Confessions of a Revival Burnout
The following is excerpted from 10 Days: The Unlikely Story of a Global Movement Mourning for the Return of Jesus.You can purchase it here, or check out my new book, Jesus Gets What He Prays For.
The first 10 Days in 2005 is one of the most encouraging testimonies I have in my repertoire.
I strongly suspect it is not possible for anyone to do 10 Days worse than we did that year. So take heart, whatever you’re doing wrong, it’s not as bad as what we did in 2005.
David and I landed in St. Louis to begin planning the first 10 Days. The Global Day of Prayer team in the city welcomed us with open arms. They were happy to have a group focused on the 10 Days leading up to Pentecost, while they focused on the Global Day of Prayer event scheduled at Busch Stadium, home of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Our expectations as a team of God breaking in with revival were sky-high. And yet, in all my experience, I can’t think of a team I’ve been a part of that has been more consistently discouraged or faced more obstacles and failure. Somehow, nothing we did seemed to work.
Empty the Tank
At that point, I had exactly a “one year” vision for 10 Days and expected everything I had seen in the vision to happen immanently, in 2005. The fact that things looked impossible was not a problem. It was supposed to look impossible. that was the point. I just needed to have faith. God was going to come through. He had to come through.
My plan was simple. I was going to give God everything I had left. Empty myself and leave it all on the altar and trust that if I laid my life down completely, God was going to move, cities were going to stop, and an incredible revival was going to break out.
I was so worn down I was barely functional. I tried my old trick of working through the phonebook, calling all the churches in St. Louis. This time I was too depressed to make more than one or two calls. The constant vulnerability to strangers, the rejection, the misunderstanding had created a wound I didn’t yet understand
My erratic behavior was getting worse. Friends who had not seen me in the past year could see something was off. I knew something had gone wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. My mood was swinging wildly, either high on expectation for revival or down and depressed, unable to carry on a normal conversation. But now, it was becoming harder and harder to find those highs. The patience and love for others I started with had eroded. I was harsh, judgmental, and had an apocalyptic mindset. Was I becoming one of those guys holding a sign, “The end is near?” Was I becoming a religious fanatic?
We printed and distributed thousands of flyers on bulletin boards throughout the city, inviting people to the 10 Days of Prayer. While I was too weak to do cold-calling, Cassi stepped up and called hundreds of congregations in the city, inviting people to join 10 Days and the Global Day of Prayer. We might be crash landing into this first 10 Days, but we were going to make it.
Watch the Cardinals
It is remarkable how in the darkest times, when everything seems to be falling apart, God so often brings encouragement as a ray of sunshine.
Truth be told, while I had my own struggles, the entire Global Day of Prayer team in St. Louis was incredibly discouraged. It seemed like everything that could go wrong was going wrong. One leader of the Global Day of Prayer in St. Louis was a pastor named Vic Gerson. Vic was in his 40’s and had a famous brother, Michael Gerson, President Bush’s speechwriter at the time.
Right in the middle of our corporate discouragement, Vic threw his back out completely while working on a flooring project. Injury had been added to insult. Lying on his back, unable to even move, he began to complain to God about how poorly our efforts were going.
The Lord spoke an unlikely phrase to him: “Watch the Cardinals.”
Vic was not a baseball fan and didn’t watch games regularly. However, he did pay attention to the next game, which was being played on Monday, May second just before the beginning of 10 Days on Thursday, May fifth.
That night, the Cardinals came into the ninth inning trailing 9-3. After two outs, the score was 9-4. But then, amazingly, the Cardinals came back to win the game 10-9. It was the largest ninth inning comeback in team history.
I was a little offended, to be honest—can God speak through baseball games? Is that allowed? And yet, that was one of the most miraculous things I had ever witnessed first-hand.
The lesson of Vic’s “Watch the Cardinals” word seemed pretty simple. Though it looked like we were losing badly—and we all felt that way—God was saying that He had a ninth inning miracle rally that would pull us out of defeat and cause us to win, “10 to 9.”
I felt like this must mean that even though it looked bleak now, the outpouring of the Spirit I was seeking would come in just a few days on the first ever Global Day of Prayer.
At the time, I didn’t pause to consider if I was misinterpreting this remarkable sign. Could it be that the game was just beginning, and God was saying, “it may look like you’re losing for a long time but don’t give up?” The thought never entered my mind. I was single-mindedly focused on pushing myself across the finish line of Pentecost Sunday, May 15, 2005.
10 Days
David and I had a plan—not a good plan, but a plan—to gather an entire city together in prayer. We decided to have three locations throughout the city that would be open for prayer 24/7. We had cold-called hundreds of churches, put up thousands of flyers, gone on the radio, and shared at schools and public settings, inviting anyone who would listen to join us.
But there was a major problem with our plan. Almost no one wanted to pray.
Because we had three locations (due to expecting the entire city to stop and join us), our small, committed team of five people needed to split up. David based his small prayer group at the Roman Catholic church that had opened their doors for prayer. Cassi and I ended up at an inner-city mission on Grand Avenue in North St. Louis. North St. Louis is one of the most depressed and crime-ridden areas in the entire nation. With bombed out houses littering the cityscape, open prostitution and drug dealing on the street, and a murder rate that would make Detroit blush, we were in a hard part of town.
My dad had wisely informed me that people would not want to come there to pray. However, in my religious zeal, I was incapable of reasoning like a normal human. All I could think was that the heart of darkness was the perfect place to pray. If people didn’t want to go there, it reflected how far away they were from God’s heart.
As we started the 10 Days, modeling our prayer room on the 24/7 movement I had read about in Red Moon Rising, I learned something I hadn’t really known before. It is incredibly difficult to do 24/7 prayer.
And, in case you are wondering, two people are not enough to sustain 24/7 prayer.
Since almost no one had responded to our attempts to unite the city, Cassi and I were attempting to pray the entire time on our own. It was like trying to bail out the Titanic with a bucket. Rather than settle on a smaller, simpler schedule that we could effectively keep, we tried to do 24/7 and ended up being totally sporadic. It was mostly the two of us in a room together. We slept, ate, and attempted to pray at the base—an old, converted YMCA on Grand Avenue. Once again, I was pushing us beyond our physical capabilities. It would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so sad.
In this state of despondency, the Lord was faithful to speak to us. I heard him speak out of Revelation 2:10:
“Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil as about to cast some of you into prison so that you will be tested and you will have tribulation for ten days. Be faithful unto death and I will give you the crown of life.”
While this wasn’t the most encouraging word I have ever heard, it was accurate. The cinder-block mission we were living in felt like a prison. When we walked outside, we were surrounded by blighted homes and inner-city neighbors who viewed us with suspicion. I wasn’t even sure if it was God talking, but 10 Days of tribulation and testing seemed to be happening.
No One Comes
My biggest source of discouragement was the near-complete rejection from other believers of what I was sharing. Since January sixth, I had cast vision to hundreds of ministry leaders in person. We had invited and spoken personally to thousands of people in St. Louis. I was so discouraged that almost no one had received the invitation.
The ministry that graciously agreed to host 10 Days of Prayer was also not interested in praying. In total, they prayed only one hour out of the 240. When they came into prayer for that one hour, while Cassi and I were gone, a man walked into the prayer room off the street and ask how to be saved. It seemed so easy—if we prayed, God would move and hear us. And yet no one wanted to do it.
Rather than patiently enduring, understanding, and forgiving my brothers and sisters, the lack of response was creating deep resentment in me toward fellow believers.
On the seventh day, Cassi and I were finally able to step away from the mission for lunch. It was our first time leaving the mission since 10 Days had started. Getting out of the prayer room and north St. Louis was like taking a breath. Being away from there made me feel alive again. After an enjoyable lunch, I was almost feeling human again.
However, when we arrived back at the mission, our four-month-old puppy, Sequoia, jumped out the open car door and rushed into traffic. A sweet older woman who lived up the side-street was driving past at just that moment and hit her. Cassi and I rushed Sequoia to the vet, and amazingly, she lived. However, she never regained the function of her front left leg.
I had imagined praying for ten days would be challenging but rewarding. This was shaping up to be the worst ten days of my life.
A New Pentecost?
As the 10 Days began to wind down, I could tell I was almost out of strength, yet I wanted to finish strong. The Saturday night before Pentecost, we hosted a late-night Scripture reading vigil, focused on the book of Psalms. Several others joined us and we were able to cover most of the night as we read the entire book of Psalms out loud. It was a powerful time of prayer and the closest we came to sustaining even a single day of 24/7 prayer.
As Pentecost approached, despite my extreme weariness and just wanting to quit and be done, I still anticipated God coming through in a massive way. I was looking for a Pentecostal outpouring on Pentecost. After all, I had done what God said, David and I had been obedient, we had traveled the country inviting people to stop everything and seek God’s face. We had done our part, or so we hoped, and now it was time for God to do what only He could do. Even though everything felt horrible, it would all be worth it when God came through with an impossible, last-minute victory.
As we attended church on Pentecost Sunday, May 15, I was crying out “God, send a new Pentecost.” At times, it felt so close, and yet the reality was while it was a good church service, it was far from Acts chapters 1 and 2.
“Did I just lay down my entire life for a good church service?” I wondered.
And I felt, with some justification, that I really had laid down my life.
Since receiving the 10 Days vision, I had quit my paying job and given all my time and energy to traveling the nation and calling people to pray. I had lost my first child to miscarriage. My dog had lost a leg. My wife had been in crisis multiple times because of my extended absences and our marriage was rocky.
Since receiving the 10 Days vision, I had lost heroes and friends. My closest relationships were strained to the breaking point. I had spent my life savings. I had laid my heart on the table day after day, to the point that now my soul was in agony from the pain of so much vulnerability, so much rejection. I had given so much to the church while getting nothing but pain in return. I was at the breaking point.
That afternoon, I attended the Global Day of Prayer gathering at Busch Stadium. We had hoped to fill Busch Stadium, but only 3,000 people came. While 3,000 people is certainly a large prayer meeting, in a Stadium designed for over 40,000, it looked like a drop in the bucket. As I sat there, it suddenly dawned on me—there was not going to be an outpouring. This was it. A bad prayer meeting with 3,000 people. This is what I had given everything in my life for.
Several things were perfectly clear to me.
One was that I had totally wasted my life and wasted my time.
Second, I had given absolutely everything for the church and my fellow believers. While I had laid down everything, they wouldn’t even turn off the TV on a Sunday afternoon and come to one measly prayer meeting. I had given my all for them, but they had not responded. And I hated them. I really, really hated Christians.
Finally, I had mixed feelings about God. Part of me wanted to accuse Him of letting me down. However, mostly I just felt like a failure. He had shown me this amazing vision; I had done everything I knew how to bring it to pass; but I had failed. I had given everything I had, everything I could possibly think of giving, but it had not been enough. I had laid my life down as best I could but the miracle hadn’t happened.
Heartbroken, and in utter agony, I told the Lord,
“God, you are too intense for me. I quit.”
Thus ended my first ever 10 Days of Prayer.