I started riding motorcycles as a young guy, and I was good at it. The first time I threw a leg over a motorcycle, I was in love. “Oh my gosh, this is it!” It was a long time from that moment until I got saved. I started riding when I was about 12, and I got saved when I was 28. During those years I was having a lot of fun and being coached by some really good people. I had the opportunity to train and gain a lot of experience in being highly mobile over all kinds of terrain: race tracks, desert racing, cross-country. I didn’t realize God was equipping me with what I now call the spiritual gift of mobility. It was exactly what I would need to be able to navigate Cambodia.
When we arrived in Cambodia as missionaries and I realized my mobility was an asset, I started traveling. I helped a lot of pastors and denominational leaders get to remote churches where the roads were bad. I trained them how to stay on a bike and not get hurt too badly. For about seven years, I followed along behind them, pulling them out of the mud and fixing their flat tires. That’s when I first started intentionally focusing on prayer for Cambodia.
And then in 2015 God ordered me to circumnavigate Cambodia’s border twice a year, praying the whole way. I was skeptical about praying for 10 days straight; I couldn’t even stay awake in a two hour prayer meeting! But on that first trip I learned that it’s not hard at all—10 days went by really fast! I took one of my closest friends along for that first "Prayer Circle," and now we have a whole prayer posse doing this. We’ve started to see spiritual breakthroughs in remote places I’ve been praying for for a long time!
But Prayer Circles isn’t just about breaking spiritual strongholds. It’s about people. Two weeks before embarking on a Prayer Circle, I’d start asking God about divine contacts along the way, and he would point out places on the map for me to stop. I would log those coordinates into my GPS while riding through the far reaches of Cambodia, and when we reached one of those points we would slow down, looking and listening. Sure enough, there would be divine contacts in that place, people who were obviously waiting for us—they just didn’t know it—and we were supposed to encourage and pray for them. They were often “one percenters”—that one lost sheep that Jesus leaves the ninety-nine others to go and find. They were isolated; they didn’t have anybody to know about them, to care about them, to show up and lay hands on them and pray for them. They felt lost and sidelined. But in fact they weren’t sidelined at all! God put them right there because he had plans for them in that place! Some of the people God sent us to were believers needing encouragement; some of them didn’t know what they believed, but internally they knew there was a God. And we got to tell them his name!
Tag along with Dave via this video, and ponder the way God pursues his people throughout their lives—and how he’s led and pursued you!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Everitt and his wife Lisa moved to Cambodia with CRM in 1994. After more than two decades, they are transitioning to a new home-base in the U.S., leaving the Prayer Circle Ministry in the faithful hands of those trained up in Cambodia to keep it going.