I Told the Mountain to Move

Patricia Raybon grew up in the church. She was a good Christian lady. But when her husband was rushed to the hospital for life-saving emergency surgery, and her daughter had left the church to embrace Islam, and her relationship with her mother had deteriorated into an obligation, she started praying. She studied the masters of prayer, Andrew Murray, R.A. Torrey, Mother Theresa, Richard Foster and many other men and women of yesterday and today who had learned to pray. And she sought the Lord for herself and poured over the pages of Scripture, struggling through the issues that seemed like immovable mountains in her life.

It is out of this experience that she wrote the book, I Told the Mountain to Move: A determined struggle to learn how to pray; a triumphant lesson in learning to love. Patricia Raybon is utterly honest; I'm sure I have never read a book by an author more transparent than Raybon. A journalist who teaches at University of Colorado at Boulder, she is a fine writer with a unique voice. A powerful voice. A voice that draws the reader into her mind and her heart.

The book is made up of twenty-four prayer lessons that Patricia Raybon learned through the years covered in the book, lessons with names like "Love Each Other" and "Be of Good Cheer," simple words but often foreign concepts. I Told the Mountain to Move describes the amazing changes that occurred in Patricia herself as she learned to pray from the Lord himself.

I found the most impressive change to be the transformation that occurred in her most significant relationships. As the book began, her marriage was in disarray, she felt compelled to preach to her daughter, and she and her mother could barely be in the same room together. The Lord restored each of these relationships as he taught Patricia about love and prayer.

If you struggle with prayer, if your relationships lack grace, if you have unsurmountable problems, then you are right where Patricia Raybon started out. Let her take you on a journey that will teach you to pray the kind of prayers that make mountains move.