5

ALL HELL

ENGLAND • SWITZERLAND • AMERICA

We are up against the unseen power that controls this dark world, and spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil.

EPHESIANS 6:12, PHILLIPS

The sound of the siren seemed to emanate from another place entirely. Another ambulance. Another family. Not us. Somewhere else. Surely, not us again.

Hudson, who was now four years old, lay in my arms, clutching his favourite cuddly toy, Lala, with one hand and gripping three of my fingers with the other. “Daddy?” he said, so quietly that I had to bow my head. “Daddy, my legs feel funny.”

We were slaloming down country lanes, scribbled across the English landscape years before cars and trucks and speeds like these. I counted numbers in my head, and tried to ignore the ominous, involuntary twitching in my son’s legs.

“It’s going to be OK, Huddy,” I whispered, brushing his hair softly and banishing the helium from my lungs. “We’ll be at the hospital soon and they will make you better. Try to stay awake.”

The National Poisons Clinic had warned us that it was probably too late to remove the powerful drugs from his tiny body.

I glanced nervously across at Sammy, searching for reassurances of my own. Strapped into a fold-down chair by the ambulance door, she was beautiful in her evening clothes, a touch of mascara around those big blue eyes, ready to party. It had been several months since the encounter with Rolling Stone in Amsterdam, even longer since that fateful return to Cape St. Vincent, and she was slowly getting better. Her hair was tied back to hide the scar, but a few strands were playing across her face as she stared down at her phone, frenetically texting friends, begging them to wake and pray for our little boy.

Instruments rattled in their allocated drawers. Lights strobed out across the fields. The swirling of the van and the smell of diesel. I closed my eyes, caught in a nightmare, hardly believing that we were back here again.

Two years had passed since Sammy’s surgery, eighteen months since our return to Cape St. Vincent. Things had been going well. Maybe too well. Much of the day had been spent with one of my heroes: an old American missions statesman called Floyd McClung. Having heard the near-mythical tales about Floyd’s pioneering work in Afghanistan on the hippie trail in the 1970s, and later in Amsterdam’s infamous red-light district, and having been profoundly impacted as a teenager by his book The Father Heart of God, I had been thrilled finally to meet this smiling giant. His seven-foot frame, wide smile, and white socks worn with Crocs combined to remind me of Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant.

Floyd was visiting England to speak at a large conference with four impressive young men. We didn’t know it at the time, sitting in that ambulance, but these people were about to become firm friends, key players in the unfolding story of 24-7 Prayer. In fact, the terror of that night would catapult us into their world in a remarkable way, almost against our wills.

One of the young men, Adam Cox, seemed to burn with quiet intensity. But where Adam was intense, his friend Nate Chud —a handsome Alaskan with a toothpick perpetually lodged in his perfect dentistry —was so laid back he almost seemed stoned. And then there was Travis, with a long blond ponytail and a remarkable call to the Native American reservations. Beside Travis was David Blackwell from Chicago, a man without an ounce of fat anywhere on his body, who could talk more enthusiastically about food than anyone I’d ever met. David once spoke for almost half an hour about a single Chicago hot dog. I timed him.

I had asked them about the impact of the recent terror attacks on their nation, and about Afghanistan, where Floyd once lived. The gentle giant sighed. “Pete,” he said eventually, “there’s an urgent need in America, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East right now for . . . Jesus!” He laughed at the naïvety of his statement, raising his hands above his head in mock surrender. “That’s why we need to pray!” He turned his attention to Sammy, staring at her over the top of his grandpa spectacles, and then looked back at me. “The 24-7 movement isn’t a coincidence. You have been raised up —by God —precisely for such a time as this.”

Emboldened and sobered, I embarked upon our story, starting with the vision at Cape St. Vincent, and our return on 9/11. I described the red moon that had risen above us the night we launched 24-7 in Guildford, about Rolling Stone in Amsterdam, about the unexpected explosion of prayer rooms and the way the movement seemed now to be morphing into mission.

Floyd just laughed and nodded like he was remembering the whole thing. And then, leaning back in that tiny chair and crossing his legs so that one giant Croc was almost as high as my head, he sighed. “OK, count me in. How do I join?”

