Amy Boucher Pye

Author: Amy Boucher Pye

  • Join me in praying from Penhurst Retreat Centre

    This week I’m leading a 7 Ways to Pray retreat from the lovely Penhurst Retreat Centre near Battle, East Sussex (on the south coast of England). I welcome you to experience some of the wonder of this place, and more so, our amazing God who loves to meet us in prayer.

    I’ll be adding short videos each day to my YouTube channel – wifi permitting! (It’s very slow here out in the countryside.) You can also enjoy the videos I created back in March from Lee Abbey, Devon, if you want to jump in now. We won’t have the seaside this week, but amazing English gardens.

    The first video I created last night shortly after arriving while sitting in the sun-soaked garden by the labyrinth. How to prepare for a retreat? I give some pointers, and some silence to enjoy the birdsong.

    How do you best prepare for a retreat?

  • “The Blessing of Stillness and Silence” by Philippa Linton: 7 Ways to Pray blog series

    How can we find stillness in a busy, chaotic world? And why should we seek to be countercultural in this quest? Philippa shares from her own journey of embracing silence as a way of encountering God. I hope you can find some time to quiet yourself today and enter into God’s loving presence:

    As I drove into the car park, surrounded by dark trees on a chilly autumn evening, I felt peace wash over me. It was October, 1989, and I had booked a weekend at a picturesque retreat house in West Sussex called St Julian’s, run by an Anglican lay community. I have been on many retreats since then but that first taste of stillness and silence at St Julian’s remains a special memory.

    Years later, I am still very much a novice at practicing stillness and silence. My prayer life is often fickle and inconsistent. Yet I hold before me the promise of stillness and silence as beautiful gateways to God’s presence.

    In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.   Mark 1:35 (NRSV)

    Jesus launches his ministry in a blaze of power – proclaiming the kingdom of God, calling four fishermen to follow him, delivering a man from an evil spirit in a local synagogue, and healing Peter’s mother-in-law. By nightfall there are crowds outside the door, bringing the sick to be healed by this amazing young rabbi. With all this desperate human need surrounding him, what does Jesus do the next day?  Very early in the morning, before dawn, he gets up, leaves the house where he and his companions are staying, and heads to a solitary, deserted place, where he prays.

    Perhaps he chose somewhere quiet in the hills above the sea of Galilee. Wherever this lonely place was, it was just him alone with his Father. His first priority is to be alone with the Father and spend precious time with him, before resuming his ministry.  If the Son of God himself needed to do this, while he was here on earth, how much more do I.

    For God alone my soul waits in silence;
        from him comes my salvation.       Psalm 62:1 (NRSV)

    This verse awakens in me a deep yearning to wait for God in stillness and silence, to receive his love and his perfect peace. It’s so simple to come humbly before God in stillness and silence, to quieten my dark thoughts and troubled impulses, so that he can meet with me and I with him. Yet it can be so hard, because there’s so much within me and without me that distracts me from following God.

    I have learned that I don’t have to be in a house of prayer, or a beautiful garden, or even alone in the hills, surrounded by the beauty of creation, in order to find God’s presence. He is always there. I can enter stillness and silence even in the musty, noisy, claustrophobic chaos of the London Underground. Just by focusing my breathing and praying the name of Jesus either silently or under my breath, I can centre my being and become aware that God is here with me all the time and can pour his peace into my heart any time. It doesn’t matter where I am. It doesn’t matter what’s going on. Just as Jesus met with his Father in intimacy and solitude, so I too can enter that intimacy and solitude with the Father and the Son.

    Entering prayer through stillness and silence leads me more deeply into a loving awareness of God. It’s so simple … and God never stops inviting me to come ever closer and deeper.

    Philippa Linton is the administrator for the education and learning office of the United Reformed Church. She is also an Anglican lay minister. She wrote a devotional for the anthology ‘Light for the Writer’s Soul’, published by Media Associates International, and her short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW Christmas Anthology.

    Order 7 Ways to Pray here for more ways to encounter God, including resources for small groups.

