For years, I struggled my way into adulthood, and my parents prayed for me constantly. I was racing in the wrong direction.
From my own experience, I can say this: A mother’s prayers are powerful.
And I am extremely grateful.
In 1985, I was living in the Northern Yukon.
For three years, I worked in that wide, lonely, beautiful land where the sky felt larger than the earth, and the nearest building might be forty kilometers away.
It was the honeymoon phase of my young Christian life.
The Holy Spirit had introduced me to another realm, the Kingdom of God. I felt ten feet tall and bulletproof.
David’s words in Psalm 18 capture that season perfectly:
“For You light my lamp; The LORD my God illumines my darkness. For by You I can run at a troop of warriors; And by my God I can leap over a wall.”
Psalm 18:28–29
That was young faith.
Raw. Hungry. Unpolished. Alive.
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A Taste of Abundant Life
In those days, I discovered something that felt revolutionary: I could mail away for cassette tapes of Bible teaching.
One afternoon, I was sitting on my grader in the Northern Yukon, listening to a teaching on my Sony Walkman. Kenneth Copeland was telling a dramatic story about praying for a young man who suddenly collapsed during a church meeting in Texas. He said the young man’s head hit the floor with a terrible sound — like someone had dropped a watermelon.
Right after hearing that story, I stopped my grader for lunch.
The gravel highway had almost no traffic, so we simply stopped where we were — me on the grader, and my coworker behind me on the vibrating roller, packing the loose gravel back into the road.
I climbed down, poured coffee from my thermos, and walked over to him.
He took a bite of his sandwich.
Suddenly his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed onto the gravel road.
His head hit the ground with that same terrible sound I had just heard described on the cassette.
He stopped breathing.
His skin began to turn blue.
I was twenty-something years old, alone in the vast wilderness, full of raw faith, and had just finished listening to a story almost exactly like this.
So I did the only thing I knew to do.
I prayed loudly. I rebuked the devil. I told my friend he could not die in Jesus’ name.
And suddenly, he gasped back to life.
A few moments later, he stood up, dazed and confused, with sharp little broken rocks stuck into his face, with blood leaking down in several places. He looked at me with crazy eyes and started coming toward me.
I prayed again with all the authority I could muster.
Suddenly, his eyes opened wide, he spun around and sprinted down the road, away from me, away from the hotel where we lived, and toward nothing but the next highway camp 60 kilometers to the South.
I packed up our lunch boxes, shut off his machine, climbed back onto my grader, put the blade down, and kept grading slowly in the direction he had disappeared.
Eventually, I found him around a bend in the road, standing quietly beside the ditch.
I asked if he wanted a ride back to his machine.
He said yes.
So I took him back, and we finished the workday together.
To this day, I do not fully know what happened out there.
Maybe it was medical. Maybe spiritual. Maybe some strange mixture of both.
But I know this: I was hungry for more.
I did not want a “just-be-nice-until-you-die” version of Christianity.
I wanted the Book of Acts “signs-and-wonders-will-follow-you” version.
I wanted the kind of life where Jesus was present, the Holy Spirit was active, and ordinary people stepped into situations far beyond their own ability.
God let me look through a keyhole into a dimension where He is King.
There is something inspiring, raw, and contagious about young faith.
Psalm 20
Psalm 20 is fascinating because it is deeply personal.
It sounds like one person, or perhaps a whole community, speaking blessing over someone standing before a difficult moment.
The Psalm begins:
“May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble…”
And it ends:
“Answer us when we call.”
The whole Psalm turns around one great question:
How do people live in such partnership with God that heaven responds when they pray?
Then, almost hidden in the middle, comes this curious line:
“May He remember all your meal offerings and accept your burnt offering.”
At first glance, that sounds distant from our world.
Did God sometimes forget meal offerings or not accept burnt offerings? If so, under what circumstances might that have happened? And are these ideas relevant today?
Buried inside those two offerings is a challenge strong enough to change a life.
The Two Offerings
In the Law of Moses, the meal offering, or grain offering, was often connected with gratitude. Flour, oil, incense, bread: the fruit of human labor offered back to God.
It said:
“Lord, thank You. Everything I have comes from You.”
The burnt offering was different.
Nothing was held back.
The whole sacrifice was placed on the altar and consumed in the fire.
