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THE PRESENCE PARADIGM

SCOTLAND • ENGLAND • ISRAEL

The road and the hillside become sacred spots to many when the winds of God blow. Revival is a going of God among his people, and an awareness of God laying hold of the community.

DUNCAN CAMPBELL

Frenzied ghosts hissed and groaned, spitting rain horizontally across the island from the North Atlantic Ocean. Weary from two days on the road, I dialled home merely to hear the sound of a friendly voice. “Honey, this is crazy. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I wish I was there with you.”

The Outer Hebrides constitute some of the wildest and remotest of all the British Isles. More than sixty granite islands lie scattered like a necklace in the jade-blue seas to the west of the Scottish mainland. Fringed in white sand, they rise to jagged heights beneath glowering skies like the teeth of a smoke-breathing dragon. A thousand years before Abraham and three thousand miles north of his birthplace, Neolithic tribes were already eking a life out of these shores, pulling fish from the sea and erecting stone circles that huddle mysteriously around the land to this day.

When Columba first brought the gospel here in the sixth century, it took root readily and spread vigorously, displacing paganism as a constellation of monasteries and simple prayer cells coruscated out across the Hebrides from the abbey at Iona. Eventually this unlikely region of the world became the greatest centre of Christianity outside the Mediterranean basin. The Hebridean islands continued to thrive as an epicentre of apostolic faith for almost 300 years, until marauding Vikings (with colourful names such as Harald Fairhair, Ketill Flatnose, and Bjorn Cripplehand) sacked the archipelago, desecrating its many monasteries and killing its priests.

Most of the Hebridean islands today are uninhabited, and I was starting to understand why. My jeans were wet, it was dark, I was almost a thousand miles from home, and I couldn’t get a signal on my mobile phone. I dashed from my car to an old-fashioned red phone box. Rain was crackling like shingle against the glass. The wind was howling under the door. But Sammy’s voice was warm as caramel, reassuring me that God had sent me to this place for a reason. She was right. I was here on a pilgrimage of sorts, visiting the scene of the last Great Awakening and investigating a peculiar set of clues I’d recently unearthed in my late grandfather’s archive.

Something had happened here in those postwar years in the Outer Hebrides, and particularly on the Isle of Lewis, that cannot be fully explained to this day. Between 1949 and 1953, the majority of the population surrendered their lives to Christ, empty churches were repopulated with young people, there were miraculous signs and wonders, and the entire fabric of Hebridean society was transformed by the gospel. All in just four years. Those who lived through those years insist that their experiences can only be attributed to a sovereign act of God in answer to their earnest prayers. They describe the Holy Spirit sometimes seeming to hover over specific geographical areas so that anyone who stepped into those particular zones could feel his presence tangibly and undeniably. On one occasion, at a prayer meeting in the village of Arnol, the room physically shook as they cried out to God.

God’s presence sometimes became so palpable in parts of the Isle of Lewis that 75 per cent of those who gave their lives to Christ, on one particular night, did so before they even reached a meeting. Workmen knelt in the mud by the roadside, repenting of their sins. Housewives woke in their beds feeling so deeply disturbed by the state of their souls that they dared not wait until morning to get right with God. A group of young people left a party and travelled together by bus to surrender their lives to Jesus at the church. Some historians argue that there hasn’t been an equivalent movement of transformational revival anywhere else in the Western world since then. Certainly anyone who prays and longs for the renewal of the church and the transformation of nations has good reason to explore the remarkable events that shook these islands in the postwar years.

Huddled in the phone box that night, I reminded myself that this was holy ground. People in this place had, within living memory, experienced the sort of phenomena we read about in the Bible, where it is said of the early church: “After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly” (Acts 4:31).

The Hebridean revival began in the tiny village of Barvas on the Isle of Lewis, where two elderly sisters, Christine and Peggy Smith, were sitting by their peat fire lost in prayer. One of them was eighty-two, bent double with arthritis, and the other was eighty-four and blind. They couldn’t do much, but they could certainly still pray, and on this particular night their souls were burdened deeply by the complete absence of young people from the church across the fields. Outside, the moon hung high in the sky and the wind swept in from the sea, but inside the fire sighed and crackled, casting gentle shadows across the room as the Smith sisters poured out their hearts to heaven in their native Gaelic tongue.

Suddenly one of the women received a vision of young people filling the church. It was as simple as that —the sort of thing we might gloss over in many of our meetings today. But these two old prayer warriors were not so flippant. They summoned the minister to their house the following morning and informed him quite unequivocally that he would be needing to get ready. “Revival is coming.”

“What do you suggest I do?” he asked a little helplessly.

