Rainey Prays on Some Days

In 1995, someone found Richard Foster 's book Prayer on a desk at the high school where I was a regular substitute teacher. I was also a pastor in town at the time, so the office assumed it was mine—it wasn’t—and insisted I take it since no one else claimed it. Like many of the books I have acquired over the years, it ended up on a bookshelf in my basement, unread. Over ten years later, I finally decided to start reading Foster’s book at a time when I needed to completely rebuild my spiritual life. When I got the book, the world was very different than it is now. I had never been on the Internet and had no idea what technological innovations were about to be let loose on the world. I grew up under the Cold War threat of nuclear bombs; fortunately, that threat never materialized. But I never suspected how we would soon be bombarded with something seemingly so innocuous and yet potentially so dangerous—information. All of that information is taking its toll as more and more peop