The older I get the more I battle fear.

And I know it’s because the older I get the more scary things I see in the world.

The more marriages I’ve watched disintegrate, the more friends who’ve lost kids, the more diagnoses I’ve heard others fight through, the more friendships fractured, the more opportunity for excruciating loss and bitter conflict.

The older I get the more I see clearly around me this fight that we’re in. This desperate fight for our souls, our children, our families, our friendships.

And I can wake up some days and just lie in bed and watch the ceiling and feel like I’m not sure I have it in me to keep fighting. But every morning my four-year-old pads down the hallway from her room to ours and climbs into bed with me. I tuck her into my side and wrap the comforter around both of us and fold her small hands inside my palms.

She fits like a prayer.

Her hair smells of my perfume because she wears it more than I do and her toes are always cold.

And I don’t want to miss any of it. Not her first days at Kindergarten, not high school or first crushes or her tender, white wedding dress one day or all those babies she likes to name now. I want to be there for all of it like my mom wasn’t for me.

And so the fear climbs like a rising tide in my lungs and I lie in bed next to her and whisper to the ceiling: Dear God, please don’t let me miss it.

Don’t let me miss out on my daughter. Don’t let me make the mistake of running out of energy for my sons. Don’t let me give up on the people around me, the friends who shape me, the work that calls me.

Dear God don’t let this fear choke out all the life that You promised when You said,

“I have come so that [you] may have life and have it in abundance.” {John 10:10 HCSB}

So it came as a sort of weird relief to me to read Priscilla Shirer’s words in her book, Fervent, that, “These areas of greatest fear and anxiety in your life are clues to some important spiritual formation. They reveal . . . that a personalized strategy has been insidiously put in place to destroy your vibrancy and render you defeated” {Fervent, page 6}.

That thought shocked me. To think that as deliberately as Jesus is planning for my, “welfare, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope” {Jeremiah 29:11} the enemy is trying to, “exploit everyone one of them.”

He is as deliberate as Jesus and when I forget that I become easy prey.

There have been too many days I’ve accepted my doubts and my fears as if there was nothing I could do about them. Too many days I’ve felt defeated before I even open my mouth to try and pray. Too many days I’ve been too busy, too tired, too overwhelmed, too afraid to pray.

Maybe you can relate?

Maybe you’ve given up hope?

Maybe you don’t believe any more that prayer is anything more than positive thinking?

Open up the first strategy for prayer outlined in Priscilla’s book, Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan for Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer. Open up and read with me that maybe, all too likely, what you don’t feel, hope, or believe anymore is as a direct result of an enemy who knows if he can rob us of our passion, he can rob us of the weapon guaranteed to, “punch Satan in the face” as my eight-year-old describes it.

“Because praying — reaching outward and upward to Him — is the way His passion comes down” {Fervent, page 35}.

This is the passion I want. Because this is the passion that flips the enemy’s plan on his head and launches, “prayers that are as personalized and devastating as the enemy’s attacks against you” {Fervent, page 35}.

This I must have. I must.

Because the passion of prayer drowns out the shouts of fear.

The passion of prayer is the promise that Jesus hears.

The passion of prayer is the opportunity to bear witness to change. To promises fulfilled.

The passion of prayer is not about my feelings, my mood, or my ability to change God’s mind. No, the passion of prayer is about me simply stepping into God’s own passion and asking Him to give me what He already has planned for me.

And then standing with a face raised expectantly to the sky, like someone waiting for rain, and watching Him provide it.

Like my kids waiting for their dad to come home — never doubting for a minute that he’ll arrive. Like my eight-year-old folding his hands in the front seat of our truck as we drive through the neighborhood on our way to pick up lunch. And when I ask him what he’s doing, he says simply and with certainty, “I’m praying. Because I want to punch Satan.”

Me too.

At 41 I want the faith of my eight-year-old so that I can channel the passion of a God who wants to answer before I even ask. I want prayers that are louder than fear. So I’m practicing. Like I teach my kids. I’m practicing to pray with expectation. Some days face down on the carpet and others while I’m driving home from dropping off the kids at school.

I want to pray like I believe it makes a difference.

I want to pray until it does make a difference.

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