The Circle Maker, Student Edition: Dream Big. Pray Hard. Think Long. by Mark Batterson

Author:Mark Batterson [Batterson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780310725145
Published: 2012-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Woolly Socks

I recently spoke at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, for my friend Chris Hodges. I toured their Dream Center in downtown Birmingham because we want to do something similar in DC. They have an amazing outreach to pimps and prostitutes. They mentor kids. They feed the hungry. You name the need, and they’re meeting it.

A woman there named Lisa likes to play Chicken with God. She’s one of those people who overflows with joy, life, and energy. She left her job to serve the poor, broken, and hungry at the Dream Center and she daily sees God come through at the last moment.

During our tour, Lisa talked about their daily dependence on God to meet the overwhelming needs in their community. It takes hard work and hard prayer. Then she told me about one of the miracles she had experienced. One day, as she was circling the Dream Center in prayer, she heard one of those Holy Spirit whispers and felt like she should take her woolly socks with her to work. It was one of the strangest promptings she’d ever had, and she thought she was losing her mind, but she couldn’t shake the impression. So she grabbed her wool socks, put them in her purse, and headed downtown. When she got there, a prostitute was literally passed out on the doorstep. Lisa opened the door, carried her inside, and cradled her in her arms until she came to a few minutes later. The woman was so cold that she was shaking. That’s when Lisa asked her, “If you could have anything, what would it be?” Without hesitation, she said, “Wool socks.” Lisa about lost it. As she told me the story, she started tearing up. Then I started tearing up! Lisa told her, “Look what I have.” She pulled out the woolly socks, and the young woman said, “They even match my outfit.”

God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him; God is great because nothing is too small for Him. A sparrow doesn’t fall without His noticing and caring, so it shouldn’t surprise us that He cares about a woman who wants woolly socks. God loves showing His all-encompassing compassion in little ways, and if we would learn to obey His nudging and whispers like Lisa, we might just find ourselves in the middle of miracles more often.

The reason we sometimes miss miracles is because we aren’t looking or listening for them. The easy part of prayer is talking. It’s much harder listening to the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s much harder looking for the answers. But two-thirds of praying hard is listening and looking.

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