There is this house on Winnebago Street on the near-east side of Madison that used to be a Meth lab but now it’s the central hub of our 24-7 Boiler Room community. The floorboards are charred from when the kitchen used to manufacture narcotics.

Over the past six months there have been at least two-dozen people passing through in varying stages of residency. The house dynamics are always changing as new friends come seeking a place to call home and learn how to live for Jesus. I’m not sure how it happened but the house has become a little bit like an accidental 24-7 Motel. I just moved into the fourth story top flat and just as me and my flat-mate settled in, Jesus moved into the third bedroom: the Prayer Room.

Transit (24-7 Prayer’s nine month residential training course) started a few weeks ago and one of the first things we did was set up a permanent prayer-space in the bedroom at the very top of our tall house. This past Sunday, after our community dinner, we all made the long trek up the flights of stairs to inaugurate the newly erected Prayer Room; or maybe I should say our Prayer Stair Well. The team decided that because it took so long to walk up the stairs that we might as well put some meditations and scripture on the walls for people to process while they climb.

The inauguration was a significant moment in the journey of our community. As we move out of the summer months of visitors and transition something in our spirit is settling into ‘home’ here.  As we huddled tightly into this new sacred space and started scratching the walls thin for heaven to seep through I glanced around the room and was reminded of another group of Jesus’ friends huddled together to pray in an upper room a few thousand years ago.

They too had experienced recent transition; changes that make our residential shuffle seem insignificant. We might have seen some friends come and go through our community, but they saw Jesus come and go right through the heart of the whole world from life to death to life again. A week and a half later they are sitting in a room praying to Jesus, a friend they are used to seeing face to face. Maybe this is first time they talked to Jesus when they couldn’t see him; maybe they felt foolish in that moment, wondering if Jesus would still respond to them the same way. Then the promised Spirit of God nearly blew the house apart with violently strong winds and spontaneous combustion. They run out into the streets yelling praise in languages they don’t even know, Peter stands up and gives an impromptu sermon, and within a few hours they made a few thousand new friends and as they taught them the way of Jesus, more new friends showed up each day.

The Kingdom of God was multiplying before their eyes, it was moving in and taking over; soon food, clothing, even real estate was being traded in this new economy. What started in the room wasn’t content to stay in the room, it couldn’t help but spread like wildfire.

This is what I thought of as I looked around our brand new Prayer Room; this small lopsided space with its rising heat from our huddled bodies is our down payment on the Kingdom of God.  It grows and spreads so much that we’re sitting here in this room because a group of people on the other side of the world thousands of years ago sat in a room and prayed. Is there anywhere this Kingdom can’t spread to?

‘Do you feel it coming?’   The Vision

Praying together at the inauguration of our prayer space were three generations, residents and friends of the Boiler Room, people from across our country and even from other continents. A plaque hung above the door proclaiming that this room was recently vacated by an adopted child who just moved across the world with his parents to serve people suffering with AIDS.  We might not have had every tongue and nation present, but we have a pretty good start.

This humble prayer room is our small dedication of real estate to the governance of God. We set it apart in anticipation of a day coming when all spaces will be under His good authority. For now it might just be a small, quiet room with creaky floors at the top of a cramped stairwell but one day it will be a city with golden streets being lowered out of the sky.

As we closed our prayer time a friend suddenly noticed that a red moon was rising in the night sky, an echo of Peter standing up on that day so many years ago and quoting the prophet Joel: “

"The sun will become dark, and the moon will turn blood red before that great and glorious day of the Lord arrives. But everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”