Powerful Prayer
Savvy Saturdays - 5/2/20
Hello friends,
Greetings from Austin!
This past week, I started to pull back on the time I slept each day hour by hour in order to fix my sleep schedule. I even managed to go to sleep by 11:30 PM! *pats self on back
Even though I’m a working adult, I’m still living the college lifestyle, going to bed past midnight. (Definitely not cause of Webtoons… hit me up if you read them though)
In fact, the night I sent out my newsletter last week, I had slept at 3 AM the previous evening, and the effects of days of unrestful sleep started to show whilst trying to churn out a post. I remember staring at sentences for minutes at a time at around 2 AM to try and make logical sense and mistyped simple words, sometimes replacing 3 letter words with 8 letter words. 😢
I briefly considered rebranding myself to Savvy Sundays so I could get rest, but I felt shifting my problems a day later wouldn’t be wise, so I pushed through and sent out what I could scrap together with my 2 brain cells by the end of that night haha 😭*cries to self.
Thanks for everyone who let me know these posts are helpful. It gives my tired self-esteem a boost and reminds me why I write these - to share life on life what God’s doing in my life, and hopefully encourage and give y’all insight!
Anyways, God has been crazy good this past week!
I’ve been attending my childhood church’s prayer meetings almost every day at 1 PM, and it’s been good being able to consistently go to God, pray for different topics and people groups, and fellowship with friends and pastors back at home.
A praise God moment was on Monday’s prayer meeting, we prayed for companionship for the lonely and for spiritual friendship, prayed for about 10+ mins aloud altogether, and then went on with our day.
Then the next day, I joined our Tuesday prayer meeting preparing to pray over the difficult circumstance of unemployment, and as we were ending off the time, a new person joined in.
At that time, I thought, “Oh, it’s just another person from church joining in to pray. We’ll pray one last extra prayer, and then I can get back to my work”
But little did I know that God had other plans.
Turns out, the person who joined was someone who had just started to seek out God. And whilst searching online, she’d somehow stumbled onto the church’s Facebook, noticed our zoom call for prayer, and joined with faith that it would allow her to get closer to God.
Being open to us, we encouraged her to continue the journey of faith and asked how we could pray for her, and she mentioned she was living in her apartment by herself, was feeling lonely, and had recently gone through a breakup (three big whammies).
After lifting up prayers over those requests we ended the call, and my pastor messaged me, declaring God’s awesomeness at that time.
And then he said this, “Oh my goodness, Eric, God answered your prayer. You prayed for those who were lonely, and the next day, God brought someone lonely you could pray for!”
And that hit me.
I didn’t realize that God had answered my simple prayer. A prayer I had forgotten and walked away from.
It was a humbling reminder where the true power of prayer comes from.
"Our prayers may be awkward. Our attempts may be feeble. But since the power of prayer is in the one who hears it and not in the one who says it, our prayers do make a difference."
- Max Lucado
As the coming weeks pass, I’m hoping to do better in prayer. To be aware and try my best to “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess. 5:16-17).
But it is a joy to be reminded that prayer is not dependent on me.
Powerful prayer isn’t in the beauty of words, the loudness of the voice, or the emotional energy felt amidst praying.
Instead, all its power is dependent on God.
And all I need to do is take the faithful act of going to God and praying.
With that, continue praying during this time my friends!
Whether it’s in prayer gatherings, in one on ones, or in your prayer closet, let us not diminish prayer and let it be cut out of our lives.
If you haven’t gone to God today, I recommend taking a few moments to go to Him! Thank Him for today, what He’s done, and maybe ask for wisdom for a greater heart of prayer. (I know I have to do that all the time).
For my fellow Texans, be safe if y’all decide to go out with the loosened quarantine restrictions. And for my other fellow statesmen, be safe too.
Keep on running the race my friends, thanks for checking in, and I’ll see y’all in the next update! 🤗
“Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.”
- Oswald Chambers
Weekly Collections
Faith
Focus on a Few Good Men: How God Does the Magic in Disciple-making - DesiringGod
This was a reminder of the beauty of discipleship and why we need to live out the commandment of making disciples of all nations.
Though Jesus spent time preaching and teaching and a good portion of His time in solitude with God, He kept a lion share of his time devoted to spending informally with the 12 disciples, heavily investing in 3 apostles (Peter, James, and John), and loving specifically His most beloved disciple (John).
A good thought to have:
who are the 12 disciples I devote to?
ex. small group, Sunday school, bible studieswho are the 3 apostles I pour out into intentionally?
ex. high school students, college sophomore/freshmen, childrenwho is my beloved disciple?
“Disciple-making will make you realize your weaknesses. Close relational context, make ourselves vulnerable, lose our privacy, get close to someone else, that's where you see your weakness most. That's where Christ makes power perfect in weakness.”
Entrepreneurship
This is a curated version of the long-form essay of Solitude and Leadership, by the American Scholar. If you have the chance to read it all, I would challenge you to.
But if you can’t, this shortened version I extracted will help you see how intertwined leadership and solitude are:
“We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going.
Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them.
Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them.
Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place.
What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things.
People, in other words, with vision.
The idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions.
How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
These are truly formidable dilemmas, more so than most other people will ever have to face in their lives, let alone when they’re 23. The time to start preparing yourself for them is now. And the way to do it is by thinking through these issues for yourself—morality, mortality, honor—so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting until you have to confront them in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it’s too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.
How can you know that unless you’ve taken counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.”
Productivity
“Bikeshedding is a metaphor to illustrate the strange tendency we have to spend excessive time on trivial matters, often glossing over important ones. Here’s why we do it, and how to stop.” - Why We Focus on Trivial Things - FS Blog
Verse of the Week
“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
- Mark 10:45
Challenging Quote
"To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing."
- Martin Luther