Sounds like a strange title for this post, no doubt. But the two words do have more in common than you might think. If you are a regular reader here, you will know that I have written a book about prayer and am in the process of doing some final edits. If you are new here, now you know too.
It has been a little bit tedious as this current edit is to check all of my Scripture references and make sure they are correct. A good thing, too. I have found a few typos which created references which do not even exist, such as 1 Samuel 49, which should have been 19. I had also included a few which, on reading now, could not figure out why I had even chosen them. Out they went. I have another 30 pages to go to finish this edit.
Then comes the next edit. All of the concordance references. That, too, will be rather tedious as there are a lot of them, and footnotes are in smaller type so not as easy to read. But better to make sure now that they are correct than let them go through the publishing stage to find there are a bunch of mistakes. I’m sure I won’t get it perfect, but I do want it as close to perfect as I can come. It can be frustrating to read a book, check a footnote or Scripture only to find it doesn’t make any sense.
Next I will probably read the whole thing over again to check for any other type of errors. I have someone who has agreed to read and endorse the book, so I will probably send it to her before I do the that particular read-through. We can do that simultaneously. Since I have been working on this book for years—more than a decade—since before I even considered turning it into a book. Originally it was just a list of prayers I would pray on a semi-regular basis. I had no idea it would turn into a 350-page book!
When I read/edit, I always do it out loud as I find I can pick out errors much easier than doing it silently. Otherwise I can skip over without even seeing extra words, typos, missing words. I find these audibly much more quickly than visually. I think I tend to almost become hypnotized and sleepy if I don’t verbalize lit.
When I thought further about prayer and editing, it came to me that sometimes we need to actually edit our prayers. There is a possibility that we could be praying wrong prayers. We may be inserting too much of the flesh and too much of what we consider the answer should be. Perhaps we are analyzing the situation from a worldly standpoint and not praying according to the will of God. It’s time to edit.
Not that we want to get too tied up in knots as to how we pray. The exact words are not of such importance as the attitude of our hearts as we come to the Lord. But it never hurts to check our prayers from time to time to see if they line up with God’s heart and word in the situation or for the person we are praying for. Or if we are seeing ourselves rightly before the Lord. If our spiritual vision is twisted or clouded, our prayers will be the same and we will not see the answers we hope for. So an edit might just be appropriate from time to time to make sure we are still in alignment with God.
Prayer is our communication line with heaven and with our heavenly Father. You could call it a life-line. Without it, we have no connection to the source of life. So we need to be sure the lines are clear. This particular book is all about how to pray using the word of God. I have often been in prayer meetings where the leader would ask someone to take a particular verse and pray into it. I discovered that many people do not know how to do this. They will read the verse, but then seem to be at a loss as to how to turn it into a prayer. So my book was born partly for this reason. Then it expanded to a teaching on the different types of prayer we find in the Bible. It kept growing, together with personal anecdotes, until it is now almost ready to publish. I hope it will prove to be a useful tool for many people to enhance and deepen their prayer life.
So there you have the story, in a nutshell, of It Is Written: My Prayer Journey into the Heart of God.
Stay tuned for future announcements when it becomes available on Amazon.
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I pray you will have a wonderful weekend. May God bless you abundantly.
For the Joy of Writing 