Praying Life, A: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

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The teaching and author's tone in this book gripped my heart and were made effectual by God to change my life. If this sounds all too familiar, chances are you could be one of the many who have been living in the midst of a lifelong struggle with prayer. Miller’s down-to-earth approach and practical nature will help you see that your relationship with God can grow and your communication with Him can get better. Somehow it didn't hit me until I was almost halfway in that the author absolutely meant the "Life" part in the title. I could fill this post with plenty of more quotes, but I’ll just say this book was an excellent resource and I know I’ll be coming back to it in the coming years.

The specific challenge was to read the book, and post about the results of a personal 30 days of real prayer, implementing the principles from the book in my own prayer life. It would have been fairer to say that any thinker, let alone leading thinkers, faced with a medieval Christianity had sent thousands of women to be burnt alive for allegedly being witches, and which in the 17th C had shattered Europe with a war that had killed about a million had sanely come to the conclusion that the world would be a safer place if religious dogma - not God - was kept to the sidelines. Given this context, I jumped at the chance to receive Paul Miller's A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World, by NavPress, for free. When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching. But I read this book anyways (because I owed my wife) and I have been forced to rethink my prior position.I would like to have seen more theological precision, such as "seeing Jesus" in the lives of Christians (97) and Miller's use of the term "incarnation" in relation to what God does when we pray (125). Was encouraging, real, humbling, but also challenging the status quo of what we believe prayer is today.

When we start our prayers with thoughts on how nonspiritual we are or how the modern church teaches us the “right” way to pray we miss the opportunity to walk in authentic fellowship with God through the gift of prayer He has given each of us.Lewis' thoughts were, as one might expect, much more philosophical as Lewis tried to grapple with the many extravagant promises regarding prayer in the Scriptures.