"The Power of a Praying Wife"

by Stormie Omartian

Well, I changed my mind and decided it was easier to read one book at a time... it seemed to flow better than a different topic each night. And I made it through one book!

"Praying Wife" was different to what I was expecting and at first I found it hard to relate to the topics as they didn't seem relevant to where Vaughn is in his journey with Christ. However, I realised that I could just use the topics as a starting point for my prayers for Vaughn. The prayers were quite specific, so it was hard to find them personal for our situations/circumstances, but I would like to go through the headings again and write up my own prayers for Vaughn, based on those. The author got me thinking about things to pray about for Vaughn, that I had never thought of before in regard to topics, not substance.

I found the author used quotes/verses from the Bible a little too often (if that's possible!). It seemed she was just using verses to make up sentences, so firstly it was a little hard to follow at times and secondly, because the verses were so short, they could easily be taken out of context... without looking up each individual verse, you don't know what the writer (of the verse) was really saying, in depth. Have I been hanging around my husband too long and now want an exegesis for any Bible verse ever used!? It seemed the author looked at the topical index/concordance at the back of the Bible and where the topic word was mentioned, she quoted. Am I being too harsh?! Perhaps, but I'm being honest about how I felt!

Without wanting to be too critic of Omartian, I also found she was a little "look what my prayers did for this person". She would use an example of someone (usually her husband, of course!) who she prayed for regarding the particular topic and explain how her prayer was answered in the future. Of course that's possible, but I felt she was saying it was her prayer, not God's power, that made the difference. It's hard to explain what I meant without sounding like I think prayer is redundant, because I absolutely don't believe that! I just mean that the way the author wrote, made it sound like it was all about her. Do I make any sense at all!?

Anyway, to end on a positive note, the book has given me some wonderful topics to pray for Vaughn about, that I had never considered before.

There are two other books to make this a "3 in 1 collection" so it will be interesting how the others are... "Praying Parent" and "Praying Woman"... I'll let you know my thoughts!