The short answer is I have no idea.
The long answer is that today the Digital Day of Prayer allowed Christians everywhere to engage in praying for missional gaps they care about.
My dad, a long-distance truck driver based in Canada, called today to chat and one of the first things he asked me about was the digital day of prayer that I wrote about last week. In addition to my post, I had emailed a number of family and friends inviting them to set aside 15 minutes today for this noble task.
“I did my 15 minutes,” my dad exclaimed as he trucked along through Mississippi, USA, 1800km from home. “Yeah, I prayed for students in Tel Aviv,” he went on to explain. “No one had signed up for [Tel Aviv], so I thought I better look after it,” he said with that kind of drawl that truck drivers use.
A big smile and sense of gratitude came over my heart. As we developed the Digital Day of Prayer, my dad wasn’t the persona I had in mind who would participate. He’s not social media savvy. He didn’t go to university (he never even went to high school). He has never travelled overseas. Hardly the digital native, global citizen I was imaging would be keen to participate in this initiative to pray for university students.
But as I talked with my dad, I realized the simplicity of three simple threads weaving together:
- My dad has a smartphone and uses it fairly well.
- He has a heart to help with something he cares about (Christian missions).
- He was presented with a low-barrier, high-impact, easy-to-join opportunity (15 minutes of concentrated prayer).
Besides my dad’s 15-minute contribution, 247 people prayed for a total of 4,410 minutes during this 24-hour period. 141 of 311 cities were prayed for from the 20 countries presented.
I hung up the phone deeply moved that the Digital Day of Prayer could empower a truck driver to pray for students to come to know Jesus halfway around the world. I guess it just wasn’t how I was expecting God to move through this event. The irony is that for my dad, I think it was just another day trucking to the glory of God accelerated by a simple digital opportunity to engage in praying for Christ’s great commission.