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COVID Confessions 4–Prayer and Webinar

May 18, 2020 by Sybil Macbeth 3 Comments Leave a Comment

Confession: I hope you all will join me on this Zoom webinar on Wednesday, May 20 (2 days from now) sponsored by Paraclete Press. Thoughtful and funny, Jana Riess, author of Flunking Sainthood and The Twible, will interview me about Praying in Color–where the idea came from, how it has changed and expanded in the 15 years since I started doing it. The webinar will last about an hour with time for questions. Click on the picture below or on this Link to sign up; it’s FREE. If you receive these posts as an email, please go to my Blog and Share via Facebook or other social media. Thanks.

Confession: I am a bumbling extemporaneous pray-er.  I get all shy and tongue-tied with God when I try to come up with accurate prayers to communicate what’s in my head and on my heart. Words escape me when I need them most, which is weird because I have always loved words. As a kid, novels, biographies, A Child’s Garden of Verses, encyclopedias, my little red KJV Bible, and Scrabble were constant companions. So I am very grateful for the Sunday School teachers of my childhood for whom words were so important. They taught me the prayers of our tradition and asked me to memorize Psalms, the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, hymns, and one-line verses of Scripture and proclamations of faith. By the time I was eight or nine, I knew Psalms 23, 91, and 100 by heart. Sixty-some years later they are in the hard-drive of my memory and still accessible. When my own words fail in prayer, I join the unheard voices of millions of other people who recite these several-thousand-year-old hymns as part of their spiritual routine.

A couple of the favorite one-line prayers I learned in Sunday School are: “There is no spot where God is not.” “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.”* “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”(Mt 5:4 KJV) “Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you.”* “In Him we live and move and have our being.”(Acts 17: 28 KJV) All of my memorized prayers, Psalms, hymns, and simple affirmations of faith are like a wardrobe of prayer shawls from which I can pick and choose. They enfold me and wrap me with the assurance that I am always in the presence of God.

Anne LaMott’s lovely 2012 book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers is a reminder that prayers do not need to be complicated or articulate, just honest. One word is sometimes all the prayer we need..

While I was packing up and getting ready to move from Tennessee to Florida in April, I found a poem I wrote in May 2009 called Three-Letter Prayers.

Three-Letter Prayers

The night in full bloom,
The star-filled sky
Flings paperwhites across the heavens.
WOW!

The open-handed man
In showerless stench,
Asks for my coins and my eyes.
NOW?

A long-loved friend,
Sobered up and free at last,
Dies
WHY?

The 8-hour surgery,
In the hands of Doc and God,
Brings relief and new life.
YES!

 

*Mary Baker Eddy

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: Anne Lamott, Flunking Sainthood, Help-Thanks-Wow: the Three Essential Prayers, Jana Riess, Paraclete webinar, Praying in Color

“Pray and Color” Coloring Book Giveaway

August 25, 2016 by Sybil Macbeth 6 Comments Leave a Comment

Author and friend Jana Riess has posted an interview with me and giveaway of my coloring book on her blog Flunking Sainthood. Jana is the author of the book Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor –her not-perfect experience and experiment of trying a new Christian spiritual practice each month and messing it up. The book is funny and honest and wise. Just like Jana. She is giving away six Pray and Color coloring books on August 29. Check out her blog and sign up today for the giveaway.

Just a reminder:
Pray and Color IS  a coloring book. It provides coloring pages and suggestions for 14 different ways to pray on them.

Pray and Color Front Cover

 Praying in Color: Drawing A New Path to God  IS NOT a coloring book. It teaches people to create their own coloring/prayer pages with doodling and simple drawing.

Praying in Color 322

 

 

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: coloring book, Flunking Sainthood, Jana Riess, Pray and Color, Praying in Color. prayer

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