Good afternoon everybody. This is the last talk before we adjourn to lightning talks. Is there anybody here that has a lightning talk that they are giving? That is a awesome, okay. I'm excited to see your lightning talks. They are better because they are less intense to prepare. So I would like to talk to y'all about your careers. Who here has one? A career. Okay. You may have more than one. That's okay too. I think we're actually not going to define career today. Thank you for the suggestion. That's a terrible idea. I have an eight-year-old boy at home. I was struggling to come up with a theme for my slides and one night heading up the stairs to bed, I stumbled directly onto an idea. So I should probably note that five years ago I basically told the me of today not to do this. So we'll just try to get this together and see how it goes. I very nearly retitled this talk, the five existential crises of a senior developer. But recent world events had my heart pretty busted up so I just want you to know that this is actually very hopeful before I start playing on your fears. Okay? All right. Okay. Let's talk a little about me first though. I'm Brandon Hayes. Here's a conference speaker pro tip. You have to start by establishing your bona fide. So I'm here to talk to career stuff to you. So the thing I need to do is dazzle you with my flashy job title. So I want to thank the front side. Before I left there, they graciously paid for my trip out here. They're an amazing front end consultancy specializing in JavaScript heavy client side applications like EmberJS apps, React Native, stuff like that. So I don't know if I was good or bad at my last job. I love the front side but I realized one day that I literally couldn't do my job anymore. So the thing is running a company doesn't mean you have one job, it means you have like 100. So leaving a CEO job, the good news is I get to write an incredible journey medium post. So I'm looking forward to that and telling you all about my incredible journey. But that's not what we're here to do today. And it doesn't really tell the whole story. I haven't even had just one career. I've had a series of them. So let me show you my impressive job history. Super awesome, right? So I don't know what you would call this. So these are careers. I had a friend correct me and say, well what you say, what you're talking about isn't a career. It's a collection of careers. I was like, okay, name that for me. Meta career. If somebody has a name for that I would love to hear it. But I actually think maybe language is failing us a little bit here because this is such a modern concept that people do this this much now. So we're going to talk about five existential crises. And existential crisis is basically where you wonder about the point of your present situation right down to the level of your very existence. And if you've never felt one of these, I'm so happy for you. I'm scared for you because it's going to happen sooner or later. It's going to be rough. It's going to be happening. It's going to happen at stupidest time. But before I do, I want to note that we as an industry and as individuals have some seriously broken assumptions that go into calculating what constitutes our value and purpose as software developers. I'm going to talk about a lot of these existential crises and how they're caused by our broken calculators giving us a distorted picture of what our careers should look like. But before we go into the reasons this happens, let's dive into each crisis chronologically. So I got to spend a week teaching at Turing School about a month ago. And my friend Tom dialed in at the end of the week to speak to the students to tell them about software in the front end. During the Q&A, one student got up and said, hey, question, what recommendations do you have for people trying to break into the industry?  And that's been my advice to people for a while. It just isn't much fun when you're trying to get that first programming job. There's very few job postings that are looking for junior level devs. Job postings say you need 10 years of react experience and a PhD in computer science to even bother applying to a junior level position. And the natural response of a rational human being is, well, that's bananas. I don't qualify for that. And they move on. But the hyper-confident people who are not rational, they come out and they push on that door a little bit, and they realize it can't open for them under certain circumstances, which we'll get to a little bit later.  And maybe you get that interview. For me, this was a remote pairing session with a VP at Pivotal Labs. And I was trying to get my first dev job. After about 40 minutes trying to build a set class in Java, which is like, I don't know, trying to build a house with chopsticks, the interviewer said, well, that's going to be a no for us. So keep at it or whatever. And I couldn't really tell, but I really imagined the guy was really irritated with me for wasting his time. So I went home. I cried my eyes out. I talked to my friend Dave Brady, who was delighted. And I was really mad. I was like, why are you laughing? He let me know this is a normal, even critical part of the horrible, horrible process of becoming a software developer. So I don't have a ton of tips for getting that first job. But confidence, I guess, is key. So if you can, borrow some confidence from the future version of yourself that knows how to do this job. And if you survive this and you hustle and hustle, you come and you get to show up in your first job. And way to go, it's going to be amazing. Right up until you hit that next existential crisis. And if you come from bootcamp or college, it's pretty jarring to learn that you were basically stranded in the woods, given a pocket knife and told, see you in production. And you're like, wait a minute. No one is going to help me take charge of my own growth. Am I really on my own? Why is your most senior developer someone who's just a few years ahead of you? Where the heck are all the 20 and 30 year developers? But it's just one of life mysteries like where the socks go in the laundry. So no time to worry about that.   Man, can you even get a break?  And you see these amazing accomplished people. And you think, that person has a podcast. This one's running a conference. This one's a world-class speaker. What am I doing with my life? How am I ever supposed to catch up to these people? How many people here are familiar with why the lucky stiff? Please be a majority. Okay, thank God. Okay, so if you're not, he was a very early proponent of Ruby and sort of this mad artist slash developer. And in 2006, I actually took a snippet of a talk from his from 2006 in my RailsConf talk this year. And I'm taking a different snippet from the same insane presentation this year. This is why the lucky stiff and the thirsty cups. Can I just take a quick poll of the audience? Has anybody ever felt like that? Have you ever felt like, am I a real programmer? I'm gonna save me. It doesn't help that there's not even a real definition of what senior developer means. And we just kind of slather, when we hire, we slather culture fit all over that to patch up all the places where we're making it up. So I'm gonna take a big detour into this in a few minutes. But the problem remains, we don't even know what we're trying to accomplish. We don't know how long it's supposed to take. We don't know how to tell when we've achieved it. It's like these definitions are specially formulated to inflame your imposter syndrome. So the reasons for this are, again, part of that broken calculator, which we'll come back to. But we just keep coding. We keep solving problems. We learn the new technology. And then at some point, we take a job tile that has senior in it and mission accomplished, right? For a while, it is great. You take the job, you level up at the technology. But after about 18 months or so, you start noticing that the pace of learning is slowing down. And that kicks off this job cycle. So let's check in on your job tenure while we're doing audience participation. How many people here have been in their job longer than 15 years? An overwhelming majority. Just kidding. Basically nobody, just you. Okay, what about 10 years? Who's been here at their job longer than 10 years? Okay, that's, all right. What about five years? Who's been longer than five years? All right, we're getting a few more hands. Who has been in their job less than 18 months? All right, so obviously that's a vast majority. The reasons for that are varied. But from talking to a lot of developers, the cycle of diminishing returns, it's a major contributing factor to burning out in each individual job and then between jobs. Again, another broken function inside of our calculator. And after a few trips on this merry-go-round, it becomes harder and harder to derive satisfaction from your job.  Okay, nope, oh, oh, hey, you can do it. Nope, come on, no. This is the rest of the talk, by the way. All right, we're just going to wait for this rocket to finish and then we're going to go. All right, let's just move on. So the last existential crisis shouldn't really be happening at all.  And that is the total existential meltdown. This is the person that gets so fed up with this cycle with a lack of foresight, having their experience under value that they bail and move to a farm. Those of you who are sort of new to programming may be chuckle, but those of you with a couple decades are like, oh my gosh, that sounds... So you get to a point where your spirit is crushed, your soul is tired, you just want to go home. All in the industry that you joined because programming for our living was your dream job.  