“What we really need,” I said, “is a few older people, mothers and fathers who’ve been around the block a few times, who’ll believe in us enough to want to help us without trying to take control.”

Floyd said he’d love to be one of those people, and casually suggested that we think about opening an office for 24-7USA at the new mission college he was establishing in Kansas City. It sounded exciting, and we agreed to talk together more the following day.

But maybe someone somewhere didn’t want us to talk more the next day, the day after that, or ever. Within twenty-four hours of that first meeting, all hell had been let loose in both Floyd’s family and ours.

Blasphemous Prayers

Worshipping in such a large congregation later that night, I surveyed the sea of shining faces and smiled at Sammy. Over the previous three years we had countless seizures, a brain tumour, the birth of a child, and the beginnings of a global movement. The encouragement from Floyd that day, and the atmosphere of celebration in the venue, felt like a milestone on Sammy’s incremental road to recovery. Life was, at last, starting to feel less scary, more fun.

After the meeting, Sammy and I popped back to our accommodation to check on the boys before heading out to a reception for fellow speakers. The babysitter had put Hudson to sleep in our bedroom so that he wouldn’t disturb his younger brother. Poking our heads around the door, we could see that he had wriggled down under the covers so that only his mop of blond hair was visible above the blankets. We whispered his name, but he didn’t move. Sammy tiptoed into the room and risked turning on a light to refresh her make-up. He didn’t stir. Didn’t move a muscle.

Then God spoke.

Not audibly. Not undeniably. But now in the ambulance, with the benefit of hindsight, it did seem that something supernatural must have taken place —and the thought granted me a faint glimmer of hope. You can call it female intuition, call it a hunch, call it luck if you really have that much faith in fate, but something caused Sammy to put down her hairbrush and go to a special container, tucked away in one of the drawers where she had been hiding her medication from the kids.

Bemused and frustrated, I watched her empty a pile of those powerful brain-drugs onto the bed in which Hudson was sleeping and laboriously count them out. A blue pill. A yellow pill. A white one. A pink one. Another white one. And so on. We were already late for the party. I was checking the time. Pacing the hallway. The moment she finished counting, I said, “Come on, let’s go,” and stepped towards the door. But Sammy just ignored my impatience and began the whole pointless exercise all over again, counting faster.

“Twenty,” she said at last. Then she looked up, fear in her eyes. “Pete, twenty of my pills are missing.”

For a split second I paused. Had she miscounted? Left some pills at home? But then, with a single thought, we both lurched towards Hudson, flung back the covers and froze with horror.

Hudson was lying on his side, curled up in his tartan pyjamas. A single yellow pill lay half-sucked on the ice-white pillow. A pretty pink one was trickling even now from his baby lips. How many anti-convulsant drugs had he swallowed, searching for one that would taste as nice as they’d always looked?

“Huddy!” I commanded, shaking him to wake him. But he barely stirred. Sammy was talking hysterically. The babysitter rushed in. There were those two wet pills on the pillow, but no trace of the other eighteen.

Scooping Hudson into my arms, I bounded out of the building in three or four strides, yelling instructions over my shoulder, running with his listless body towards the site office.

“Call an ambulance!” I shouted, barely recognising my own voice. My lungs were empty and the world was moving way too slow. The hospital, they said, was twenty-six miles away. Twenty-six miles at night on narrow country roads designed for horses. Lanes scarcely wider than the van in which we were travelling.

Many years ago, God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah to a terrified people: “I know the plans I have for you,” he promised, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). Sitting there in the site office a little earlier, holding our semiconscious four-year-old, awaiting the ambulance, I’d felt all such hope draining from my body. Could the very drugs that saved my wife now damage or destroy our firstborn son? My own triumphant sermon, preached with such conviction barely an hour before, now seemed hollow.

The National Poisons Clinic had fired questions down the phone. I heard myself confirming that, yes, a four-year-old boy had indeed ingested up to eighteen epilepsy pills and sucked on two more. I had recited the names and the strengths of my wife’s medication. Some of the strongest anti-convulsant drugs on the market. At least ninety minutes previously.

“Nineteen?”

“No. Nine-oh,” I replied flatly.

A slight pause.

