The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears

by Mark Batterson

raw dependence is the raw material out of which God performs His greatest miracles.

We pray out of our ignorance, but God answers out of His omniscience.

Most of us don’t get what we want because we don’t know what we want. Here’s our secondary problem: Most of us don’t get what we want because we quit circling. We give up too easily. We give up too soon. We quit praying right before the miracle happens.

In fact, the death of a dream is often a subtle form of idolatry. We lose faith in the God who gave us the big dream and settle for a small dream that we can accomplish without His help. We go after dreams that don’t require divine intervention. We go after dreams that don’t require prayer. And the God who is able to do immeasurably more than all our right brain can imagine is supplanted by a god — lowercase g — who fits within the logical constraints of our left brain.