“What should you do?” they gasped. “You should pray, man!” And then these two octogenarian saints proposed a deal. “If you will gather your elders and pray in the barn at the other end of the village at least two nights per week,” they said, “we will do the same here from ten at night ’til three in the morning.”

And so a remarkable series of late-night prayer meetings began in the village of Barvas on the Isle of Lewis in the year 1949. They persevered like this, praying for five hours a night, twice a week, because they were convinced that God had spoken —and that when he gives a promise it’s our job to pray it into being.

There were no instant answers, no further visions, and certainly no teenagers miraculously turning up at church. But they refused to relent. The Smith sisters kept praying in their cottage, and the church elders kept praying in their barn for many weeks, until a particular night when one of the elders stood to read Psalm 24:

Who may ascend the mountain of the LORD?

Who may stand in his holy place?

The one who has clean hands and a pure heart,

Who does not trust in an idol

or swear by a false God.

They will receive blessing from the LORD

and vindication from God their Saviour.

“Brethren,” he said, “it is just so much humbug to be waiting thus, night after night, month after month, if we ourselves are not right with God.” They nodded and he continued, “I must ask myself, ‘Is my heart pure? Are my hands clean?’” He lifted his head and emitted a strange cry; then he fell to his knees and crumpled to the floor.

The barn was suddenly filled with the presence of God. It was a moment that would later be identified as “the catalyst that let loose a power that shook the Hebrides.”[21]

The following morning the minister sent word to an organisation called The Faith Mission in Edinburgh, requesting a Gaelic-speaking evangelist to be sent to the island without delay. A preacher by the name of Duncan Campbell was duly dispatched and made his way north. By the time he reached the village of Barvas, Duncan Campbell found the church building packed with inquisitive locals who wanted to make sure that they didn’t miss out on whatever peculiarities might happen next.

What happened next is a holy thing, and I write about it even now with a sense of awe. It was as though the Holy Spirit began moving in the building. Many in the congregation actually cried out as if they were in physical pain. Some people arrived at the church after midnight, having been woken at home with an irresistible urge to come. That first meeting continued until four in the morning. Duncan Campbell himself had intended to stay in the Hebrides for just ten days but remained for more than two years, travelling from place to place, praying and preaching everywhere he went, leading countless people to Christ.

Standing in the phone box that night, with the rain beating against the glass, I didn’t want to stay in the Hebrides for another two minutes, let alone ten days or two years. But Sammy’s voice was reassuring, reminding me patiently of the ways the Lord had led me here. The journey had begun several weeks earlier as I flicked through some old papers belonging to my grandfather who had recently died. Buried amongst endless cuttings from newspapers, yellowed with age, I’d made a discovery so startling that it had compelled me to come.

I’d found out that The Faith Mission had been started by a man called John Govan with help from his brother, my great-grandfather James Govan. As a member of The Faith Mission and a contemporary of the Govan brothers, Duncan Campbell would have been trained, commissioned, and sent to the Isle of Lewis by members of my own family. I’d always loved the stories of the Hebridean revival, but suddenly, unexpectedly, I felt the excitement of a personal connection.

The Faith Mission had begun, I learned, with a season of intense prayer at The Water Street Hall in Edinburgh led by John Govan. For ten days, people had gathered to seek God each evening after work, sometimes continuing all night until dawn. “A day came,” my great-grandfather wrote, “when the very room was shaken, as in the days of the early church and we were filled with the Holy Spirit, with ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory.’”

It was hard to imagine those stern-looking brothers with their starched collars and bushy moustaches ever smiling, let alone experiencing “joy unspeakable” during an all-night prayer session, at which the building physically shook. Stirred in ways I couldn’t quite articulate, I poured out my heart to a trusted older friend and immediately regretted it. Interest in ancestry and family trees is a sure sign of ageing. But she listened carefully. “I think you need to go to the Hebrides,” she said eventually. “The Lord has something there for you, something in your history that he wants to release into your destiny.”

This sounded fun, and I immediately began envisaging the group of friends I would cajole into coming along for the ride. We could climb a couple of mountains, take in a distillery along the way. But then she fixed me with a beady stare. “Pete, I think you should go alone.”

I flew to Scotland, drove up through the majestic mountains of Glencoe, crossed the bridge to the Isle of Skye, and drove its length in the shadow of the Cuillin mountains. I boarded a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry to sail forty miles northwest across the Minch to the Outer Hebrides. When we landed at Tarbert, I drove another fifty miles north, along narrow roads across deserted moorland, as the night and the rain settled in. Finally I arrived in the tiny, unlit village of Barvas where I was now standing, dog-tired in soggy jeans, wondering if this whole expedition had been a terrible mistake.

