[NOTE FROM JESSICA: Go here for the archive of emails from the 9-Day Prayer Challenge: May 21-29, 2018].

DAY 2 INTENTION: Vision

For the second day of our prayer challenge, let us ask for God’s vision.

• God, open our eyes that we might sight see things like You do (cue my favorite song right now).
• Send your Spirit to hover over the places in our life where we experience blindness, where we have been overcome by fear and suspicion, where our eyes have been clouded by the empty promises of the world.
• Open our eyes that we might see each other with fresh eyes, that the seeds of division and hatred that are being sown by the Enemy might be choked and crowded out by our love for You and one another.

REFLECTION: Eyes to see, ears to hear.

Throughout the Gospels, we hear about Jesus’ miraculous healing of the blind and the deaf, about how the lame could suddenly walk, and the dead were raised.

For the longest time, I have always understood these miracles as something that was for someone else, for someone other than me.

Then, over the past few months, I kept on coming across the story about Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52) and how Jesus asks a man (who was obviously blind), “What do you want me to do for you?”

In reading this, I would always say to myself, “Why does Jesus make Bartimaeus ask when he’s clearly blind and begging on the side of the road. Can’t he give him a break and just heal him?”

I became so focused on the technicalities of this interaction that I almost missed what the Spirit was showing me — that I am the blind beggar.

These last few months, my answer to Jesus’ question is the same as that of Bartimaeus, and has become the prayer that permeates every part of my life: Master, I want to see.

And even now, when I read Jesus’ words from Luke 4:18-19, I begin to understand that in order for me to be sent out to bring glad tidings and proclaim liberty, I must first recognize that without Christ, I am poor, I am held captive, I am blind, I am oppressed. And that the healing and freedom that Jesus offers is not for someone else — it is for all of us.

Know that I hold you all in prayer today, friends (all 60 of us!!).

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The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord (Luke 4:18-19).