Ellen is a single woman who sensed God calling her to leave her job and enter full-time ministry that paid only a fraction of the salary she was receiving. She sent me this email:

Vonette Bright, co-founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, spoke frequently encouraging intercessory prayer. I heard her tell of going to one place to speak and meeting a woman who had been praying for Vonette and that particular meeting. At the close of the meeting the woman said to her, “God is not going to let me let you go. He wants me to intercede for you.”

There was a great famine in Samaria and people were starving. The king tore his clothes in despair and vowed to kill the prophet Elisha. Surely he had power to deliver them from the nation that held them captive and he was doing nothing.

In his book Dialogue With God, Mark Verkeler tells of his first journaling experience. Judy, a rebellious teen who was living with their family, had been breaking the house rules, and he decided it was time to confront her. He intended to tell her that if she didn’t live by the rules, she would have to leave. She was still at school, so he went to his office to pray while waiting for her.

Why do some enjoy a more intimate relationship with God than others? “We are at this moment as close to God as we really choose to be,” states Oswald Sanders. In his book Enjoying Intimacy With God, he wrote of a study he did of Moses and the Israelites that revealed four circles of intimacy available to God’s people.

“As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people, both now and forever” (Psalm 125:2). On stormy days, how foolish it would have been for the Israelites to have exclaimed, “I can’t see the mountains today; I guess they’re no longer around us.”

When my husband and I visited Kansas City's Nelson Art Gallery, he detected a detail I had missed while looking at a painting of Christ on the Sea of Galilee. The painting pictured the frightened disciples in the mist of a violent storm. While the panicked disciples tried to bail the water out of the boat, Jesus slept peacefully.

Pastor Nakov in Macedonia attended a conference in 2013 in Turkey. His heart ached when he saw many mosques in contrast with early Christian ruins. He wondered “Why is Islam flourishing?” and “What happened to the gospel witness?”