I left the phone box, dashed back to the car, and began driving down unlit roads to find the lodgings my mother had kindly arranged through one of her Scottish friends. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. My mum’s friend had apparently called another friend, who had called someone else, who had said that they knew someone in the Barvas area. This woman’s house had been full, but she had suggested that perhaps her neighbour might be willing to accommodate a complete stranger. It was a tenuous invitation, to say the very least. My hosts probably weren’t even Christians. How on earth, I wondered, was I going to explain the reason for my visit, when I barely even knew the reason myself?

I was greeted at the door by an elderly lady with a warm smile and white hair coiled lazily into a bun. “Come away in,” said Morag McPhail, as if I was an old friend. “You look half-drowned!” She took my coat and ushered me into the kitchen where her husband, Donald, was sitting by the range —a tall, lean man, with white hair and the most penetrating blue eyes I’d ever seen. Some Viking blood in there for sure, I thought.

Morag busied herself making tea while Donald plied me politely with questions. At first he asked about my family and my connection to his neighbour. Then he asked about the reason for my visit.

A little hesitantly, I explained that, in case they weren’t aware, there had been an extraordinary revival of Christianity here way back in the 1950s.

My elderly hosts nodded politely, indicating that, yes, they were perhaps somewhat aware of the revival.

A little more confidently, I explained that I was a Christian and that I had come to the Hebrides on a sort of pilgrimage.

Again they nodded as if perhaps they understood that, too.

Then I explained about my great-grandfather and The Faith Mission and the link to a preacher called Duncan Campbell.

At this point my hosts erupted with laughter, as if they’d been holding it in. They started talking, both at the same time.

“Aye, we knew Duncan Campbell,” laughed Donald.

“So you’re related to The Faith Mission?” enquired Morag.

“He led me to Jesus!” continued Donald.

“Me too,” said Morag, beaming.

“Mr Campbell was our son’s godfather,” Donald chipped in.

“Aye, he was a dear friend.”

“But you said you’re related to John George Govan?”

The population of the Outer Hebrides today is little more than 27,000 inhabitants stretched across more than sixty islands and a thousand square miles. Very few of its contemporary residents were even alive in the days when revival shook the land. But my hosts had experienced the awakening firsthand. In fact, they had become Christians through it and had even known the late great Duncan Campbell personally.

But it was even more remarkable than that. Donald McPhail was too humble to tell me about the important role he had played in the revival, but subsequent research left me in no doubt that God had set me down in the home of the man who had been the main intercessor of the awakening, aged just sixteen.

There were times during the revival when Duncan Campbell’s preaching was surprisingly ineffective and he would turn to Donald McPhail for prayer support. On one occasion he was preaching to a group gathered in a police station, but his words were falling flat. Donald rose to his feet and prayed a single word with deep emotion: “Father,” he said. That was all. Just two syllables and the Holy Spirit came in power, like a rushing wind. People began to cry out for salvation without another word being preached.

On another occasion, the teenage prayer warrior took a naval officer to catch a bus. “When Donald shook my hand,” the sailor later recalled, “it was as if God himself touched me.” As the bus drove away, that man gave his life to Jesus.

Donald was now an old man, but he kindly took me to different locations on the island, recounting the astonishing stories of God’s work in each place, without ever mentioning the ways in which he himself had been deployed.

There is a telling story about a visit Donald received one day from Duncan Campbell at his family home. Donald’s mother rushed out to the barn to let her son know the exciting news that the most famous man in the land had come to call. She found him kneeling with his Bible, deep in prayer. “Please tell Mr. Campbell,” said Donald firmly, “that he shall have to wait because I am having an audience with the King.”

At the end of my stay, Donald stood in the kitchen, laid his hands on my head, and gave his benediction. The teenage intercessor was now old and grey, but the glory of those years was still undeniably etched in his features, and I felt the fire.

The book of Hebrews describes a great cloud of heavenly beings and heroes of the faith cheering us on as we seek to live for Jesus. Whenever I’m flagging in my faith, I find it helpful to remember that these saints, whose lives have inspired mine, are watching my choices, applauding my efforts and crying out, “Come on!” I can imagine Christine and Peggy Smith, the two elderly sisters who prayed until the Hebridean awakening began, standing in that great cloud of witnesses, applauding the young intercessors praying night after night in 24-7 prayer rooms, as they once did in their little cottage.

Next to the Smith sisters I can picture that dignified elder from the barn. He’s solemnly waving his Bible and exhorting us to holiness, urging us to ensure that we have “clean hands and a pure heart.”