So I mentioned that our calculators are broken. We're calculating our purpose and our value in this industry improperly. These calculators are broken because we're feeding them some bad assumptions, and that throws off our formulas about where our value lies. So let's take a look at some of those. The first broken formula in our calculator is the compressed timeframe we use to measure ourselves. There are a ton of reasons behind this, but it lends a sense of pretty extreme urgency to what we feel like we have to accomplish. It starts with, hey, I don't see any role models, they don't see any people here that have been here 15, 30 years in this industry, maybe it only lasts for 10 or 15 years. Since I'm only in it for 15 years, I better get good fast. Hey, everybody else is getting better faster than me. I have kids and I don't have time for the second job managing open source. I can't really keep up anymore. Hmm, maybe I don't even have a place here. I'm out of time, I'm out of runway, and there's a manager job opening, I'm taking it. And after 10 or 15 years, you bail out. And then the next person comes along and says, hmm, people only seem to manage 10 or 15 years in this industry. So there's nothing fundamentally wrong of leaving the technical track to be a manager. It actually is kind of aligned with my preferences. But I've seen many developers look at that as their only way forward past that 15 or 20 year mark. We seem to have developed a career track that's like looking for elite athletes, like Olympic gymnast that burns them out at about the same rate instead of marathoners that can be competitive their whole lives. And the reasons for this are actually tied to a couple other broken functions in our calculator. So the second broken formula in our calculators is the hero problem. In the absence of concrete evaluation, we only have others to compare ourselves to. And we start comparing ourselves to the most visible people in our communities, our heroes. It's become fashionable to hate on the idea of our programming heroes. The problem isn't the idea of heroes, it's the measurements that we use to determine what makes somebody a hero. So they wrote a framework that gained wide adoption or they spend every waking hour working on open source. They had a successful exit in their business. Those are definitely visible metrics, but they may not be healthy to call heroics because they're not attributes that we can easily emulate. And many of them are impossible for people without copious amounts of spare time.  I believe that if having kids or being a single parent or having obligations to take up a person's spare time wrecks your ability to perform heroic programming feats, then we have failed to properly define that term. The third broken formula is about technology adoption. It's a big part of that Groundhog Day feeling and the existential crisis and the feeling of exhaustion the JavaScript community loves to talk about. But all of our communities actually suffer from. So one day Paul Graham descended from the heavens to give us a fashion magazine for the software developer and startup communities. So what's in, what's out, what is so last framework?  So you need to take every advantage that you can with that short runway. This creates an increased sense of importance about what's in fashion. So we need our fashion magazines, our businesses may depend on them. Alan Kay is one of the parents of much of what we know about computer science and he holds that programming is a pop culture which means we feel compelled to stay up on trends and use words like idiomatic. It also means we have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reinvent solutions that have already existed. I know a fair number of developers who burn out so badly on just this aspect of programming that they're ready to walk away from day to day development or the industry altogether. So I don't necessarily know that we've got a shot at changing that about programming but we can develop some coping mechanisms. The fourth and final broken formula I want to speak to is the idea that senior developer is the terminus of your career. One thing that I learned running a business is that it's made me fascinated about how money flows through our businesses. If you follow the money, it's pretty easy to see one big reason people leave. Individuals in a company create and capture value. When we hire salespeople, managers, executives and so on there's a calculation that occurs about their salary or commission structure that allows the company to make enough margin on that to be profitable. So the first question is well, do programmers create value at an increasing rate over their career? I think so because we don't need more 80 hour a week 10X programmers solving the wrong problems 10X faster. We need folks that know which nine of the 10 problems don't need to be solved in the first place. That and the things they can teach the rest of the team is what makes super experienced developers so damn valuable and we need more of them. They obviously can and should be paid more, commensurate with that increase in value. But a weird thing happens to that value curve. Partly because programmers hate talking about money and as a business owner, I love that about programmers. It's extremely common that as soon as they're paid enough to not have to talk about money, they stop thinking about value. They get to not have the uncomfortable conversation and their company gets to keep all of that additional value for the rest of their tenure. So there are some notable exceptions to this. For example, at Netflix managers are tasked with researching the market salaries for their people every year and paying at top of that market value. But companies like that aside, this is a pretty widespread problem. The short-term thinking and the loss of respect for history, the lack of need to increase pay after about year five or 10. It starts looking pretty bad for folks into the second or third decade of their dev careers. It creates a culture that worships the new, eats the youth of our people and spits out experienced folks and leaves them wondering where they belong. So our broken calculators have a strong bias toward valuing things that only young, single, childless folks have time and tolerance for. It's seeped into so much of our culture that people are literally getting plastic surgery to try to be allowed to stay in this industry. We often assume older people just can't keep up with the pace of change when the pace of change itself may be a symptom of not having enough experienced people. For instance, I found out last night that Evan Phoenix and I are the exact same age. Look at him, look at me. That guy has had work done. So when the money curve flattens for technical contribution, many companies offer to promote us into higher pay scales in the management track that don't buy us against us because of our age. And so that's the easiest way out. If you have 10, 15, 20, 30 years of experience or you plan to at any point in the future, your teams desperately need you to set the standards for quality work, choose the right problems, educate people and generally help folks avoid huge, costly, time-wasting mistakes. If you want to stay close to technical work, your experience and your temperament are crucial and we need you on the team. So maybe this habit we have of turning senior devs into junior managers instead of creating a longer technical track is counterproductive, especially for those that move into management simply out of frustration or a lack of runway. And it may take some tough love to fight for reinstating the distinguished developer track at our companies, but I think it's a fight worth having. So I'm not here to fix the whole industry. I'm here to help you as an individual come up with a plan to mitigate the effects of these problems and create a space that you're happy to occupy for the next 30 or 40 years. Maybe cumulatively, if we work together, we can do something about the systemic problems, but let's talk about you for a minute. I have a six-point plan for building a track to help you grow in capability and income for as long as you care to stick it out. So as part of this, we've got to fix our calculators so we understand how to calculate, increase and capture the value, whether or not we choose to stay on the technical track. Fixing our broken calculator starts by stopping and reevaluating some of our base assumptions. First, we need to stop and catch our breath and get some perspective. For me, this happened recently when I had an amazing perspective shifting talk with this guy. This is Alan Worsbrock. He's a 45-year veteran of the industry. He's worked for big and small companies. He's founded them. He's worked in high-level positions at Microsoft and Mozilla. He was one of the earliest implementers of small talk and he wrote the ES6 language specification for JavaScript. Now he consults and teaches people how to use history to protect the future of this volatile industry. He's basically like a programming James Bond. You wouldn't know it by looking at him, but he's a badass. And he told me that as he sees it, one of the biggest problems in our industry is that we're all racing to try to have the biggest impact we can in a 15-year career and that timescale is totally out of whack. It breeds an urgency and makes us feel like we're constantly behind.  He said it's exceptional if people are able to have industry-wide impact before decade four or five. For me, this conversation helped create a perspective shift from a 15-year race to a 45-year fun run. When you think on this timescale, it takes the pressure off. There's plenty of time to have an impact, to contribute, to learn more. There's time to develop the version of yourself that can have that big impact 30 years from now. So step two is to find your board of advisors. You need people that you deeply trust and that can help you reach clarity and think about what you really want. These moments in clarity and purpose are difficult and impossible to achieve by yourself. They may happen in solitude, but they don't happen in a vacuum. When I was just getting started as a developer six years ago, I adopted a mantra, paid to code, paid to code. Somebody just hire me, get paid to code. I want to get paid to code. Later at a start-up meetup, I went with a friend of mine and there was a talk by the CEO of the company that owned the building that we were meeting in. My friend JT elbowed me and said, hey, didn't you say you wanted to get paid to code? This guy just said they hire Ruby developers here. Go up and talk to him. And I was like dressed in a hoodie and I was like, I don't know. I felt like I looked like a schlub and I was embarrassed, but I went up and talked to the guy and said, hey, you don't know me, but I'm looking for a job as a developer and he's like, oh, we'll get back to you. But sure enough, they did get back to me and that was my first paying developer gig. A second story. A few years ago, I went to a breakfast with a bunch of people including Sarah May and she won't remember this, but I was describing how I was getting super burned out and I was using building robots to teach kids how to code as sort of a coping mechanism for that burnout. And everybody else at the table was like, cool, you could actually maybe get a job doing robots and Sarah cut right through that and was like, you seem happiest when you are teaching people. And I was like, huh, I never thought about that before in my entire life. I was kind of taking it back, but these are the moments that stick with me. I've also learned exactly what I do and don't want to do, being brutally honest in my one-on-ones with my business partner, Charles. And I realized I didn't want to play the role of small company CEO anymore. He and the rest of the wonderful people at Frontside since that was beyond burnout and they supported me when it was time for me to move on. So the third step is to design your career map. This is where I want to spend some time elaborating because our industry is just terrible at this. So I want to declare upfront that the blueprint I'm about to offer is kind of a straw map. I thought very deeply on it, I researched it as much as I can, but it's just my take. So you're welcome to beat it up, customize it, tear it up, start over, but I want you to think about how we can start coming to an agreement amongst our various companies on the definitions of what it is to be senior and building tracks for people to progress there and beyond. So last year at RubyConf, I got up and embarrassed myself by playing guitar very poorly before showing this map. I talked about three tracks that developers can follow, but today I want to focus on the engineering track. If you want to leave the developer track, as you can see you have a lot of options, but for a bunch of reasons, most of our smaller companies don't have access to a solid developer track.  