No leftovers. No private portion. No retreat.
It said:
“God, all that I am belongs to You. I am all in.”
Psalm 20 does not oppose these two offerings. It joins them together. The first is plural, the second is singular.
God remembers the grateful heart.
And God receives the surrendered life.
Mature faith needs both.
Cain, Abel, and the Heart Behind the Gift
This theme reaches all the way back to Genesis 4.
Cain brought an offering from the fruit of the ground. Abel brought the firstborn of his flock.
The problem was not that grain offerings were wrong. Later in the Law, God clearly welcomed grain offerings.
The deeper issue was the heart behind the gift.
God has never merely wanted religious activity.
He has always wanted the person.
That same invitation echoes forward into the New Testament:
“Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.”
Not dead sacrifices now.
Living ones.
People fully available to God.
All in.
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I’m standing in front of my grader, with a roller behind me, doing remote airstrip maintenance.
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Looking Back at Younger Days
Recently, I was looking through old photographs from my younger years.
I saw a young man full of hope, faith, and vision.
I was not highly educated then. I did not understand cross-cultural ministry. No deep leadership training. No polished strategy.
But I believed God could do something.
And I was actively available.
There is a kind of faith often found in younger believers that is beautiful to behold, a willingness to say yes before all the details are figured out.
Keith Green used to talk about the “green-light / red-light test” for missions:
Jesus told us to go.
So all the lights are green unless God clearly turns one red.
There is something deeply biblical about that kind of availability.
As Paul Hattaway said:
“Our greatest spiritual ability is our availability.”
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The prison guard called me to pick up one of the guys who had been in for a long time and had no family nearby. I took him to another guy’s place who was recently released, and we went on a ministry trip to a conference in Altamira. They shared their testimonies. Then my friend got baptized…! Oh yeah! I could take on a troop of warriors, and with God’s help, I could leap over a wall. There are no feelings that compare.
When we are in way over our heads, we are in the perfect place for God to use us. We usually don’t have it all figured out, but we know the next step in the right direction.
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The Fire Does Not Have to Go Dim
Now I am 65.
And one of the subtle temptations of growing older is nostalgia.
We can start saying:
“Things were better back then.” “People were different.” “The world has gone downhill.”
But was the past really so perfect?
My grandparents were immigrants who knew poverty. My parents had their own hard roads. Every generation has faced its own darkness, confusion, and fear.
The world has always needed redemption.
And God has always been at work.
Sometimes I wonder if what we miss is not actually the old world…
…but our old expectancy.
Jesus still calls people into abundant life.
Not comfortable life. Not predictable life. Not safe life.
Abundant life.
A life full of opportunities beyond our strength, challenges bigger than our experience, moments requiring radical trust, and people trapped in darkness who still need hope.
This is as true at 65 as it was at 25.
As true in the Amazon Basin as in the Arctic.
As true for grandparents as for young leaders.
As true for retirees as for missionaries.
God is still looking for people willing to place themselves on the altar again — not to earn His love, but because they trust Him enough to belong fully to Him.
And the next generation is still looking for people who can show them the way.
Those coming after us are watching.
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Mother’s Day
As we celebrate Mother’s Day, we are thinking with gratitude about the women who prayed for us, carried us, encouraged us, corrected us, and quietly helped shape our faith when it was still young and fragile.
These are often the ones who prayed, like David in Psalm 20, for God to “send help from the sanctuary” into our lives.
Some are celebrating with family this weekend. Others are grieving loss, distance, or longing.
May God meet each person with His kindness and presence.
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A Prayer
Lord Jesus,
Restore in us the holy expectancy of young faith.
Thank you for mothers, parents, and mentors who helped us along the way.
Form us into people who encourage those behind us along their way.
Save us from nostalgia that slowly becomes unbelief.
Teach us gratitude for every good gift, but do not let us stop at gratitude.
Form us into acceptable living sacrifices — fully available, fully surrendered, fully awake to Your Kingdom.
For the young, give courage. For the old, renew fire. For the weary, restore hope. For the cautious, awaken trust.
Encourage us with glimpses into Your realm. Let the reality of Your presence exude from us.
And when You call us beyond our abilities, remind us again:
By You we can run against troops… …and by our God we can leap over walls. Yeah!