Beside the elder stands Duncan Campbell, the great Gaelic preacher, calling out in that booming voice, challenging us not just to pray but to preach the gospel courageously. Behind Duncan Campbell I see his mentor, my ancestor, John Govan, urging us not just to pray and not just to preach, but also to train and release the next generation of revivalists, as he once did.

Finally, I see a tall, impressive man with white hair and the most piercing blue eyes you’ve ever seen. It was 6 September 2004 when Donald McPhail went to join that great cloud of witnesses. In his left hand I imagine him holding one of Morag’s cups of tea, and with the other he’s punching the air cheering on all the teenagers, reminding them that it all begins and ends in “an audience with the King.”

Then suddenly everything becomes silent and still. Every eye has turned to Donald as if they know what will happen next. Slowly a smile spreads across his face. He raises his hands (spilling a little tea), throws back his head, and issues a cry of delight: “Father!”

And at the sound of his voice all heaven roars.

Donald McPhail’s remarkable spiritual authority flowed directly from his intimacy with the Father in prayer. As the apostle Paul says:

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children.

ROMANS 8:15, MSG

The public authority of Jesus also flowed from his intimacy with the Father. Jesus was the same. His public authority flowed from his personal intimacy with the Father in prayer:

For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.

JOHN 5:20-21

The most important discovery you will ever make is the love the Father has for you. Your power in prayer will flow from the certainty that the One who made you likes you, he is not scowling at you, he is on your side. All the other messages of this book lose their meaning without the infilling presence of God the Father. That was the significance of the temple for Christ: It was “my Father’s house.” It was home. Unless our mission and our acts of mercy, our intercession, petition, confession, and spiritual warfare begin and end in the knowledge of the Father’s love, we will act and pray out of desperation, determination, and duty instead of revelation, expectation, and joy.

Our Father

As a natural activist, I don’t find this easy. I tend to want the authority without the intimacy, the power without the hidden hours enjoying the Father’s presence. I am ashamed to admit that my tendency in prayer is to rush through the preliminaries (“Our Father”) to get down to the “real” business (“Thy kingdom come” and “give us this day”). I tend to justify prayer by its results, and want to prove to the world (perhaps even in this book) that it is productive, that it works, that it is not a total waste of time.

But as the 24-7 movement unfolded around the world, Sammy’s illness meant that I was unable to travel much. At a time when I might otherwise have been visiting exotic prayer rooms, clocking up air miles, and speaking at conferences, I was in fact at home changing nappies. And it was through the frustrations of this apparent restriction that God began to teach me a great deal about waiting and worshipping in the hidden places, dwelling quietly in the Father’s house, sitting at the feet of Jesus like Mary of Bethany instead of rushing around serving him like Martha, being rather than doing. The Father began coaching me, speaking to me powerfully through the mundane circumstances of my new domestic realities.

On one particular occasion, when I had just finished writing a book, I gathered Sammy and the boys in front of my computer. I’d been working so hard for so long, the children were fractious and I was exhausted. We committed the book to the Lord, said “Amen,” and dispatched the manuscript to the publisher. It was a moment I’d been anticipating eagerly, and I knew exactly what we should do next.

We drove to a pub with a large leather couch for me and a playground for the kids. Collapsing into the soft embrace of the sofa, I pointed the boys towards the swings and slides: “Go and have fun!” I grinned, a little too enthusiastically. “Play as long as you want.”

They whooped with excitement and bounded towards the door. One of them ran right on outside to the playground, but our other son paused, watched his brother running to the swings, and then looked back at me quizzically. Slowly he turned round and walked back into the room as if he’d forgotten something or had something to ask. But instead he just climbed into my lap, threw his arms around my neck, and said four words that sucked the air from the room: “Daddy,” he whispered, looking into my eyes and nodding his head with each syllable to emphasis the point, “Daddy, I missed you.” While our other son laughed on the slides and swings outside, I sat quietly inside, breathing in time with the little man in my arms.

He didn’t become any more my son at that moment just because he’d preferred me to the playground. I didn’t start loving him more than our other boy outside on the swings. But his act of unnecessary affection ministered to my tired father’s heart at depths he could never have known. And the Bible says that this is precisely the opportunity we have in Christian prayer: to minister to the Father’s heart, with unnecessary acts of deep affection. When we choose God’s presence at 3 a.m., he won’t love us any more than all the sensible people asleep at home, but our desire to be with him in those moments is the sweetest song we will ever sing.

God’s Oscar Speech

When Jesus was baptised, the Spirit descended and the Father announced to the world how very proud he was of his boy: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). At this point in his life, Jesus hadn’t done anything publicly to merit such approval. He was thirty years old at a time when people rarely lived beyond forty-five, and his ministry had still not begun, yet the Father was already pleased with him. God’s pleasure in us is never dependent upon our achievements. He doesn’t grade our performance like a wannabe celebrity in a reality show. He loves us because he likes us because we are his kids.

