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Prayer Partners: How Praying With Someone Can Multiply Your Blessings, Includes the 90-day Partner Experience! - Hardcover

Gold, August; Fotinos, Joel

 
9780385525145: Prayer Partners: How Praying With Someone Can Multiply Your Blessings, Includes the 90-day Partner Experience!
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385525141 ISBN 13: 9780385525145
Verlag: Harmony Books, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Offers guidance on how to connect with others through prayer regardless of background and affiliation, explaining how the authors developed their own process and sharing hands-on exercises for developing a group prayer practice.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Founder and Spiritual Director of Sacred Center New York for over eight years, August Gold is also an award-winning author, and has served as an inspirational teacher and counselor in New York City for 20 years. She speaks nationally and internationally at conferences and organizations.
www.augustgold.net 
 
Joel Fotinos, a vice-president at Penguin Group (USA) Inc., is the publisher of the Tarcher imprint and founder of the Putnam Praise publishing program.  A co-founder of Sacred Center New York, he is an ordained New Thought minister and lives in New Jersey.
www.joelfotinos.com

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How Did Prayer Come into My Life?

It began innocently enough. One Sunday morning when I was in my early twenties I was reading a magazine account of a woman whose worst nightmare had come true: the small plane she was traveling in, along with her father and four other passengers, crashed in tropical, shark-infested waters. Separated from her father and the others, madly treading water in the treacherous ocean, she did something she'd never done before--she prayed. She prayed to God to help her have the strength to tread water for ten minutes, just ten minutes. And miraculously she was given the strength to keep from drowning for ten minutes. Then she prayed for another ten minutes. And she got that, too. Ten minutes by ten minutes she made it unharmed through the night one prayer at a time until she was returned safely to shore where she was reunited with her father.

For the life of me, I could not put the magazine down. I sat hypnotized by the photographs of this woman and her father. Every single little prayer she prayed was answered, instantly. She was an ordinary woman just like me, so if she could pray and get help immediately, why couldn't I?

By the time I finished reading the article the possibility of answered prayer in my life seemed within reach. With just the belief in the possibility, the door that I'd closed to God years before opened. My life changed in that instant, but I didn't know it yet: I received my first answer to a prayer I did not even know I had.

Years later I would call this moment by its real name: my spiritual awakening. And it was not even my own prayer that led to my awakening--it was the prayer of the woman from the newspaper story. Nor was it my God I was praying to; she was praying to hers. I had piggybacked on the prayers of a complete stranger. Years later I would come to understand that every prayer--long or short, silent or aloud, angry or grateful, tearful or fearful--is answered through you when you are open to receive; whether it is piggybacked or stolen or counterfeit doesn't make a difference.

Prayer became a lifeline to the Divine for me, and prayer by prayer I followed in the footsteps of my heroine, one bite-size prayer at a time, until I stumbled upon the hidden truth about prayer: when we are open to receive, every prayer is answered.

So day after day I earnestly prayed the way my heroine did until one morning I hit an invisible ceiling--the more I prayed, it seemed, the less passion I experienced. I no longer looked forward to praying. I continued to speak the words correctly but they came out sounding mechanical. I wanted to feel more but I didn't. Something was missing but I didn't know what it was.

A year went by before I learned that it wasn't something that was missing but someone. The someone turned out to be my first Prayer Partner, Peter, who introduced me to a whole new way of praying, which changed everything.

A New Way to Pray

As it turns out, this "new" way of praying was not new at all. "If two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:19-20 NKJV). Jesus introduced the idea of Prayer Partnering over two thousand years ago. Every spiritual tradition has a form of praying in unison--some that predate Christianity--as a method that multiplies both the power of your prayer and its results. I didn't know that then. All I knew was that praying with someone else breathed life into my prayers in a way that nothing else had.

Suddenly I looked forward to my prayer time with my partner. It was fun and alive and utterly spontaneous. Whenever I prayed alone, I never laughed or got swept away in the excitement of connecting with the Divine. Now I was praying with fervor as I prayed with and for my partner, and he with and for me.

What to Expect from This Book

Prayer Partners is a simple book about a profound spiritual technique. It is so easy that you could begin using this technique tomorrow morning and begin reaping the benefits right away. We're not inventing anything new. We're applying what Jesus taught and unleashing the power of his teaching in our own prayer lives.

Prayer Partnering changed my life forever, and it changed the life of my co-author, Joel, too. We wrote this book because we know that Prayer Partnering can do the same for you, and more.





Why I Started Praying with a Partner

I'd like to report that my introduction to Prayer Partnering came after a gentle nudge from the heavens, a sweet dream from which I awoke and knew it was time for me to partner with another good soul in prayer. But it didn't happen that way. No change in my life has ever happened with a soft touch.

It is written that the "fates lead those who will, and those who won't they drag." That's me. I have to be beat up a bit to get the message that it's time to change. Then I'm all ears.

Never was that more true than when I was twenty-four years old and bought a three-story house with the love of my life. It was located in a bad neighborhood that was in the process of being gentrified, so it was only a matter of time until the value of the house increased tenfold. The plan was that we would eventually sell the house, and the money was going to support us as we grew old together.

Together we lasted two years. On the day I moved out of our house, I suggested that when the time was right, we'd need to talk about dividing the money from the sale of the house.

"Why would I do that?" Josh said coolly. "This is my house."

I couldn't get my mouth off the floor. This betrayal was such a shock that a year later I still had not gotten over it, let alone forgiven him. This wasn't an angry lover lashing out; clearly Josh had planned to keep the house from the day we had bought it. "Let me sign the papers for the house," he'd explained. "My bosses are conservative, and if they find out we're living together it might jeopardize my future with them. Give me your share of the money and we'll put everything in my name, but we both know that this is our house." He was studying to be a lawyer in a big Washington, D.C., law firm that was financing his education. He knew the court system inside out; it was in his blood--his father and grandfather had been lawyers. Spending time in court would be a game to him. I had so lost the case.

I woke up day after day dizzy with resentment and told my Judas story to anyone who would listen. Everyone agreed that Josh had stabbed me in the back, and that his was an unforgivable act. When they assured me that "what goes around comes around," I felt the sweet shiver of vindication. Their words were music to my ears.

Josh's betrayal became the central story of my life. Each day I needed to enroll more people in my point of view, so when I wasn't telling my story to some stranger I'd just met, I was revisiting the memory in my mind's eye. Most nights when I should have been sleeping I was reliving the pain of what he'd done to me. I replayed that final conversation with Josh a good five hundred times, each ending the same way in my imagination: his tear-stained humble admission that he was wrong and I was right.

On the days when the hate made it hard to breathe, I took stabs at forgiving him, mainly to have a few moments of peace, but it didn't last. Or maybe it lasted for an hour or a day, and one time even for a whole week. But then I'd return to the central premise that kept the fire of my resentment burning: a person like that doesn't deserve forgiveness. Anyway, if I forgive my betrayer, aren't I betraying myself?

The day before Prayer Partnering turned my life around, I was vacationing at a friend's house at the Delaware shore. It was a beautiful day and I...

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Verlag
Harmony Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385525141
ISBN 13 
9780385525145
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
274
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar