When to escalate

Most requests are what you expect: illness, work, money, a child, a marriage, a grief.

A few are not. Every prayer ministry that runs long enough eventually receives a request from someone in danger, and you should decide how you’ll respond before it is in front of you at ten at night.

What to escalate

Any sign of suicide or self-harm. Explicit — “I don’t want to be here anymore” — or oblique: giving things away, saying goodbye, saying everyone would be better off. Take the oblique ones as seriously as the explicit ones.

Violence, at home or coming. Someone describing being hurt, someone afraid of what a person in their house will do, someone hinting at what they might do to somebody else.

A child at risk. Anything describing harm to a child, from anyone, in any wording.

Immediate crisis. Someone who has no food tonight, who has just been thrown out, who is in the middle of something happening right now.

If you are unsure, escalate. Nobody has ever been harmed because a responder flagged something that turned out to be fine. Wrong in that direction costs a few minutes of somebody’s time; wrong in the other direction can cost more than any of us want to think about.

How to escalate

Use the escalation in the system. That is what it is for. It puts the request in front of the people whose role it is to decide what can be done — locally, with the team who was actually at that event, who know the community and know what help exists there.

Then pray for them. Escalating does not replace the prayer; it accompanies it.

What you are not being asked to do

Read this part twice, because good-hearted people get it wrong in the same direction every time.

You are not being asked to rescue anybody. Not to counsel someone through a crisis. Not to talk anybody down. Not to find them, contact them, or put yourself into a dangerous situation for a stranger on another continent.

You could not do it from where you are, and attempting it can make things worse for the person: an outsider inserting themselves into a violent household, at a distance, with no context and no way to follow through, has caused real harm before.

Escalate. Pray. Let the people who can act, act.

This is not a smaller thing

It can feel like passing the buck. It isn’t.

Somebody in the worst night of their life told the truth to strangers. Two things happen because you were at your desk: the people who can help now know, and God is being asked to intervene. Both of those are real, and neither would have happened otherwise.

Jesus himself kept stepping away from crowds who needed him in order to pray, which is a strange thing to do if prayer is what you fall back on when you can’t do anything real:

But Jesus often withdrew to solitary places to pray. — Luke 5:16 (OTB)

You are not the last line of defense for these precious people. God is. You are being asked to bring them to him, and to tell somebody who can help.

Recite this

Escalate it, pray for them, and stay out of the middle.

Try it this week

Find the escalation control in the system now, while nothing is urgent.

Know exactly where it is before the night you need it.