Patricia Raybon Online

Patricia Raybon’s award-winning writing life didn’t follow her home. Instead, she faced a mountain of discord: a strained 25-year marriage, a daughter’s conversion to Islam, an unsettling alienation from her aging mother and a troubling distance from a silent God.

Beset by such family and spiritual struggles, the author and journalist decided to enroll in her own personal school of prayer. Her new book, I Told the Mountain to Move, chronicles the life-changing education that took her from the rote prayers of childhood to a mature understanding of her faith.

Her husband’s sudden illness was the catalyst for Raybon’s quest, but it was just one of several mountains she faced. Others included her youngest daughter’s conversion to Islam and the burden of secrets from her own past. Somehow, she says, this "scratched-up, middle-of-the-road Christian dug up enough common sense to call on God," and embarked on a course of radical transformation.

For that’s the essence of prayer: it’s about getting changed. Being a "good person"--attending church, sending thank-you notes, driving the speed limit--isn’t enough. "God, it turns out, wanted me to be transformed," Raybon says. And while she longed for such change, she knew that renewal comes only through work and sacrifice: "This was hard gospel. The gospel of trials."

Raybon, the daughter of devout Christians who raised her in a vibrant African-American church, had been going through the motions for years. Her prayers met with silence: "God was my Deus Absconditus--the God who is hidden," she writes, "cold and distant, and as soundless as the grave."

So Raybon vowed to learn to pray. But "what did I know of the secrets of prayer?" she says. A former reporter, she was now a journalism professor at a state university, "where the idea of praying to an unseen God could get me laughed off campus, if not out of a job."

But a journalist’s instinct is to find answers. So Raybon started studying. She sought out teachers among classic and contemporary Christian thinkers, including Quaker theologian Richard Foster, American evangelist R.A. Torrey and South African "prayer warrior" Andrew Murray. While their wisdom guided her, it was the experience of prayer, and the relationship it builds with God, that changed her.

So while Raybon was confounded when her daughter left the family’s Christian faith for Islam, Raybon’s prayers led her to offer love talk rather than arguments. "I couldn’t win Alana back by arguing," she writes. "But I could live like a Christian. So I loved my daughter, hijab and all."

In I Told the Mountain to Move, Raybon traces her journey and her transformation with searing honesty and triumphant hope. "I started out frightened and resentful, unloving and unsure," Raybon writes. "I wanted God to change these hard things for me. But God was changing me."