I had tried to describe the way that his legs were occasionally spasming. They said it was probably too late to get the drugs out of his system. Someone muttered something darkly about his liver and other organs. I shut it out. The thought of those powerful drugs irretrievably damaging our child was simply too terrible to accommodate.

Sitting in the ambulance now, I held my son, closed my eyes, and prayed desperately in sighs and mumbled blasphemies.

We arrived eventually at the hospital where night staff hurried us, blinking, through bright lights to an observation room. Sammy’s frenetic texting seemed to have mobilised a small army of intercessors, and yet it felt foolish to admit such things amidst the cold, clinical tools of medical science.

A doctor arrived to conduct some initial observations. He instructed a nurse to take a blood sample and hurried away. Sammy and I sat talking as calmly as we could, holding hands, exchanging worried glances. We noticed that Hudson’s spasms had stopped. What did it mean? He began to stir. And then he suddenly sat up and asked where he was. We stared at him in amazement, hardly knowing what to say.

The nurse returned to take Hudson’s blood. She ran a few checks and took his sample away for analysis.

Eventually, the doctor returned with the results. “Hudson Greig,” he said slowly, checking his clipboard, looking at us and then at the blinking boy in the tartan pyjamas staring up at him. Were we certain, he asked, still staring at Huddy, that our child had ingested so many pills? Because there was no sign of any poison whatsoever in his system. All Hudson’s vital signs were fine, he said, his eyebrows arching with doubt. And then, with a weary shrug, he said we were free to go.

We arranged a new prescription for all Sammy’s missing drugs and climbed into a taxi, hugging Hudson especially tight. Had we really just experienced a miracle? How could a child who had been convulsing and half-conscious when we carried him into the ambulance a few hours earlier now be heading home completely fine without any clinical intervention? We would later interrogate the babysitter, check and double-check the apartment for any sign of the missing pills, and search in vain for a way to explain Sammy’s mysterious compulsion to count her drugs. In the end, however, we never did find a better explanation than the simplest one of all: God really had spoken to Sammy and answered our prayers. He had intervened miraculously to spare the life of our little boy.

Of course, people question miracle stories like these, and so they should. In a world full of charlatans and sweet, gullible suckers, it’s only rational to wonder about the number of serious, verifiable illnesses which remain uncured while Jesus appears in a tortilla, sends gold dust around Christmas time, or makes a leg grow by half an inch. We were never meant to anchor our faith in tortillas and Pentecostal osteopathy. We didn’t kiss our brains goodbye when we gave our lives to Jesus. And he doesn’t get insecure if we ask a few sensible questions.

However, although miracles can be misreported, and they certainly don’t happen as frequently as we might like, this does not mean that they don’t happen at all. Jesus performed many miracles and told us to expect the same (John 14:12). It was Einstein who said that there are really only two ways to live: as if nothing’s a miracle or as if everything is. The very intellectual capacity we possess with which to question miracles is in itself a kind of miracle beyond explanation. We might as well deny our own ability to think and blink and read a book. Waking up as we do in a cosmos where a billion planets have apparently been perfectly choreographed to orbit a million stars, it’s absurd to question the possibility that sometimes a car might swerve unexpectedly to spare the life of a child. Finding ourselves to be intricately designed, sentient beings, it seems ridiculous to doubt the occasional wonder of an eye opening, or a virus dying, or a depression lifting, or a cancer that had been inexplicably growing one day inexplicably shrinking the next, or a collection of anti-convulsant drugs disappearing from a child’s bloodstream at the command of the One who constructed his cardiovascular system in the first place.

We paid the taxi driver a small fortune and trudged wearily back towards our apartment, muttering something about docking Hudson’s pocket money for the next twenty years. But there was still one more shock in store, as we discovered from a steward on night duty.

“Quite a night,” he muttered.

“Quite a night,” we agreed.

“First this little monkey scares us all witless,” he said, winking at Hudson, “and then this terrible business with Floyd McClung’s daughter.”

“Why?” we both exclaimed. “What’s happened?”

“I guess it was while you were gone. Misha —that’s her name. She was pregnant and went into labour, but something went wrong. She’s in a coma. Fighting for her life, and the baby too. Not looking good, I’m afraid. Need to pray.”

