The Circle Maker_Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears

by Mark Batterson

  In every spiritual journey, there are setbacks. And if you listen to the accuser of the brethren, you’ll feel like a failure. Too many men have believed his lies. The truth is that the victory has already been won. To seal the victory, all it takes is a defining decision and a daily decision. This doesn’t mean it will be easy. In fact, the longer you’ve been in bondage the harder it will be. And that can be overwhelming when you think long, but part of thinking long is breaking down our dreams, goals, and problems into short-term steps. And it always starts with the first step. Circle Daniel 1:8.

  Make a resolution not to defile yourself.

  Then circle it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that.

  Some of us don’t start fighting the battle because we’re not sure we can win the war, but the war has already been won nearly two thousand years ago at Calvary. All you have to worry about is winning the battle today. God can take care of tomorrow.

  Can you keep the resolution for a day? Sure you can.

  That defining decision will lead to a daily decision, and together, these defining decisions and daily decisions will lead to a different destiny.

  The Spirit Versus the Flesh

  On the eve of His crucifixion, Jesus was in Gethsemane praying hard and thinking long. He was about to face the greatest test of His life, and He knew He needed to pray through the night. His disciples were supposed to be praying, but instead they were sleeping. They probably pretended to be praying when He awakened them, but drooling and snoring are dead giveaways. You can hear the disappointment in Jesus’ voice when He asks them: “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?”

  That challenge is worth circling. Take it literally. Take it personally.

  Jesus was always coming through for the disciples, but the disciples couldn’t pray through for Him. They didn’t even last an hour. The disciples let Jesus down when He needed them most. It didn’t just hurt Jesus; Jesus knew it would hurt them as well.

  Let me play counterfactual theorist.

  I wonder if Peter would have denied Jesus if he had been praying instead of sleeping? Maybe he failed the test three times because he hadn’t done his prayer homework? We see those three denials as three temptations, but maybe they were three opportunities to get it right. While I can’t prove it, I think Peter would have passed the test if he had prayed through. But he didn’t.

  Then Jesus hits the bull’s-eye, and we live in the crosshairs.

  “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

  Is it ever! Never were truer words spoken.

  Most people have a willing spirit; it’s the weak flesh that gets in the way. The problem isn’t desire; the problem is power — more specifically, willpower. This is where fasting comes into play. Fasting gives you more power to pray because it’s an exercise in willpower. The physical discipline gives you the spiritual discipline to pray through. An empty stomach leads to a full spirit. The tandem of prayer and fasting will give you the power and willpower to pray through until you experience a breakthrough.

  Escape Velocity

  On July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin climbed aboard Apollo 11 on Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The multistage rocket weighed 102,907 pounds, but it carried 5,625,000 pounds of propellant.

  Breaking the sound barrier is one thing; exiting the earth’s atmosphere is another thing altogether. At takeoff, the five engines produced 7,500,000 pounds of thrust in order to exceed the gravitational pull of the planet and reach an escape velocity of 17,500 mph. But that only gets you into orbit. If you want to shoot the moon, you’ve got to top 25,000 mph.

  Prayer is the way we escape the gravitational pull of the flesh and enter God’s orbit. It’s the way we escape our atmosphere and enter His space. It’s the way we overcome our human limitations and enter the extradimensional realm where all things are possible.

  Without prayer, there is no escape. With prayer and fasting, there is no doubt. Like tandem staging, it will take you to spiritual heights you never imagined possible. You won’t just escape our atmosphere;

  if you pray a little harder and fast a little longer, you may just shoot the moon.

  On Sunday, July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed their lunar module, the Eagle, on the Sea of Tranquillity. The first thing they did was celebrate Communion. Because of a lawsuit filed by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, when NASA aired the reading from Genesis by the astronauts of Apollo 8, it decided to black out that part of the broadcast.

  Aldrin, an elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), took out a Communion kit provided by Webster Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas. In the one-sixth gravity, the wine curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Just before eating the bread and drinking the cup, Aldrin read from the gospel of John:

  “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.”

  It must be hard not to dream big when you’re 94 million miles from earth. It must be hard not to pray hard when you’re traveling 25,000 miles per hour thru space. It must be hard not to think long and think different when you’re watching the earthrise from the surface of the moon.

  After the greatest technological feat the world had ever known, Aldrin circled back to an agricultural metaphor about bearing fruit. It’s a long way from the garden of Gethsemane to the Sea of Tranquillity, both in terms of miles and in terms of years. But when you plant carob trees, you never know when or where or how they will bear fruit. But bear fruit they will, two thousand years later and 94 million miles away. They will bear fruit from here to eternity, from here to infinity.

  Chapter 15

  Life Goal List

  On a rainy afternoon in 1940, a fifteen-year-old dreamer named John Goddard pulled out a piece of paper and wrote “My Life List” at the top. In one afternoon, he wrote down 127 life goals. It’s amazing what can be accomplished in one afternoon, isn’t it? By the time he turned fifty, John Goddard had accomplished 108 of his 127 goals. And they were no garden-variety goals.

  Milk a poisonous snake.

  Skin-dive to forty feet and hold breath two and a half minutes underwater.

