Rich Dixon is back!

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The first big event on the ride happened at Elk River.

Before we get to Elk River, I should talk about prayer and The Dream. I don’t understand how prayer works.

I know prayer changes me.

I believe in prayer and its power. I believe in talking transparently to Jesus and doing my best to listen. I believe He hears prayers and I absolutely believe He answers. Every single time.

Others seem certain about clear links between prayers and results. I rarely see an obvious straight line between my prayers and subsequent events. I don’t believe everything positive represents a YES from God, or that disappointment always signifies a NO.

God’s orchestrating a larger, longer-term story, with a more complex web of characters and subplots, than I can possibly comprehend. His story never wavers and yet somehow incorporates our choices and mistakes. I don’t know how that works.

I don’t want to confine His magnificent, infinite story within artificial walls just so I can pretend to understand.

This dream didn’t need a smaller, more predictable version of God. A God-sized dream requires a God big enough to hold it in the hollow of His hands. One of the incredible gifts of hours cranking alone was the opportunity to contemplate His incomprehensible majesty. And the more I tried to imagine Him, the more I knew I didn’t really know.

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Before we left Fort Collins, our friend Dick Foth advised us to be open to what God had in mind. He prayed for us to meet people who needed to hear our message: a single parent searching for direction, a family of a special needs child, a poor person who’d learn remarkable generosity, someone in recovery…

Foth’s prayer list was long and quite specific. We didn’t know what to make of it, especially when we began meeting those on his list, one by one, beginning in Elk River.

Like I said, I don’t understand how prayer works.

To be continued…