Nearing a Far God: Praying the Psalms with Our Whole Selves
Overview
Experience Transformation When You Pray the Psalms with Your Whole Self
Feeling hopeless? Lonely? Anxious? Do you want to experience the presence and love of God through every joy and struggle of life? Do you long to enrich your prayer life and grow your relationship with God? The Psalms will guide you into fresh encounters and a lasting deeper attachment to God.
You may have read or studied the Psalms. In Nearing a Far God: Praying the Psalms with Our Whole Selves, you’ll experience the Psalms in fresh, personal, and life-changing ways:
- Discover how the Psalms can draw you into dialogue with God no matter your pain, struggle, or doubt
- Practice transformative writing and prayer exercises that engage and impact the whole brain and the whole self
- Reclaim ancient practices of movement and bodily postures to heighten your worship and deepen attachment to God
Masterful teacher and award-winning author Leslie Leyland Fields has helped thousands of God-seekers around the world experience spiritual breakthroughs by expressing their life stories through the lens of Scripture. Whether you read and practice Nearing a Far God on your own, with a local group, or with a cohort organized by Fields, you too can experience profound change, hope, and the always near presence of a loving God.
I struggle with prayer the way that you may struggle with prayer. And yet Leslie Leyland Fields is welcoming us into what she calls “a new place that is not far or hard to get to.” With gentleness, grace, and exquisite language, Leslie is the guide who is leading me, and you, to the One who is near.
Leslie Leyland Fields has provided a journey through the Psalms engaging your heart, mind, body, and soul. Slow down and process these ancient words. Your life will be richer for the journey.
Leslie Leyland Fields has displayed her extraordinary gifts as a writer in a growing list of publications. In Nearing a Far God she turns to the inspired poetry of the Psalms. Here she encourages us, and shows us how, to bring our whole selves to the Psalms and put them before God. She does that very thing in the book, moving from moments in her own life into the rich texts of the Psalms. Sunday school classes, Bible study groups, and individuals will find Nearing a Far God to be a wonderful guide into a deep reading of the Psalms, where they may confidently expect to be engaged by God.
What is prayer—really? What is prayer when we let it and our lives be the complicated messes they are? And why wouldn’t our emotions—shamed by a previous generation of evangelicals—be part of our prayers? Leslie Leyland Fields demonstrates fierce and authentic praying as she reframes old, limited notions of prayer. Fields avoids easy how-to steps or simple answers and teaches us how to integrate praying the Psalms with being richly and deeply human.
Practical, theologically informed, rich with insight, these personal encounters with the Psalms give readers an imaginative, life-giving way to bring these ancient prayers into the very heart of the lives we live now. Grounded in scenes from her own remarkable life, Leslie leads us step by step through a process of claiming each psalm, making it our own, uniting our cries for help and exuberant thanksgivings to those of all who have prayed them over centuries. This book offers a new way of understanding the Bible as a living word: It lives in those who enter it with faith, hope, and all the particulars of our messy lives, letting it shape our prayers and listening for the voice that calls us by name.
I’ve long been an admirer of Leslie Leyland Fields, her lyrical prose, and her wisdom. This beautiful, honest book does not disappoint. What sets Nearing a Far God apart is Fields’s masterful ability to blend the timeless wisdom of the Psalms with the practical realities of our lives today. Her words are a source of comfort for those in times of sorrow and a celebration for those experiencing moments of joy. This book is a gentle, trustworthy guide for those yearning to draw nearer to God.