  Learn jujutsu.

  Study primitive culture in Borneo.

  Land on and take off from an aircraft carrier.

  Run a mile in five minutes.

  Go on a church missions trip.

  Retrace the travels of Marco Polo and Alexander the Great.

  Learn French, Spanish, and Arabic.

  Play the flute and violin.

  Photograph Victoria Falls in Rhodesia.

  Light a match with a .22 rifle.

  Climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

  Study Komodo dragons on the island of Komodo.

  Build a telescope.

  Read the Bible from cover to cover.

  Circumnavigate the globe.

  Visit the birthplace of Grandfather Sorenson in Denmark.

  Publish an article in National Geographic magazine.

  My favorite Goddard goal is one he never achieved: Visit the moon. Now that is dreaming big and thinking long. He set the goal before anyone had ever escaped the earth’s atmosphere!

  John Goddard has not accomplished every goal he set. He never climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and his quest to visit every country in the world fell a few countries short. There were also some disappointments along the way. His goal of studying Komodo dragons (the world’s largest living lizards) was thwarted when his boat broke down twenty miles offshore. So Goddard hasn’t accomplished all of his goals, but I doubt he would have accomplished half of what he did if he hadn’t set the goals in the first place. After all, you’ll never achieve the goals you don’t set.

  The brain is a goal-seeking organism. Setting a goal creates structural tension in your brain, which will seek to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, who you are and who you want to become. If you don’t set goals, your mind
will become stagnant. Goal setting is good stewardship of your right-brain imagination. It’s also great for your prayer life.

  When I first read Goddard’s list of life goals, I was inspired to come up with my own life goal list. While I started more than a decade ago, I still view my list of 100-plus life goals as a rough draft. Every year I check a few goals off the list; I also add new goals along the way.

  Dreams with Deadlines

  What do life goals have to do with dreaming big? For that matter, what does goal setting have to do with praying hard and thinking long? The answer is everything. Goal setting is a great way of doing all three simultaneously.

  Goals are the cause and effect of praying hard. On the front end, prayer is a goal incubator. The more you pray, the more God-sized goals you’ll be inspired to go after. But prayer doesn’t just inspire godly goals, it also ensures that you keep praying hard because it is the only way you’ll accomplish a God-sized goal. Simply put, prayers naturally turn into goals, and goals naturally turn into prayers. Goals give you a prayer target.

  In their groundbreaking book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras introduced the acronym BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). I’ve substituted a P for the G. I think of my God-sized goals as Big Hairy Audacious Prayers (BHAPs). They force me to work like it depends on me and pray like it depends on God.

  Goals are a great way of thinking long. I have checked approximately one-quarter of my life goals off my list. Some of them, like speaking for an NFL chapel or coaching a sports teams for each of my children, I’ve checked off numerous times. But many of my life goals will take a lifetime to achieve. It might take until I’m seventy-five to write twenty-five books. I cannot pay for my grandchildren’s college education until I have grandchildren. And I have no idea when I’ll be part of baptizing three thousand people in the same place at the same time, like the day of Pentecost, but it’s on my life goal list. And that’s why they are life goals. They might take a lifetime to achieve, but they are worth waiting for and working for.

  Finally, setting goals is a practical way of dreaming big. If prayer is the genesis of dreams, then goals are the revelation. Goals are well-defined dreams that are measurable. Getting in shape is not a goal; it’s a wish. Running a half marathon, however, is a goal because you know you’ve accomplished it when you cross the finish line.

  Goals are dreams with deadlines. And these deadlines, especially if your personality is anything like mine, are really lifelines. Without a deadline, I would never accomplish anything because I’m both a procrastinator and a perfectionist. And that’s why so many dreams go unaccomplished. If you don’t give your dream a deadline, it will be dead before you know it. Deadlines keep dreams alive. Deadlines bring dreams back to life.

  I dreamed of writing a book for thirteen years, but the lack of a deadline nearly killed my dream. It wasn’t until I actually set a deadline, my thirty-fifth birthday, that I was able to finish my first manuscript and accomplish a life goal.

  Visualization

  “Show me your vision, and I’ll show you your future.”

  I was twenty-one when I heard those words, and I’ll never forget them. But it’s not just the words that impacted me; it’s the fact that they were spoken by the pastor of one of the largest churches in the world. His words carried extra weight because he knew whereof he spoke. Very few people have dreamed bigger dreams or prayed harder prayers.

  Scripture says that without a vision, people perish. The opposite is true as well. With a vision, people prosper. The future is always created twice. The first creation happens in your mind as you envision the future; the second creation happens when you literally flesh it out.

  Vision starts with visualization. In 1995, Alvaro Pascual-Leone did a study validating the importance of visualization. A group of volunteers practiced a five-finger piano exercise while neurotransmitters monitored their brain activity. As expected, neuroimaging revealed that the motor cortex was active while practicing the exercise. Then researchers told the participants to mentally rehearse the piano exercise in their mind. The motor cortex was just as active while mentally rehearsing as it was during physical practice. Researchers came to this conclusion: imagined movements trigger synaptic changes at the cortical level.

