The Praying Life

Bob Thune reviews Paul Miller’s The Praying Life and includes a number of excellent quotes from the book

• Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart.
• If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life.
• Less mature Christians have little need to pray… there is no complexity to their worlds because the answers are simple.
• Cynicism is the air we breathe, and it is suffocating our hearts. Our only hope is to follow Jesus as he leads us out of cynicism.
• The persistent widow and the friend at midnight get access, not because they are strong but because they are desperate. Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.
• I do not understand prayer. Prayer is deeply personal and deeply mysterious. Adults try to figure out causation. Little children don’t. They just ask.
• Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.
• We think spiritual things – if done right – should just ‘flow.’ But if you have a disability, nothing flows, especially in the beginning.
• There is a tendency among Christians to get excited about ‘listening to God’ as if they are discovering a hidden way of communicating with God that will revolutionize their prayer lives… This subtly elevates an experience with God instead of God himself. Without realizing it, we can look at the windshield instead of through it.
  How would you love someone without prayer? People are far too complicated; the world is far too evil; and my own heart is too off center to be able to love adequately without praying.