A Tour of the Terrain

Prayer by Richard Foster, HarperCollins, $17.00

Reviewed by Steve D. Mathewson, pastor, Dry Creek Bible Church, Belgrade, Montana.

As a boy, I visited the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I struggled to understand its significance until my folks splurged and hired a personal tour guide from the National Park Service. For a modest fee, this guide took the keys to our car, drove us through the battlefield, pointed out key sites, and answered our questions. I got the tour of a lifetime!

Richard Foster's most recent book, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home, offers its readers a personal tour through the terrain of prayer. I immediately warmed up to him as my tour guide when I read his humble admission: "I am speaking for all the prayerless persons I have been and all the prayerful persons I hope to become."

Untangling the inside

Soon into the tour, I realized how my own prayer life has been stifled by a hardening of the categories. Many of the twenty-one ...