And when Alan told me about his first shop, he told me about the fact they gave him a sheet that unfolded into this giant broad sheet and it had a 30 year plan for his role as a technical contributor. And it looked like this, but it had more expectations in rows and a little more detail in columns. And he looked at the 30 year plus column for distinguished engineer and it had requirements like has created industry impacting software and things like that and wondered how he could ever achieve that. So naming things is hard and this track is tough to name. The industry shorthand right now is individual contributor or IC. I'm not a huge fan of the implication that the engineering track is not as much of a team sport as things like management. I think it kind of reeks of that lone genius developer myth, but collaborative contributor it may be a little too on the nose. So I've been calling this the distinguished developer track, but I'd love to hear what other people are calling it. So let's follow this distinguished developer track to find out what we need to do to build our own path to get there. So here's a statement I'm willing to stand by. There is no senior Phoenix developers out there. If you think you are, you're wrong. There are no senior React developers out there. If you think you are, you're wrong. And here's another. The thing is senior developer is not technology specific. That is a sure tip off that somebody has missed defining senior. So I've written about this before, but to me seniority is just the amount of direction a person can provide versus the amount of direction that they require in order to perform their jobs. It's about how much of the problem you can own independently. Now that's kind of a gross oversimplification. So let's dig in. So historically we've gone with wildly differing definitions and got reactions to determine what constitutes senior. I want to get a little prescriptive here for a sake of argument. So I picked 12 traits that to me add up to the kind of independent work that defines where a developer is on the track of being senior. So I'm giving each of these traits my own definition, which means they may not match yours, which is okay. We can talk about it later after I've had a nap and maybe some cider. So the 12 traits I'm presenting fit into three categories, which form this Venn diagram that adds up to a developer that can work and lead projects independently. It's still all mushy and gut feelings unless you can look for evidence that demonstrates one of these traits that a person has actually got experience and time and energy invested into each of them. So the evidence does exist though because if you're working on a trait and you care hard enough about something, the artifacts of this developed trait, concrete examples would just naturally fall out or artifacts if you're using the Queen's English, but I'm not British. I'm a citizen of the Republic of Texas and we say artifacts. So let's dive into these traits and their artifacts. The idea here is to look for how much a person has worked these muscles, not whether they simply like the concept of these traits. For instance, with curiosity. It's not the question of how curious is this person. It's how much does this person exercise their curiosity muscle? There'll be evidence of that exercise. Make sense? Okay, let's dive in. The first one is technical capability. Technical capability is what you think it is. It's the ability to tackle difficult technical problems and see them through the end. The four traits I want to highlight here are curiosity, rigor, fearlessness and propensity to ship. Otherwise known as shippiness, which is a real thing probably. So let's talk about each trait and highlight a person from our community that exhibits this at a level well beyond senior. One more thing, the ranking of each of these from junior to beyond senior is relative to that specific muscle. So a person can be junior in one area and senior in another. And in fact, that's the most likely scenario. So let's start with curiosity. Curiosity is the ability to be fascinated by the world around them and the way things work. So a junior just needs to know enough to ship. If they're a junior at this trait, they just want to know enough to ship. At mid-level, they will have done deep exploration in their primary tool or language and maybe started some exploration in an adjacent or one other. So maybe they're a Vim user and they've explored a little Emacs or have a hobby language on the side. Senior level, routinely transplants ideas from multiple tools or languages into their current task. And to go well beyond that, they will use patterns from mastering many languages to advance the state of the art. An example for this would be like Josef Aleem in creating Elixir. So rigor is the ability to know which foot to put forward and a willingness to walk that path. So we'll use testing as an example. At a junior level, they know the right thing to do but they don't know how to push forward and so they give up. So there's no tests. A mid-level exercises the discipline and tries and pushes through even when it may not be a good idea so you get crappy tests. A senior level knows the pain, the discipline, the pain the discipline is there to solve and is able to explain and enforce it among a team. And so you get decent tests. And beyond that, they can see industry-wide patterns and spot where the discipline is required or being incorrectly applied. And like we need a new approach to testing. Sandy Matz is a great example of that and talked about this on the change log recently. Fearlessness is an unwillingness to be intimidated by problems that don't have a clear solution. At a junior level, they're too scared to attack problems for fear of failing and needs a clear path in order to be willing to start. A mid-level developer knows they're likely to be able to get through. They may actually mimic fearlessness by being ignorant of the consequences. A senior level assumes or knows basically anything's possible and knows which problems to attack and which ones to leave alone. And beyond that, they can attack problems on an industry-wide scale. Like, hey, let's design a framework or, better yet, let's improve the framework we already have. Aaron Patterson, I would consider a really great example of this. Fearlessness is not just jumping into the unknown. Bye. It's about knowing that failure is an outcome that could end up turning out okay. And so being willing to try anyway. So, propensity to ship is the desire and ability to get work out in public repeatedly and rapidly. So it finishes what fearlessness starts. So at a junior level, maybe you have 90% complete projects all over the place and few, if any, to point at at all. At a mid-level, you may have lots of started, published, and abandoned work. At a senior level, you put work into maintaining a few projects that are getting some usage and you know what it is to maintain and own shipping software. And beyond that, you'll have work that's recognized and had impact at an industry level. So Mitchell Hashimoto could be a great example of that. Somebody that just keeps shipping. The second idea is leadership. The second area of traits. The net result of somebody who has exercised the muscles of leadership is they'll typically be labeled a really excellent contributor. So the traits I wanna highlight are owner's mindset, communication, and persuasion skills, purpose, and the ability to focus on the next right thing. In an owner's mindset, you can own larger portions of the problem closer and closer to the core business problem. And they range everywhere from junior where I just wanna solve the problem at hand to being able to point to more specific cases of ownership of a business problem. At a senior level, you would probably be able to say, I've sacrificed these technology preferences to solve this business problem. Beyond that, you probably have started, run, failed, crashed, cried, and succeeded in business at some level. To me, Lea Silver is a really great model of somebody that exhibits this trait. Communication and persuasion is the ability to bring people together to a shared understanding, resolve conflicts, and inspire people. At a junior level, you have a basic understanding of the importance of communication. At a mid-level, you may have developed some active listening skills. At a senior level, you can explain some touch situations they've diffused and prevented by changing communication patterns. And beyond that, they exhibit industry-level influence in writing, public speaking, and other media. And I'm loath to say this, but I think maybe Justin Searles is an example of somebody that does that really well. I'm kidding, he's a friend of mine. He's a total thought leader. I guess you could call that thought leadership. So, purpose is the ability to connect to you and work toward a clear vision of a desired outcome. A junior just wants to work toward a larger purpose, but isn't sure what that is yet. A mid-level can kind of describe how their work aligns with the larger purpose of the company. A senior level probably has their own purpose and is able to explain how their purpose aligns with their work. And beyond that, they probably have a group of people around them, helping them to achieve a compelling vision. Saran Yabarak is a great example of somebody who's gathered a community