There are just two other occasions on which the Gospels report the actual words of the Father speaking audibly to Jesus, and since it has only been recorded three times in the totality of world history, all three moments surely deserve our particular attention. This first instance occurred at Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan at the start of his ministry. The second occurred during his transfiguration on a mountain in the middle of his ministry (Luke 9:35). The third occurred in the temple at the end of his ministry during Jesus’ final week (John 12:28). The weird thing is that, on all three occasions —in the river at the start, up the mountain in the middle, and at the temple near the end —the Father says pretty much the same thing. At Jesus’ transfiguration the Father says, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matthew 17:5). Almost identical to his words at Jesus’ baptism. And the third time he simply affirms Jesus, assuring him that his life has already brought glory.

These three exchanges which punctuate the three years of Jesus’ ministry must surely rank as some of the most important verses in the whole of Scripture, and yet they say so little. The Father could have denounced the Romans, rebuked his Son’s detractors, told people to repent, or revealed the meaning of life. This, after all, is God speaking audibly to his Son for all to hear. But instead, on each occasion, all he says is “I love you” twice and “I’m proud of you” three times. And it seems to me that, in the absence of any other evidence, these three exchanges alone tell us all we need to know about the unconditional affection and affirmation within the heart of the Trinity, and consequently the relentless love of the Father towards all of us as his children: His priority is relationship, and his default is kindness. The Father’s Oscar speech, his one phone call, the words he wants to write in the sky on your birthday, are these: “I love you. I’m proud of you.”

Of course, this can be frustrating. Most of us would prefer God to speak in specifics: to tell us what to do, when to do it, and how. But he generally refuses to micromanage our lives. When I say, “Where should I go?” he says, “I love you.” I ask, “What should I do?” and he says, “I’m proud of you.” I say, “How should I handle this situation?” and he says, “Let’s hang out.” Time and time again God ignores my most pressing questions in order to answer the deepest longing of my heart.

A prayer room may sometimes become a sort of classroom in which we learn from God, or it may occasionally become a boardroom for doing business with him, or a war room in which we fight for the extension of his kingdom. But first and foremost a prayer room is not a classroom, a boardroom or a war room; it’s a living room for intimate interaction with the Father. Carol Arnott, who with her husband, John, has spent more than twenty years helping Christians to wait and to “soak” in God’s presence at their church in Toronto, puts it like this:

There must be time for Him, just to love Him and have Him love us, no other agendas, no shopping lists of prayer requests. These may come later, but we need to put loving Him first, because only as we are filled with His love, do we have love to give away. So many Christians cannot rest in His presence but must constantly “be on duty.” . . . I do not want to hear the words, “Depart from me; I never knew you.” I want the love affair to begin now.[22]

Couch Time

Resting in God’s presence is one of the most important and one of the most difficult things we will ever learn to do. I went on retreat to an old monastery with my friend James, an Anglican priest. It was only a two-day retreat, but I arrived with long lists of all the problems I needed to pray about, questions I needed God to solve, and three big books I was determined to read. All in forty-eight hours. Noticing how unrealistic and driven I was, even in my prayer times, James told me a simple, beautiful story that helped slow me down.

James’s son Connor was in his final year at school, and most days, when he got home he would come and find his dad in the study, remove his tie, and flop down onto the sofa. He would remain there for a while as James continued to work —silently sprawled out on the cushions, staring at the ceiling, idly thumbing his phone, never particularly wanting to talk. Connor didn’t have any agenda other than to unwind for a bit in the presence of his dad. Later in the evening he would chat about his day and ask to borrow the car. But when he first got home all he wanted to do was to be with his father without doing or saying anything. “You have no idea,” said James, eyeing the ambitious pile of books I’d brought on retreat, “how deeply I treasure those wasted moments, simply doing nothing together every day.”

Our Father in heaven longs for us to seek out his presence in the Holy of Holies without an agenda. Not out of duty. Not because we have favours to ask or things to get off our chests. He wants us to seek him out simply because we are happier in his presence than anywhere else. “One thing I ask from the Lord,” says the psalmist:

this only do I seek:

that I may dwell in the house of the LORD

all the days of my life,

to gaze on the beauty of the LORD

and to seek him in his temple.

PSALM 27:4

Of course there are times to be intentional in prayer: to petition the Father for provision, to cry out for help, to ask for advice, to borrow the car keys. But if we only ever make demands of God, we will gradually reduce our relationship with him to a self-interested wishlist of transactional requests. Instead, in the words of Pope Francis:

Prayer should be an experience of giving way, of surrendering, where our entire being enters into the presence of God. This is where dialogue, listening and transformation occur. Looking at God, but above all sensing that we are being watched by him.

