Prayer is the kind of exercise that can lead to discouragement if we're not careful. Some of you reading this chapter are discouraged right now, because you keep trying to pray but you can't be consistent with it. Some of you are discouraged because you pray every day and still God has not answered your request.

Prayer is about real-world concerns, spoken in real-world language. God does not want us to shift into a stained-glass prayer voice to address Him.

Prayerless people cut themselves off from God's prevailing power, and the frequent result is the familiar feeling of being overwhelmed, overrun, beaten down, pushed around, defeated. Surprising numbers of people are willing to settle for lives like that. Don't be one of them. Nobody has to live like that. Prayer is the key to unlocking God's prevailing power in your life.

God does not give us desires that cannot be realized.

Fear in the midst of the storm is instinctive and beneficial. Fear of a storm that could happen is not. It's an intrusive emotion that can lead us to a greatly diminished life.

A man of faith is a stable man looking in only one direction for the wisdom he needs. He knows that the God to whom he prays is able and willing to respond to his need.

The more you are grateful for what you have the more you will have to be grateful for.

I tend to write about my anxieties - it's what I'm afraid will happen. And I write a story working it out.

I was always anxious about whether I'd find a career I loved or be able to afford to buy a house.

The Third Method of Prayer is that with each breath in or out, one has to pray mentally, saying one word of the Our Father, or of another prayer which is being recited: so that only one word be said between one breath and another, and while the time from one breath to another lasts, let attention be given chiefly to the meaning of such word, or to the person to whom he recites it, or to his own baseness, or to the difference from such great height to his own so great lowness.

News these days was a constant play on people's fears, and he seldom watched it.

God isn't like a genie in a bottle who will do whatever we ask. Prayer is about talking with God, getting to know him, learning to love the things he loves. He's preparing us to be fit citizens for the kingdom to come, and his goal isn't to give us everything we want in this world. Don't you want whatever God knows is best?