of people around them. Or is she? What's really going on? Hashtag code maybe. Is it a friendly community or a dangerous cult? No, that's probably pretty nice. So, the ability to focus on the next right thing is the ability to break large problems down so that you know the next appropriate task. Junior level needs somebody to break that problem down for them. Mid-level would be unintimidated by a blank page or an empty code base. More seniors would be unintimidated by a messy page or a messy code base. And beyond that, a person will have used to this sort of like superpower of time, right thing leverage and the tortoise-hair consistency to have accomplished an inhuman-seeming amount. To me, Yuhuda Katz is a great example of somebody that does this really well. The third area is connectedness. And the idea here is to see other people as humans and include their needs in their work. And somebody asked me, why didn't you call this empathy? And the answer is, I got to make up the word connectedness. So, the traits that I wanna explore here are community-mindedness, mentorship, empathetic work and courageous honesty. So, Webster's dictionary defines community-orientedness as a thing I just made up. So, I define it as how much of your work and influence you share with others versus how much you keep to yourself. At a junior level, there's little to no community work. At a mid-level, you do more, maybe speak at meetups. At a senior level, maybe you're speaking at conferences or organizing things or maintaining an active blog at work. Beyond that, you may have industry-wide recognition for your community work. Sarah Allen for her Bridge Foundry Work or Improving Our Government's Technology Outreach at 18F would be a good example to me. Mentorship is the ability to share what you've learned with people in a way that impacts their behavior. So, at junior level, they like the idea of mentorship, but they're really looking to be mentored. At a mid-level, they maybe have a couple people that will call them a mentor. At a senior level, there would be lots of people that would say, I owe some of my career to them. And beyond that, they're recognized for large groups of people as a direct influence on their growth. I think Julia Evans, if you've never seen her programming zines, I highly recommend you check them out. Empathetic work is the ability and willingness to project the impact of your work on the lives of the people that are affected by that. And I use documentation to basically measure this almost entirely. So, basically, it is user experience and documentation. How much do you care and invest in the people that are going to use and maintain your software? So that's basically the rank of junior to senior there. I think beyond senior there would be widely recognized for helping entire teams to work more harmoniously in ways that improve the lives of users and maintainers. Sarah May is known for doing this in person and after a couple of whiskeys on Twitter. Courageous honesty is the last one. It's the willingness and ability to have a hard conversation that you know needs to happen.  At a mid-level, you've studied and practiced skills for having these crucial conversations. At a senior level, you probably alter the course of somebody's business and certainly your personal relationships by having direct, kind, honest feedback. And beyond that, you'll know where these patterns of conversations are likely to be and teach people to put processes in place for them. I had to reach outside of our community to think of the best example for this, but you should watch Brene Brown speak and read her books. She's phenomenal. So I can't tell if this person is seriously junior or seriously senior on the courageous honesty scale. I've had job interviews that are very like this. So when you take all these together and you look for evidence of these traits, you can start to map out an average experience level across them and decide what you want to classify as generally junior, generally mid-level, generally senior and so on. Some people, probably most of us, are likely to be senior in some areas and junior in others. It's not an exact science, but the idea is to get a sense of what areas of improvement a person needs to work more on to be able to do more independent work. It also allows us to recognize that people from non-traditional backgrounds bring a lot to the table, even though they're maybe junior on the technical capability side. So again, you're not gonna be world-changingly amazing in all 12 of these, so it's important to discover your strengths and play to them. Once you've assessed those strengths, your map is gonna pretty much look like a list of the areas that you wanna grow in. It'll be challenging to map out, but it'll be more fun to cultivate than exercises, some latitude in determining technical objectives of assignment. Completed work is reviewed for desired results. So with that map in hand, the one that you design, you'll know what you want to get out of your job. You can work with your management team to talk about exactly what you want to learn and work and grow in and what the boundaries of that job are, where it maybe ends. That's where you pitch your manager on your career track as part of a more concrete system.  The only thing I ask is if you do take some of these ideas and publish how you do it so that other people can see your improvements, because I want to see an open source style thinking take hold and be applied to this problem. So with your map in hand, you'll have a long-term sense of what your goals are. You should know where that road at that job likely ends and I hope you're in a position to be able to be honest with them about it. If you're not, it's not ideal, but it's okay. It's super counterintuitive to think that a workplace would rather have you lie to them about your plans to work there forever, but maybe that's just me. So, and at some point it will be time to move on. And naturally these plans are going to change and adapt as you learn more about your preferences. For instance, when I was 24, my goals were not what they are now. In case you're wondering, that's today me goals. So, let's dive back into the scary world of those five existential crises, except now you have a new inventory. You're armed with a 45 year perspective, a group of advisors that want to see you succeed, a map of your path and your preferences, buy in from your company to help push you along this path, knowledge of what you want to accomplish and when you need to move on and the ability to adapt your plan. So at the first crisis you can pick your mantra, decide not to give up and lean on your board of advisors. Get paid to code. At the second you can realize you're in charge of your learning, your education, your growth and that's okay. You have a network of people to help guide and help you stitch together a mentorship program. On the third one, I hope you inferred that the why song was, the point was the question is absurd.  You can work with your company to start understanding how independently you can work along that path. On the fourth one, once you start being able to assert your value as a senior developer, you're able to help craft a distinguished developer track at your workplace that rewards and recognizes the things you bring to the table as a more experienced developer. That goes a long way toward breaking that cycle and avoiding burnout. And the hope is if enough of us pull together and create cultures that value deep experience, we can keep more of the senior developers that are bailing out to jump into other career tracks or leaving tech all together. So I'd like to explore one theory why we burnout, a loss of a purpose to our work. So if you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in essence it's a layer cake of getting our needs fulfilled, one atop the other. As programmers, most of us live in the top two, striving for acceptance and internal fulfillment. It's a position of extreme privilege. Yet many of us hit these crises instead of fulfillment and happiness. Well, all these existential crises center on one key supposition, that happiness and fulfillment lie one more rung up the ladder, another salary increase, the next job, the next technology, another industry. Happiness is obviously found in more money, more prestige, more recognition, more impact, right? Climb the ladder, it's gotta be up there somewhere. But happiness isn't a layer cake. It's a swirl cake. The skills to dig in and mine for happiness and contentment are the same at basically any layer. So why am I telling you this? Well, many of our existential crises center around this stretching upward instead of inward for purpose. So the stretching is not a bad thing. It causes us to do crazy counterintuitive things like open source our code and suffer panic attacks at three in the morning, writing a conference talk. The six point plan, such as it is, is just a small micro framework, small focused micro framework. See, I don't do enough JavaScript anymore. I should be able to say that roll up right off the tongue for reminding you that you're right where you need to be on your own personal path. So last thing I'll say, I recently reread Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance for the first time in about 20 years. And it was very different this time around. To some, this book is a heartwarming father-son tale to others, it's an interesting interpretation of Zen in our modern lives. To yet others, it's a philosophical journey into the definition of quality. It also has a sort of frightening subplot about mental illness and the loss of identity. But to me, it wound up being a book about the purpose of our work and our lives. So to explain what I mean, you just need to know that in graph theory, there's nodes and edges, the dots and lines on a graph. I wanna talk in terms of nodes and edges.  