Praying Circles
The Book - The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson
This was the second time I attempted to read Mark Batterson’s The Circle Maker. Based on my highlighting, it looks like I made it about a quarter of the way through before putting it down the first time.
I’m typically not one to put a book down and not finish it. (I can think of only a handful of times this has happened.) Now, I do tend to read about 10 books at any given moment. So if I lose interest, it may take me a while to get back to it, but give it a year or so and I’ll feel the need to whittle away at my current reading list, and the book will get done. That didn’t happen with this one.
I simply didn’t keep reading it, and I don’t know why.
This time, when I picked the book back up, I was on my way to Boston for a long weekend with one of my college roommates for a girls’ trip. The flight was long, and, this time, I couldn't bring myself to put the book down. I actually had to be strategic about when I read it because I found it so hard to stop.
I laughed. I cried. I dreamed. I was convicted. I was encouraged. Truly, I experienced the gamut of emotions in this one book.
By the end, I wanted to pray all the time about everything. I’ve actually found myself frustrated a few times recently and telling God, “This is another thing to pray about! How am I going to add this to my list? It already takes up all this time. When does it end?” Then I catch myself and realize that it’s kind of the point – we’re supposed to pray all the time (1 Thes. 5:17).
The more I’ve been praying, the more I’ve found things to talk to God about. Batterson writes about when we do decide to pray:
“If you do pray, all bets are off. You can live with holy anticipation because you never know how or when or where God is going to answer, but I promise you this: He will answer. And his answers are not limited by your requests. We pray out of our ignorance, but God answers out of His omniscience. We pray out of our impotence, but God answers out of His omnipotence. God has the ability to answer the prayers we should have prayed but lacked the knowledge or ability to even ask.” (19)
I really like this perspective. God’s omniscience and omnipotence mean that I can trust Him to know what really needs to happen. He sees all the moving pieces that I cannot. He takes into account the past, the present, and the future and all its possibilities as He answers the prayers of His people.
Now, Batterson does not say that every prayer will be answered the way we’d like. He does not believe God is a genie in a lamp. What he does think is that “...part of praying hard is persisting in prayer even when we don’t get the answer we want. It’s choosing to believe that God has a better plan” (128). I know I get stuck in cynical mindsets far too often, but I’m realizing that it is less a pessimistic outlook and more an issue of pride. When the omniscient, omnipotent God of the universe is at work, who am I to know what is best in any given situation? Newsflash: I don’t.
On the matter of unanswered prayers, Batterson says: “One of the reasons we get frustrated in prayer is our ASAP approach. When our prayers aren’t answered as quickly or easily as we would like, we get tired of circling. Maybe we need to change our prayer approach from as soon as possible to as long as it takes” (196). This is definitely something I was convicted about. I am often not willing to take the “as long as it takes” perspective on matters of prayer. But God plays the long game all the time. I really should realize that more. He seems to be all about the wait. Again, this does not mean that every prayer we pray will be answered exactly as we wish if we wait long enough, but giving up before we see God working it out is our loss.
Yet, while we’re in the waiting, we can be doing: “Praying hard is hard because you can’t just pray like it depends on God; you also have to work like it depends on you. You can’t just be willing to pray about it; you also have to be willing to do something about it” (114). I struggled with this idea a bit because I think it can easily be misconstrued as a works-based faith. This is not what Batterson intends, though. Rather, I think he views the need for people to work with God as a necessary step of faith. He’s not saying go it alone, and God will catch up. No, Batterson is saying that we need to trust God because He is stretching our faith and growing our dreams. God is after big prayers and big dreams because they glorify Him in big ways. And sometimes that means we need to actually do something to partner with God in fulfilling the prayer.
This might be a silly example, but it makes me think about how I’m training for a half-marathon next year. I can pray all I want about running a half-marathon, but if I haven’t put in the work, then my prayers are a little bit pointless.
Several of the books on prayer that I’ve been reading this past summer have discussed the concept of praying specifically. This is absolutely an area where I need to grow. Batterson, too, dealt with the problem of vague prayers: “I was immediately convicted by how vague my prayers were. Some of them were so vague that there was no way of knowing whether God had answered them or not” (27). Trusting God is often built from a history of depending on Him and seeing how He has come through time and again. However, if our prayers are non-specific, we can’t as easily recognize when He has been working. When we pray specifically, it is much easier to recognize when He is at work.
This also seems to connect to another concept that Batterson wrote about. He said, “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” (156). Prayer opens our eyes to spiritual realities in a way few other things can. A couple of years ago, my dad was re-diagnosed with melanoma. As he prayed before dinner one night after his diagnosis, he started praying something I hadn’t heard him say before: “Thank you for the challenges and opportunities You’ve given us.” Whether intentionally or subconsciously done, this idea has become a frequent part of Dad’s dinner prayers. And it made me realize that everything can be turned into prayer. In doing so, everything, whether challenge or opportunity, becomes a way for us to see God at work.
Towards the end of the book, Batterson began wrapping up his discussion on prayer by emphasizing that “[o]ur prayers don’t dissipate over time; our prayers accumulate through eternity” (207). Prayers are the greatest (and longest) legacy we can leave behind.
One idea I’ve thought a lot about in recent years is legacy. What kind of legacy will I leave behind? I am not currently married, nor do I have children. (It’s one of those prayer matters I need to be more persistent and less resigned about.) However, I often tie legacy to the passing on of the treasures of family and faith to future generations. After all, I have been enormously blessed by the family of previous generations who poured into me, many of whom are no longer with us. I’m left to wonder who I can impact in the same ways, when I have no children of my own to love, guide, and encourage. Batterson’s book challenged me to reconsider how I think about legacy. Perhaps the greatest legacy I can leave behind is one of prayer – specific and long-lived prayers for my family, my nieces and nephews, my cousins, my friends, my students. Perhaps by the end of my life, I can be known as the woman who prayed, and God answered her.
A Practice - Journaling Prayers
One way I have found to help me pray is to journal my prayers. I have done several versions of this over the years. Unfortunately, my consistency leaves something to be desired.
Last year, I decided to try something a little more structured to attempt to be more consistent. I ordered a prayer journal from Val Marie Paper. It is designed with a monthly format where you can list specific requests for a variety of people and situations, and then write your prayers each day of the month.
I turned this into a quarterly journal rather than a monthly one, and it has worked a lot better for me. My written prayers may be a full-on written entry, or they may actually be more like lists of specific things I am praying about or for. I include gratitude lists in there as well. I have found the flexibility within the structure that works for me. And as I look back over the quarters, I find the wisdom in praying specifically because God has moved in ways I would not have noticed otherwise.
If you are interested, another prayer journal I’ve seen referenced recently (although not one I have used) is the 5-year prayer journal from Hosanna Revival. Like the 5-year one-line-a-day journals, this journal helps you track specific daily prayers over five years.
I encourage you to try whichever methods interest you as you work to develop a prayer rhythm and routine that fits you.
