We (Calvary) are in the midst of a 21 Day Season of prayer-walking.  Nope it’s not a new exercise program, though it’s certainly not a bad idea to exercise body and soul both at the same time!  Sometimes we use the phrase, “praying onsite with insight.”  Prayer-walking is taking prayer outside the four walls of the church and into the community.  We are prayer-walking the Penn State Campus.  We are drawing a circle around the campus and asking God to transform what’s inside the circle.  We are prayer-walking 21 days leading up to a Calvary-wide worship gathering on campus — Calvary on Campus, September 15, at Eisenhower Auditorium.

Last Wednesday was Calvary Classic’s day (each of our gatherings is taking a day) to prayer-walk Penn State.  14 of us went out including 5 wonderful kids and I have no doubt that Jesus smiled brightly upon them!  We split up and went to a variety of places like Beaver Stadium and Findlay Commons.  I gave out a list of prayer requests for each spot and we went out to pray. 

I’m sure some of you who are asking questions like, “Why are we doing this?”  What difference does it make to pray?  And if prayer makes a difference, why do I have to go there?  Even if I want to pray why can’t I just pray from home?” All I can say is that something happens when we pray onsite. Something happens in us.  One of the reasons that we pray — of course — is because there are tens of thousands of students on that campus who don’t know and love Jesus.  But one of the reasons we go there to pray is because that fact doesn’t grab our hearts the way it should.

I think of places in the gospels where it says that Jesus saw the crowds and he was filled with compassion.  There is simply something that happens in the seeing that fuels our prayers.  In another place (Luke 10) Jesus sent them out to the villages and as they were going he said, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few so pray…”  But their prayers were fueled as they went onsite.

Today our staff prayed on campus.  I’ll be there again tomorrow.  In fact, if you are reading this, even if you are not part of the Calvar family, I would ask you to go somewhere on campus and pray at least once between now and September 15. God did something in my heart on Wednesday night, some emotion, compassion, brokenness I hadn’t felt in awhile, and that shaped my prayers. I want that for all of us.

For the online version of a prayer-walking guide, you can go to www.calvarysc.org/prayer. If you do go out and pray, I would love to hear about it.  Send me an email…