So here's a thing you made, is it a quality thing? Does this node possess quality? Robert Persig defines quality as the relationship between a person and an object. He thought so deeply on this topic that it literally caused a complete mental breakdown. But I wanna use this graph to try looking at quality from a different angle. Imagine the thing that I have is a hammer made of Belgian chocolate. Is that a quality item? Well, it depends on the purpose. So let's define quality as fit for purpose. So that just pushes the heavy lifting into defining purpose, which again, exists as the relationship between a person and a thing. So that chocolate hammers quality depends on its purpose. If my relationship to it is that I have a nail to drive, it is a low quality item. If I'm hungry, it is a high quality item. One of my friends, one of my closest friends, Kyle Simpson, is a deep thinker about software. And he talks about this delusion program that we sometimes have that we're engineering things that are gonna stand for all time. He calls us architects of sand castles. Our sand castles are so ephemeral that we can see them evaporate many times over the course of our career. It can become disheartening to think that we're just architecting sand castles for the waves to reclaim. But that's missing the point of building these sand castles because this isn't about you. It's not about me. The purpose of a thing really takes hold when it starts fulfilling a purpose for another person and we get to serve a purpose for other people and they to us. And over time, you make more of these connections by creating more work that serves a purpose for more people by connecting other people directly to you and being a friend or mentor to them. Purpose is not in the nose, purpose is the edges. As we grow our impact and our sense of purpose by creating more of them and at higher quality, which again means how much it helps the person on the other end of that relationship. So when we create work that fulfills a purpose for somebody, when we do work that helps somebody else, that's when we feel most connected to our purpose. The sand castles we built and the work that we put in bring somebody joy, ease their pain or improve their lives in some way. And I'm gonna go out in the furthest limb I've ever done publicly and state that I think the purpose of my life is to facilitate these connections, to improve conditions for as many people as I can, directly or through my work, starting with the relationships that matter the most to me. That's a scary thing to say and it's a scarier thing to attempt. So how am I supposed to accomplish all that? Well, one foot in front of the other, 45 years later, you'll be astonished at what you can accomplish. Do not overestimate what you can do in the short term. Do not underestimate what you can do by making small improvements over a long period of time. And if we're willing to take the 45 year view, we don't need to burn ourselves out keeping up and comparing ourselves to others. If we're spending our days making steady progress on understanding and achieving our purpose, if we're using our work and our lives to improve things for those around us, we're mining for the happiness under our feet instead of trying to reach one rung higher. I've met those people. I wanna be one of them. I want you to be one of them. Study what it means to do great work, find people that bring that out in you and put one foot in front of the other. I love you and I believe in you and I'm here to help. Thanks. I'm Tiviking on Twitter. Come find me anytime here on the social media for virtual hugs.


Well, hello, my radiant family. It's Corey Russell here. It's an honor to be with you for this Seek First Wednesday service. A kind of a great honor. Some of my most powerful times in God have been with you. And I am expecting that the Lord's going to meet us today. As I share with you guys some of the things that are on my heart, my goodness, the things that happened in 2020 are unprecedented. It was truly, I believe, a transition year for the whole globe and a transition year for the body of Christ. And transition is difficult. It's uncomfortable even using the language that Jesus used in the Olivet Discourse. He talked about that the days preceding His coming and the generation that would come, they would be likened to birth pangs in the same way that a woman goes through birth pangs leading to the birth of her child so the earth would go through birth pangs. And I just want to say it to you. I believe that we are at the beginning of those birth pangs. The earth is in transition. And I found in my life that as things get more intense, it actually makes me simplify. And it makes me get back to core questions of who are you God? I'm made for you. What's my life to be about? And I believe that the Lord is wanting to really bring some things into focus in this year and in this next decade for us in this hour. And I believe He wants to remove the peripheral, remove the side conversations. And He wants to simplify us. And I want to say to you, my heart is deeply knit to you guys. Pastor Lee all the way down. I just love you guys. I carry you in my heart. And I believe radiant as well as the family I'm a part of here at Upper Room in Dallas. And I believe that there are many others in this nation and across the earth that God is raising up that I believe is forerunning a new wine scan of how a local church is to be operating. And I'm going to be teasing some of those things out in my message today. But I felt like 2020 was a year to get me to simplify.  That was the simple call was to get back into our room and to reconnect with the Father in the secret place. I want to pray for us. Right before I do, I want you to turn to Isaiah 56, verse seven, and I want to look at a verse. I want to talk about the house of prayer being our eternal identity and how God is speaking to the local church in this hour of how we need to reorient ourselves to entering into our house of prayer identity. Father, we love you so much. We're just so grateful, God, for all the things that you did in 2020, the adjustments, the trials, the disciplines, the temptations, all the things we walked through in 2020. We thank you, Lord, that is going to prepare us for where we're running in the future. And Father, I pray for the radiant family. I pray for the Seek first Wednesday crew. God, I pray that you would visit us with the Spirit of Revelation. Father, I pray that you would release that Spirit of Revelation upon us and that it would touch us corporately and it would touch us individually. It would touch us in our homes and our marriages, in our church, and that it would touch the whole radiant network and that you, God, would bring about something glorious in these days. We ask you to do this in Jesus' name. Amen. The first thing that I want to touch on is, I want to make it clear to you that the house of prayer is our eternal identity. This is the eternal identity of the people of God is to be the house of prayer. This didn't come up from Mike Bickle and Kansas City. It didn't come up from a Korean pastor in Korea who had prayer mountain for 50 years. Whatever model of prayer that you might be familiar with, it was actually spoken of in Isaiah 56 and Isaiah 3,000 years ago gave us the clearest definition of God's people and of what his house is to be about. I want us to look at it, Isaiah 56 verse 7. This is amazing. It says, even them, he says, even them I will bring to my holy mountain and I will make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar. Here it is. For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Now the ultimate fulfillment of this Isaiah 56 passage is actually going to take place when the Lord returns and when Jesus is back on the earth ruling in Jerusalem and the Lord makes that house in Jerusalem his house of prayer for all the nations of the earth as we see prayer go on even into the millennium. Even into the next age prayer will go on because prayer is how God's resources, his kingdom is advanced. It's through his people being connected to his heart and through song and through prayer releasing his kingdom. We know that prayer will always exist because the expansion of his kingdom will know no end is what Isaiah 9 tells us. Well what I love about Isaiah 56-7 is I believe that what God is doing in these days. I mean I spent 18 years in Kansas City, a part of the International House of Prayer. We heard what the Lord did and how for the last 20 years day and night prayer. I believe what we've been seeing over these last 20 to 30 years in the earth and we've seen an explosion. I think in the mid-80s there was like 25 houses of prayer. Now there's tens of thousands of day and night prayer houses, local church praying, praying communities. It's an explosion across the earth and I believe it's one of the clearest signs of the generation that we're living in. I believe this Isaiah 56-7 spirit is being released upon the church in this hour. One of the things that I love about Isaiah 56-7 it says this. It starts with even them. That's powerful because when most of us have thought about prayer in the past, we've thought about it for the super elite, the super anointed ones, the kind of mystical prophetic ones that prayer and intercession has been reserved for the holier ones. But what I love in Isaiah 56 and this is the invitation God is giving to you. He's giving it to me and He's giving it to the whole body of Christ in this hour. It's the phrase that even them, even the most disqualified, the most messed up ones, the ones that have been through the most difficulty in their lives, maybe 2020 was a year you royally screwed up. Maybe you found that in your seclusion and in your isolation, you ran back to old forms of medication, old forms of anesthetizing your pain, indulging in too much media, too much this, too much that. What I love about the spirit of Isaiah 56-7 is this, even them. There is an invitation for you and for me to come out of the caves of shame, to come out of the caves of isolation, to come out of the caves of fear and rejection and condemnation and to begin to draw near to God's holy mountain and the place of prayer.  