This is a random bit of ad hoc theology that came out of a prayer session several years ago. It was helpful at the time. Maybe it will be helpful to someone else...
Christ's followers are called to pray in all things. Usually, prayer requests are immediate and personal. Help me get through this test, heal my injury, watch over my family, convince my roommate you're real. Perhaps to balance this tendency, God sometimes calls people to 'intercede' for communities. If you get asked to join a prayer meeting for a country, school, denomination, etc, you are talking to an intercessor. As someone who is much more comfortable praying for immediate needs (and preferably face-to-face), i have always thought of intercessors as God's artillery division. They get a sudden call to pray for some group and they'll dedicate weeks or months to it, single-mindedly pouring prayer onto a recipient they may have never met. And then all of a sudden the call stops. If they've organized prayer groups those might continue for a couple weeks, but they tend to peter out pretty quickly, as far as i can tell because the Spirit is suddenly not in it anymore.
I understand waking up in the middle of the night with a sudden urge to pray for a person who is in dire straights. And i understand prophesying over communities and then immediately praying about that. But these calls aren't preceded by community-wide difficulty, they go on for a long time and often end without noticeable effect. I'm pretty sure this is a frequent source of frustration to intercessors. I've talked to people who are ready to give up on prayer because "I prayed and prayed for [noun] and nothing happened and i'm too tired to pray anymore. I was so sure God was calling me to pray." Its all very well to say "Don't give up" but why should they continue if they're tired and all they've done has accomplished nothing?
Here are some things we know about prayer:
1) "The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." (James 5:16)
2) "The joy of the Lord is your strength." (Nehemiah 8:10, as the people cry out for their wayward nation)
3) "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing." (John 5:19)
4) "I urge then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people - for kings and all those in authority." (1 Timothy 2:1-2)
It appears that broad-scale intercession is commanded in the Bible, it is expected to be effective, we should expect to receive calls to intercession and it is supposed to be joyful. So what gives?
When i was a teenager and paid attention to such things, the U.S. Army had a concept artillery unit called the XM2001 Crusader. It caught my imagination as a budding physicist for two reasons. First, it had massive gyroscopic stabilizers. Its body was so forcefully aligned upward that it could fire its 155 mm cannon at targets 40 km away (over the horizon) without taking time to deploy outriggers. Instead of several minutes for existing artillery, it would take 45 seconds to stop, orient and fire. The second feature that blew my mind was the Multiple Round Single Impact (MRSI or 'mercy') ability. By starting at high trajectory and firing quickly, the Crusader could fire up to eight shells in such a pattern that they impacted the target simultaneously. The first round would be in the air for nearly three minutes; the last just shy of a minute. The Crusader could move 15 seconds after firing (no outriggers to pack up), so by the time the enemy realized they'd been hit, the fire cite would be vacant.
Almost uniquely among weapons, you don't fire artillery while looking at the target. In the old days, a siege engineer would receive fire orders and align the gun and then your job was to put ammunition in the air as fast as possible. Now the engineer is mostly replaced by a computer, but the same principle applies. You have to trust that your commander knows what he's doing, that he sent you to a place where the enemy aren't and gave you coordinates for a place where they are. You don't follow your shells to see where they land; by the time they do, you should already be doing something else.
We know from experience that spiritual warfare is bi-directional. Prayer upsets Satan and often provokes a counterattack. Intercessors are often so focused on the horizon that they're ill-prepared to pray for themselves. I've actually seen global ministries take the precaution of having people with a healing anointing regularly check in on their intercessors. Given that, i think there's a lot of be learned from the Crusader model.
First, intercession should be aligned upward. Rather than trying to maintain focus on big prayers by hugging the ground and using the weight of your own piety for support, stability should come by remembering Who you're praying to. Even a gyroscope takes time to spin up. Before praying, take some time to align, but don't bother to dig in.
Second, fire orders are at the discretion of your Commander. Most intercessors are good at starting on command, not so good at stopping. They want to pray their way to victory, pummeling the target until salvation occurs. But prayers are powerless outside of God's will. When the call to pray stops, its time to either switch targets or scoot. If this call has displaced some of your personal prayer time and small group activity, its probably time to run back to the safety of the Church. Hopefully by the time your prayers take effect you'll be in a completely different mental place and less susceptible to retaliation.
Finally, don't worry so much about the outcomes of your prayers. Your prayers are powerful and effective and the Laws of Heaven are as immutable as the laws of physics. If they don't come back down immediately, that just means they'll be back later going quite fast. A scattered battalion of Crusaders might all fire in different sequences at different times to drop hundreds of shells simultaneously onto an enemy stronghold just as the ground forces arrive. This is made possible because Command&Control now has real-time knowledge similar to our Commander's. You have no idea who else is being called to pray and who is being readied to move in when all those prayers come back to Earth.
