It looks less like intensity, and a lot more like joy.

The pattern that emerges from David’s tabernacle is this: prioritize presence in the church, and you get the kingdom in the city.

As David Fritch writes, “The presence of God was David’s political strategy.”6

But the modern church’s best-kept secret is this: we believe in productivity, not prayer. We believe in solid programs, above-average teaching, and yet another worship album release. That’s success right? The church’s underground atheism in our time is that we will busy ourselves with almost anything except prayer.

Then he did it. For the thirty-three years of David’s reign as Israel’s king, worship and prayer took place twenty-four hours a day. David put prayer back at the very center of God’s people.

David’s big idea, the culmination of seven years of waiting and dreaming, was, “What if we pitched a tent? A tent where anyone and everyone can come to worship and pray. Nothing fancy, just a common space right at the city center for prayer.”

Dayenu prayers sound like, “God, lunch today would’ve been enough, but you provided me with the resources to choose the type of food I wanted to eat and options to pick from.”

Dayenu means “it would have been enough.”

Morris West names a certain point in the spiritual journey when our prayer vocabulary gets summarized to only three phrases: “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”39 To enjoy our lives, to savor our days, is sweet praise to God.