Notes

SCRIPTURE QUOTATIONS ARE TAKEN from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Much of this book adapts reflections, homilies, and essays I first wrote and published over many years of ministry; they appear here revised, combined, and expanded.

Prologue. The psalm that anchors these pages is Psalm 34:6; Job's confession is Job 1:21.

Chapter 1. C. S. Lewis's counsel that we must lay before God "what is in us, not what ought to be in us" is from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964). St. Augus-tine's teaching that God commands our asking so that the asking may enlarge our desire is from his letter on prayer to the widow Proba, Letter 130 (written A.D. 412).

Chapter 5. Mother Teresa's words about the silence and the emptiness are from her private letters, published in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

Chapter 11. The bishop's words to Monica, "it is impossible that the son of these tears should perish," and her story are from Augustine's Confessions, Book III. George Müller's lifelong prayer for five friends is told in his own Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller and in Arthur T. Pierson's biography, George Müller of Bristol (1899).

A Simple Way to Pray. The rhythm of morning, evening, and midday prayer follows Psalm 55:17 and Daniel 6:10.

All persons in this book are real, and I have told their stories as faithfully as memory allows. Names, places, and identifying details have been omitted or altered to protect their privacy, and a few accounts are composites drawn from many similar conversations, presented as such in the text.