Review: Praying For Strangers

The best indication of whether I loved a book was the amount of underlining you find when I'm done.

And Praying For Strangers has multiple underlined passages.

I have to admit that the book was written by my friend River Jordan, so I was pre-disposed to like it because I know her to be one of the most gentle, sweet, authentic people I've ever spent time with. River, I know, is the real deal. So I could trust what she had written to be that as well.

This book was not someone just dreaming up another way to repackage the same old stuff they'd written about before. This wasn't an author trying to come across as an expert on something so you will believe in them and buy their products. On the contrary, River is primarly a novelist-- someone who is most comfortable making up stories. She never set out to write a memoir based on the New Year's Resolution that God put on her heart the year she sent both of her sons off to war. That little resolution became a way of life-- an adventure that led her to get involved in stories she wasn't making up, the stories of the strangers who came her way, strangers she prayed for.

This book inspired me to see strangers differently. As more than just the person waiting on me or waiting with me. More than just people to be contended with or endured. Strangers are people like us, people with stories and struggles. People who need prayer and-- in the praying-- can help us put our lives in perspective, having an eternal viewpoint instead of an immediate one.