It is easy to become confined by our prayers. We say these words at those times and at that place in the morning or before a meal or at this point in the Sunday service. Prayer slips into a faithful practice when it was meant to be the core substance of a faith-filled life. That's the point of this book'to shake us free from a dutiful prayer life and launch us into a more expansive life of prayer.

Jesus is calling his disciples beyond a mere —prayer life and into an unbounded life of prayer. He wants to lead us to a radical kind of intimacy with God and each other that becomes the very labor and delivery room of the Kingdom'the birthplace of divine love in the world. It's the place where prayer and justice and mercy and faith become inextricably intermingled and unleashed like a flood-tide onto a parched land. While prayer may not be the secret formula to a great awakening, we can be assured it paves the only pathway that will lead us there.