The Pope even admits: “Sometimes I allow myself to fall asleep while sitting there and just let Him look at me. I have the sense of being in someone else’s hands.”[23]

Learning to dwell (and even to sleep) in the love of the Father in this way is offensive to the strategic part of our brains —a violation of the ego, a sort of dying. It can seem irresponsible, like David dancing in his underpants when he should have been thinking about his reputation as a national leader (2 Samuel 6:12-16). It can appear profligate and superspiritual, like the psalmist “yearning,” “fainting,” and even “crying out” simply to be in God’s dwelling place (Psalm 84). It can seem naïve and scandalous, like Mary of Bethany splashing bottles of Chanel on Jesus’ feet, when the money could have been used to feed the hungry (Mark 14:3-4). It can be inefficient, like Jesus staying up all night in prayer when he really needed to be sharp the next day (e.g., Luke 6:12). It can appear selfish, like Mary abandoning her sister peeling potatoes in the kitchen so that she could recline at the feet of Jesus (Luke 10:38-42). It can seem rude, like Donald McPhail ignoring his important guest to continue his “audience with the King.” It can seem unstrategic, like me swapping church-planting for mere prayer. “To be a witness,” says the writer Madeleine L’Engle, “is to be a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”[24]

23-7 Prayer

Near the start of the 24-7 movement I shared a pizza with Brennan Manning, the much-loved priest and author of The Ragamuffin Gospel. “How do you know when you’ve prayed enough?” he asked me with a twinkle in his eye.

“I guess I don’t,” I admitted eventually.

“So you feel guilty most of the time?” he continued.

“Well, I try not to . . .”

“Let me tell you,” he continued, waving a piece of Hawaiian pizza in my direction, “how we see prayer in the contemplative tradition. For us,” he said mischievously, “the hour you might spend in a prayer room each day would be the one hour in the day when you don’t pray.”

He paused, but I just stared at him blankly.

“It’s like this,” he continued. “The hour you spend in the prayer room is when you refocus, re-centre on Jesus, becoming fully aware of his presence once again. When this happens, you can carry God’s presence with you into the other twenty-three hours of the day, knowing all the time that he is with you, he is for you, he likes you, and he hears your thoughts. You’ll see people and situations the way he sees them. When problems arise you’ll pray in real time, right then and there, instead of compiling prayer lists for a later holier moment. In fact, your life will become that moment: a continual conversation with God.”

I nodded. This was a strange concept to someone who had grown up in a tradition that anchored prayer securely in an all-important daily devotional time, or at an optional weekly prayer meeting, or at church on Sunday morning. It seemed strange, and yet it also made a lot of sense in the light of the things we were learning about the presence paradigm. Here was a way to move from just saying our prayers to being our prayers, from asking for God’s kingdom to come once or twice a day to carrying his presence with us continually. It meant that the real purpose of a 24-7 prayer room is to multiply itself into the lives of those who use it, sending them out from the presence of God as walking, talking prayer rooms, carriers of his presence —living temples of the Holy Spirit.

Nice Tree

God spoke to me about this very clearly one day, as I walked down a road near my house. It wasn’t an audible voice, but it was so unmistakably and unexpectedly him that I stopped immediately, mid-pace, right there in the crowded street. God said, “Look at that tree.”

I froze and stared at it with my heart racing. Something momentous was obviously about to happen. Perhaps this was to be my burning-bush moment? Or perhaps the tree was about to fall, and I was to heroically save someone? Or maybe the Lord was about to give me a powerful prophetic revelation or even an angelic visitation.

I stood there transfixed, staring into the branches of a fairly average hawthorn (if my memory serves me correctly), hardly daring to breathe. And gradually . . . absolutely nothing happened. I waited undeterred, rooted to the spot, eyes aloft, muscles tensed, while fellow pedestrians gave me sideways glances, probably concerned that I’d lost my cat, or cricked my neck, or was having some kind of awkward “episode.”

“OK, I’m looking at the tree,” I hissed eventually, just in case God hadn’t noticed or had got distracted with events in the Middle East. “What happens now?”

But God didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to reply. Eventually, a little reluctantly, he said, “I just thought it was a pretty good tree, Pete,” before adding, “Why do you always have to get so intense about everything?”

I found myself muttering, “Nice tree, Lord. Good job on the tree.” Then I wandered off down the road a little dejectedly, having experienced the most underwhelming epiphany of all time.