  • “Learning to Lament” by Rachael Newham: 7 Ways to Pray blog series

    What happens when God is suddenly silent? Rachael shares movingly of her experiences as a teenager and beyond. She eventually found hope in the Psalms and learning how to lament. That someone before her could voice her feelings gave her a language with which to communicate with God. She learned to lament. I believe you’ll find her post so encouraging:

    It was a running joke when I was small girl that if I were saying grace, we’d better get the microwave on standby as the food would be cold by the time I’d finished praying. As a young child, prayer felt as natural to me as breathing, a near-constant conversation between my God and I.

    As I grew older however, the easy connection became strained, even more so when I first developed mental illness at fourteen. Prayer no longer felt like a two-way conversation, but talking into the ether. I was bombarded by questions about who I was and what I believed about the God I felt had abandoned me to myself. I can’t remember ever doubting God’s existence, but the distance grew into what felt like an unreachable chasm. I got stuck on the idea that I couldn’t pray for myself, that God couldn’t possibly care for a messed up teenager living a comfortable life when there was so much struggle and poverty going on in the world. My vision of God shrunk with my ability to pray and I began to believe that the miraculous encounters I heard about from friends attending summer festivals were totally outside of my reach.

    I’d been writing in a diary since the earliest days of my illness; and when someone wrote Psalm 40 in a card to me during a particularly dark period, I began to address my writings to God. Suddenly I was no longer venting my pain into the void, but into the presence of the Father I’d given my life to aged five.

    The words of Psalm 40 became my own prayer;

    “I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy put, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.”

    There was something astounding to me that someone had expressed my despair before God all those years ago and yet was able to declare that God had met them in the midst of the pit. It was not the flash of light miracle I so craved, but something began to change for me. As my writing became my prayer, I started to rediscover the closeness with God that I had been missing.

    I would later learn to call the prayers I was writing lament – that as I learned to express my despair before the God of hope, He was opening up the possibility that perhaps the gospel truth of our belovedness was not lost to me, that I was not lost to Him.

    I began to almost crave the more reflective times in church life of Advent and Lent, the ancient liturgy and story of the God moving into the neighbourhood and experiencing the breadth of our humanity, the darkness of Good Friday and the silence of Holy Saturday met me where I was and I didn’t feel as if I had to fake jubilation in the same way that I felt was expected at Christmas and Easter.

    Over the past few years however, I have begun to appreciate the call of Romans to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice”, the recognition from Ecclesiastes that “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.“ The seasons of life; of happiness and sorrow are experienced as the family of God and our times of corporate prayer and worship should have space for the joy and the pain to be expressed together in community.

    Our God has given us the gift of prayer and community through every season of life so that through it all we may listen for the heartbeat of God whose love remains steadfast.

    Rachael Newham is the Mental Health Friendly Church Project Manager at Kintsugi Hope and the author of two books. Her most recent And Yet was chosen as a part of The Big Church Read. Rachael founded the Christian mental health charity ThinkTwice and led it for a decade. She writes and speaks widely on issues of theology and mental health. You can keep in touch with her on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

    Order 7 Ways to Pray here for more ways to encounter God, including resources for small groups.

  • Relinquishing the Woman Alive Book Club

    After creating the Woman Alive book club sixteen years ago, I’ve reached the difficult decision that it’s time to hand it over to the next host. I’ve loved talking all things books for so many years, but I decided it was time to move on as I embrace the writing-speaking-spiritual-direction life.

    Here is the video announcement and following is my very last magazine entry – featuring my own 7 Ways to Pray!

    Thank you to all of you who have been an amazing part of this group. I’ll continue to be active in the Facebook group.

