This past summer I dove into the book by Pete Greig and Dave Roberts called Red Moon Rising: How 24-7 Prayer is Awakening a Generation. Such an incredible book – I felt myself encouraged and excited by the different ways that prayer is shaping our world. From Prague to Northern Ireland, Ibiza to California, God’s people were calling on His name expectantly. And just as He always did, He was showing up.

There’s one story in particular that has remained prominent in my memory months after putting the book back on my shelf. Greig describes one 24-7 gathering in the U.K. in which a guy named Paul shared his thoughts on what it really meant to authentically intercede for someone. Paul’s sister struggled with severe anorexia, a battle that was slowly killing her from the inside out. Day in and day out, he saw her unable to perform simple activities such as dressing herself; he watched her dejectedly as her body succumbed to diabetes and menopause 20 years too soon.

But Paul couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t pray. He couldn’t take action. Until that meeting, his heart had been calcified and resistant to delve into her pain. He realized that he couldn’t pray because true intercession meant identifying her pain as his own. And he was still unwilling to do that.

In Joel 2:12-13a, it tells us to, “Give [God our] hearts. Come with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Don’t tear… clothes in grief, but tear… hearts instead.” God commands us to tear our hearts. It’s so hard to take that pain on, to let our hearts be swept into it, especially when it’s our natural response to avoid pain at any cost. We see gutted houses in once thriving neighborhoods. We read about guerrilla warfare, hear about corporate corruption, and witness fractured relationships all around us. And we go about our daily routines. So where’s the balance? How do we allow ourselves to jump into it intentionally when it can get overwhelming?

With FORTY almost an entire year behind us now, I’ve been meditating on prayer anew, and feel like this needs to be my next step in my prayer life. I want to begin to understand and practice true intercession. I need to start praying for the relationships in my life that have hurt me and continue to hurt me. The ones that I feel are beyond redemption, beyond hope. I need to pray for the people who I’ve started to give up on, even if this means that I’ll be hurt by it in the end. I need to love free from fear.

I know the root of my fear. I know why it’s so easy to give up. What if I pray and I pray and come to God on their behalf and He still chooses not to heal them? To save them? To comfort them when they’re hurting? I don’t have definite answers to these “what ifs,” but I do trust in the God who said that He causes everything to work together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). So if He chooses to allow someone dear to me to feel pain, I have to believe that it is for His greater glory and a better purpose than I can fathom.

Just maybe this trust is one of the first steps towards true intercession. We often see examples in scripture of how God’s love exposes pain and leads people to action and intercession. As Christians, we pray to be able to have a love like that. To love as Christ loves us. To love our neighbor as we love ourselves. But to be quite honest, God’s love is impossible to wrap our minds around. It’s completely unnatural and otherworldly. But with Christ, it’s not just possible. It’s necessary.