A fantastic beginning...

I've just started reading a book I suspect I'm going to love. It's titled simply, "Living Prayer," and is written by Robert Benson who wrote "Between the Dreaming and the Coming True" which I just recently finished reading, and absolutely loved.

This new book has a fantastic opening paragraph or so, just the way a book on prayer should start, I think. Or maybe I'm biased, because I too, tumbled unaware into a life that is increasingly shaped by prayer. A life in which the words "intercession" and "intercessor" are ones that I am struggling to become familiar (familial, really) with. A life in which everything seems to have changed.

Benson writes:

I did not mean for all of this to happen to me. Or any of it, for that matter. I am still astonished by it all, and still a little afraid of it, actually.

I only started out to put a little formal devotion into my life, a kind of crash course in organized prayer. At best, I had this vague notion of wanting to be a person whose first words in the morning were a prayer, a prayer that rose up in me as I rose up in bed. I am not even very certain where that notion came from. But since the day it entered my head, nothing in my life is the same. Everything has changed - utterly, completely, irrevocably.
(Living Prayer, pg. 2)

There are dozens of other gems in the first chapter alone, but, as I read those opening lines, I couldn't help but think, "this is how a book on prayer should start." Uncertainty, confusion, reluctance, astonishment, fear, and joy.