  • “Prayer for the Tongue-Tied Pray-er” by Jeff Crosby: 7 Ways to Pray blog series

    I first met Jeff Crosby in Singapore at LittWorld, a wonderful gathering for writers, publishers, and graphic designers from around the world. As we shared a jetlagged breakfast together, I soon realized here was a thoughtful and articulate person – a quiet leader with gravitas. I love how he shares how what he once saw as a stumbling block in his life has become a pathway to God. Please take a few moments to read and ponder his words:

    I have always marveled at people for whom eloquent and impassioned prayer rolls off the tip of the tongue and out of their hearts with great ease and authenticity. Spontaneous. Joyful. Heart-felt. Genuine.

    I’ve long wanted to be among those people.

    Though I believe deeply in the importance and the efficacy of prayer, I have never been among that crowd. Instead, I am more often than not tongue-tied, like a singer on the stage who forgets the first lines of a song he’s known all his life and has to start all over again, cheeks blushing, heart chagrined.

    But as I have grown older, I’ve accepted my tongue-tied prayer life, like my introverted temperament, as something of a gift and I’ve found life-giving pathways around it that have fostered intimacy with God, and helpful self-reflection.

    In her book 7 Ways to Pray, the author Amy Boucher Pye writes instructively to people like me when she introduces the concept of the prayer of examen, originally formulated by St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order. She has carried a specific practice of examen in her family (in her case, on vacations) , in which she, her husband and teenage children daily reflect on the joys and the irritations of their days away from home. “I realized recently that these highlights and lowlights can morph into prayer that helps me understand how I’m relating to God,” she writes. “As I pay attention in my life and look back, with his help, to name the things that brought me joy or frustrated me, I can understand how I’m moving toward or away from him.”

    The practice of examen at the end of my days has been a gateway to prayer. In quiet on a walk through the natural world or sitting at my writer’s desk, I reflect on the consolations (what was life-giving) and the desolations (what was life-depleting) in the day I am drawing to a close, and out of that reflection I form a prayer of thanks for the presence of God in the midst of it all. I often carry prompting questions written by friends at the Fall Creek Abbey, Beth and David Booram, such as:

    • Where am I experiencing an emerging desire?
    • Where might I be carrying a misplaced expectation of God, others, life, or myself?
    • What in my life is giving me joy? What is giving me sorrow?

    As I consider those prompting questions, I am invited to recognize, reflect, and respond in prayer to the God who loves me unconditionally.

    The prayer of examen has been, for me, one of the life-giving avenues for a tongue-tied pray-er. And there are others.

    Throughout the global health pandemic, I have prayed the Book of Psalms daily, guided by the devotional reflections of Dane Ortlund, a pastor and writer, through the book In the Lord I Take Refuge. If the examen helps me pay attention to what is stirring in my own soul and my sense of God’s presence (or absence), praying the Psalms helps me realize that there is nothing I am facing that has not been faced by those people of faith who have gone before me. Praying the Psalms “foster[s] communion with God amid all the ups and downs of daily life in this fallen world,” Ortlund writes.

    I have found that to be true.

    The prayer of examen and daily praying the Psalms have given this tongue-tied, praying believer sacred pathways to communion with God. And I am thankful.

    Jeff Crosby is the president and CEO of ECPA, the trade association of Christian publishing in North America. He is the author of The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts, to be published by Broadleaf Books in May of 2023.

    Order 7 Ways to Pray here for more ways to encounter God, including lots of resources for small groups.

  • Praying with a Painting: Going fishing

    By Leo Boucher. Used with permission; all rights reserved.

    How might this painting lead you into prayer?

    Spend a few moments looking at it, lingering where your eye lands, asking God to speak to you. You might want to consider a section of Scripture as you do so. I immediately thought of Peter walking on the water to meet Jesus (see Matthew 14:22–36), but actually one that fits better for me is that of the disciples, bereft of Jesus after his death, going fishing (John 21). They are looking for fish, but really they are searching for Jesus:

    Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Galilee. It happened this way: Simon Peter, Thomas (also known as Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together.“I’m going out to fish,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

    Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.

    He called out to them, “Friends, haven’t you any fish?”

    “No,” they answered.

    He said, “Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish.

    Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” As soon as Simon Peter heard him say, “It is the Lord,” he wrapped his outer garment around him (for he had taken it off) and jumped into the water. The other disciples followed in the boat, towing the net full of fish, for they were not far from shore, about a hundred yards. When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread.

    Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish you have just caught.” So Simon Peter climbed back into the boat and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time Jesus appeared to his disciples after he was raised from the dead.

    (John 21:1–14, NIV)


  • Celebrating Mothers

    Amy, her dad, and her mom in a pose of laughter.

    Happy Mother’s Day – that is, if you celebrate today and if it’s a day to celebrate for you. I know for many, it can feel painful, whether you had or have a tough relationship with your mother, or if you wanted to be a mother and haven’t been, of if your family forgets that it’s Mother’s Day and your child sees you cry for the first time as you make her waffles.

    I want to honor my lovely mom, who serves and gives so much to our family. Above is a photo with us and my dad during my recent visit.

    I thought I’d also share my first published article in Woman Alive (from 1999), which I found this week when I learned that Woman Alive is turning 40! It features what’s today known as a “tradwife” – women parenting their children full-time. Not sure I like that term; the title, “domestic artistry,” is better.

    I love the line that closes the article: “It’s hard to be bored when you’re with someone you love.”

  • “Praying When the Going Gets Tough” (part 2) by Georgie Tennant: 7 Ways to Pray blog series

    How can we continue to trust God when the worst has happened? Georgie takes us through some of the tough questions she faced after her sister died. I love how she didn’t shy away from bringing all of her questions to God, even when she felt bitterly disappointed in him. If you haven’t read the first installment, you might want to do so now.

    Last week, I wrote about prayer during my sister’s six-month journey with terminal cancer. In the early hours of the morning of 24th September 2017, I sat with her and my brother-in-law, each of us holding one of her hands, as she finally slipped from this life. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

    In the early flurry of practical arrangements, I hardly had time to stop and think. I remember, though, a late-night conversation with my husband, where I poured out my fear that I would never be the same again – that I would never be able to trust God with anything, ever, because it felt so much that He hadn’t come through for us when He had been our only hope.

    This has been a long journey of prayer and counselling to get back on my feet, emotionally and spiritually. Mine was the kind of story I didn’t want to read, when I was walking the path with my sister, hoping and praying for a healing that didn’t come.

    Yet here I was. I know my story has helped others around me cling to faith when all feels dark, so I hope, by sharing some of my revelations on the path to rebuilding my faith and prayer life, it will help those reading this blog too, in similar situations.

    Three key things that I learned:

    1. Acknowledge hard emotions and crushing disappointments

    If we leave our disappointments and frustrations about unanswered prayer simmering and bubbling without facing them, they can eat away at us, causing hurt and bitterness and eventually explosions in our faith, which can cause us to walk away from God.

    God is big enough to hear our ragings and our disappointments and it is far better to take them to Him and allow Him to breathe fresh hope into our souls than try to carry on, pretending everything is fine.

    The book of Psalms is like a manual for honestly expressing our emotions. David cried out to God over and over again when he was feeling bitter, confused, angry, in despair, abandoned. In doing so, he was able to focus himself afresh on God and allow God to bring him to a place where he put himself back in God’s hands again.

    2. Try to accept that there is a bigger picture and a different perspective that we cannot even begin to imagine – both now and in eternity

    This is really, really hard. We look at our circumstances and often can’t see an inkling of sense as to why God wouldn’t change them, heal us, rescue us, deliver us. We may never find an answer this side of heaven as to why some people’s prayers are dramatically answered and others are not.

    It helped me to look at the response of Jesus himself to his own suffering, in the Garden of Gethsemane, and understand that even he prayed for deliverance from his circumstances. Even he suffered and grieved that things couldn’t be different and even he could not have his immediate prayer answered, if his mission on earth was to be fulfilled.

    Jesus’ prayer at that time helped me, as I wrestled with unanswered prayer and disappointment: “Abba, Father,” he cried out, “everything is possible for you. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.” (Mark 14v36). What a hard, hard thing to pray. And, for us, what a lot of soul-wrenching wrestling to get to that point. But it was reassuring to know that Jesus felt what I was feeling, that he is a suffering saviour and that he understood me and could carry me through this.

