Because We Can

This week a couple of friends are joining me for a motorcycle ride. We’re calling it the Billings Lunch Ride. The plan is to ride from Morrison, on the west side of Denver, to Billings, Montana, and come back the same day. Yes, I’ll save you the Googlemaps effort; our route will make it 560 miles each way or a total of 1120 miles in one day.

Why? You may well ask. Because the road is there and because on our motorcycles we can. And because our friends will get these gape-jawed, glassy-eyed stares when we tell them what we did. That still counts for something because we are men, after all.

Twenty-some years ago I was doing Bible translation projects in Germany for Kurdish dialects when I ran into a guy who had been “doing mission work” out in Eastern Turkey for a few weeks. Curious, I asked him more about what kind of work. He replied that he and a friend had gone out there and ridden around on public buses and prayed for the Kurds as they traveled. Unimpressed, I asked him how much Kurdish he spoke. None. I asked how much Turkish he spoke. None. “You mean you just played tourist in Eastern Turkey and want to call it mission work,” I said. I was less grace-infused in those years.

I have had to repent of that arrogant attitude. Back then I was so impressed with what I was involved in that I scornfully dismissed his ministry as useless. And I’m sure the Lord was not pleased with my attitude. This brother could not leave his job and his family to spend years learning language, but he was doing what he could. He gave up his vacation time to travel through enemy territory and claim for Jesus every square foot of earth the sole of his foot touched. That was my first acquaintance with “prayer walking.”

Since then I have done some prayer walking myself. And I believe it is a valid and powerful ministry. We shouldn’t look at visible ministries such as medical aid, translation work and development projects as the whole enchilada. Invisible ministries, such as prayer, are just as critical. Who knows what impact he had on rulers and authorities and powers of this dark world and spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places by crossing their territory in faith, filled with the Holy Spirit and praying on all occasions and calling for the establishing of God’s kingdom in those precincts?

So as we ride to Billings and back, we have agreed to treat the ride as a prayer walk on fast wheels. In the unseen realm of the spirit, some demons may flee shrieking in disarray to see three men filled with the Holy Spirit sweeping across hundreds of miles of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana in a few hours and raising a holy cry for God’s Kingdom to be established and every opponent disarmed in the name of Jesus Christ.

But that’s not why we are doing the ride. I have already told you why we are doing it. This is more in the spirit of “Whatever you do, do it with all your heart, as unto the Lord.”