Do you kind of hate it when you risk a little vulnerability with someone-you share some hard thing you're going through, some spiritual dry spell, some tender concern-and they say something like 'You should pray about it!' . . . as if that's the easiest thing in the world and praying through hard things doesn't feel like a high-risk undertaking. Jarrett Stevens has been helping people find language for prayer over the course of a few decades. He's discovered along the way that prayer is more straightforward than we make it out to be. With helpful starting practices to make prayer a more natural rhythm for your life, Jarrett helps you to find your voice when words of prayer are hard to come by, to settle into the silence when God seems quiet, and to bring all your cares and celebrations to God because He longs to walk with you in and through them.
'I do not want my image of God. I want God.'
---C. S. Lewis
Like Lewis, Jarrett Stevens wants to truly know and experience God, not some distorted and destructive image of the Almighty formed over the years. With wry humor and profound insights, Stevens searches to align his broken images of God with the images of God found in the Bible.
Attempting to recapture the spirit of J. B. Phillips' classic, Your God Is Too Small, Stevens addresses various assumptions we have about God and sorts through twelve different views of God---six destructive and six constructive.
God is not, for instance, the cop around the corner waiting to catch you breaking the law. Neither is he a talent show judge, wincing as you struggle through life. What if those destructive images we've shaped were replaced with more positive ones---a neighbor you can call for help in the dead of night ... or a tired-eyed father waiting for his child to return home safely? These images come straight from Jesus' teachings and invite us into a new experience with the true and living God.