At the door of our apartment, Sammy paused to gaze at Hudson asleep in my arms, his head resting on Lala sandwiched against my chest. “Thank you, Lord,” she whispered softly, stroking his blond hair. “I don’t know what’s going on round here,” she continued, staring now at the long row of identical doors. “But please, Lord, would you do for Floyd and his daughter what you just did for us?”

We opened the door and went in to bed.

I spent much of the next day online and on the phone, furiously mobilising prayer for Floyd’s daughter, doing what little we could to support them. There was no time to process our own trauma from the night before —the news coming through from America was terrifying. Misha had suffered an amniotic embolism and was being kept in a coma. Some of the fluid from her womb had leaked into her heart, and this had caused cardiorespiratory collapse. She had gone eight minutes without breathing. The medical prognosis for both mother and baby was utterly bleak. Misha, it seemed, was suffering from one of the most dangerous and untreatable conditions in obstetrics, a set of complications associated with an 86 per cent mortality rate.[28] Even if she survived, Floyd had been cautioned to prepare himself for the probability that his daughter would suffer long-term neurological damage. As for his new grandchild, it was a boy called Luke born by emergency C-section, but he had probably been starved of oxygen for as many as fourteen minutes.

The prognoses for both Misha and baby Luke were terrifying, and yet we prayed for them with a new level of faith fuelled by the miraculous events of the night before. Hadn’t God just delivered our own son supernaturally? Couldn’t he do it again? We prayed because it was all we could do, but also because it was the most powerful thing we could do, and we mobilised the 24-7 networks around the world to join us.

The following night Floyd was scheduled to preach to the big crowd in the circus tent, but with his daughter lying in a coma on the other side of the world, we assumed he wouldn’t do it. Some said he shouldn’t do it. He was white as a sheet, clearly traumatised, but he was also determined to preach. “I’ve come here to deliver a message and Satan’s not going to stop me,” he said quietly. “I can’t make any difference back home, right now, and I’m not going anywhere until I’ve done the thing God brought me here to do.” And so, armed with just a pocket Bible and without notes, this broken-hearted father took to the platform and conveyed the Father heart of God to a spellbound congregation. I had never heard such a defiant sermon; the passion and the pain were written across his face on the large screens. Many people responded to the message and streamed to the front of the tent to ask for prayer. Floyd stepped out of the spotlight and down into the twilight at the side of the stage. Quietly switching on the mobile phone I had lent him, he dialled home.

The phone glowed blue, highlighting Floyd’s features as he lifted it to his ear. I watched him smile wearily at the sound of his wife’s voice, but then his features froze. He ended the call looking shocked. “It’s Misha,” he said, half-whispering. “She’s, um, awake, and she’s . . . she seems fine. No sign of brain damage. And we have a new little grandson, Luke. They think he’s gonna be OK too.” At last Floyd’s features broke into a smile of pure joy.

We would later discover that medical staff at Misha’s hospital had been so stunned by this dual miracle that they set about calculating the statistical probability of what had taken place. The likelihood of both Misha and Luke surviving an amniotic embolism without lasting neurological damage was 1 in 1.2 million. Virtually impossible.

What were we to make of it all? It had been a day unlike any we’d ever known. Within hours of meeting Floyd and discussing the possibilities for 24-7 Prayer in America, we had both nearly lost our firstborn children, and had both received miracles of deliverance.[29]

It’s easy to overplay our own significance in the greater schemes of life, but we must also avoid the opposite pitfall of underestimating the authority we have as children of God, especially when we pray (Ephesians 6:18). The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth insists that “prayer exerts an influence upon God’s action, even upon his existence.”[30] Jesus promises unambiguously to do “whatever you ask in my name” (John 14:13). A little later he sends his disciples out with “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18-19). That’s a lot of authority. Our prayers can often be more powerful than we dare imagine. Hudson, Misha, and baby Luke could easily have died or been brain-damaged on the same day, but instead we prayed and they were saved.

