I’ll start with why I read this book. I wanted to improve my prayer life and also just learn more about the prayer lifestyle. So I started researching on books in that department and found this in the process. I have no regrets and here’s my summary of some of the points in the book:
- We need to be comfortable praying like children. God wants the real us. We shouldn’t over-spiritualize prayer; let me explain. Prayer should be conversational and based off of an intimate relationship with God.
- Efficiency, multitasking and busy-ness kill true intimacy. We don’t need to come with an agenda when we want to spend time with God- true for most intimate relationships.
- There’s no substitute for focused times of prayer – even if we ‘pray at all times’. – When we live without prayer, we’re quietly confident that time, money, knowledge, and talent are all we need in life (deep). – Time spent praying makes us more dependent on God because we technically have less time to be ‘productive’. Prayer should be that integral to our lives.
- Baby steps in prayer are allowed (meaning we don’t have to start off by praying 24 hours non-stop; what matters most is the position of our heart)
- Poverty of spirit makes room for God’s spirit. (I have to admit that I just really understood what it means to be poor in spirit, and why it’s a good thing 😀)
- There are different attitudes towards prayer: naive optimism, cautious optimism, and cynicism. But the ideal is cautious optimism: Not denying reality, but also having a peace that there’s a God in control regardless of life’s outcomes.
- We shouldn’t avoid praying out of the fear of our prayers going unanswered. That’s like trying to protect God’s reputation and He doesn’t need us to do that (whew). While God is not a genie who’ll grant every wish (He knows better), He does want us to come to Him as we are, without putting up a show.
- For every answered and unanswered prayer in our lives, God is weaving a story (I’ve personally found this to be true). But when the story doesn’t play out our way, we become cynical – we say prayer doesn’t work. But the real problem was with our expectations of how things should have played out.
- Often when we think everything has gone wrong, we’re just in the middle of a story. God is concerned about the very details of our lives.
- It helps to use some kind of written system such as prayer cards or prayer journals to support our prayer life but we also need to be careful to not be carried away by just the ‘system’ while losing touch with the actual person of God (I’ve always known about prayer journals but I just learnt about prayer cards and will now be employing those). Well, I hope that this little snippet blessed you as much as it did me🤗
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