Reading to help deepen prayer

Perhaps the title of this post seems a bit of a paradox. After all, the only real way to deepen prayer is to engage in it - to commit time and effort - to give God the first place in our lives. Reading about prayer is not the same as praying - but, having said that, there is some useful reading we can do to help us on our way and to point us in new directions when our prayer life has become a little, how shall we say, stale!

If you found Deepening Prayer - 1 helpful, then I would like to recommend a little book that I have found useful and continue to find useful whenever I dip into it. It is called Coming to God in the Stillness and is by a Dutch missionary called Jim Borst.

It is a book in two parts - the first part describing a method of contemplative prayer, and the second part answering such questions as:

• What is contemplation?
• What does contemplation achieve?
• How do I deal with distractions?

Jim describes contemplative prayer as a prayer of the heart when the lips and the mind come to rest.
If you want to venture into this form of prayer then this is a very useful book to have on your shelf. If not, don't worry, God has made such an infinite rich variety of life in the world - if we all looked the same it would be very boring and if we all prayed the same I'm sure God would find it equally boring!!

Blessings upon you as you grow in prayer.