Your relationship with God is at its best when you talk to him about trivia: trees and trains and parking spaces. I’d hate it if my children only ever talked to me about Grave Matters of Serious Concern. What’s more, if you only pray about big, important, weighty matters, you will only occasionally be grateful. But if you learn to pray about things like nice-looking trees or your daily bread when the supermarket is full of the stuff, then you will live in a state of continual gratitude for miracles so common that most people take them for granted.

I often wonder what Adam and Eve talked to God about when they walked with him in the cool of the evening before there was any sin or sickness or suffering in the world, before there were any problems at all in the world, before there was any need for intercession or spiritual warfare. I presume that they merely said “Thank you” and “Wow” a lot. Perhaps they pointed out things they had discovered in Eden that day and asked a lot of questions. Maybe they explained the weirder names they had chosen for the animals. They must surely have said a lot of things like “Nice tree, Lord.”

One day we will be with the Lord for ever. But what will we talk to him about once there are no more sicknesses to be healed, sinners to be saved, churches to be planted, and injustices that need to be fought? Too often we only pray about problems: conflict at work, friends who need healing, prodigals far from God. One day, when the Lord invites us to walk with him in the cool of the evening, and there are no more problems we can possibly address in prayer, will we have learned simply to enjoy his presence, hallowing his name without asking for anything in return?

A friend of mine attended an intensive residential interview for a particular role in senior church leadership within a major denomination. They gave him psychometric testing, asked him to facilitate group discussions, quizzed him about his theology, and set him essays on complex ethical dilemmas. These were probably all good things to do, but at no point in the whole two-day process did anyone simply sit him down, look into his eyes, and ask the most important questions of all: “Do you love Jesus? How did you meet him first? Was it him who sent you here? Did you carry the presence of God with you when you stepped through the door today?”

This is peculiar, because there isn’t a single biblical character used significantly by God who did not have a life-changing encounter with his presence. Not one. Ezekiel would probably have failed a psychological test. The apostle Peter would have flunked a group-facilitation exercise for sure. James and John had unhealthy ambition. Thomas was plagued by doubt. Paul had been a Machiavellian aggressor against Christians. But none of this really mattered because they had all encountered Christ and become carriers of his presence.

Jesus called the twelve disciples to himself primarily so “that they might be with him” and only secondarily “that he might send them out to preach” (Mark 3:14). Before we do great things for Jesus, we are called very simply to become his friends. Henri Nouwen, who swapped a successful career as a university professor for life amongst the physically and mentally disabled, said that the most important question for any minister of the gospel is not “How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results?” but “Are you in love with Jesus?”[25] This means that we are qualified for Christian service by our praying and not our preaching, by our desire to worship him and not our workload on his behalf, by knowing Jesus personally and not just by knowing a lot of interesting things about him. If you lose God’s presence you lose everything, but if you know his presence you already have everything you will ever need.

The Secret of Obed-Edom

I have always had a particular soft spot for a very minor biblical character called Obed-Edom, whose life epitomises the sheer joy available to us all in the presence paradigm. But blink and you’ll miss him. He photobombs the story of David a couple of times, and then he’s gone. And yet Obed-Edom knew all about hosting the presence of God because he had once accommodated the Ark of the Covenant in his own home. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out.

You may recall that the Ark had been on its way into Jerusalem, carried clumsily on the back of a cart, when an unfortunate ox-driver called Uzzah reached out and touched it. He was only trying to stop the holiest object in the world tumbling to the ground. It should never have been carried so casually in the first place, but poor old Uzzah dropped dead on the spot. Everyone was suddenly terrified —so much so that King David gave orders to abort the procession and approached the nearest landowner with one of the most extraordinary requests in world history: “Would you mind housing the Ark of the Covenant for a while?” David needed time to work out what to do.

I assume that Obed-Edom had a large house, and that he had children. Imagine how worried he must have been when he commanded them not, under any circumstances, to touch the big box with the angel wings in the spare room. Obed-Edom had no guarantee at all that housing the symbol of God’s presence was not going to cost him his life or the life of at least one of his children. Caught somewhere between wonder and fear, he must have thanked God for the unspeakable honour of his presence with one breath and begged God to spare his life with the other. More than a thousand years before the cross of Christ, Obed-Edom was forced to gamble his life upon grace.

The glory of God’s presence must have been heavy throughout Obed-Edom’s home for the three months in which he housed the Ark. I imagine worship and prayer erupting continually; revelation flowing freely; his marriage happier and more fulfilled than it had ever been; the children laughing, thriving, and healthy; neighbours coming round just to enjoy the atmosphere of peace and joy; arguments getting resolved quickly; and consciences sensitised to holiness. We’re told that, during this season, Obed-Edom’s business prospered so much that eventually King David was provoked to envy. You have to be significantly successful in business to leave a king feeling like he’s missing out. Wanting the blessing of God’s presence for his own family and city, David eventually determined to retrieve the Ark and resumed the procession, but this time he did so with appropriate reverence and lavish attention to every detail. It became such a joyful carnival, so full of the presence of God, that David himself was eventually overwhelmed with worship, dancing in complete abandonment in his underwear.