It says this. He says, even them, I will bring to my holy mountain and look at the phrase, I will make them joyful in my house of prayer. The primary emotion connected to the place of prayer that God is going to restore, He's going to release joy. When most of us think of prayer, we don't think of joy, but Isaiah tells us right here, joy is going to be the primary hallmark of the people of God in context to connection with God. Our God is a joyful king. Our God is the blessed God. He's the joyful God. He is the happy God and it says in Psalm 16 that at His right hand is His pleasures evermore and in His presence is joy. And I believe that joy is going to fill the place of prayer individually and corporately in this season like no other time. How is the Lord going to do this? Number one, I believe the Lord is going to release new views of Him. He's going to remove, the Holy Spirit is going to knock off old views of God that see Him mostly disappointed, mostly angry, mostly frustrated that we haven't done enough and we're going to begin to connect with the happy God, the beautiful God and the joyful God. And as you begin to get new views of God, joy is going to replace boredom. Joy is going to replace just duty and discipline and we're going to fall madly in love with being in God's presence. Number two, I believe that God is anointing singers and musicians to begin to lead and to give language and let the rhythms of our prayer ride upon the rhythms of music and song. I believe that the Lord is releasing songs and music to help bring us into the joy of prayer. And number three, we're going to begin to see answered prayer like no other time. Jesus tells us this in John 16. He says, you will ask the Father and He will answer your prayer so that your joy may be full. We're going to become full of joy as we begin to see that God operates His kingdom through answered prayer. Many of us have gotten trained in not seeing our prayers answered, but I can hear the Holy Spirit say, I'm bringing forth childlike praying to release the power of my answers in the earth. He says, I'm going to make them joyful. Look at this. In my house of prayer and then Isaiah declares it, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. I mean of all the different, you know, language and all the different words to characterize Father's house, it would be the place of prayer. Not my house shall be called a house of evangelism. It's awesome. A house of missions, a house of healing. It's awesome. House of prophecy. It's a house of prayer, which means the primary culture and anointing resting on the house is prayer. It's prayer, which is simply connection with God, relationship with God. God's like I'm after more than dead forms. I'm after more than you living at a distance. My house is Abba's house and this is where intimacy takes place. This is where government takes place. This is where you hear my words over you and you get washed in who you are to me and then you speak my word back to me and you see my power released. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. See, I believe that as we get back to the apostolic foundation of prayer, and this is why I'm talking to radiant.   You are a house of prayer and it's for the purpose of the nations.  This is what Isaiah prophesied and then Jesus will take it up a notch because in John two and in Matthew 21, do you know Jesus began his ministry in Jerusalem and he ended his ministry in Jerusalem by cleansing the temple and by making it very clear my father's house is the house of prayer. I love it.  Jesus comes right into the temple and he starts turning over the money changers. He starts removing all the obstacles and this is in essence what Jesus is saying. You've turned Abba's house into something other than what it was created to be. You've created so many barriers, so much resistance. You have built yourself up at a distance. My father's house is the place of connection between heaven and earth and you've turned it into something else and it says in John two that when the disciples saw Jesus doing this, Psalm 69 got stirred in their minds as they begin to connect that the son of David looked just like David. Zeal for your house has consumed me. In Matthew 21, Jesus rides into Jerusalem and they're waving the prom branches and they're saying, Hosanna to the son of David. Hosanna to the son of David.  And what did Jesus do as the son of David? What did he do as the son of David? He walked right into the temple. He cleansed the temple and the Bible says that the blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he held them there. What is Jesus doing? He's saying, I am the son of David and I'm setting up my throne in the house of prayer that my governmental seat is in the temple.  My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Jesus said this and I want you to understand something and that's why I'm talking to you radiant. That's why we're talking on this Seek First Wednesday. I believe that radiant, you guys are putting this thing in priority, ministry to God, connection with God, loving God, getting filled with the knowledge of God's will and out of overflow of connection with His will, speaking and singing God's word back to God and seeing His kingdom get released. This is how God releases it. Prayer and worship is how God's resources are released into the earth. His kingdom is manifested in connection with His people. If I've spent many times thinking about this next though, God from Genesis to Revelation, do you know what God's ultimate longing is? It's dwelling on the earth with His people, dwelling on the earth with His people and what we see in these sacred spaces called the prayer room. What we see both corporately, but what we see in the prayer room are those divine connection points between God and man. God calls this beautiful and He's going to fill us in 2021 with a fresh revelation of this. I believe that what we're seeing take place is just at the beginning because this is going to be the primary anointing resting on the end time church. I said it to you at the very beginning, I believe that we're steadily moving in to the generation of the Lord's return. I believe 2020, we've crossed the threshold, we are in transition and the earth is moving into a different mode and I believe it's important that we understand where this is going so that we can get enough into alignment with it now. Understanding the future actually equips me for today. The church at the end of the age will only be one church. She will be a praying church. Revelation 22.17 tells us the spirit and the bride say come that before the Lord returns, we're going to see the church come into unity with the Holy Spirit and as the church comes into unity with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is going to remove all the false garments off of the church, all the false identities off the church. It's going to remove widow mentality, orphan mentality, slave mentality, living at a distance mentality and the Holy Spirit is going to be our wedding planner as he introduces us to God his father and God his bridegroom and the church is going to come into her bridal identity which is intimacy based.  The spirit and the bride and when the nitrogen of the spirit meets the glycerin of the bride, we're going to see a global explosion. It's the cry, come, come and our deep will call out to his deep and we will provoke the Son of God to return. Do you know why Jesus is going to return? It's because we want him to. He is going to come back for a lovesick bride, a church that misses him and that wants him and that's in full unity with the Holy Spirit. God's going to use great presence and great pressure to produce a great prayer. God is going to use great presence and great pressure to deliver us off of our islands of individualism and our islands of isolation. We are going to find ourselves in prayer rooms and dinner tables in this next season and we're going to begin to come into a divine unity with the Holy Spirit and we're going to come into a divine unity with each other in the body of Christ and that John 17 prayer of Jesus is going to come into manifestation that they would be one Father as you are in me and I'm in you that they would be one in us that the world would believe. There is coming a oneness through the Holy Spirit that he is going to release and it's going to be the greatest prayer that's going to provoke the Son of God to return. Jesus told us in Luke 18 he gave us a parable that men would always pray and not lose heart and he gave us a parable about a widow woman crying out to an unjust judge and the unjust judge for a while would not listen to this widow but she kept coming and coming saying I need breakthrough I need breakthrough I need breakthrough and Jesus said I want you to pay attention to what the unjust judge said the unjust judge said this though I don't fear God nor regard man yet this widow keeps troubling me I'm going to give her what she wants lest she wear me out and Jesus is going to use that parable to tell us that if a widow can overcome an unjust judge how much more can the bride the elect standing before the righteous judge not see breakthrough in our lives in our families in our cities in our nation and across the earth before he returns and then Jesus ends this parable in Luke 18 by saying this he says and he goes and will God not avenge his own elect who cry out to him day and night though he bears along with them I tell you that he will avenge them speedily nevertheless here it is when the Son of man comes will he really find faith on the earth when Jesus says will he find faith he's actually making a declaration that he will find faith and what does faith look like in this parable faith looks like this persevering prayer rooted in intimacy persevering prayer rooted in intimacy which means prayer that doesn't quit because you know who he is and you know who you are before him and I want you to know something the reality of God is judge is going to become very clear in the coming days I want you to know we're not he's not just the beautiful God that we worship but he's a judge who comes to make wrong things right he comes to release justice and physical bodies by releasing healing he comes to release justice where there's been oppression and depression he wants to release power encounters where there's been the lost loved ones it's going to release salvation where there's been a disconnect there's going to be restoration financial breakthrough physical breakthrough emotional breakthrough and ultimately it's going to be the judge breaking in upon the earth before he returns as Jesus begins to manifest his righteous judgments in the earth and Jesus is going to connect his justice to his elect ones who cry out to him I'm here to tell you friend Jesus is going to come and make all the wrong things right we have it right here in the word of God one of my favorite other verses about what we're going to look like before the Lord returns is in Revelation 5 verse 8 it's the great pitcher of the Lamb who is worthy to take the scroll and open up its seals out of the right hand of the Father and the cry goes out the search goes out there they do a search in heaven on earth under the earth and the report comes back to John there's no one found worthy who can open the scroll or lucid seven seals this scroll is the title deed to planet earth and it's the judgments of God to eradicate evil from the planet and then it says this and I looked and behold he hears there is one who's prevailed the lion from the tribe of Judah the root of David and then John's looking for a lion but he sees a lamb as though it had been slain having seven seven eyes and seven horns horns speak of authority eyes speak of revelation and this crucified resurrected lamb walks right up in the midst of the the lightnings the thunderings and the voices the beautiful burning god the bible says he takes the scroll out of the right hand of