As most of you know, I have been doing the night watch at the international house of prayer for almost 6 years now. Today I discovered some good news about my lifestyle choice.

People who are on the night watch have almost no chance of dying in a fire. Statistically, most fire related deaths occur between midnight and 5AM, causing approximately 3,500 death a year.

Since I’m not at home when a potential fire disaster occurs (or I’d be awake to help prevent it) I’m virtually invulnerable to this particularly unfortunate circumstance. In fact, fires cause more deaths in the US than most other disasters combined (excluding car accidents).

It’s like a night watch super-power.

When you are in a bunker you become short-sighted, jumpy, and things feel cramped and lonely. It becomes easy to define yourself almost entirely by what you are against - at the risk of forgetting what you are for. Ultimately, this leads us to a rather dangerous elitism which sets our view as higher (and…have mercy Lord…more holy) that the church/movement/group, etc, that is located someplace else.

My point is this: we need to be quick to listen and slow to speak because the prayer movement that God is raising up (how many times have we heard our leaders say it?) is going to happen many places on the globe with many different expressions.

God is changing the understanding and expression of Christianity - that will be very messy. That’s good news and bad news because it means all of our sacred cows (that is the optional, personal, private predjudices and idols of our lives) are at risk of being killed and made into hamburger.

The good news: he’s given us God-TV and our support raising efforts to keep us humble. How many people know that we began broadcasting in Pakistan in May? Two cities (Karachi and Lahore…don’t ask me to pronounce the second one) in a predominently Muslim nation now see the Prayer Room. This thing called ‘our lives’ is out of our control. God-TV is a way for God to connect us profoundly to the lives of people with different values, personalities, languages, that all of our personal preferences will be deeply challenged.

Of course, if we are actively raising support (AHEM. I hope this is the case for most IHOP-KC staff) we get to experience the same internal shaking. My trip back to Pittsburgh brought me into contact with Episcopalians, urban missionaries, Mennonites, recovering Emergent church folks, a recent Harvard grad, representatives of the  “New Monasticism, missionaries to the Muslim world, and homeless people. In each case, I had the opportunity to affirm what God is doing in their lives, and invite them into what God is doing me.

We need to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Avoiding elitism will take our energy, time, finances, and above all, our patience. The bridal paradigm demands we be patient with those ‘outside’ of our lingo and expression of faith. Remember who you were before you spent six hours a day in prayer. God loved you in your weakness. He loves those who don’t have the privilages we have. Yes, we have privilages. We live in a greenhouse of God’s presence. We have privalages, we are rich.

Some may ask: What does that look like? I’ve got an answer to that. Get to know one of the teens here for the Summer Teen Internship - better yet - email KJ or Brent and tell them you have some floor space. Humility invites action, not pious thought.

Intercession is real.  It is more real than voting, politics, or public policy. 

Recently, I’ve been reading up on a lot of foreign policy books (mostly related to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the last 50 years or so).  What I’ve realized is that though people spend their entire lives trying to figure out nations, government, and ways of acheiving peace and safety - the people in charge are really just guessing.

 You can’t predict the rise of al-Queda - you can’t forsee 9/11 - you can only ‘push and pull’ other nations back and forth with economic sanctions, covert ops, and the threat of military invasion.  Every situation is ‘win-lose’.  The strong prevail over the weak.  There is no justice in international affairs.

So, who is really calling the shots?  People like Daniel - those who stare into eternity.  Those like the apostle John who are invited into the counsel of the Lord.

I’m learning to pray for my enemies:  Mahmoud Ahmidinajad and Kim Jong-il.  I’m asking that God would raise up prophets who would speak the word that would break the back of the strongholds destroying their people and blinding them to truth.

I’m also praying for the leaders in this nation.  We need grace.

But the good news is that we can shift nations.  We can bring (in a limited sense)  justice to bear and haste the coming of the one who will finally rule with true justice.  We are doing the most significant work in the earth.  Prayer is the center.  We are changing nations.

Leisure and the Gospel: A Day in the Life of Zadok pt. II

So, we’ve already established that Zadok has about 291 days a year committed to fulfilling his commitments as an intercessory missionary. This alone, however, doesn’t really establish for us just how much he is actually working – since every hour of those days could be spent in a multitude of ways.

Let’s do the numbers on those 291 days.

Of course, Zadok has to sleep and gets an average 8 hours a night. We’ll factor this into the number for rest at the end.

That leaves us with 4656 potential waking hours for working. Zadok has been given grace by God to do the night watch – a lifestyle that suits his character as a contemplative and his predilections as a night owl – and he goes whole hog jumping into it for 6 hours each working day.

That brings him down to 2910 hours for the rest of his IHOP responsibilities and the mundane activities that make up the rest of life. A man of habit, he decides to clean IHOP four hours a day 6 days a week.

That brings him down to 1746 hours for personal household responsibilities. He’s a family man – and he’s consistent in helping his wife with the kids and the household chores for a solid 4 hours each day.

That leaves Zadok with 582 potential leisure hours a year – or about two hours every day. (And that’s for a workhorse who does a fourteen hour day six days a week.)

I’m not going to ask for a show of hands of people who regularly do a fourteen hour day.

If we add up those 582 hours with the hours spent sleeping – and factor them into our percentages – we get…

53% of hour time each year is spent in leisure, recreation or rest – with a fourteen hour work week six days a week (including sleep in leisure).

In a future post, we’ll compare these numbers with the ‘average American’ ratios for work and leisure - though I’ll tease you by letting you know that ‘technically’ we work more - but then, we haven’t defined work OR leisure yet - which could certainly turn things on their head.

Leisure and the Gospel: Zadok’s Labor and Rest

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the nature of rest related to the unique work of prayer which we engage in as intercessory missionaries at IHOP-KC. I’ve had the opportunity to engage in some discussions related to our revised absence policy – and thought it would be a good topic to examine critically over the next few weeks.

My basic premise is this: we have no idea how much time we spend ‘resting’ and how little time we spend ‘resting well’. When I say ‘we’ I mean myself as well. One would be hard-pressed to deny that we (in America) live in one of the most privilaged, entitlement-driven, self-serving cultures in human history. Because of this fact, I think an honest examination of the actual quantity AND quality of or leisure can only lead us further into the grace of God.

The question, ultimately, comes down to how the Bible defines work and labor and how the Bible defines rest, recuperation, and leisure, but before we get into the discussion as it relates to the Bible – I’d like to simply look at a few of the basic facts.

-the IHOP-KC missionary lifestyle - by the numbers -

The average IHOP-KC missionary – (we’ll call him ‘Zadok’) - has a ‘work-week’ of six days, assuming he takes one full Sabbath day off a week.

(6 x 52) = 312 ‘work-days’ a year

Then we subtract Zadok’s 21 personal days (any day off where he misses a scheduled sacred trust prayer meeting).

312 – 21 = 291 days

So that means Zadok is ‘working’ 291 days a year - (this assumes that he uses his 21 support/ministry days to do ministry and raise support – which certainly counts as work).

So Zadok ‘works’ 291 days a year (about 42 weeks), and he ‘rests’ an average of 74 days a year (about 10 weeks). Of course, there may be those who have all of their prayer meetings scheduled scheduled within a span 4-5 days – which would change these numbers radically – but we’ll stick with Zadok’s schedule for the sake of simplicity.

So, by the numbers about 80% of his days are spent working and about 20% are spent resting.

These numbers are a little deceiving, however – since every moment of those 291 days isn’t spent ‘working’ – within each day we spend a certain percentage of time working AND resting.

More numbers on that later.