Prayer can become merely a habit and get boring fast, so in Finding God in the Verbs: Crafting a Fresh Language of Prayer (IVP, Mar.), J. Brent Bill and Jenny Isbell encourage people of faith to be imaginative and shake up their practice of prayer.
Bill and Isbell lead workshops on the topic, so the book offers 35 exercises for believers to create their own prayers, instead of falling back on the ones they might have learned as children or in church and repeated for years. An appendix includes fill-in-the-blank templates to get creative juices flowing on topics like gratitude, anger, darkness, and interceding for the needs of others.
Mad Libs provided the inspiration for one example from the book: "Dear Holy Changer, Today my heart is full of a sense of busyness and feeling ungrounded. Because you change things from scattered to solid, I am coming to you with what is in my heart. Sometimes I fear that I will be swept away in busyness, but I also hope for a sense of calm and feeling centered."
The words we choose encapsulate our theology, says Bill. “Do my verbs show that I pray to an active God? What do the nouns I use say about my images of God: loving, caring, distant, uninvolved?” Language that is more personally relevant leads to “more authentic, honest, vibrant prayers,” he says.
