A Praying Life (by Paul E Miller)

(Amazon UK link)

Every so often I browse the special offers for Kindle books, and download a selection that are free, either long-term or temporarily, and which look interesting. Sometimes it’s years before I get around to reading them, and that’s the case with ‘A Praying Life’ by Paul Miller. He’s not an author I had heard of when I saw this book available free back in 2011, but the reviews of the book were almost unanimously positive so I downloaded it.

I started reading ‘A Praying Life’ about five weeks ago. It's subtitled ‘connecting with God in a distracting world’. I’ve read many books on prayer in the past few decades, so I wasn’t expecting anything dramatically different. But I like to have something like this to read, a few pages at a time, first thing in the morning.

I liked the style immediately. The foreword is honest and encouraging, acknowledging that prayer really isn’t easy, and that the way we talk to God sometimes bears little relation to the way we talk to family members. It’s written by someone recommending the book, and is followed by the iIntroduction, written by the author. In this, he says he never set out to write a book on prayer, but was encouraged to do so by his wife, and the friend who wrote the foreword.

Chapter One launches straight into an anecdote. The author describes an incident in the mountains when he was camping with five of his six children. One of them has a mini-crisis, and it leads on to a cynical question. Paul Miller takes a step back, and examines the way this kind of honest question pervades much of our prayer life, and indeed our general expectations of God and of life itself.

The book is divided into four or five sections, but I didn’t quite follow the divisions. Perhaps that’s because I was reading on my Kindle, where section breaks are less obvious, and one can’t page back to see where a section started, or see a heading above the page. It didn’t matter - the content flowed extremely well, gently peppered with relevant anecdotes from the author’s family life. He admits that he makes mistakes with his children, and that he forgets to pray, or doesn’t trust in God when he does.

So while the main content of the book is not anything that’s new to me, it was written with a different and very encouraging voice. Paul Miller reminds us what it means to come to God ‘like a child’. Children can be demanding and selfish, they often hassle parents, or repeat themselves. And that, we are gently reminded, is just fine. God wants our presence, not carefully formulated prayers. It’s okay to ask about things that seem petty or irrelevant to others; if they matter to us, then God cares.

I’m the kind of person who likes theory to be interspersed with examples from real people, so the style of the book, which does exactly that, was ideal for me. I didn’t agree with every word; I can’t see myself making prayer cards, as the author suggests, for instance. I got a little bogged down towards the end of the book at some of the suggestions, but that’s okay. Not everyone will agree with every word in any book. And the ideas were offered openly, giving the author’s personal experience and some examples of how these cards helped him. That doesn’t mean they are required, or even that everyone would benefit from them.

I particularly liked the idea that we’re all living in a story, whether or not our lives seem to be exciting. I liked the focus on waiting for God to act, on taking a day at a time, a step at a time, consulting God in pretty much everything we do. I don’t know that I’ll remember to follow the advice and suggestions, but I hope so.

The only parts of the book that didn’t appeal to me were some diagrams, which I struggled to understand. But I’m not a visually oriented person; charts and graphs generally leave me cold. But I’m sure they would be of interest to those who like visual aids. And they may well work better in a printed edition of this book.

Highly recommended to any believers - or fringe church members - who would like a reminder of what prayer is supposed to be, and who enjoy books with interesting and relevant anecdotes. The Kindle version I downloaded is no longer available, and the new ebook version costs almost as much as the paperback, at the time of writing. So the link above is to the paperback version of 'A Praying Life'.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews