Here’s a story I bet you didn’t hear about. On September 22, 2001, eleven days after 9/11, twenty thousand or so folks gathered at Government Center to pray for Boston. That was the day that John Ashcroft let us know that Boston had been targeted for a terrorist attack, particularly—ahem—directed towards large crowds. I have a vivid memory of walking to the prayer gathering at about six that morning and seeing the Herald’s headline: “HUB LOCKS DOWN.” All, evidently, except for one idiot going to the most likely terrorist target in Boston history.

What do you think about prayer? Maybe you think it’s (a) a wonderful symbol of the human spirit, (b) a placebo for folks who need that sort of thing, (c) a powerful means to see things change or, (d) well, God knows what you think. I will say I hear some great stories. Today, for instance, I heard about the mother of a friend. We’d prayed for this woman a couple of weeks ago after hearing that her breast cancer had metastasized and would require in-home hospice care from my friend, who began preparing for that. Today we heard that her doctors were baffled at the utter lack of any evidence not only that she has cancer, but that she’s ever had cancer. Early in December the Globe wrote an article about our church. The article began with a story of a woman who dragged herself to our church after a fall that had left her in great pain and multiple body braces. Someone at our service said that they sensed God wanting to heal people with serious back trauma. That got her curious enough to ask for prayer and she was totally healed, took off the braces and never put them on again.

And at this gathering just after 9/11, tens of thousands of people from all over the country—not just New England, but Florida and California and Georgia—prayed for fresh encouragement on a grand scale for residents of our awesome city. They prayed that any sense of living a hardscrabble Northern existence would be gone, that we’d have a fresh experience of overflowing abundance from God, that it would seem like things really would turn out okay in our lives. And you can take this for what it’s worth, but right at that point, of all things, our beloved Patriots began the most amazing run of any professional sports team I’ve ever followed—a run where, as it were, judgments against them were shockingly overturned, where the breaks finally went their way. (Bill Belichick is quoted in a recent book as saying at the moment of victory, “Can you believe we just won the Super Bowl with this effing team?!”) And then this city—which within the month before the prayer event had been called “Loserville” by local radio hosts—saw two more Super Bowl wins and a World Series win in the next four years. Obviously you can read this any way you’d like. But I know the way it’s seen by many of my friends who were praying that day.

And why did these people come from all over the country that day to risk their lives on our behalf? I asked that of the organizers and got an answer that was both surprising and the secret belief of every Bostonian. Namely (in so many words) that Boston (and, they told me, Cambridge) was The Most Important Place on Earth. Not for whatever reasons you might think—the universities here, future leaders coming from all over the world, our innate wonderfulness—but because that’s what praying people from many places were sensing from God, that He had plans for Boston that would prove to be a gift to people all over the world. And this, along with other things, has been mobilizing church leaders all over town, more of whom are praying together and empowering their congregations to pray together than I’ve heard of in any other spot in America.

So join the fun! As one of the biggie biblical prophets encouraged, pray for the prosperity of your city! As the Psalmist encouraged, more and more take all your needs and troubles to God before you take them anywhere else! And, should you have a sickness or a need you’d especially like prayer for, we—in partnership with many other local churches—are offering bi-weekly so-called “healing rooms,” free drop-in times where you can get prayer from experienced and gifted people. (They’ll run Thursday evenings and Friday mornings, starting the 26th. Give us a call for specifics.) Maybe you’ll see improvement or maybe you won’t, but you will get some rich prayer. And, in all of this, let’s see together if we actually are living in the center of the world.