Name
Adventures in Prayer by Catherine Marshall

Description
Subtitle: How to Reach for God’s Helping Hand; Chosen Books

This is a classic written in the 1970’s that has sold over 1,000,000 copies. In this book the author shares her practical belief in God’s ability to answer our prayers and to guide and shape our lives as we pray.

Chapters include;

Prayer is Asking

The Prayer of Helplessness

The Waiting Prayer

The Prayer of Relinquishment

The Prayer in Secret

The Prayer of Joyous Blessing

The Prayer that Helps Your Dreams Come True

The Claiming Prayer

Let Your Heart Form the Words!

Review: This book was one of the most influential prayer books of my earlier years because it clearly showed how prayer could change the course of your life. One chapter in particular “The Prayer that Make Your Dreams Come True” tells about how the author who grew up in a poor household during the Depression in West Virginia longed to go to college and didn’t have enough money to cover going off to Agnes Scott. When her mother found her crying on her bed, Catherine’s mother told her that she believed that God had placed this dream in her. She ushered Catherine into the master bedroom and they knelt and asked God how to make this dream become reality. Soon afterwards her mother was offered a small sum of money to write for the county, and Catherine was able to go to college.

In retrospect, this answered prayer changed not only Catherine’s life but the life of literally millions afterwards because Catherine became a pioneer writer in the sort of inspirational personal experience books on faith we enjoy today. Her works were ground breaking in that they were not dry theological treatments on faith but rather, as the title of this book suggests, “adventures.” She spoke about real life and continually asserted that she didn’t feel that she was a special case. If God could do this in her life, she felt completely confident He could do it in ours.

Although this book has very positive true experiences such as this one, I love Catherine because she is a realist and doesn’t pretend that we will get everything we think we want. Another chapter is called “The Prayer of Relinquishment” and the short yet difficult to say prayer attached to this chapter is simply this, “I relinquish this to You.”

This is a very quick read – only 114 pages in the paper back version. And although it was written by someone of the preceding generation, the truth of it will ring in your heart and mind.

Since I first read the book in my early adulthood, I can add the testimony of my own experiences that prayer is truly and adventure and that prayer is the only way to bring about those dreams and visions that God puts into our spiritual DNA. This book isn’t just principles on prayer, it is full of timeless wisdom.

Added by Karen Barber on June 12, 2011