The Lost Skills of Prayer

Christian prayer practices for hearing God, deepening your faith, and praying honestly again. If your prayer life feels rushed, dry, or stuck on repeat, The Lost Skills of Prayer gives you eleven neglected practices that Scripture models and most of us were never taught. You ask, you thank, you say amen, and somewhere in there you suspect there's more. There is. The Psalms hold silence, confession, complaint, thanksgiving, and years of waiting, and most of us were only ever handed one of those instruments. In these pages you will practice: Silence - being quiet before God on purpose, even for ninety seconds Stillness - coming back when your mind runs off, and reading what your distractions are telling you Confession - saying what you did in plain words, without hiding or theater Lament - bringing grief and anger to God the way the Psalms do Thanksgiving - training your attention to notice what you have been given Scripture Meditation - reading slowly enough to be changed Listening - testing what you think you're hearing against Scripture and wise counsel Intercession - praying for people without turning them into a list Waiting - living faithfully in the long middle Perseverance - asking again when nothing has changed Praying When You Don't Feel Like It - a floor for your worst days Each chapter is built around one passage of Scripture and ends with something to try: a seven-day silence experiment, a confession in three plain sentences, a lament you write yourself, a week of thanks with no repeats, five names to pray for over thirty days, and more. There are no scripts to copy and no formula to follow. Written for churchgoers who believe in prayer and struggle with it: the distracted, the discouraged, the tired, the longtime believer who never learned to be still. It works for personal reading and for small groups. Prayer can be learned, one practice at a time. Start with one this week.