One of the most astonishing episodes of my life happened in 1995, stemming from a phone call from New York’s Lake Ontario region.
“Hi there Jerry, this is David Spencer. Would you like to go to China?”
David’s grandfather had long ago pioneered the mission agency through which we had served in Africa through our younger years. David was in pursuit of friends to pull together a low-profile short-term prayer team.
From the early 1970s a phenomenon (tagged later on as ‘Prayer Walking’) had been evolving, expanding its reach year after year. No single group or organization or church had a corner on this partnering-with=God practice. Prayer-walkers – hundreds, then later on thousands of small bands of intercessors donning all manner of footwear – had been taking to the streets all across broad sectors of the globe. Missiologists, evangelists and church planters took note, sensing that a burgeoning prayer movement was clearly afoot. The work of a sovereign, compassionate, pursuing God.
By the 1990s bands of such purposeful intercessors (Jesus-followers directing their praying outward toward the needs of others) had lined up at airline ticket counters. It was as though the world’s nations, many of them hosts to entire people groups still uninformed of the existence of Jesus, had seized the hearts of these travelling travailers.
Our prayer-journeying team (of Canadian and American heritage) numbered twenty and rangwd in age from 19 years to 81.
From our Hong Kong Port of Entry where orientation sessions were taken in through the fog of jet lag, we navigated thousands of miles by train, plane and automobile, by country bus and the occasional rickshaw. Add to this the mile on mile prayer-walking stints along strategic venues of five ‘gateway cities’, the occupants of one such urban center numbering sixteen million strong. Indeed, no town whose sidewalks welcomed the touch of our collective shoe leather boasted populations of less than three million.
An eye-opening, soul-stirring adventure of a lifetime.
Soon, I would take in a piece of news from a Pennsylvania farming community set to catapult my mind to jaw-dropping wonder. Leaving me happily puzzling in the general direction of the heavens,
What manner of God are you?
©2024 Jerry Lout