Put Your Fists Together and Pray

The Bible is clear that we are engaged in a vicious spiritual battle, in which God’s purposes are contested constantly. Prayer (in which we harness our wills with God’s will to resist Satan’s will) is our greatest weapon of defence as well as attack. People sometimes ask why God requires us to pray, as if it were merely a form of relentless begging: “please, please, please” in the tone of a child beseeching his father for a treat, or a football fan wishing like mad for a goal in the final minute. But to pray is not to plead from the sidelines; it is to invade the field of play. In prayer we join the team, actively shaping the outcome of the match, challenging and occasionally outplaying an aggressive opponent (Revelation 12:10-12). Martin Luther went so far as to describe prayer as “a constant violent action of the spirit as it is lifted up to God, as a ship is driven upward against the power of the storm.” He continues:

Thus we must all practice violence and remember that he who prays is fighting against the devil and the flesh. Satan is opposed to the church . . . the best thing we can do, therefore, is to put our fists together and pray.[31]

It can be troubling to recognise the militancy of prayer and the level of authority we may wield to affect the outcome of spiritual battles. But the truth is this: There are terrible evils that will only be restrained, and wonderful blessings that will only be unlocked, by our prayers. “You do not have,” says the apostle James very simply, “because you do not ask God” (James 4:2). The Lord’s purposes are contingent upon our prayers because he has chosen to work in partnership with our free wills. He has not made us automatons preprogrammed to do his bidding. He is love, and love liberates, love trusts, love risks, love collaborates. It does not dominate, control, coerce, or enslave.

The Creator is still creating. He invites those made in his image to join him in imagining and forming the future —new songs and movies, new scientific theories, innovative businesses, revolutionary social policies, brilliant computer games, medical breakthroughs, recipes for soup. In the words of the great French philosopher Blaise Pascal, God has “instituted prayer . . . to impart to his creatures the dignity of causality.”[32]

Fool’s Gold

One of the most confounding miracles we’ve experienced in more than fifteen years of continual prayer involved a much-loved Swiss prayer warrior called Susanna Rychiger. She relinquished the prospect of a senior post in her successful family business to pioneer a 24-7 community in the beautiful Alpine town of Thun. One day the Lord spoke to Susanna, directing her to move into a particular, strategically located apartment in the centre of town where she would be able to reach out to many of the neediest people. The rent on this new apartment, however, was way beyond Susanna’s modest budget, so she cut back on all luxuries and began to pray for provision daily, claiming the promise of Psalm 55:22: “Cast your cares on the LORD and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.”

If I had known about Susanna’s financial challenges at that time, I probably wouldn’t have asked her to consider flying to South Africa, at her own expense, to represent 24-7 at one of the first meetings of the Global Day of Prayer. I certainly wouldn’t have promised her so casually that God would provide the money for her flight if he wanted her to go. But Susanna, being a godly woman, just smiled and promised to pray about it. Almost immediately someone did indeed offer to fund her trip.

The meetings in Cape Town furthered an important friendship with the organisers of the Global Day of Prayer, so it’s easy to see why God had so speedily provided the funds for Susanna to attend. But of course, while she was in Cape Town, she continued to pray for the money to pay her rent back home.

A friend called Rebecca was house-sitting Susanna’s apartment while she was away. Deciding to clean the place before Susanna returned, Rebecca went to the cleaning cupboard, opened the door, and gasped. Thousands of Swiss francs lay scattered around the boiler and over the floor. Why was Susanna hiding so much money while pleading poverty? Why had she left it like this, strewn across the floor? Why hadn’t she put it in a bank like everyone else?

Understandably perplexed, Rebecca piled the bank notes neatly in the corner of the cupboard, scribbled a note asking Susanna to call, and went home to her parents wondering what to do.

“Did you find the money?” asked Rebecca, without any introduction, when Susanna finally called.

“Money?”

“The pile of money. The pile of money in your cleaning cupboard, Susanna.”

Unsure what to think, Susanna initially opened the door of the wrong cupboard. The voice on the phone redirected her, and she gasped at the sight of the cash. With her mind reeling and her hands trembling, she knelt to count 14,000 Swiss francs —half a year’s wages. Could Rebecca be playing some kind of game? But Susanna knew for sure that she didn’t have that kind of money. And even if she did, why would she leave it like this or decide to give it in such a convoluted way? Rebecca was clearly freaking out too.

