Prayer Without Pretending: What Happens When We Pray Through Guilt, Hurt, Shame, and Confusion

By Angela Ashwin

If you feel one way and pray another, maybe it's because you're afraid to let God know how you really feel. Angela Ashwin believes that honesty is the key ingredient in any healthy relationship. But many of us feel uncomfortable being angry or depressed in front of God. Instead, we insist on being politely insincere whenever we pray, thus building a wall between ourselves and God that no amount of time or technique will overcome. Frustration, guilt, distraction, grief, fear, and even pride can be the raw material for our prayers, if we will consent to being who we really are in the presence of God. Whether we have hurt someone or been hurt ourselves, we can bring our sins and our pain to God and let him decide how to handle them. God is big enough to deal with our anger and loving enough to dispel our fears. Prayer without Pretending is a book to help you open up to the grace that comes from living in God's presence as you really are.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0892836989
• ISBN13: 9780892836987
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Vine Books
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Get Real!

This book does a job of portraying prayer for exactly what it is: an expression of yourself to God. It encourages us to drop the pretenses and to be our real selves with the Father. Now, that's a pretty liberating concept! The book is presented in three parts: 1) Praying with Your Hurts 2) Praying with Your Sinfulness and 3) Praying with Your Misfortunes, Fears and Frustrations. Each section breaks these categories down even further into specific areas and shows us how we often allow the very things we want and need to deal with and prayer to become the stumbling blocks that keep us from prayer.The author is obviously writing not only from inspired knowledge, but from having been down the road of "getting real" in her own prayer and spiritual life. I found it encouraging and uplifting as well as a helpful aid in stripping away the unrecognized insincerity that is so often present in our relationship with God.