him who sat on the throne now this is the point right here and when he had taken the scroll the four living creatures and the 24 elders they fell down before the lamb and in one hand they have harps and in the other hand they have golden bowls here's the phrase full of incense which are the prayers of the saints the thing that I want you to lock in on is the word full that what Jesus is going to produce in the earth see I believe Jesus has been an intercession for the last 2000 years and it's and it's been about awakening the church to the glory and the dignity of partnership Jesus wants more than us just getting out of jail free card of checking off religious boxes Jesus died for connection Jesus died so that us who were a far off might come into the intimacy and the dignity of the redeemed of partnering with him and what you see in revelation five eight through the harp and through the golden bowls full of incense the church wakes up we wake up we wake up to our glory and our dignity through prayer and through song because there's a coming upon a fullness fullness of incense which are the prayers of the saints which means the church has understood how government is released and we're not just standing by saying go for it Jesus Jesus is saying I've got a suitable partner who's moving with me every tribe every tongue every people every nation in unity and we're going to see the global new song arise I want you to know that we're in these days that's why 2020 is so important we shifted over into a new season that I believe takes us onto this track matter of fact I believe Malachi 1 verse 10 is some of what God did in 2020 Malachi 1 verse 10 and then I'll talk about Malachi 11 in a second but Malachi 110 Malachi shows up to the nation of Israel and the priesthood was in shambles that had gotten to such a bad place they were taking leftover animals they were taking blind animals whatever was left of weak blind messed up animals and they would bring them as sacrifices and this is what the Lord says through Malachi he says who is there among you who would shut the doors so that you won't kindle a fire on my altar in vain Malachi shows up and he goes guys Israel you've lost the revelation of who I am and you've entered into the religious spirit of going through the motions checking me off your box going to church going through songs and living the other six days and 23 hours of your week disconnected from me and I want you to know that I will shut the doors so that you can reconnect with the glory of my name and reconnect with an honor it is to be connected to me and may I submit to you that I believe some of what happened in 2020 was God releasing a global shutdown on the church so that we can rediscover the honor and the glory of connection and doing it together in the same place with God because the very next verse Malachi 110 and Malachi 111 he gives us one of the greatest prophecies of what I believe is going to become really clear in the coming days he says for from the rising of the sun even to its going down he says my name shall be great among the Gentiles he says this in every place incense shall be offered to my name and a pure offering for my name shall be great among the nation says the lord of hosts that God's answer to the global shutdown is the reemergence of global worship and prayer global incense and I want to tell you by the word of the lord we are going to see the coming years marked by an explosion of worship and prayer in local churches like radiant we're going to see it happen in our homes we're going to see it happen personally in our marriages in our homes in our churches and we're going to see the anointing of prayer and I just want to say it to you and submit this to you I believe that the churches that refuse to restructure and reprioritize the ministry of worship and prayer in our local churches are not going to be useful to the lord in the coming days I believe that we're in a Matthew 25 moment to where the cry the brygrom is coming go out to medium is going to get louder and louder and louder and what happens as that cry gets louder is there comes an exposing of reality wise virgins are ones who have built history of intimacy foolish virgins are busy running the machine of ministry and we are going to see the wise virgins come to the forefront and they will be entrusted with apostolic mission apostolic power and apostolic resource in the coming generation I want to tell you that by the word of the lord we are going to see this thing take place like no other time I believe we've crossed over into a new season I want to submit some things that I feel personally what the Holy Spirit is saying to radiant as well as to the body of Christ 2020 in many ways exposed prayerlessness in the church and I believe as we embark on the days ahead we must cultivate watching and praying so that we aren't found medicating our hearts in other places and are unable to stand the coming days I want to say that again 2020 exposed prayerlessness I heard so many people say if I just had more time to seek God then I would and yet I found most people spent more times on social media in front of television screens in front of debate rooms and actually the thing they said they would do if they had the time didn't happen I believe 2020 is a call to the body of Christ it's time to watch and pray and to be careful where you medicate your heart because you are either going to connect your heart and get it free in the presence of God or you will look to Netflix you will look to social media you will look to all the vices and the comforts and the medications of this world to bully your heart instead of finding it in the one place and I feel like Luke 21 34 is a very prophetic chapter for the body of Christ in this hour this is Jesus's last words of the Olivet discourse and Luke he says take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down so that's the deception of sin I've seen in my own life the thing that is going to bring an escape if we don't watch it the thing that promises an escape many times produces a pressure and Jesus says take heed to yourself pay attention to your interior life lest your hearts be weighed down with three realities corousing drunkenness and the cares of this life and that day come on you unexpectedly Jesus says it will come as a snare on all of those who dwell on the face of the earth watch and pray that you may be able to escape all these things and to stand for the Son of Man Jesus says it's not an hour as you move into these days of intense glory and intense shaking you need to cultivate watchfulness and prayer getting your eyes open and getting your spirit engaged and keeping your spirit unencumbered from the weights and the seductions and the medications of this world this verse is going to become clearer and clearer as we're moving into the coming days because there are so many vices as intensity comes that we find our solace we find our comfort and we find our source in God alone I believe we're in the middle of a shift again I spent 18 years in Kansas City International House the part of the Lord visited Mike Bickle in 1982 in Cairo Egypt he was in a hotel room seeking God in Cairo Egypt and the fear of the Lord filled the hotel room and the Holy Spirit spoke to him and the Lord said this I will change the understanding and expression of Christianity in the whole earth in one generation I want to say that again the Lord says I will change the understanding and expression of Christianity in the whole earth in one generation there are many dynamics I believe Mike understood this in the encounter he understood that the church would begin to function differently number one and that the lost the lost world would begin to see the church differently I believe that we are in the middle of a great reformation a great shift and a great change of wine scan and of reality and I want to tell you I believe at the core of the change is God is taking the ministry of worship and prayer from a back room ministry with a few and he's bringing it to the front room with all I want to say that again he's taking it from a back room ministry with a few and he's bringing it to the front room with all he's delivering us from Sunday only Christianity he's delivering us from living at a distance and he's inviting all of us into intimacy because no one can sing your song for you but you and no one can pray your prayer for you but you I believe that I believe that radiant is called to help lead in this global shift I want to say that to you saying it to upper room I'm saying it to radiant there's only a couple of other places that I know I believe that radiant is called to to lead this nation in the earth in this shift of moving prayer from a back room ministry to the front room and beginning to give a vision for corporate prayer beginning to give a vision for corporate prayer and break through the walls that have kept it kept it from being realized I believe radiant is called to plant praying churches but even more will strengthen equip and inspire other praying churches I believe you're just at the beginning Lee I just believe you're just at the beginning team I believe you're just at the beginning and God's going to use what has been forged in Kalamazoo in in your different campuses there and God's going to begin to export it across the earth the priority of worship and prayer and the priority of corporate prayer I want to say that again the priority of corporate prayer we all love individual prayer but I believe God's calling us into the room I was even thinking about this verse in Hebrews where it says not to forsake the assembling together of yourselves as the day the day of the Lord approaches so getting together and being in the same room together will increase and intensify as the coming of the Lord intensifies and as we move into that generation which means proximity I'm calling it prayer rooms and dinner tables prayer rooms and dinner tables it's praying people that make praying churches praying people make praying churches first Peter 2 5 says that it's living stones that are being fit together he's not fit in dead stones which means this it's what you cultivate in private that fuels you to show up corporately and that we take our stand on the wall to see corporate realities manifested I love going to the corporate prayer meeting to get blessed but I come to the corporate prayer meeting as a living stone to take my stand on the wall and I believe that God wants to call you into this in a new way in 2021 and on we must cultivate private prayer in order to strengthen corporate prayer I believe that the phrase that the disciples asked Jesus when they said teach us to