Maybe a generous friend had secreted the bank notes in her cupboard while she had been away? It was a lovely thought, but since Rebecca was the only person with a key, this would have involved breaking into the apartment. And why would anyone go to such lengths when they could easily just post it through the door, or make an anonymous payment into her account? No one would scatter money in a weird little cupboard, especially while someone else was staying in the house. It didn’t make sense.

Perhaps the previous tenants had left the money there? Quite apart from the fact that people tend not to forget that much cash, Susanna had been living in the apartment for several months, had obviously often used the cleaning cupboard, and knew that the money certainly hadn’t been there previously.

Susanna carefully searched every nook of the tiny cupboard in case the cash could somehow have been hidden for some time, but there was no way it could possibly have been missed.

The bank told Susanna that no one had reported the money lost. The police said that it hadn’t been stolen. Nobody could explain how it had appeared in her house. In the end there were only two possible explanations: “Either the world’s most confused burglar had broken into my apartment and deposited thousands of francs in my cupboard before leaving without a trace, or God really had heard my cries for provision and made the money materialise in my cupboard.”

Susanna took the money upstairs, laid it out in front of her, and prayed. She thanked God, repented for doubting his power to provide, and told him it was his money, not hers.

Susanna was surprised by how many people —even senior Christian leaders —struggled to accommodate the notion that God could, or would, do this kind of miracle. “I discovered that a lot of people believe God can make trees but not paper! They believe that story where Jesus uses a fish as an ATM, because it’s in the Bible [Matthew 17:27], but doubt that God would ever choose to do anything remotely similar today. I think it’s because money is such a stronghold in our materialistic mindsets,” she says. “We worship money, we put our faith in it. If God can make money so easily, our currency gets devalued, our value system is undermined; our idol comes tumbling down.”

We may accept the vast credal miracles of creation, resurrection, and salvation whilst doubting the smaller miracles of healing, guidance, protection, and provision. We trust God for our eternal salvation yet struggle to believe that he will sometimes still intervene in ways we can’t explain when we cry to him for help.

Three days after discovering the cash, a friend asked Susanna to show her the cupboard. Susanna opened the door laughing, but then she froze. Another 200 Swiss francs had appeared out of nowhere on top of the boiler. “I freaked! There was no way that we could have missed any remaining money the first time. We had checked every millimetre of that cupboard, you can bet on it!” It was as though God was just adding a little extra, playfully blessing his daughter and enjoying her surprise.

The next morning Susanna got up early, opened the cupboard again, and found another 200-franc bill. Susanna just handed the money to her friend. “This is for you —I don’t need any more!” At that moment she made a solemn decision to give away whatever else God provided through the cashpoint he’d installed in her kitchen. And of course, inevitably, whenever friends came to visit they would all ask to see the cleaning cupboard as if it was some kind of holy shrine.

Eleven days later, Susanna hosted a meeting to plan a youth conference with her friend Michael. When he arrived he went straight to check the cupboard like everyone else. There was nothing in there, so Susanna laughed, he closed the door, and she made tea. Minutes later they were standing in the kitchen, drinking the tea, and discussing the conference, when a gentle shuffling sound suddenly came from the cupboard. They froze for a second, looked at each other, and lurched for the door.

Michael opened it and gasped. Another 13,600 Swiss francs lay scattered on the floor of the closet which they had checked just minutes earlier. “Michael and I never did manage to prepare our conference that day,” recalls Susanna. “We were on our knees laughing, crying, and thanking God.”

That was the last cash to appear in Susanna’s cleaning cupboard, but overall, in less than a month, a total of 28,000 Swiss francs —a year’s wages —had materialised, on four different occasions, witnessed variously by Susanna and three of her friends.

Susanna paid her rent and taxes, then gave the rest of the money away. As she did so, many of her friends and family who didn’t know Jesus came to believe in God’s power to provide supernaturally more readily than some of her Christian friends. One pastor actually admitted that he didn’t want it to be true because it would destroy his theology. Susanna just replied, “Hallelujah!”

The Power of Normal

Susanna told me these stories, and I confess that I checked my own cleaning cupboard on more than one occasion! The 24-7 movement had significant financial challenges at that time. I couldn’t understand why God didn’t just make the money materialise for us, the way he’d made it for Susanna. But as I thought about this, he taught me one of the most important lessons I have ever learned about money.

