Non-Stop Prayer in the Arabian SandsThe Phantom Intercessor - 12 Apr 2011
The call to prayer wakes you at five, distracts you pushing your trolley around IKEA, interrupts your conversation over tea with a friend in the evening cool. Prayer rooms are by every public toilet, at every petrol station, in every hotel. Even Marks and Spencer’s, where I go for my occasional Brit‐fix has prayer rooms.
And people are praying everywhere ‐ the truck driver stands by his cab in the midday sun on the dusty shoulder of the highway, the waiters at the creekside restaurant evaporate and line up by the kitchen door, dipping and bobbing, shoes off. A woman, every inch of her veiled in black, struggles to shift a row of steel hospital waiting room chairs, riveted together, to face Mecca.
We left over 2½ years’ ago, to start new lives in the Middle East, heading into quite an unknown, a place of unfamiliarity as ever, but of some antagonism too. More than usually, it felt like we would need to pray…
True of anywhere you might say: but the sense was soon enhanced as we found ourselves surrounded by prayer in the place we’d come to, and prayer rooms too, lots of them, thousands of them… everywhere. But rooms that face in a different direction and look to a god with a different name. The apparent loss of prayer adventures we’d explored back in the UK became suddenly both a crucial preparation and a very fond memory.
Surely it’s easy: in my first weeks here I found a strong, dynamic church, and there I could share our 24-7 adventures. We could start a week of prayer here and pick up those threads again? Not so fast… People were interested in this English guy with his slightly whacky ideas, intrigued even: but they’d never heard of 24-7 Prayer, and perhaps it was, well all just a little too English, too quirky!
So we made a tiny prayer room at our villa:
The maid’s room.
We don’t have a maid.
So I spend a day cleaning and clearing, buy paper, paints, hang drapes from the ceiling, a map on the wall.
A place to pray. And time to pray.
Some days three or four hours slip by in there – and God listens. I tell him about the workers, the labour camps, the Pakistani taxi drivers, away from their families for years and years. I ask their children’s names and write them on the wall. The Christian expats, working in pivotal situations, key positions, crisis positions. Christians working with Muslims. Things I can’t tell anyone. I tell him about our friends with a recovery place, about the sheikh and Iran and the dhows and Oman. I tell him about my friend Rob’s cancer. God knows all this but still patiently listens.
Some days in there are lovely. Others are heavy and hard, it is like wrestling. I talk and talk about Rob but he dies. Some days I avoid the maid’s room, leave the candles unlit, the flowers cut from the garden wilting. Nothing is happening.
At first frustrated, though too busy to worry, we soaked ourselves in this place, gathered the pulse both of its coercive, five-times-daily prayer, and the clear spiritual ambience, ambition and animosity all around. We longed and dreamt to see the simple model of constant, 24-7 Christian prayer, a room in a shop unit somewhere, perhaps a school, best of all in a glitzy mall. But there seemed no obvious way: 98.5% Muslim, with Christian premises closely regulated, options on such spaces here are highly restricted.
When friends came over for a visit in late 2010 and lightly shared the 24-7 vision, seeds began to take root. Through “Red Moon Rising”, people caught glimpses of 24-7’s story elsewhere, and infectious tales began to capture people’s imagination. As the New Year dawned with disruption flaring across the wider Middle East, increasingly close to our borders, and on-going pressures being felt on the church too, the need for concerted prayer seemed less impetuous and rather more imperative!
We kept up the dialogue with our church leaders, and when they agreed to take it forward, we began to search concertedly for somewhere to meet.
Finding premises is one of the hardest things. As a church we have had to move ten times in the last ten years, and have spent so, so much in rent. Each time there is a change of management, a different reason, but really people are uncomfortable when they know you are a church.
Options in people’s homes had obvious drawbacks of disruption in the night and raising neighbours’ suspicions. But then a perfect place appeared:
At the deacon’s meeting, as soon as I mention needing a room, J+S' hands go up, they are smiling and volunteer a room in their villa. J had happened to be in M's office, saw the pile of Red Moon Risings on his desk, so M said to take one. He read it and loved it. As they were looking for a house, he prayed ‘Lord, if our new house is big enough, I’d love to have a prayer room there’. They ended up in a 9‐ bedroom villa, with parking and no security cameras, right near where the church is now meeting.
As central and as easy to find as anywhere in this sprawling city, with a separate doorway, a bathroom and pantry attached, their little room was perfect…
People were so eager now to help and all this would have been impossible without them: an injury in worship had put me onto crutches, we had tensions distracting us far away at home, severe job uncertainties here. It is never without a fight, never a ‘given’. So many people joined in, the sign-up process was sorted out, the room beautifully, yet simply decked out with a floaty Bedouin-like canopy across the ceiling, rugs on the floor, a chair and bean bag, lining paper on two walls to draw, scribble and write on, one of which had a feint line silhouette of the city… Maps of the region, in the corner a little barasti, the desert Arabs’ sun shelter, usually made of date palms, ours of hessian with fronds on top and a cushion inside! The sign-up for the week was half complete a week before launch and it gradually filled before we started.
The first hour began on Saturday night, just before the working week here.
We post our numbers on the sheet for people to call in emergencies ‐ we keep checking our phones but nobody calls. Except twice, later in the week, when the room has been double or triple‐booked. There seems to be a bartering of slots… We feel bad taking a slot ourselves, because we hear people can’t get them. There are oblique posts on facebook, rumours, everyone is thanking us, sending messages.
Word spread about the room, the walls quickly covered in God-graffiti, and now it’s been decided to go for 24-14! Who knows what God will do next? But at last we have the first single 24-7 Prayer Room in this piece of the Arabian Sands - and we can face whichever way we want.