The Circle Maker (Enhanced Edition): Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears

by Mark Batterson

Few people prayed with more consistency or intensity than Daniel, and what makes his persistence so remarkable is that he knew his dream of rebuilding Jerusalem wouldn’t be fulfilled during his lifetime. He prayed toward the city that he knew he would never see with his physical eyes, yet he saw it with his spiritual eyes. Daniel prophesied that it would take “seventy years” for the desolation of Jerusalem to come to an end. Is it possible for man to dream continuously for seventy years? Daniel did just that. He never stopped dreaming big or praying hard, because he was thinking long. That is what prophets do. He wasn’t just looking beyond the Babylonian captivity to the restoration of Jerusalem; he was looking even further into the future to the first and second coming of Jesus Christ. Daniel was thinking in terms of millennia. His prayers and prophecies were the seeds of our salvation, and we reap these blessings until Christ returns. The thing that impresses me about Daniel is that he knew his prayers wouldn’t be answered for seventy years, yet he prayed with a sense of urgency. As a procrastinator, I would have been tempted to wait until the last week of the sixty-ninth year to even start praying. Not Daniel. He had the ability to pray with urgency about things that weren’t urgent. That is an important dimension of thinking long.