Our Prayer Book Won!
We won! Woo hoo! Our book, Prayers for the Pilgrimage, won IVP’s 2024 Readers’ Choice Awards for the “Bible and Devotional” category.
Thank you for voting. Thank you for caring. Thank you for supporting our work. Phaedra and I are truly and deeply grateful.
I had promised to play a proper tune on the French Horn if we won, and I’d been practicing Jeremiah Clarke’s “Trumpet Voluntary” in the garage, and getting to the place where I wouldn’t utterly embarrass myself—and then a piece to one of my valve levers broke off. It just broke off.
I couldn’t believe it. I haven’t had anything break in the forty years that I’ve owned the instrument. I tried to fix it myself but didn’t have the right tools, so I’ll have to take it into a shop to get it repaired.
Instead of playing the horn, I played the “air horn.” And then I tooted one obnoxiously loud note over the entire valley. It was a godawful noise but it got the message across: a message of joy. And thanks for sharing in our joy, too.
With the beginning of the Church Calendar drawing near, I’ve got 20 prayers for the season of Advent, with each week exploring a different theme—Light, Hope, Joy, Trust. We’ve got prayers for the 12 Days of Christmas and four for the season of Epiphany, including one “For the Flight to Egypt,” in honor of all refugees.
We’ve got a prayer “For Sanity on Christmas Eve for Frazzled Parents.”
We’ve got two prayers to mark the end of the secular calendar: one “For a Good Ending to the Year” and another “For a Hard Ending to the Year.”
So if you know of someone who might benefit from prayers that would help them to express their hearts longings to God during the “Little Lent” of Advent and the dramatic season of Christmastide, which includes not just the glorious Mystery of the Incarnation but the martyrdom of Saint Stephen and the massacre of the Innocents, please consider recommending Prayers for the Pilgrimage: A Book of Collects for All of Life to them.
Thanks yet again for your generous support of Phaedra and me. We did a little dance on our back porch this morning when we heard the news and gave each other a big, happy hug!