The fact that God can create banknotes supernaturally at will means that when he chooses not to do so (which, let’s face it, is pretty much always), it is because he wants to provide for us in another way. Generally, God prefers to bless us through relationships, allowing money to flow from person to person through generosity and merit. In fact, the word currency, which we use to describe money, derives from the Latin correre, meaning “to run.” It has given us our modern term for the current in a river, or an electrical current, or a “common currency” of ideas.

Money is designed to move around, to flow dynamically between people, whether through a monthly wage or a commercial exchange or in the form of a gift. Money loses its purpose as a catalyst for creative exchange when it is allowed to stagnate, merely accruing interest in a bank or becoming a number on a screen. Nine times out of ten, therefore, God chooses to provide for our needs —whether financial, medical, or emotional —naturally through people, not supernaturally through angelic visitation, manna from heaven, or cash materialising in cupboards. This may be less mysterious, but it is actually ultimately far more creative and relational. As one theologian says, God tends not to work by “violently ripping into the fabric of history or arbitrarily upsetting the momentum of its powers,” but rather “within and through the closely textured and natural historical processes of our modern experience.”[33]

Susanna prayed for rent, and God provided for her needs. Floyd and I prayed for our kids, and their lives were miraculously spared. The Smith sisters prayed for young people in the Outer Hebrides, and revival came to their land. We prayed for God’s help in marketing a book in America, and he lined up an interview with Rolling Stone. Miracles happen. But between such mountaintop moments, we must all traverse the long, predictable valleys of the mundane.

If our days were continually punctuated with the kind of supernatural interruptions described in this chapter —if our prayers were all immediately granted —we would be like spoiled children with weak bodies and rotting teeth. We are strengthened and matured by seasons of boredom and even pain that demands perseverance. In fact, it is often during these unglamorous, in-between times that we mature; our faith fills up into faithfulness, we learn to push into community and into God’s presence, which is, after all, the greatest miracle of all.

Mr. Tumnus and Us

As the 24-7 movement began to expand internationally, I asked the Lord for someone to share the load by coordinating the work at home in the UK. I needed a friend I could trust, someone passionate about prayer, highly relational —and able to work without a salary! The obvious choice was my old friend Phil Togwell, who was working at that time with homeless young people in central London. In his spare time he was running a youth church in Romford which had been going crazy with 24-7 prayer. Nervously I asked Phil to consider quitting his job to work with us, adding as casually as I could that we wouldn’t be able to pay him anything. It was obviously an outrageous suggestion.

Phil’s long, wiry goatee and twinkly eyes always reminded me of Mr. Tumnus, Narnia’s half-human faun. When I asked him about quitting his job and working for us for free, his eyes twinkled and his beard quivered even more than usual. He pointed out very gently that he loved his current job, and then he asked (not unreasonably) how he would feed his wife and daughters. But there was also an excitement in his eyes. He admitted that he was longing for a deeper sense of community and a greater adventure from life, so he agreed at least to pray about it.

It was a decision that would change Phil’s life, and the lives of thousands more to this day.

The Holy Spirit began by whispering to Phil through a line in The Lord of the Rings:

“And now,” said the wizard, turning back to Frodo, “the decision lies with you. But I will always help you.” He laid his hand on Frodo’s shoulder. “I will help you bear this burden, as long as it is yours to bear. But we must do something, soon. The Enemy is moving.”[34]

Sensing that the Holy Spirit was giving him the choice, asking him to decide, Phil sat down to take a long hard look at their family finances. How much money would they actually need to survive? They could use all their savings —it didn’t seem right to ask others for support, if they themselves were sitting on a nest-egg —but God would still have to provide an additional £1,000 per month just to pay the bills and put food on the table. Phil and Emma quietly shared their need with a few friends who offered to support them with small monthly gifts. In this way they raised a total monthly pledge of £310 —way short of their target.

On 9 January, Phil and Emma did a secret deal with God. They’d been trying to raise money for several months, with meagre success. To add to the pressure, Sammy and I were due to come and stay with them three days later, on 12 January. “Give us just half the money we need in the next three days,” they prayed, “and we’ll trust you for the rest. But if you don’t, we’ll just have to tell Pete and Sammy we can’t afford to do the job.”

