Okay. I recently read this incredible book,
RED MOON RISING, and I really wanted to share this bit from it with anyone that might happen across this blog. RED MOON RISING is a book about the 24/7 prayer movement. If you haven't heard about it, you need to look into it. In fact, you should stop reading this right now and leave wherever you are to go and buy this book and begin reading it immediately. Or order it from a christian bookstore RIGHT NOW to be delivered to you in only a few days. The book is story after story of God's FAITHFULNESS and amazingness!!!
This is a bit long (don't scroll down, it's shorter to read than it seems!), but bear with me, it is really something. Parts of it spoke straight to my heart. I hope it reaches you as it did me.
It was about 3:15 a.m. and I'd taken a middle-of-the-night slot in the Chichester prayer room where we'd been praying now without a break for several weeks. I wandered around the room, reading what was on the walls, trying to pray. I think Moby was on the stereo as I sipped a Red Bull energy drink and tried to shake off the sleep that was hovering nearby, waiting to return if I wasn't vigilant.
'Why am I here in the middle of the night anyway when sane people are all tucked up in bed?' I wondered, trying to make sense of the events of the previous weeks: the wrestling with God, the wild goose chase around Europe, Hernnhut, and Dubi, and now this crazy prayer room. Wasn't it all a bit extreme?
I grabbed hold of a big blue marker pen, sat down on the floor with some sheets of paper and began to write: 'So this guy comes up to me and says, 'What's the vision? What's the big idea?'' I wanted to explain the dreams and visions that were causing so many of us to pray like never before. I guess, when you're going against the flow of what the culture around you expects-and often against the flow of what the church expects, too-you need to be able to explain yourself.
The words that tumbled out onto the paper reflected conversations, thoughts, and prayers from previous weeks, previous months, and somtimes even previous decades. I soon lost track of the time, scrawling a stream of conciousness, a succession of word-pictures onto the paper as Moby's soulful gospel samples filled the room. I was formulating a declaration of spiritual intent that would reach far beyond the walls of that converted warehouse in Chichester-although it never occurred to me at the time. If I'd known what would happen with my poem-prayer, I would have seized up, unable to write, but at that moment in the middle of the night, I was intimately alone with my Master, and the world outside was forgotten as I scribbled my fervent thoughts onto paper, lost in a place somewhere outside of time.
I taped the sheets of paper to a large piece of linen separating the room and went home to bed still buzzing. This is what I had written:
THE VISIONSo this guy comes up to me and says, "What's the vision? What's the big idea?" I open my mouth and words come out like this...The vision?The vision is JESUS--obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.The vision is an army of young people. You see bones? I see an army.And they are FREE from materialism. They laugh at 9-5 little prisons.They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday. They wouldn't even notice.They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the West was won.They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations. They need no passport. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying.What is the vision?The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation.It loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games.This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause.A million times a day its solderschoose to losethat they might one day winthe great 'Well done' of faithful sons and daughters.Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night.They don't need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"And this is the sound of the undergroundThe whisper of history in the makingFoundations shakingRevolutionaries dreaming once againMystery is scheming in whispersConspiracy is breathing...This is the sound of the undergroundAnd the army is discipl(in)ed.Young people who beat their bodies into submission.Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms.The tattoo on their back boasts "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain."Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes.Winners.Martyrs.Who can stop them?Can hormones hold them back?Can failure succeed?Can fear scare them or death kill them?And the generation prayslike a dying manwith groans beyond talking,with warrior cries, sulphuric tears and with great barrow loads of laughter!Waiting. Watching: 24-7-365.Whatever it takes they will give:Breaking the rules.Shaking mediocrity from its cosy little hide.Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs,laughting at labels, fasting essentials.The advertisers cannot mold them.Hollywood cannot hold them.Peer-pressure is powerless to shake their resolve at late night partiesbefore the cockerel cries.They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive inside.On the outside? They hardly care.They wear clothes like costumes to communicate and celebrate but never to hide.Would they surrender their image or their popularity?They would lay down their very lives--swap seats with the man on death row--guilty as hell.A throne for an electric chair.With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days, they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on them.Their DNA chooses JESUS. (He breathes out, they breathe in.)Their subconcious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus.Their words make demons scream in shopping centers.Don't you hear them coming?Herald the weirdos!Summon the losers and the freaks.Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes.They walk tall and trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension.Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.And this vision will be. It will come to pass; it will come easily; it will come soon.How do I know? Because this is the longing of creation itself, the groaning of the Spirit, the very dream of God.My tomorrow is his today.My distant hope is his 3-D.And my feeble, whispered, faithless prayer invokes a thunderous, resounding bone-shaking great "Amen!" from countless angels, from heroes of the faith, from Christ himself. And He is the original dreamer, the ultimate winner.Guaranteed.
