Leadership as Intercession Part 2 : Present to God on Others’ Behalf Ruth Haley Barton | eReflections
I thought this was a remarkable blog on intercessory prayer. Part 1 of our summer eReflection series can be found here . “I look at God, I look at you, and I keep looking at God.” — Julian of Norwich The practice of intercessory prayer has been a hard one for me to incorporate into my life as a leader because the way it was taught early in my Christian experience made it seem so weighty and burdensome. It often involved elaborate lists for praying around the world (in thirty days or less), promises made that were very hard to keep (“I’ll pray for you”), and thinking really hard about what to pray for (since clearly God wouldn’t know what to do for the person I was praying for unless I told him!). As time went on, there was a different problem that emerged. When it came to the difficult experiences that are part and parcel of life in leadership—criticism, complaining, subtle jealousies and other kinds of bad behavior—I noticed that my first response was generally not to