Review: A Year of Living Prayerfully

May 5, 2015August 26, 2025 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

A Year of Living Prayerfully by Jared Brock, Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 2015.

Summary: Jared Brock and his incredibly patient wife Michelle go on a year long pilgrimage that takes them to the Vatican to meet the Pope and to Westboro Baptist Church and many other places alternately delightful and weird in a quest to deepen their prayer life.

OK. I was really prepared not to like this book. It appeared to be a knock-off of A.J. Jacobs’ A Year of Living Biblically and Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood. Frankly, I thought the cover a bit cheesy (although reminiscent of Jacobs’ book).

I was pleasantly surprised. What I found instead was an alternately amusing and thought-provoking spiritual pilgrimage that not only deepened the writer’s prayer life but challenged mine.

Beginning with a conversation that described the movement from crisis praying to kingdom prayer, Brock and his wife embarked on a journey taking him to New York, Israel, Europe, Asia, England and back to his home in Hamilton, Ontario. They began by praying and celebrating Sedar with a group of Orthodox Jews. Daily prayer with the men of the synagogue renews his thirst for prayer.

In Israel they encounter the crassness and commercialism that exploited the center of three major faiths. Brock can only pray for Jerusalem’s shalom, and in that the shalom of the world. He goes to Mt. Athos in Greece and experiences both silence and the Jesus prayer. Then they head off to Italy and through a strange set of circumstances, a meeting with Pope Francis. Francis says that “prayer was opening up your heart to God” and asks them on parting to pray for him. From there, they went on to Spain and hiked a short distance of the Camino in winter and looked in vain for one who received the Campostela (a certificate for hiking the equivalent of 124 miles).God answers their prayer while waiting in line at the airport behind a man who had done just that. He spoke of completing the walk in silence, communing with God. France, the kitchen of Brother Lawrence, and Taize’ were their next major stops. Most moving was the account given them of the assassination of Brother Roger, who founded Taize’, and those who continued the prayers, and extended forgiveness to a woman who did not know what she was doing.

Apart from a Quaker prayer service and an attempt to meet Billy Graham, who was too frail to do so, the next part of the book gets weird. They visit a “nudist church” and meet some very unconventional Christians carrying out ministry to a population few try to reach. They are encouraged on their own to try sitting naked before God in prayer. They meet a physician who prays as well as heals the sick, humbly and with sometimes miraculous results, and then attend a Benny Hinn crusade that seems more about prosperity (at least Benny’s prosperity) than a gospel of healing. Then weirdest of all, they visit a Tony Robbins conference that ends with walking on burning coals. This section closes with a visit to Westboro Baptist Church and the determination to pray down the love of God upon this benighted and hate-filled church.

After a risky journey to North Korea and a visit to Yonggi Cho’s church in Seoul, the Brocks end up in England visiting Keswick, where he finds the photo of a young Scotsman who was one of the first Hundred who followed Hudson Taylor into missions with China Inland Mission. The young Scotsman was his great-great-grandfather. He is challenged by the “boiler room” in Spurgeon’s church–the prayer meeting that fueled Spurgeon’s ministry and the prototype of modern 24/7 prayer. He ends in his home town of Hamilton, at a site of a revival in the 1850s that was part of the Third Great Awakening.

The narrative is broken up with quotes by either the individuals he is meeting or famous “people of prayer”. One of those I appreciated most was this by St. Teresa of Avila: “You pay God a compliment by asking great things of Him.” Brock’s writing style is conversational and even colloquial at places making the book an easy read. Yet I had several “takeaways”:

The silences as well as our words are important, not only in singing but in prayer.
Prayer is about communing with God, about being in God’s presence and carrying that through our lives.
Prayer is something done in and through our embodied life.
Finally I was struck anew with the transformative power of prayer.

I will close with this quote from Karl Barth found on page 308: “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” Perhaps in such a disordered world, living prayerfully may be the sanest response.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Upcoming Reviews of New Works: March 2015

March 20, 2015 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

One of my “blog resolutions” for this year was to review more recently published works. I still will review “backlist” works simply because they are of interest to me, and I hope others as well. But I also realize that reviews of new works are helpful to others who hear about a recently published work and are deciding whether to read them. Here are some of the books on my TBR pile that I anticipate reviewing in the next month or two (links are to the publishers’ websites):

1. Minds, Brains, Souls, and Gods by Malcolm Jeeves. Probably the oldest book on the pile with a 2013 publication date but dealing with a number of the current issues in neuroscience research and the implications of this for what we believe about what it means for us to be human and even the implications of claims for a “God spot” in the brain for our belief in God.

