And though I would agree that all of these ideas have some
merit, when I read the story of the 1947 Fellowship of the
Burning Heart, I felt as if I had found my spiritual soul mates! I
wondered if I had perhaps been born a few decades too late. I
so deeply admired their devotional lives and how jealously
they guarded them, yet I knew few contemporaries who
embraced a similar conviction. After sixteen lonely years (at
that time) of carrying a torch, I couldn’t help but shout, “I’m
‘in.’ I’ve been ‘in.’ I’m staying ‘in!’ ”
Granted, sixty minutes a day is not a lot of time. But when
that—or any—specific amount of time is attached to God, it
sounds impossibly long or much too demanding to request of
the average person. Yet most of us spend at least one hour a
day either watching television, working on the computer, or
working out at the gym. Some of us spend even more than one
hour a day in business or staff meetings.
If you’re like me, God needs at least that much time to chisel,
mold, purge, and prune you. If you’re like me, one hour alone
with God each day gives Him extended time to talk to you—to
shape and reshape your life. In fact, one hour, on some days,
may seem hardly enough time for Him to change your
stubbornness, empower your weakness, heal your
relationships, or even restore your soul.
One hour a day with God, as the 1947 Fellowship of the
Burning Heart discovered, is where the seed of an idea turns
into an organization and millions are changed for eternity (such
as Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ International);
where an amazing prayer is uttered from a mountaintop,
resulting in unaffordable property being purchased at a rock-
bottom price (such as Henrietta Mears’s founding of Forest