Every year, the church I lead does something brave. We pray for 12 hours straight. People at church have the option to come and go as they can. That’s the beauty of this schedule. Some stay with me all 12 hours. I have to lead for the whole 12 hours.

This is physically exhausting. It’s a lot…specifically a lot of spiritual warfare. I look forward to it and don’t look forward to it every year.

We’ve done this for four years now, and every year we pray for some hard things—often hard things involving justice, systemic racism, healing, missions, and circumstances that seem far too complicated for me to fix.

In 2025, Amanda joined us from her hospital bed, connected to endless tubes and fighting for her life because of an infection after a botched surgery. She was with us for a lot of the 12 hours, other than when a nurse or doctor needed to be with her. From May to October, we prayed consistently for her. Often, we saw no results. The infection lingered. The infection grew more complicated.

It was hard for me to lead our church in prayer week after week when the news wasn’t encouraging. She was dying. Couldn’t God have healed her more quickly? Why was it all so scary?

Amanda will tell you that her healing began after the 12 Hours of Prayer.

In 2025, we also prayed for Jordan, who had been in and out of hospitals for months with dangerous blood clots from an autoimmune disease he had been suffering from for more than ten years. The prayer was specific: that a new biologic medicine would return Jordan to the quality of life he hadn’t experienced since 2016.

The medicine worked, though we didn’t know for another few months. The medicine still is. Jordan is happily living a full life again.

In 2026 we prayed for Steve, whose business partner locked him out of their business. Civil court proceedings began. Months passed. Court dates came and went. Lawyers worked and got paid a lot of money. There were no decisions from the judge, or the decisions were negative.

We kept praying as a church again with me leading and wondering why none of the court decisions came back with justice. I was praying with doubt.

The very next morning after our 12 Hours of Prayer, the judge finally made a ruling and declared Steve’s business partner unfit to run a business.

A decision. Nine months later than we expected, but a decision that brought justice. Steve says this happened because of our 12 Hours of Prayer.

And then there is LaToya. For 22 months, we prayed for her as she faced a first-degree murder charge following a domestic dispute involving her estranged husband. Her prayer was that the charges would be dismissed with prejudice.

Trial dates were set and postponed. Multiple motions to dismiss were denied by different judges. We kept praying. We prayed for 12 hours in 2025 and 2026 for all of this, one specific prayer for LaToya every hour.

Then 6 days before the trial was scheduled to begin, the prosecution finally admitted they had an audio recording LaToya had made during the altercation. The recording revealed the escalation and threats against her life. An emergency hearing was held. Three days before the trial was to start, the case was dismissed.

Prayer answered. We as a church celebrated. We carried the weight of this one for 22 months. Celebration!

However, this is what I’m continuing to learn.

Two months after Amanda was released from the hospital, she was back in the hospital with another infection.

What? Didn’t God miraculously answer that prayer?

Amanda now has scans every six months at a hospital three hours away to make sure a small pocket of infection deep in her abdomen stays small. She also has chronic pain as her body continues to heal.

We continue to pray.

Amanda has to live through the anxiety of those scans every six months. And yet she says, “So what? God has healed me.”

Twenty-two days after Steve received his judgment, his business partner still didn’t honor the ruling and was still draining money from the business.

What? Didn’t God answer that prayer?

We continue to pray.

Steve says, “I know God has my back.” He heard that from God repeatedly through those long, awful months, and he believes it now. There may be worse news to come as the forensic accounting tracks the fraud. And yet he says, “So what? God has my back.”

Now the healing for LaToya can begin after 22 months of legal shenanigans. We continue to pray.

This is what I have been learning about prayer.

We prayed for big things and received big answers to prayer. We celebrate these as miracles. We also need to continue to pray.

But how I pray is different after receiving these big miracles.

I struggled to lead my church in prayer with the slowness that healing and justice took for these dear people in my life. I had an expectation of God to work a whole lot faster. I worried that our many, many, many prayers would end with Amanda’s death and LaToya incarcerated so “God, do something now!!” I openly shared this wavering with my people at church as I continued to pray out loud with my fears.

God did do something that met our expectations. Maybe something about our commitment to 12 Hours of Prayer broke something open. I do not believe prayer is a transaction we make with God. But Amanda, Jordan, Steve, and LaToya will tell you that something happened from our commitment.

So as I pray now for yet another scan, for the forensic accounting, for healing of trauma, I find myself praying with a whole lot more confidence and trust that God is also going to do something again.

That’s what surprises me the most–my confidence to pray through these hard things.

There is something about prayer being evidence-based. But we have to pray through to get the evidence. Answered prayer is the evidence.

We have seen God answer big prayers. We have also learned that an answered prayer doesn’t mean life becomes easy or predictable.

Answered prayer changes our perspective.

We don’t pray because we are certain we know what God will do. We pray because we are learning to trust God who knows what to do. Trust is evidence-based. We have some powerful testimony as evidence.

I say we, because it really helps to pray with other people through these big things.

We continue to pray.

Not because we have figured out how to make God do what we want. But because we have learned, over and over again, that God is trustworthy.

For a church that helped me write the Bible study, Trust Issues with God, this is saying something!