2. Suffering and the Search for Meaning by Richard Rice. I’m part way into this book on six different ways Christians deal with suffering, the problem of evil and God. Very clear, with numerous personal stories and yet good theological and philosophical depth.

3. College Disrupted by Ryan Craig. This book deals with the rising costs of college education and the ways college education is becoming “unbundled” to deal with these costs through MOOCs, other forms of online education, and cobbling together degrees through courses from various institutions.

4. A Glorious Dark by A.J. Swoboda. This book is described as dealing with the tension we often experience between what we believe and what we experience.

5. Nonviolent Action by Ronald J. Sider. Sider explores the common ground between just war and pacifism theorists on the ethical requirements upon Christians to pursue where possible nonviolent solutions to conflict.

6. A Year of Living Prayerfully by Jared Brock. Brock is a young activist who spent a year on a global “pilgrimage of prayer”. This book is his account of that journey.

7. The Accidental Executive by Albert M. Erisman. The book’s subtitle is “lessons on business, faith, and calling from the life of Joseph”. Erisman is a former Boeing executive.

These aren’t the only books I anticipate reading but are some of the new (or newer) titles you can anticipate on the blog! I realize that all of this is non-fiction. If any of you have suggestions of quality fiction you think I should read, I’d be glad to hear from you!

If you want to be sure to catch the reviews of these and other books as well as other thoughts on books, reading, and life, I hope you will consider following the blog. If you have a WordPress account, just click the “follow” section of the black header. If you do not, just click the blue “Follow” button that appears near the top of my pages and WordPress will send you email previews of my blog posts.

Crying Out Day and Night For Justice

December 4, 2014August 26, 2025 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

I never saw this before.

This past Sunday, I preached on the Parable of the Persistent Widow in Luke 18:1-8. I’ve often heard others preach, and have myself taught the message of this parable that we should “always pray and not give up” (v. 1). I’ve thought in terms of things like seeing people come to faith, praying for the sick, praying about needs related to our work and our lives. I don’t think that is wrong, but as I studied this parable I was struck by the fact that the widow was seeking justice from the unjust judge (v. 3). Furthermore, in Jesus’s own application of the parable verse 7 says, “will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?” Verse 8 reinforces this theme: “I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly.”

One of the basic things I learned about Bible study years ago was to pay attention to repeated words. They are a clue to what the writer or speaker considers important. Clearly in this passage, one of the things Jesus considers important is justice, and praying for it.

In recent months and weeks, we’ve been inundated with news stories about the death of a young black man in Ferguson, a black youth in Cleveland, and an older black man in New York City. In two of these cases, local grand juries refused to charge police with any wrongful death and there has been a great outcry in the press and in social media either decrying the injustice of these decisions and the deaths that occurred at the hands of police, or in defending the police officers, who often put themselves at risk in protecting public safety and have to make split second decisions that, if wrong, may cost them their lives or the lives of others.

While I personally have decided that it is fruitless to raise my voice on one “side” of this discussion or the other in social media, I will say a couple things. One is there is something wrong with this pattern with so many dying in the streets, some at the hands of police. It is clear to me that we still are a racially divided society. If nothing, the vehemence in the outcries on both sides of the discussion reveal we are a long way from what Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned as “the beloved community.”

It seems to me that in the predominantly white church community (the one I know best) we either resort to attempts at personal justification (“I’m not racist” or “I’m personally colorblind”). Or we attempt to join and justify one side of the outcry, and, from what I can see, simply perpetuate and deepen the divisions in our society.

None of this is to say that the bereaved and their communities shouldn’t pursue justice nor that police shouldn’t be supported in their hard work. In fact, in a society where the rule of law is upheld, our legal system should be the place where these things are adjudicated, and it is right for those who believe that justice is denied to continue to pursue it via legal means. It’s not a perfect system, but the best we humans can devise in a fallen world.

But the parable (remember the parable!) also exhorts us to prayer to God for justice as well. For those of us who are Christ-followers, obedience to Jesus means that we keep praying for justice. Our first work in these matters is to seek the Lord. But the parable also says it is to be our persisting work. And this is where I fall down. I see advances in civil rights. I see a president of African-American descent in the White House. I mistake progress toward King’s “dream” with fulfillment. And I stop praying.