    3. Believe that our prayers not being answered as we long for doesn’t indicate the level of God’s love for us.

    If the devil can undermine our trust in the absolute truths that God is good and He loves us, he’s got us on the run. If we can hold on to them, even by our fingernails, we’re on much more solid ground. God has already proven His love for us by everything he has already done for us. Whether our prayers appear to be answered or not doesn’t change that fundamental truth.

    Here are a few things that have helped me to get back on the prayer ‘horse’ after disappointment:

    1. Praise and worship and get back into God’s presence – even if you’re crying through most of it – which I did in the very early days. God’s presence alone is healing and faith-building.

    2. Thankfulness – be grateful for the small things. It really helps to re-gain balance and re-connect with God, recognising all the good gifts you still have, despite particular prayers going unanswered.

    3. Ask the hard questions. Find as many theories and ‘answers’ as you can. Discuss, read others’ writing about it, watch video clips – anything that will help you to process your disappointment and come to terms with your loss. But accept that you can never have a water-tight theology of unanswered prayer.

    4. Keep believing in the power of prayer. Pray for your prayer life to grow and be healed. Just start praying for things again. “Lord, I believe, help me in my unbelief.”

    5. Just do it and ask for God’s help with what to pray and how. Have a go, even with all sorts of fears and doubts rising up.

    The Rend Collective Song “Weep with Me,” says, “What’s true in the light is still true in the dark; you’re good and you’re kind and you care for this heart.” I think this sums up perfectly the experience of prayer after disappointment.

    If you are struggling with disappointment from prayers unanswered, I pray today that you will know the courage to face and wrestle the difficult, painful questions, and, in doing so, find His goodness, His kindness and His peace.

    Georgie Tennant is a secondary school English teacher in a Norfolk Comprehensive. She is married, with two sons, aged 13 and 11, who keep her exceptionally busy. She writes for the ACW Christian Writer magazine occasionally, and is a contributor to the ACW-Published New Life: Reflections for Lent, and Merry Christmas, Everyone, and, more recently, has written 8 books in a phonics series, published by BookLife. She writes the ‘Thought for the Week’ for the local newspaper from time to time and also muses about life and loss on her blog. The full sermon that inspired these blog posts can be found here, starting at around the 12-minute mark.

    Order 7 Ways to Pray here for more ways to encounter God, including lots of resources for small groups.

  • Praying with a Painting: Capturing the real

    A scene in the Western part of America, with mountains in the the background. In the foreground on the left, three figures sitting at a table - two women and a man; on the right, two figures at another table, the man reading.
    By Leo Boucher. Used with permission; all rights reserved.

    I love this painting of my dad’s – it’s one where he paints on the back side of glass, so he has to create everything in reverse. I didn’t get a great photo of it, as you can see the reflection above the two women, but the photo gives you an idea of the picture.

    What I especially love about this painting is how my dad captured the three sitting at the table on the left. I recognize them as my mom and Jan and Tom, who are a very close couple to my parents’ (they were part of our great neighborhood group when I was growing up). My dad really captured the pose of my mom in particular – that’s so her! She’s at rest but also probably pondering something. I’d love to know what she was thinking at that moment.

    What strikes me in this painting is how artists can capture a slice of the ‘real’ in their art, even as writers labor to convey a thought or feeling in their words and sculptors similarly through the medium of clay (and video producers and graphic designers and so on).

    What’s the ‘real’ in you that maybe only God sees? Or that you reveal to a select few? What might an artist capture in your pose today?

    I invite you to spend some moments pondering and praying. You could ask God to show you how he would paint you or make a sculpture of you or a movie of you.


  • “Praying When the Going Gets Tough” (part 1) by Georgie Tennant: 7 Ways to Pray blog series

    When Georgie faced desperately sad news about her sister, she didn’t give up on prayer. I’m honoured to host her deep and poignant thoughts this week and next. You won’t want to miss her hard-won wisdom.

