First-class Noticer

Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.

Colossians 4:2

The word watchful is a throwback to the Old Testament–era practice of sitting on a city wall and keeping watch. Watchmen were the first ones to see attacking armies or traveling traders. They had the best vantage point. They saw things no one else saw. They saw things before others saw them. And this is precisely what happens when we pray. We see things no one else sees. We see things before others see them. We become God’s watchmen.

Prayer is the difference between seeing with our physical eyes and seeing with our spiritual eyes. Prayer gives us a God’s-eye view. It heightens our awareness and gives us a sixth sense that enables us to perceive spiritual realities that are beyond our five senses.

In their classic book Geeks & Geezers, business gurus Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas make an interesting observation about a common denominator among successful leaders in every field. Bennis and Thomas call them “first-class noticers.”

Prayer turns us into first-class noticers. It helps us see what God wants us to notice. The more you pray, the more you notice; the less you pray, the less you notice. It’s as simple as that.

Let me explain how it works from a neurological perspective.

There is a cluster of nerve cells at the base of our brain stem called the reticular activating system that monitors our environment. We are constantly bombarded by countless stimuli vying for our attention, and it is the job of the RAS to determine what gets noticed and what goes unnoticed.

So you download a new ringtone. And you’d swear you’ve never heard it before, but after downloading it, it seems like everybody else has the same ringtone. It’s not that lots of people went out and downloaded it when you did. It’s the simple fact that when you downloaded that ringtone, it created a category in your RAS. That ringtone went unnoticed by you before you downloaded it because it wasn’t important to you. Once you downloaded the ringtone, the RAS recognized it as relevant.

When you pray for someone or something, it creates a category in your reticular activating system. You start noticing anything related to those prayers. Have you ever noticed that when you pray, coincidences happen? And when you don’t, they don’t. It’s more than coincidence; it’s providence. Prayer creates divine opportunities. But prayer also sanctifies the reticular activating system and enables you to see the God-ordained opportunities that are all around you all the time. And once you see them, you have to seize them.

The Aramaic word for prayer (slotha) means “to set a trap.” Opportunities are like wild animals. They are tough to capture. If you’re going to seize them, you’ve got to set prayer traps.

We often think of prayer as nothing more than words spoken to God, but maybe it’s more than that. Prayer is not a monologue; it’s a dialogue. We speak to God with everything from words to groans to thoughts. And God speaks to us through dreams, desires, promptings, impressions, and ideas.

The Sixth Sense

There is an old adage: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In reality, everything is in the eye of the beholder. The emotions we experience don’t reflect our external reality; they reflect our internal reality. We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are. That’s why prayer is so critical. It’s a way of seeing reality — and, more specifically, the reality that is beyond that reality we can perceive with our five senses.

Some things cannot be perceived with the five senses; they can only be conceived by the Holy Spirit. Some things cannot be deduced via deductive reasoning; they can only be imagined by the Holy Spirit. Some things cannot be learned by logic; they can only be revealed by the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit compensates for our sensory limits by enabling us to conceive of things we cannot perceive with our five senses. Think of it as a sixth sense. The revelation of the Spirit gives us extrasensory perception, in the truest sense of that phrase. He helps us see the invisible and hear the inaudible. But that sixth sense has to be cultivated, much like our five senses do. Our spiritual vision develops much like our physical vision does.

When babies make their grand entrance into the world, their visual resolution is one-fortieth of that of a normal adult. They lack depth perception. And their visual range is only about thirteen inches. The world is low-definition, two-dimensional, and only thirteen inches in diameter. Slowly yet sovereignly, the world begins to take on width and breadth and depth. By four months, a baby can perceive stereoscopic depth. By six months, visual acuity has improved fivefold. Their black-and-white world has burst into a kaleidoscope of colors, and they have volitional control of their eye movements. And by his or her first birthday, the child sees the world almost as well as an adult.

Our spiritual eyes develop in much the same way. And prayer is the key to perception. Before our spiritual eyes are opened, the world is only thirteen inches in diameter. It’s like living in a low-definition, two-dimensional world. Then the Holy Spirit gives us depth perception. He opens our eyes to see the ordinary miracles that surround us, the ordinary miracles that are us. It’s like our spiritual cataracts are removed to reveal a reality that was always there. Like Jacob, we come to the ultimate realization: “Surely the LORD^b is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”

When we open our spiritual eyes, we start seeing God everywhere we look. We see the image of God in others. We see His fingerprints on His creation. We see God-ordained opportunities all around us all the time.

It’s something like what happens when we watch a film with 3D glasses; when we pray, God comes at us in ways that startle and thrill us.

We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.