What the succession of events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York do is challenge me to renew my efforts in prayer and become aware that this is an area where persistence is vital. As I look for God’s answers, such praying can also change me. Praying helps me listen both for God’s invitations to join him in pursuit of the “beloved community” and opens my ears and my heart to listen to other voices than simply the ones that most resonate with me, voices that need to be heard if real reconciliation and not simply self-justification are to occur.

I’ve concluded that I need to persist in crying out to the Lord to bring justice (all that that means) into the racial divides in our country. I pray the Lord’s prayer each morning and night. As I pray, “Thy kingdom come” I will include in my prayers the coming of Jesus’s just rule into our racially divided land. It occurs to me that I could be praying that the rest of my life. I hope not, but Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” What sustains our persistence over that “long arc” is the promise of a God who will grant justice, who will bring a kingdom of shalom.

Going Deeper question: For what do you believe God wants you to persist in prayer? How is a concern for justice a part of that?

This post also appears on my church’s Going Deeper blog for this week.

Vacations With, or From God

June 18, 2014August 27, 2025 / rtrube54 / 3 Comments

This is probably a hazard of being employed in a Christian organization. Since so much of what we are doing is connected with our faith and helping people know Christ, it is sometimes a temptation on vacations to take a vacation from God. Maybe this is a problem others don’t have, but the fact that Rich (Hagopian, our pastor) addressed this on Sunday suggests that it may be.

Rich helpfully observed that developing regular spiritual disciplines can be helpful in this regard. I sometimes refer to these as habits of faithfulness, habits similar to brushing our teeth, that put us in the place where we are paying attention to God. And it is the case that things like my personal Bible reading and prayer do serve as times to think over the vacation day ahead and offer that, and myself to God.

Sometimes though, I think I look at vacation as a time to let down on the discipline and I wonder how many others deal with this? Many of us live highly scheduled lives between our work, family, church, and other obligations. Vacation is a welcome break from all that. And I think sometimes I, at least, am tempted to take vacations from God because I start to associate Him with all that discipline of a highly scheduled life that I long to get away from for a week or so.

It seems to me that vacation can be a time of hearing afresh the invitation of Jesus found in Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus invitation is “come to me and find rest”. I think that is what we often are longing for, even in the midst of all our travel plans or whatever else we have in mind for our vacations. So I wonder, as we plan our vacations do we ask Jesus to help us rest, to help us find the rest we need in him?

Here are some of the disciplines of rest that have helped me:

Sleep! Many of us are racking up sleep deficits and don’t discover how tired we are until we slow down. I’m struck that when Elijah ran for his life from Jezebel’s threats (1 Kings 19), God let him sleep and eat before he spoke anything to him. Plan a day or two to simply sleep until you wake up without alarms. Then thank God for his gift of sleep!
Unplug. I have a hard time with this, but I find when I turn off the computer and get off the ‘net, I also mute the chatter of hundreds of voices so that I can hear the one that matters.
Long wandering prayer. David Hansen wrote a book by this title in which he described his long, leisurely walks in the woods, or by a fishing stream (it could be by the shore, or even a quiet city street in early morning) where he just noticed, thought, and prayed as things came to mind, and listened for God.
Slow, reflective reading of scripture, maybe a short portion that I think about over several days. A form of this is lectio divina which Rich mentioned and has provided resources for in the past.

One of the curious things about Jesus’ invitation to rest is that it is actually an invitation to rest, not from our work, but in the midst of our work. It’s not a rest from all yokes but the rest that comes from being in the yoke with Jesus, following his lead, going at his pace. I wonder if vacations can be a time where we can “re-yoke” if we have slipped the yoke.

And this might be helpful for those who would say, “I’ve not been very good at spiritual disciplines in everyday life.” You might ask yourself during vacation, what one or two ways of “resting with Jesus” do you want to carry back into every day life and how will you do it? Ben was wise in his post to suggest starting small. Five minutes of being quiet with Jesus each day, or five minutes reading and thinking about a verse of scripture, or one “long wandering prayer walk” a week might be all you do. But it will help you carry the “rest” of your vacation time with God into the rest of your life.

Here’s hoping you have a “restful” vacation with God!

[This post also appears in Going Deeper, a blog our church hosts to “go deeper” in response to our pastor’s weekly messages]

Modest Beginnings of a Lenten Wannabe

March 4, 2014 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Today is Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras, the day before the beginning of Lent. Can’t say I will be doing any wild celebrations. I will be rehearsing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms with Capriccio Columbus and then meeting up with my son for our weekly habit of getting a beverage together and solving the problems of the world (or at least comparing notes on blogging and computers).

