The Hunger for Prayer - Part 8

MY STORY

Long before I understood the secret place, I was drawn to prayer.

I always loved prayer.

I attended prayer meetings.

I prayed at home.

I wanted to be someone who knew how to pray with depth, authority, and relationship with God.

But for a long time, I thought prayer was mostly something you attended or something you did.

I didn’t yet understand that prayer was also abiding.

Intercession.

Burden.

Persistence.

Prevailing.

Fire.

Continual communion with God.

I had seen that kind of prayer before.

I saw it in my grandmother.

She didn’t just pray as a religious habit.

She carried something with God.

There was a depth in her prayer life that marked me, even when I didn’t fully understand what I was seeing.

I remember wanting that.

I prayed for years, asking God to make me a prayer warrior like my grandmother.

But honestly, I didn’t know how.

I remember noticing that people didn’t seem to pray like my grandmother and her friends prayed.

There was a depth there.

A travail.

A knowing.

A burden.

A longing.

A relationship with God that felt powerful and real.

And I remember someone saying something to me that stayed with me:

“It’s your age now. It’s your time to do it.”

And I remember thinking:

How?

How do you become that kind of person?

How do you learn to pray like that?

How do you carry that kind of relationship with God?

For so much of my walk, that was the struggle.

I loved God.

I wanted God.

But I didn’t always know how to live for Him.

People say things like, “Fake it till you make it,” but that never healed me.

It only taught me how to perform.

And performance was already something I knew how to do.

I didn’t need to fake faith.

I needed to be formed.

I needed discipleship.

I needed truth.

I needed the Holy Spirit.

I needed to learn how to abide.

And when desperation and calamity came into my life, I learned quickly.

Revelation opened the door to intercession.

Prayer stopped being something I attended.

It became how I survived.

It became how I breathed.

It became where I took fear, confusion, pressure, and pain when I didn’t know what else to do with it.

And without realizing it at first, God was answering the prayer I had prayed for years.

He was teaching me to pray.

Not just with words.

But with surrender.

With persistence.

With honesty.

With fire.

With dependence.

With my whole life.

This was the doorway into the secret place.

Not because I had mastered prayer.

But because desperation taught me where to go.

And once I found Him there, I knew I could not live without that place again.

To continue reading My Story read Part 9