    It is March 2017. I am away on a church ladies’ weekend, due to speak in a session the next day. My sister has recently had a baby and has been feeling unwell. Earlier that day she had been on her way to hospital to get checked over. Now it is the evening and neither she nor my parents are answering my texts requesting updates. Phone signal at the retreat centre is poor.

    At last, my phone pings. It is my Mum. My sister’s cancer is back and it has spread.

    It is impossible to convey in so few words the direction our lives took from that night, for the next six months, whilst my sister underwent immunotherapy, designed only to “prolong her life and make her comfortable,” according to her medical notes. There was so much practical, medical need – hospital appointments, relapses, emergencies, and so much helping her to hold on to the life she was trying to live, as a mother to a tiny, baby boy and a five-year old girl. In her last month, there were hospital visits and, later, hospice ones.

    How does one pray at such a time? I had prayed before for practical needs, emotional healing, guidance, direction, peace – but never for something with so desperate, so crucial, an outcome. In this week’s blog post and next, I hope to give some insight into how I prayed in the face of needing so daunting, so enormous a miracle. And then how I recovered my prayer life afterwards, when the longed-for miracle didn’t arrive.

    1. I prayed despite my fears that the prayers would go unanswered

    I had never asked God for anything so big and so crucial in my whole life. I had to rise to it, I had to feel the full fear of all the possible outcomes and let it drive me to pray like never before for the miracle that seemed so desperately out of reach. Mark 9 v 24 became my frequent cry: “Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief.”

    2. I prayed because what other options were there?

    I came to the simple conclusion that, if you don’t pray for a miracle and don’t get a miracle, you avoid disappointment. But what if… just what if?! I took the stance of believing for a miracle but having the courage to face hard questions and harsh realities at the same time.

    3. I prayed simple, desperate prayers when I couldn’t find the words

    Many days I could only squeeze out a “God please heal her. I don’t know what else to pray.” God hears every tiny breath we utter in prayer to him. John Bunyan says “the best prayers often have more groans than words,” so I knew it was okay when those were all I could utter.

    4. I prayed specifically, on waves of faith on the days that they came

    Some days, I was inspired to pray into specific aspects of the situation. Those moments gave me hope and, more importantly, gave her hope as I shared with her the things I was praying. I still believe hope was a powerful currency for her and helped her to keep going when all seemed lost.

    5. I prayed for smaller elements in the situation

    The right words, strength, peace, the right appointments – things that weren’t so big and scary and overwhelming as praying for the big miracle.

    6. I prayed using the words of others

    I declared promises from the Bible over her, using songs and psalms – ones that stirred hope and faith in me when it was wavering or ones I could cry out to God with, as prayers. I used prayers other people had written and found those able to express things I couldn’t.

    7. I was carried by the prayers of others

    It was a tangible comfort to know that so many people were praying the same thing as me all over the country. I know those prayers made a difference, just like in Exodus 17v12, “Aaron and Hur held [Moses] hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset.”

    Ultimately, there was no miracle of healing. Within six months my sister’s death happened, leaving a very small girl and an even smaller boy behind, not to mention big issues of faith and theology, trailing in her wake.

    Next week, I will be back to explain how I walked through those and came out with my faith and prayer life still intact.

    Georgie Tennant is a secondary school English teacher in a Norfolk Comprehensive. She is married, with two sons, aged 13 and 11, who keep her exceptionally busy. She writes for the ACW Christian Writer magazine occasionally, and is a contributor to the ACW-Published New Life: Reflections for Lent, and Merry Christmas, Everyone, and, more recently, has written 8 books in a phonics series, published by BookLife. She writes the ‘Thought for the Week’ for the local newspaper from time to time and also muses about life and loss on her blog. The full sermon that inspired these blog posts can be found here, starting at around the 12-minute mark.

    Order 7 Ways to Pray here, including in the US, UK, and Australia. You’ll also find lots of resources for small groups – videos and a leader’s guide – here.