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Good morning. The fighting in Sudan between supporters of General Burhan and General Hemedti can evoke two kinds of reaction. The first is, ‘This seems impossibly complicated. I don’t know a whole lot about East Africa and its history.’ The second is, ‘I can’t keep up with all the crises in the world from Ukraine to Afghanistan to Taiwan, let alone the Turkish earthquake. I just don’t have mental or emotional capacity for another one.’ Both reactions are ones of powerlessness. As a pastor, I find powerlessness is the one common feature that unites every congregation I’ve served over thirty years. ‘The world feels so complicated,’ people say, ‘and I don’t know how to make bad things any better. So I feel dreadful.’ One way to address powerlessness is to break stories down into their component parts. So, for Sudan, we have the legacy of the civil war in Darfur 20 years ago. We see outside countries arming each side, meanwhile vying for access to natural resources. Rival geographical élites and diverging attitudes to Islam are also at play. We inevitably witness personal animosities and ambitions. And there’s the way military promotion becomes a route to security in a poverty-stricken country. It may seem surprising to say this kind of analysis is integral to the practice of intercessory prayer. But for believers, intercessory prayer is all about understanding a situation, then working out what you yourself can do about it, before asking God to do the rest. You often hear a person of faith say, ‘We pray for Sudan.’ That’s actually a lazy prayer, because it hasn’t gone through this process of understanding and distinguishing. A more thoughtful prayer would say, ‘Change the hearts of leaders bent on violence; strengthen all protecting the vulnerable; and empower governments and NGOs to defuse the conflict and mitigate its effects.’ This kind of prayer asks itself the specific question, ‘What do I really want God to do?’ In the process it forces those praying to ask themselves, ‘What actually might I be doing?’ This dismantles powerlessness by not allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by things we can’t do anything about and by focusing instead on where our own agency genuinely lies. There’s an irony here. In common speech, prayer is something we resort to when we’ve tried everything else. By contrast in this approach, when we face overwhelming need and complexity, intercessory prayer is actually the first thing we do. That’s because such prayer isn’t an abdication of responsibility or admission of failure. Instead, it’s a unique way of assessing what’s going on, where we can make a difference, and what only God can do.