Our youth pastor once preached about “Outrageous, Audacious, Ostentatious Prayer.” I feel like that’s a leap above regular faith. It’s when you go beyond the normal expectations and step out to the unheard of—to the kinds of things that cause people to look at you and say, “You’re crazy.” Ok, maybe they wouldn’t actually verbalize it; but, they’d say it with their eyes, begin that sly side-step, moving away from you, thinking you’re not like everybody else.

Message to the world: “I don’t WANT to be like ‘everybody else’!” I’m choosing to believe for things that some don’t have the audacity to believe can happen. I’m going to pray BIG prayers, claim aloud things I don’t possess, and worship God for outrageous answers to prayer!

More than once I’ve been told, “Don’t get your hopes up.” Many times I’ve felt that I was the only one actually believing for something…. And. That’s. Ok. I’m beyond worrying if anyone is going along with me for the prayer journey.

People’s prayers all look different. I look at prayer more like a hike. You see, Satan hasn’t paved a nice flat, obstacle-free surface for our prayer journey. It’s more like an uphill, rocky climb. It may momentarily flatten out to make us think things are going better, only to let you step off an unforeseen cliff that lands you smack in the middle of a forest where you can’t tell which direction you need to go.

Yeah, it’s a hike. It takes endurance. It takes faith that the next step will be securely planted in God’s footprint ahead of me. With each step I get closer to what outrageous, audacious, ostentatious prayers bring: outrageous, audacious, ostentatious MIRACLES! And this is why I’ll get them—because I dared to pray them. I’m daring to venture past average prayer life into the realm of outrageous prayer.

I’m nowhere near where I need to be yet. I imagine others who are stronger than I walking in the treetops on their prayer journey. We can always be closer to God, more patient, growing in our faith and in our worshipful attitude along the way.

And that’s my prayer… to be striving toward those outrageous, audacious, ostentatious miracles and improving my ability to believe for and receive them.