attacks, but they were encouraged by that because it was evidence that they were doing something right. During the second forty-day period, the group saw tremendous victories in big things and little things. It was during those forty days that Selina met David, but it was the focused prayers of nine friends that prepared her to meet him. She identified some of the lies she had believed and mistakes she had made. Then she circled them in prayer while her prayer circle double-circled them.
I love this particular prayer experiment not just because I had the privilege of marrying David and Selina; I love it because it’s the perfect marriage of praying hard and thinking long. Praying hard + thinking long = staying focused.
What would happen if you focused your prayers on one thing for one person for one month or one year? There’s only one way to find out: do your own prayer experiment.
Game with Minutes
On January 30, 1930, Frank Laubach began a prayer experiment he called “the game with minutes.” He was dissatisfied with his intimacy with God and decided to do something about it. Like Honi, who wrestled with a singular question his entire life, Laubach grappled with a question that framed his prayer experiment: “Can we have contact with God all the time?” He chose to make the rest of his life an experiment in answering this question.
Laubach sought to deconstruct the false constructs he had been taught. Then he rebuilt his prayer life from the ground up. We must do the same. Prayer isn’t something we do with our eyes closed; we pray with our eyes wide-open. Prayer isn’t a sentence that begins with “Dear Jesus” and ends with “Amen.” In fact, the best prayer doesn’t even involve words at all; the best prayer is a life well lived. All of life is meant to be a prayer, just as all of life is meant to be an act of worship.
Laubach described “the game with minutes” in these terms:
We try to call Him to mind at least one second of each minute. We do not need to forget other things nor stop our work, but we invite Him to share everything we do or say or think. Hundreds of us have experimented until we have found ways to let Him share every minute of our waking hours.
One of the ways that Frank Laubach played “the game with minutes” was shooting people with prayer. Some people would walk by without any reaction, but some people would do a sudden about-face and smile. Sometimes a person’s entire demeanor would change.
Six months into his experiment, Laubach wrote these words in his prayer journal:
Last Monday was the most completely successful day of my life to date, so far as giving my day in complete and continuous surrender to God is concerned … I remember how as I looked at people with a love God gave, they looked back and acted as though they wanted to go with me. I felt then that for a day I saw a little of that marvelous pull that Jesus had as He walked along the road day after day “God-intoxicated” and radiant with the endless communion of His soul with God.
A prayer experiment like this can turn a commute or walk or workout or meeting into a meaningful spiritual discipline. Though I advise against the actual shooting motion, it’s a great way to pull the trigger on 1 Timothy 2:1: “I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people.”
What if we stopped reading the news and started praying it? What if lunch meetings turned into prayer meetings? What if we converted every problem, every opportunity, into a prayer?
Maybe we’d come a lot closer to our goal: praying without ceasing.
Chapter 14
The Speed of Prayer
In the world of aviation, the sound barrier was once considered the unbreakable barrier. Many engin
eers believed that Mach 1 represented an impenetrable wall of air, and the dozens of pilots who died trying to break the barrier solidified that belief. At low speeds, shock waves are a non-factor, but as an aircraft reaches higher speeds, new aerodynamics are introduced. When a plane approaches the speed of sound, shock waves increase and cause pilots to lose control. The buildup of air pressure in front of the aircraft causes a wave drag. And because the air on top of the wing is traveling faster than air on the bottom, due to Bernoulli’s principle it typically results in a catastrophic nosedive. The British, among others, put on hold their attempt to break the sound barrier when their prototype, the Swallow, self-destructed at Mach .94. But that didn’t keep a young American pilot named Chuck Yeager from attempting the impossible.
On October 14, 1947, a four-engine B-29 took off from Muroc Field high up in the California desert. Attached to the belly of the bomber was the Bell X-1 experimental plane. At 25,000 feet, the X-1 dropped from the fuselage, its rocket engine fired into life, and then it ascended to 42,000 feet. As the plane approached Mach 1, it began to shake violently. The challenge of controlling the plane was compounded by the fact that Yeager had broken two ribs while horseback riding two days before. He didn’t tell his colleagues because he didn’t want to delay history and his chance to make it. As his plane hit Mach .965, the speed indicator went haywire. At Mach .995, the g-force blurred his vision and turned his stomach. Then, just as it seemed as if the plane would disintegrate, there was a loud sonic boom followed by an almost instantaneous and eerie silence. As the plane crossed the sound barrier, 761 miles per hour, the air pressure shifted from the front of the plane to the back. The shock waves that had buffeted the cockpit turned into a sea of glass. Yeager reached Mach 1.07 before cutting his engines and coming back down to earth. The unbreakable barrier had been broken.
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