The story moves on. Obed-Edom’s fifteen minutes of fame have passed. But then, when we are just about to forget him altogether, the name of Obed-Edom begins to pop up again and again. First as a temple porter, then as one of the “singers with instruments” appointed by the Levites, and finally as a treasurer in the temple (1 Chronicles 15:18, 21; 2 Chronicles 25:24). If this is the same fellow, we may well wonder why such a successful businessman would take a relatively humble job as a porter, and then as a musician in the worship band, and finally as the temple treasurer. We can’t know for sure, but it is a reasonable guess that Obed-Edom had fallen in love with the presence of God. The one commonality between these three roles is that they all orbited the Ark of the Covenant, now housed in the temple. Having experienced the blessing of proximity to the Lord, Obed-Edom knew that nothing else and nowhere else could be as satisfying. He simply didn’t care whether he was a treasurer, a porter, or a musician. He would do anything to get as close as he could to the Ark once again. Obed-Edom’s overwhelming passion for the presence of God is captured in Psalm 84. The psalm itself is anonymous —no one knows for sure who wrote it —but I have a theory that Obed-Edom was its author. I should say at this point that there is absolutely no academic evidence whatsoever to support my theory. But even if he didn’t write Psalm 84, it’s certainly easy to imagine Obed-Edom happily reciting it as he went about his duties at the temple:

How lovely is your dwelling-place, LORD Almighty!

My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD;

my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. . . .

Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you. . . .

Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God

than dwell in the tents of the wicked.

When we host God’s presence in our homes, schools, businesses, and churches, we unlock Obed-Edom’s secret. The joy of the Father’s house ruins us for the suburbs of religious mediocrity. Augustine knew this secret too: “You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”[26] That is often my experience when I step into a prayer room. The door shuts, and I sigh with the sense of homecoming. All the voices that have been conspiring to distract me from the presence of God are exposed in that moment as convincing lies. I remember again that my main purpose in life, my highest calling, the primary reason for my existence, is simply, wonderfully, in the famous words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”[27]

As the 24-7 movement continued to expand, we were certainly experiencing the joy of God’s presence and sometimes even felt a bit like Obed-Edom, almost addicted to the Father’s house. The stories I’d heard from Donald in the Hebrides still lay far beyond anything we’d so far witnessed, but there were certainly many encouragements. And so we had gathered the 24-7 tribes in Amsterdam to seek God in the wake of 9/11. We were focused on Europe and the Middle East, and when Rolling Stone unexpectedly crashed the party and the movement began to take off in America, we started to wonder whether maybe the Holy Spirit was calling us to look west as well. The answer was coming, but we were going to face one of the most supernatural and terrifying encounters of our lives to find it.

Many centuries before Europeans arrived in America, around the time of Abraham, the ancient Celts stood on the beaches of places like the Outer Hebrides, gazing west as the setting sun sank flaming into the sea. They would wonder what lay beyond that distant horizon, and would sit around fires at night weaving magical stories about a place they called Tir na Nόg, “Land of the Young.” The citizens of this land were, they believed, always happy and eternally young. Paradise awaited them somewhere beyond the sea.

It’s fascinating to me that the modern mythology of America as a land of dreams, of plenty, of eternal youth may well be as old as these stories of Tir na Nόg, nurtured over many centuries in the imaginations of the very Celtic peoples who first left Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, lured so easily by the promise of a New World located, as it always had been in their oldest thoughts, beyond the western horizon where the sun slips into the sea.

Tir na Nόg sounded pretty good to Sammy and me. We were learning to find the presence of God in the midst of our trials, but with terrorist attacks filling the headlines in Europe and regular seizures still afflicting our lives at home, a bright new land of happiness and eternal youth sounded great. Exchanging the English rain for Tir na Nόg was a beguiling dream, but it was to be an unexpected nightmare that would propel us, soon enough, to its shores.

SELAH

Be still, and know that I am God.

PSALM 46:10

I pause now to become more aware of your presence in the stillness of this moment. Grant me epiphanies of the ordinary today —glimpses of your presence in the places I go, the people I meet, the routine things I do. Teach me to perceive and receive your presence in all things. Amen.

It is not necessary for being with God to be always at church; we may make an oratory of our heart wherein to retire from time to time, to converse with him . . . Everyone is capable of such familiar conversation with God.

BROTHER LAWRENCE, THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD