Pray With Your Eyes Open

"My prayers never seem to go anywhere." If that sounds like you, here is the help you've been looking for. Richard L. Pratt, Jr., knows the burdens many of us carry because of inadequate prayer lives. In this instructive yet often entertaining book, he offers clear biblical direction on how to pray more effectively. With remarkable care and balance he discusses key issues, from fascination with God to honest confession of our deepest needs, from concerns over form and freedom in prayer to questions about body language and fasting. Pratt tackles head-on the issues that can puzzle us the most: Why pray when God will do whatever He pleases anyway? Does God ever change His mind? Can we get anything we want by asking for it in Jesus' name? Is it ever right to argue with God? Discussion questions, practical exercises, and assignments with each chapter help to make this book ideal for Sunday school classes and study groups, as well as individual use. - Back cover.

In rhyming text, a child wonders how, when and where is the perfect way to say a prayer and realizes that there is no wrong time or place.

We have all experienced a disconnect between God's promises to us and our everyday reality. We wait, without understanding why. We want to know God's plan so that we can trust it--but God so often hides his plan so that we will trust him. What can we do in the meantime as we are waiting for an answer, a change, or a miracle? With deep compassion, Wayne Stiles helps readers understand why God makes them wait. Unpacking the Old Testament story of Joseph, Stiles shows readers how to find comfort and opportunity in the time between God's promises and his answers, revealing the perspective-altering truth that sometimes when we think we are waiting on God, he is actually waiting on us. Anyone who has felt a disconnect between God's promises and their reality, who doesn't know what God wants them to do next, or who struggles with the brokenness of their world will find in Wayne Stiles a wise and trustworthy guide to finding peace in the pauses.

In The Circle of Fire (formerly published as Prayers: A Communion With Our Creator) Ruiz inspires us to enter into a new and loving relationship with ourselves, with our fellow humans, and with all of creation. Through a selection of beautiful essays, prayers, and guided meditations, Ruiz prepares our minds for a new way of seeing life, and opens our hearts to find our way back to our birthright: heaven on earth. The result is a life lived in joy, harmony, and contentment. In my teachings, "The Circle of Fire" ceremony celebrates the most important day of our lives: the day when we merge with the fire of our spirit, and return to our own divinity. This is the day when we recover the awareness of what we really are, and make the choice to live in communion with that force of creation we call "Life" or "God." From that day forward, we live with unconditional love in our hearts for ourselves, for life, for everything in creation. This book, first published in 2001 as "Prayers: A Communion with Our Creator," will remind you of what you really are. It has always been my favorite book, and now in honor of my favorite prayer, it has been appropriately renamed "The Circle of Fire." -- don Miguel Ruiz

While handling the tough assignment among half a million hostile Moros, Laubach experienced a most extraordinary breakthrough of the sense of the Lord's presence as he prayed. Prayer was for him "the mightiest force in the world."