pray is going to come front and center in the coming days the disciples spent three and a half years with Jesus heard every message witnessed every miracle saw every deliverance and they never asked him teaches to preach prophesy heal or deliver they go teach us to pray and Jesus the great shepherd intercessor is once again calling the body of Christ and he is wanting to instruct us in the place of prayer individual prayer corporate prayer I believe that's what I love about you guys leadership leadership prayer lives that disciple others I got a vision for moms and dads but I'm thinking of moms you know the kid wakes up at 7 a.m runs into the living room and he sees mom on the couch Bible open notebook open worship music on and the little kid sees tears coming down mom's face and do you know what hits the kid at that moment Jesus is not a once a week meeting but he's a real man and mom has intimacy with him and I can feel his presence in the room do you know that your kids are going to remember your tears when talking to Jesus more than just your rules to them about following Jesus that's the kind of leadership Jesus produced I believe he wants to do it in our homes and I believe he wants to bring it to the corporate this is what happened if you this is what happens if you don't cultivate private prayer if you don't cultivate private prayer you will always look to public prayer to be your main source and it will always turn into a soaking session versus a governmental session we are the ecclesia the governing body and when we gather together in corporate prayer meetings it is a time of encounter it's a time of going up and encountering God together but from that place we legislate we through our decrees and through our prayers and through our songs we are extending the rule of God in our cities in our states in our nations and in the earth and if you look to the corporate prayer meeting to be your main source you'll never have the capacity to move into that place because you haven't cultivated it at home I want to see people that cultivate private prayer that can move into corporate prayer these are some of the things I want to give you just a couple of tips when people ask me about private prayer and I'm going to bring this into corporate as well when people ask me how Cory how do you spend an hour I will tell them I spend it 2020 20 minutes of receiving prayer does not begin with you talking but it begins with you receiving listening hearing and encountering him we come through the door of gratitude and we're just with him and as you said for that 20 minutes what will begin to happen is God will begin to well up on the inside of you and the first movement is receiving the second movement is activation I will engage my next 20 minutes by praying in the Holy Spirit making short declarations to God whispering Bible verses to God and I will begin to activate my spirit and then I move into my last 20 minutes and I will begin to make request and make intercession for my wife my children loved ones and people that are in need I've done that individually I would encourage you to do that but when we talk about corporate there are three things that I believe are critical in how we move in a corporate prayer meeting I found that three principles three movements that are very important number one coming through the door of thanksgiving and it's on 100 verse 4 says enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise as we come through the door of thanksgiving in a corporate prayer meeting what it does is it makes you become present it takes you out of the regrets and the thoughts of what you just came out of and it delivers you from the fears and the worries of tomorrow and it brings you into now and one of my favorite statements to begin a prayer meeting is God it's good to be here with you I got a history with you God you've carried me through dark nights you have seen me at my worst and you've brought me to this moment and God I want to say it's good to be with you here the power of thanksgiving is it brings you into a state of gratitude and it brings you into present tense thank you God usually in a corporate prayer meeting you will move from gratitude into worship the Holy Spirit will always escort you and you will move from just thank you God into now you begin to discover God and you will turn into one of those four living creatures revelation 4 that surround the throne of God that say holy holy holy Lord God Almighty to him who was and is and is to come and what you find in worship is that the revelation of God strikes your spirit the revelation of his beauty of his holiness of his goodness of his love of his power of his righteousness his justice his wisdom all the multifaceted aspects of who God is will strike you and in that place you begin to worship him friend we were made for the search and the discovery of God and this is eternal life to know him as we engage in corporate prayer let's gaze on God together and number three we move into intercession this is what I love about you guys you guys are an interceding people and out of the overflow of encountering the beautiful God we now take our seat next to Jesus in the ministry of intercession Hebrews 3 says that we are partakers of the heavenly calling and Hebrews 725 says that Jesus forever lives to make intercession he forever lives to make intercession and he's able to save to the uttermost those who are coming to God since he always lives to make intercession and we join him in that ministry and out of encounter out of identity and out of intimacy we now labor for those who do not know who are disconnected and who may not know God in the way that we're experiencing him it's in that place of encounter that I believe God is setting intercessors he's setting radiant as a prophetic watchman for Kalamazoo for Michigan for the whole region and for the nation as you stand in that watchman role and you begin to labor for the bride you begin to cry out for the bride to come into a deeper revelation there's a leadership anointing on radiant so you labor for pastors and you labor for leaders to come into a deeper revelation for a spirit of revival to touch churches a spirit of revival to touch homes in the region and the spirit of intercession comes out of you intercession is this is the key of intercession God creates through words and songs God's power is released through singing and through praying that's what he did in Genesis one God said let there be light and there was light when you sing and when you pray God's word it releases his power it transcends time it transcends distance and it releases the power of God that's what we do in intercession we take our encounter and we're always thinking what about the poor what about the lost what about the broken what about the bride and we stand in that place and we move into second commandment love of laboring for our neighbors I believe that God wants to use radiant to equip corporate prayer in the region as well as all over the nation I believe he wants to bring us to this place of intercession this corporate place of intercession prayer for Israel I say a 62 verse six and seven I have set watchmen on your walls oh Jerusalem there's an anointing on Kalamazoo a grace on Kalamazoo and on radiant to pray for revival prayers like Isaiah 64 verse one oh that you would run the heavens and come down Exodus 33 18 please show me your glory Matthew six thy kingdom come thy will be done I believe he wants to release revival praying acts 217 you said in the last days you would pour out your spirit God pour out your spirit I believe God wants to use radiant to release the fire of revival to the cold indifferent dull disconnected heart of so many people in the region I want to pray for you today you're my brothers and sisters I want to call you in 2021 in this year come to the prayer room reorder your life reorder your schedule some of you are like you know what I can get to 1 6 a.m I can get to 1 7 a.m prayer make that holy and don't miss it for anything in the world find your stand on the wall and make it sacred begin to reorder things in your life and begin to find yourself in the house this is the wisest thing we can be doing in this hour some of you are getting moved on in a deeper way and you feel like the Lord's calling you in a more full-time way or in a giving more time I want to say give yes to it and number three some of you have looked at 2020 and you screwed up royally you messed up times and you're like God you can never use me I live in constant shame condemnation guilt and I want to say to you even you the Lord has an invitation to come to the place of prayer prayer see corporate prayer is powerful because I love my individual prayer life but in corporate prayer the ceiling lifts and there's a fullness dimension that isn't known individually fullness is always in context to corporate Ephesians 3 that you would know together with all the saints with link death height to know the love of Christ that you would be filled with the fullness of God see this is what happens I need Corey and Anna and Rachel I need you guys I need Ryan I need the worship leaders that you have at radiant I need you guys I need Caleb playing on the piano I need you guys doing your thing I need the songs you sing to sing over me to break the thing off of me so I can hear God's voice again for my life and then they need my prayers and they need your prayers it's corporate we need each other and as the days increase to the coming of the Lord are being found together in our histories of corporate prayer is going to be the oil and the equity and the currency to stand in the coming days I want to pray for you radiant I want to say I love you and I just want to ask that this year would be marked by the anointing and the grace of prayer personal prayer family prayer corporate prayer God I pray in the name of Jesus that you would release the anointing of prayer upon radiant church upon all the radiant network God I pray that you would strengthen the prayer room that you would fuel the prayer room that you would fund the prayer room God I pray that you would activate seers and that you would awaken dreams and visions that you would stir the prophetic spirit and that you would release your word in the name of Jesus God I bless radiant I speak grace grace to every mountain grace I pray a wall of fire around that prayer room God I thank you Lord that you've said it in the heart of Kalamazoo Lord I bless my friends I bless my family and I pray that you would release grace and strength in the name of Jesus build your house of prayer we pray in Jesus name amen I love you and I bless you I can't wait to see you again amen