What Else Could Happen? Origin Story, Part 2

Go here to read Part 1, Not It!

After I prayed for thirty minutes for that InterVarsity staff retreat, I woke up the next day thinking: I want to do that again. That was amazing.

I had to drive to a friend’s house that morning, so I didn’t officially sign up for a slot, but covered the retreat in prayer as I drove.

That afternoon the team was going to prayerwalk a campus in Colorado. I thought: I can’t be there in person, because I’m two thousand miles away, but I can prayerwalk my own land.

I walked up and down my driveway and back and forth along the road.

At some point I realized: Europeans came to Virginia more than four hundred years ago. There has been, I’m sure, a great deal of conflict here, perhaps even on my own property. And if not on my property, then certainly in my county, which has both the University of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Jefferson enslaved more than six hundred people in his life.

Our county carries a lot of pain in its history.

Out of the blue, I started praying out of Numbers 35:33: “Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.”

Lord, you say that when blood has been shed, you require the blood of the one who shed it to wipe out the stain. Jesus, I ask that your blood would cover all of the ugliness. We claim your blood over the murders, over the enmity, over the pain.

Where on earth did that come from? I had never prayed a blood-guilt prayer like that before. I was surprised it popped out.

And yet it felt right. Four hundred years of suffering is a long time.

I finished and went about my day.

On Monday, I woke to an email from Connie, giving the backstory.

This campus had never had a Christian ministry last longer than a year, for a whole host of reasons. The resistance was so strong, Connie said, “My hope had been that the staff could go and come back without any car accidents.”

That was her level of faith and expectation: please, just don’t let anybody die.

But that Saturday morning, one of the off-site intercessors had been researching, and found that the “reverend” who helped found the university had also been responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre, killing something like a hundred and fifty innocent people, mostly women and children.

Blood guilt around the university.

The intercessors prayed exactly what I had prayed: Lord, we recognize the blood guilt, and we claim the blood of Jesus over this university.

And the prayerwalk was a beautiful time. The staff workers made connections with Christian faculty. No one had an accident. It was covered.

I was gobsmacked. I had prayed for the exact same things, but I didn’t know about Sand Creek. The Lord brought the blood guilt to my mind, and I prayed it too.

I felt like I had stepped into one of the missionary biographies I had read about. Except that this is now my story, too.

That weekend gave me a hunger for prayer I had never experienced before.

If that could happen, what else could happen?

Jesus, thank you for the excitement that comes with answered prayers. Thank you for the ways you connect your people, so that even though I was two thousand miles away from those who were on the ground, and other people were also praying off site, we all got to be part of what you were doing.

Thank you for the excitement and hunger you give us.

We give you praise, Jesus, because you are worthy. Amen.

On to Part 3: More Prayer This Month Than Last Month!