I’ve never been part of a church tradition that practices Lent or Advent. What I’m struck with more and more is that without a season of preparation, Easter and Christmas are just these isolated days where we talk about the birth or resurrection of Jesus, and then on we go. A few years ago, I read Bobby Gross’s Living the Christian Year. This book gave me a vision for how the seasons of the year and the traditional church celebrations of the Christian year can remind me of the bigger story in which I live.

The term Lent as best as I can tell comes from the German for long or length and is associated with the coming of spring when the days grow longer. Traditionally it is this 40 day period beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending with Easter. The imposition of ashes is to remind us of our own mortality (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”), the consequence of human rebellion against God. It is a season of repentance, of turning back to God expressed in practices of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. It culminates in Holy Week with Good Friday, when Christ died and Easter Sunday when fasting turns to feasting as we celebrate the victory of Jesus.

This year I want to make modest beginnings in this practice. Since my own community doesn’t impose ashes I probably won’t do this. I’ve decided on a few practices during this season which seem appropriate in my own life:

I’ve decided to fast from looking at blogging stats. I think I’ve become a bit too obsessed with this and spend more time than I ought in this practice. Maybe faith, when it comes to blogging is to just write and trust God for views and following.
I often spend time looking at stats at the end of the workday. One of the ideas of fasting is to free up time for prayer. So I will take the time I would have spent on stats and pray–perhaps especially for those I’ve interacted with that day.
The other is almsgiving. Scripture talks about giving in secret. One of the things I want to do this year is find one way to give or serve in secret each day. It will be interesting to see if I can come up with different ways to do this. At any rate, to keep this practice, I can’t tell you any more about it–at least what I’ve done.

The other practice many observe is some form of Lenten readings. A couple colleagues told me about God for Us, edited by Greg Pennoyer. It includes beautiful artwork and readings by people like Lauren Winner, Scott Cairns, Kathleen Norris, and Richard Rohr. We’ve picked up a copy and will use this for Lenten readings.

I really don’t know what to expect. Mostly, I long to live more deeply into the story I believe–to see it move from head to heart and into life–even as I anticipate the celebration of resurrection life on Easter.

I would love to learn from some of you who have gone far deeper in this practice. What are the practices that have meant the most to you in this season? And if you are not a Christian, are there seasons like this in your own faith or worldview and what are the practices that turn that into lived experience?

Review: A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

March 3, 2014March 3, 2014 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul E. Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nearly every Christian I know, and perhaps those of other faiths as well, feel they are rank beginners in this matter of prayer. It is not only the making of time and space for prayer in our lives but confronting the distractions we face when we pray, the struggle to figure out what we ought say, and wondering whether we will be heard–is anyone there?

I cannot say this was the best book on prayer I’ve read. I would give pride of place to Ole Hallesby’s Prayer and John White’s Daring to Draw Near: People in Prayer. However this is a very practical guide to prayer that many will find helpful because of how open and vulnerable the author is about his own prayer journey.

One of the big issues Miller deals with in this book is our prevailing cynicism about prayer that prevents us from trusting God with the most basic details of our lives. Does God really care? Can God really do anything? His most powerful example of overcoming this is describing his prayer journey in praying for his daughter Kim, who suffers from a developmental disability. Throughout the book, he relates instances of praying for God’s help in dealing with aspects of her disposition, including a habit of waking in the night and pacing. Slowly, with Kim, and others in his household, he learns to trust God to transform them rather than trying to do this himself.

At its root, Miller teaches that prayer is an acknowledgement of our helplessness and that this is actually good news. We are helpless to change the character of others or even our own character. Often we face situations that are beyond our control or ability to change, and even the ones we think we control may are often far more complicated than we acknowledge. He encourages us to take seriously Jesus extravagant promises for those who abide in him. This means our wants are shaped by what Jesus wants but at the end of the day, he encourages us to ask with the freedom of children for the wants we find in our hearts as we’ve been abiding in Christ. This is not “name it/claim it” theology but rather the boldness and freedom that arises in relationship.

He concludes his work with sharing his use of index cards in praying for people and the ways he prayer journals. What is most winsome throughout the book is that Miller keeps it real and shares how he actually prays as a result of scripture and his own prayer journey.

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