Radically Happy

The Event: All-Night Prayer

On May 17th at Echo Church in San Jose, the new* Pray the Bay is holding its final All-Night Prayer Meeting for Pentecost 2024. I’ll be there from 10 pm to 5 am, but you can stop by for just an hour or two.

I attended the kickoff on April 5th at Experience Church in San Francisco. Two separate people came up to me and gave me variants of the same prophecy:

“That thing you have been praying about for years, you will soon see with your own eyes.”

My reply:

“I think I am seeing it right now. In fact, eight years ago I imagined seeing it this week!”

The Expectation: Relational Revival

To be fair, in my “prophetic fantasy” from 2016 I imagined it as having already happened, not just beginning. But I did date my futuristic article “April 1st, 2024”, which is at least “poignant” even if not “accurate.”

Regardless, this is precisely the kind of revival I was hoping to see. Characterized by what Joel McGill calls an outpouring of “the fruit of the Spirit” in relationships, not just the “gifts of the Spirit” for ministry.

It was such a profound experience I’ve been struggling with how to describe it. Even though there was plenty of prayer and worship, it didn’t feel like a typical “prayer meeting” or “worship night.” To me, it felt like a “date night with Jesus,” where it was more about being with that Special Someone than any particular activity.

The Experience: Dwell Time

One word that I’ve found particularly evocative is the idea of “dwelling” with Jesus, where the focus is primarily on being with Him and ministering to Him. Yes, we want to be made holy and spread His Kingdom, but in some ways that’s just a side effect of drawing closer to Him.

That is why I titled this blog post “Dwell Time”, as the various technical meanings of that term align surprisingly closely with how that first night felt: resting at home with Christ as He cleans us up to stay locked on Him.

Adsorption filtration removes contaminants by adsorption of the contaminant by the filter medium. This requires intimate contact between the filter medium and the filtrate, and takes time for diffusion to bring the contaminant into direct contact with the medium while passing through it, referred to as dwell time.

Filtration#Dwell_time

The dwell time in GNSS is the time required to test for the presence of a satellite signal for a certain combination of parameters.[^cite_ref-1][1] A search process detects whether a GNSS satellite is present or not in an area of the sky, based on correlation of a received signal with a reference signal stored in the receiver.

Dwell_time_(GNSS)

In information retrieval, dwell time denotes the time which a user spends viewing a document after clicking a link on a search engine results page (SERP).

Dwell_time_(information_retrieval)

In the military, dwell time is the amount of time that service members spend in their home station between deployments to war zones. It is used to calculate the deploy-to-dwell ratio.

Dwell_time_(military)

Dwell time (TD) in surveillance radar is the time that an antenna beam spends on a target.

Dwell_time_(radar)

In transportation, dwell time or terminal dwell time refers to the time a vehicle such as a public transit bus or train spends at a scheduled stop without moving.

Dwell_time_(transportation)

Invitation

If you are in or near the Bay Area, come find out for yourself. I’d love to see you in San Jose, but there are events in the other counties every Friday before then. Check the website for details.

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End Note

* The original Pray the Bay was spawned out of Pray South Bay, as highlighted in Ed Silvoso’s 1995 book “That None Should Perish“. Unfortunately, it faded away in the early 2000s, perhaps because we weren’t able to resolve the tension between local churches and midweek “praise and worship” nights. The new generation seems to have overcome that hurdle, possibly because Zoom calls feel more “neutral” than in-person gatherings…