By the day of our visit, the Togwells were still £190 per month short of that all-important halfway mark. With heavy hearts they greeted us at the door, knowing that we would be almost as disappointed as they were.

At the first opportunity to be alone, Phil told me he had something important to tell me. This reminded me that I also had some news to share.

“OK, you go first,” he said, trying to delay the inevitable.

“Well, three days ago, I bumped into an old friend in Portsmouth and he’s just got a new job, but, um, he’s not in a great place with God right now. He certainly isn’t going to church, but he was asking me all about 24-7.”

“OK,” said Phil, a little wearily.

“Look, the point is,” I continued, completely failing to read Phil’s bleak mood, “I told him about you guys and how you’re total rock stars and you’re wanting to start working with us but you need a bunch of money and, well, he said he’d like to support you.”

Phil knew that unless this new donation amounted to at least £190 per month —by far their biggest gift so far —it wasn’t going to make any difference. “How much?” he asked, testily.

“Two hundred pounds per month,” I replied.

“No way!” Phil began laughing. Then he yelled, “Hallelujah!”

Our wives heard the commotion and rushed into the room. Still grinning wildly, Phil told Sammy and me about their deal with God and the secret deadline they had set three days before.

“Three days ago?” I said, counting back through the week. “That was the day my friend made his pledge.”

“Perfect timing then,” laughed Phil. “God really does hear our prayers, huh?”

“Glad you think so, Phil,” I grinned, “since you just became the UK coordinator of a prayer movement.”

“And God’s given us an extra tenner a month too,” said Phil.

“That’s obviously my commission,” I joked, already looking forward to recounting the story to the donor and blowing a couple of his non-churchgoing fuses.

That night Phil and Emma Togwell agreed to coordinate 24-7 Prayer in the UK. They were only halfway towards their target, but God was on their side. “I feel like Moses refusing to heed the call at the burning bush and asking God to send someone else,” wrote Phil in his journal. “And yet this is my call.”

Early the next morning, Phil received another financial pledge. It was anonymous, via a Gmail account. To this day neither of us knows where it came from. It covered the exact amount they needed to achieve their £1,000 monthly target. Overwhelmed, he woke Emma to show her the email, phoned me, and turned to his journal again. “God forgive me my lack of faith! Forgive my double-mindedness! Forgive my needing-to-know-it’s-you every few seconds! You have swept away my feeble wonderings!”

Phil Togwell stepped into his role with 24-7 knowing for sure that it wasn’t just a job. This was a call from God himself, and the people who’d pledged to support them financially were also going to do so in prayer. He and Emma decided to risk all their security, to use up all their savings, and to live very simply indeed in order to serve the purposes of God. It was to be the beginning of a faith adventure which continues to this day, touching countless lives. And we were just about to discover that it had come in the nick of time for something new that God was planning.

The spiritual warfare around our encounter with Floyd had been so dramatic and traumatic that on my next visit to America I made a beeline to see him in Kansas City. I was determined to continue the conversation that the enemy had so violently sought to abort.

Floyd greeted me warmly, still wearing his Crocs with socks, and took me to a microbrewery for fish and chips.

“So I feel like we went way too far on our first date,” I ventured, squirting ketchup on my fries. Floyd threw back his head and roared with laughter.

I could tell you that I had no idea, as we talked that night in Kansas City, that another amazing chapter of the 24-7 story was about to begin, but I’d be lying. The truth is that I knew with every fibre of my being that God was on the move, turning the page, initiating something immeasurably beyond my imagination. The sense of destiny was palpable, and I returned to England convinced of two things: First, Satan hated the idea of us establishing any kind of bridgehead for 24-7 in America; second, we should do the very thing he so feared.

SELAH

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against . . . the powers of this dark world.

EPHESIANS 6:12

Holy Spirit, please open my eyes to see the reality of the spiritual battle today. Deliver me from evil. Soften my heart to discern spirits, sharpen my senses to detect the Enemy’s lies. Teach me to rule and reign with the authority you have given me in and through Jesus. Amen.

There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter claimed by Satan.

C. S. LEWIS, CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS