Sunday, 12-2am: How I Learned to Pray
The night is warm and the crickets and cicadas are singing loudly. My headlights pick up the fields of corn on either side of the road and I scan for deer or any other animals that might try to cross the road in front of me. I blink and try to rub the sleep out of my eyes. Glancing down at the time, I see: 11:55pm. I should be able to get to the prayer room by midnight.
My breath is heavy with coffee by the time I arrive at my destination. I pull my guitar out of the back of my car, grab my Bible and journal, and walk up the steps of Gateway House of Prayer. The prayer room always feels… different somehow. Is it the calm, ambient lighting? The browns and grays of the chairs and walls? The sound of quiet music drifting through the empty room? I’m not sure, but instinctively I take a deep breath as I push open the doors and walk to the sign-in sheet.
This is my first time taking a 2-hour prayer watch in the prayer room– and I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do. On the sign-in sheet I see a space titled, “Watch Focus”. I hadn’t thought of that before, didn’t realize I was supposed to have a focus. Glancing up at the weekly schedule and remembering that today is Sunday, I scribble down “the local church” as my prayer focus, sign my name and the time I arrived, and sit down on the front row.
The prayer room is a quiet place at 12am. The coffee is starting to kick in and an anticipation for something, anything, to happen is starting to grow. What is God going to do? Hope for greater connection with Him begins to grow. Following this train of thought, however, I start to wonder, what am I going to do? Can I really pray alone for two hours straight? And why am I here anyway when everyone except for partiers and gas station attendants are sound asleep?
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Reflecting on my first night watch at Gateway always brings a smile to my face. How little I knew of what was in store! I wonder how much God must have chuckled during those early days of pacing back and forth across the prayer room, praying rather loudly, busting strings on my guitar, and dancing like a wild man across the room. I wonder how much He chuckles now as I sit in the same prayer room six years later and write this article, pretending that I’ve figured a few things out and grown up a bit.
What led me to take a watch in the middle of the night at Gateway? The short answer is that I was hungry. Desperate, really. God had done a massive work in my life during a discipleship training school in New Zealand and when I came home I was terrified of losing my sense of His Presence in my life. I didn’t want to fall back into old habits and patterns, and didn't want to settle for anything less than an authentic, day-in-day-out relationship with Him.
Just a few days after returning home, I woke up and felt an immediate prompting from the Lord. Go to Gateway, the now familiar, quiet voice whispered. I knew very little about this ministry; matter of fact, my only previous experience of it was rather humorous and slightly negative. But since I was trying to live every day in response to the Holy Spirit’s revealed will, I grabbed my Bible and headed to the prayer room. There I met two watch leaders who asked if they could pray over me. This might be surprising to some of you, but up until that point, I cannot recall a stranger offering to pray for me. I gladly accepted and felt immediately encouraged. People pray like this in Lancaster County?
The watch leaders told me about the Tuesday night equipping services and mentioned a few people I could connect with. I showed up that next Tuesday and that’s when I heard Luke Weaver, who was at that time the director of Gateway, share about the need for people to cover night watches.
A few days later, I was in the prayer room at midnight on a Sunday morning.
For six months I kept my watch until I returned to the school I had attended in New Zealand for a year of staffing. Sometimes I roped in a friend or two. Most of the time it was just me, my guitar, and travel mug. And I can honestly say: it was during this 2-hour watch that I learned to pray.
Though some of the nights I felt too tired to connect deeply, almost every night I felt something happen. Whether it was coming to a place of stillness and peace or getting fired up for the Church and reaching those who don’t know Jesus, I knew that I was interfacing with Someone much bigger than me. I continued to pray for the local church and I noticed after a few weeks my heart started to change towards it. I hate to say it now, but looking back, I had a bit of bitterness and criticism toward the Church. I guess I just kept wondering why I had to travel halfway across the world to find a real, tangible experience of God when I had spent my entire life going to various churches. Maybe missions is the only place people can really enter into the life I always wanted, I thought.
And yet, as I prayed, I started to glimpse a bigger picture. I started to feel, in a deeply emotional way, God’s heart for all of His children. Denominational divisions and theological debates, criticism and judgment, refusal to collaborate and support one another, church splits and abusive spiritual leadership— it all began to break my heart. For the first time in my life, compassion began to replace bitterness.
I didn’t read any books about the call for unity in the Church. I just started praying and God began to give me His heart.
Fast forward six years: I’ve been privileged to travel to several countries and share the good news of Christ; I’ve seen men and women and children experience immediate healing, freedom, and encounters with the Holy Spirit through prayer; I’ve met many individuals who are quietly living out their faith with a deep, unshakeable love for God and others; I’ve been a part of four internships at the house of prayer and watched so many hungry, ordinary people discover the transformational Presence of God in their lives and the beauty of prayer. The journey that started at midnight on Sunday mornings in 2017 has been more wonderful than I could have possibly imagined.
It hasn’t been without challenges. I wish I could say my spiritual journey has been just like an elevator ride– straight up into glory. In reality, the “elevator” seems to get stuck pretty often and often takes me lower before it takes me higher. There have been wildernesses and caves of Adullams, rich pastures, still waters, occasional answers and a whole lot more questions, tough disappointments and surprising miracles. Leaning into God–and believing He hears and answers prayer–doesn’t make life easier necessarily; I’ve found sometimes it makes it more complicated.
But would I trade it for a life empty of enchantment? Empty of a sense of cosmic purpose? A life of materialism and reason, comfort and pleasure? A simple universe and a life ultimately spent “looking out for number one”? Not in a million years.
In future articles, I’d like to share more about specific ways of praying that can bring more awareness of God’s Presence and increase our heart for intercession. For now, I’d encourage anyone who read this far to seriously consider what stepping towards God might mean. What if you truly believed the promise in Jeremiah 29:13, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord,”? Jesus said so. “Whoever seeks will find.”
I don’t think spiritual experiences are for a select few. For the radicals. I think anyone who’s hungry can eat and anyone who’s thirsty can drink. If you want to learn how to pray, pull a card from the disciples’ deck and simply ask Jesus to teach you. Sure, the books are great (I have quite a stack sitting next to me right now), but if my story means anything I think it means anyone can pray if they, well, pray.
Written by Tim Ornelas, Assistant Director.
Thank you for reading! We genuinely hope this blog article has encouraged you and look forward to sharing more in the months to come. You can check out our volunteer page for a list of available watches and find more information here. Feel free to reach out with any questions or thoughts via email. You can also follow us on Instagram and listen to our podcast here.