Three times a year, something unusual happens at OneHope.
We stop.
Meetings are cleared, projects are set aside, and teams across the world pause together for one purpose: to seek the Lord.
We call it our Day of Prayer. It is a time when the OneHope missional family comes together not only to pray for the work before us, but to pray for one another. We bring our needs, our burdens, our partners, and the children and youth we serve before the Lord.
After nearly 40 years of gathering this way, I could tell story after story of prayers answered and miracles we have witnessed in this community. But our Days of Prayer are about more than setting aside time on the ministry calendar. They express a conviction that has shaped both my life and OneHope from the beginning: prayer must be our first response, not our last resort.
The more responsibility we carry, the easier it is to believe we simply do not have time to stop. I have felt that tension throughout my life in ministry. But I have also learned that the more God entrusts to us, the more dependent on Him we must become.
I learned that long before I ever led OneHope. I grew up on the mission field with parents who began their days in God’s Word and prayer. My dad still models what it means to live in ongoing conversation with God through what we call “breath prayers,” talking with Him throughout the day as naturally as breathing.
That example shaped me. To this day, time in God’s Word and prayer remain nonnegotiables in my life. The fuller the schedule becomes, the more I recognize how desperately I need His presence, His wisdom, and His direction.
That same conviction is why Spirit Led is one of OneHope’s core values. We bring our work, our partners, our decisions, and ourselves before God. Then we listen. We remain open to Him interrupting our plans, changing our course, or leading us somewhere we did not anticipate. We do not want to move ahead of the Holy Spirit or lag behind Him. We want to walk where He leads.
At our most recent Day of Prayer, we focused on the prayer Jesus taught His disciples. As I prepared, I found myself returning again and again to John 13 through 17. Those chapters give us a beautiful picture of the posture with which we come before the Father in prayer.
The disciples were confused. One of them would betray Jesus. Their Teacher was preparing to leave them. They did not understand everything happening around them or what was about to come.
And out of that very human place comes a simple request:
Lord, teach us to pray.
I think many of us come to prayer that way.
We do not have everything figured out. Sometimes we arrive carrying a burden that has just entered our lives. Other times, it is a prayer we have carried for years, and we find ourselves asking, Lord, how much longer? We may not even know what to say. We simply know we need Him.
What strikes me about those chapters is that before Jesus gives His disciples words to pray, He forms the posture of their hearts.
He kneels and washes their feet, forming in them a posture of humility and service. He tells troubled disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” teaching them to trust the Father even when they cannot understand what He is doing. He calls them to abide in Him because apart from Him they can do nothing. He promises that the Holy Spirit will be with them. And He commands them to love one another as He has loved them.
All of that changes how I hear the Lord’s Prayer.
“Our Father” reminds us to rest in the fatherhood of God. We come as beloved children to a Father we can trust, One who does not abandon His people in the darkness.
“Your kingdom come, Your will be done” teaches us to surrender our own desires to the Father we trust, just as Jesus did before the cross.
“Give us this day our daily bread” reminds us that we live every day dependent upon the Father’s provision.
“Forgive us” draws us back into the right relationship with God and with one another.
And “deliver us from evil” is not naive optimism. It is confidence in the risen Christ, who has already walked through suffering and death and now intercedes for us.
The Lord’s Prayer is not a string of familiar phrases to recite. It is a family prayer. Jesus teaches us to say our and us, not simply my and me. Prayer draws us beyond ourselves and into the burdens, hopes, and needs of the Body of Christ.
That is why praying this way together as a global ministry matters so deeply to me.
Across Africa, Asia Pacific, Eurasia, Latin America, North America, Southern Asia, and the Lusophone world, our OneHope teams serve in profoundly different circumstances. Some are navigating conflict and instability. Some are serving alongside churches in places where following Jesus carries tremendous cost. Others are discerning new opportunities created by technology, partnerships, and rapidly changing cultures.
Our circumstances may be different, but our dependence is the same.
Because the vision God has entrusted to OneHope is far beyond our human capacity. Reaching every child and youth with God’s Word will never be accomplished through strategy, resources, or effort alone.
We need the Lord of the harvest, we need the Holy Spirit, and we need to abide in Jesus.
The greater the opportunity, the greater our dependence must become. Apart from Him, we can do nothing. But as we remain in Him, He shapes our desires, our prayers, and the work He has entrusted to us.
That is why we stop to pray. Not because prayer interrupts the work, but because prayer keeps the work surrendered to the One whose mission it has always been.
Would you pray with us? Pray for our teams and ministry partners. Pray for the children and youth God has called us to serve. Pray for laborers for the harvest. Pray for sound minds in an anxious world. And pray that in everything we do, we would remain sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Because this mission has always been His.
We simply want to follow wherever He leads.
