Circling the Issue

It's a season of introspection.  You know the feeling: when all sorts of outside influences, intentionally or not, speak to your spirit about a particular issue.  You may want to ignore it, but it will not be ignored.  

I've been reading The Circle Maker, which has come highly recommended from every person in my social circle who's read it.  Its subtitle is "Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears."  Now, I have some pretty big dreams--and some pretty great fears.  So ushering in dreams and conquering fears seems like a worthwhile pursuit, don't you think?  

But here's the thing: I thought the book was going to focus on the dreams and fears we have for ourselves.  And yes, these are worth praying circles around.  But what's actually been standing out to me is the Miraculous that God wants to work because we're praying circles around 

GOD'S GREATEST DREAMS. 

And that's a scary thing.  So it becomes true, for me, that my spirit perceives at some level that the mirror-dim dreams that float around in the back of my mind--those exhilarating, mysterious, generation- and region-transforming dreams that the Holy Spirit resurrects in my heart every year or so--those dreams also are wrapped up inside my biggest fears.  

I like my comfortable life.  I don't really want my life to be radically different, turned upside-down for the purpose of investing in this generation of children.  But I know, too, that as long as I hold on to being comfortable, my influence will not extend outside my comfortable walls.  The Lord's work will go undone by me.  

There is no way for me to know What May Be, or What Could Have Been.  I love control, love knowing what to expect.  But the only thing I really have any control over is how I spend this moment.  How will my Present Tense be spent?  And I know that more than any other pursuit, what God desires of me, what He's compelling me to do, is to Pray.  I have to learn to pray.  I so desperately want to be able to learn it by reading a book, by learning from someone else's experience.  But that just won't do.  The only "trick" for getting the hang of being a prayer warrior of any clout at all is to 

just pray. 

So maybe the first circle I need to pray through is 

EXTEND MY WALLS.  Less of me, and more of You, God!

And those of you who are already decent pray-ers?  Would you lift me up?  That I would just pray, and see at a profoundly deeper level what the Lord has for me to put my hands to?  Thank you, friends!