  That study confirmed statistically what athletes already knew instinctually. Mental rehearsal is just as important or more important as physical practice. It’s mind over matter. And that is a testament to the power of right-brain imagination and the importance of well-defined dreams. When you dream, your mind forms a mental image that becomes both a picture of and a map to your destiny. That picture of the future is one dimension of faith, and the way you frame it is by circling it in prayer.

  In 1992, a Canadian swimmer named Mark Tewksbury won the gold medal in the 200-meter backstroke at the Barcelona Olympics. When he stepped onto the gold medal stand, it wasn’t the first time he had done so. He stood on the gold medal stand the night before the race and imagined it before it happened. He visualized every detail of the race in his mind’s eye, including his come-from-behind victory by a fingertip.

  The Australian sailing team did the same thing in preparation for the 1983 America’s Cup. The coach made a tape of the Australian team beating the American team three years before the race. He narrated the race with the background sound of a sailboat cutting through the water. Every member of the team was required to listen to that tape twice a day for three years. By the time they set sail from San Diego Bay, they had already beaten the American team 2,190 times in their imagination.

  The simple act of imagining doesn’t just remap your mind; it forms a map. And that is the purpose of goal setting. If dreams are the destination, goals are the GPS that get you there. So before sharing my life goal list, let me retrace my steps and explain how I arrived at them.

  Ten Steps to Goal Setting

  Goals are as unique as we are. They should reflect our unique personality and passions. And we arrive at them via different avenues. But these ten steps to goal setting can guide us as we circle our life goals.

  1. Start with Prayer

  Prayer is the best way to jump-start the process of goal setting. I highly recommend a personal retreat or season of fasting. I came up with my original life goal list during a two-day retreat at Rocky Gap Lodge in Cumberland, Maryland. The relaxed schedule gave me the margin I needed to dream big, pray hard, and think long. My original list only contained twenty-five goals. During a ten-day fast a few years later I revised and expanded the list.

  If you set goals in the context of prayer, there is a much higher likelihood that your goals will glorify God, and if they don’t glorify God, then they aren’t worth setting in the first place. So start with prayer.

  2. Check Your Motives

  If you set selfish goals, you would be better off spiritually if you didn’t accomplish them. That’s why you need to check your motives. You need to take a long, honest look in the mirror and make sure you’re going after your goals for the right reasons.

  One of our goals — to create a family foundation—was inspired by my role as a trustee for a charitable foundation. The man who created the trust was tragically struck and killed by an automobile while visiting London, but he had written the trust into his will. It’s been almost two decades since his death, but his legacy is the hundreds of ministries that have received seed money in the form of a grant. No matter how much or how little money we make, that legacy of generosity is inspiring us to do something similar as a family.

  By sharing my list of life goals, I know I’m risking my reputation because the motivation behind some of my goals can be easily misinterpreted. Owning a vacation home, for example, may seem selfish, but our motivation is to use that home to bless pastors who can’t afford to take a vacation. Why? Because others have blessed us in that way when we couldn’t afford a vacation. Yes, we would love a place to escape to, because we live in an urban setting. Yes, it’s one way to diversify our portfolio and sav
e for retirement. But our deepest motive is to simply return the blessing.

  For the record, this goal has not been checked off the list because in prioritizing our goals, this one is near the bottom of the list. We won’t go after this goal at the expense of our giving goals, because our giving goals take precedence over all other financially related goals. More than a decade ago, I had a paradigm shift when it comes to finances. I stopped setting “getting goals” and started setting “giving goals.” All of our financial goals are giving goals because that is our focus. Our motivation for making more is giving more. After all, you make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give.

  3. Think in Categories

  It is hard to pull life goals out of thin air, so I recommend looking at the life goal list of others. Don’t cut and paste someone else’s goals, but it’s a great way of getting your own ideas.

  Another trick that has helped me is thinking in categories. My goals are divided into five categories: (1) family, (2) influential, (3) experiential, (4) physical, and (5) travel. The obvious omission is a category for spiritual goals, but that is by intention. All of my goals have a spiritual dimension to them. Some of them are obviously spiritual, like taking each of my children on a mission trip or reading the Bible from cover to cover in seven different translations, but running a triathlon with my son was a spiritual experience as well. Any goal that cultivates physical discipline will cultivate spiritual disciplines too.

  Even the seemingly least spiritual goal on my list, going to a Super Bowl, turned out to have a spiritual component to it. After the Packers won the 2010 NFC championship game, I tweeted that I would preach for tickets. I was half joking, but a pastor-friend in Dallas, Bryan Jarrett, took me seriously. I would never have spent the money to buy tickets myself, but I was happy to preach for them. To top it off, Super Bowl XLV happened to fall on Josiah’s birthday, and he got to go with me! For one day, I think I won the Best Dad of the Day award. Of course, the downside is that it’s all downhill from there. He’ll never get another birthday gift that comes close to that one! Neither of us will ever forget that experience, but what made the experience even more meaningful is that I got to preach the gospel. I was thrilled to be part of the Super Bowl celebration, but that celebration pales in comparison to the celebration in heaven over anyone who put their faith in Christ the morning I preached. That goal ended up being one of the greatest win-win experiences of my life.