Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God: Expanded and Enhanced Edition

By Sybil MacBeth and Lauren Winner

“Just as Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way showed the hardened Harvard businessman he had a creative artist lurking within, MacBeth makes it astonishingly clear that anyone with a box of colors and some paper can have a conversation with God.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review 

Maybe you love color. Maybe you are a visual or kinesthetic learner, a distractible or impatient soul, or a word-weary pray-er. Perhaps you struggle with a short attention span, a restless body, or a tendency to live in your head. Maybe your prayers feel more like a list for Santa Claus than a love letter to God, or you’re just bored with the same old prayers you’ve said since you were a toddler. Maybe you’re not sure that anyone out there is listening, or you just feel deep in your bones a hunger to know God better. 

The prayer practice Praying in Color® was born when Sybil's desperation to pray for family and friends intersected with her love of color and doodling. Praying in Color® invites the whole body into prayer and gives you a new way to be with God. 
 

This revised, expanded edition of the bestselling, groundbreaking book:  

• Presents double the wisdom and insight from Sybil MacBeth, from fifteen years of experience praying, teaching, and leading workshops 

• Includes a foreword by Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God  

• Brings a sense of fun and delight into prayer time 

• Gathers our mind, body, emotions, thoughts, and spirit into the same space for a while 

• Is ideal for praying on your own or in small groups, church fellowships, hospital rooms, university classrooms, prison ministry, elementary schools, and so much more. 

Sections of the book include:  

• Disgruntled Prayers 

• Praying Your To-Do List 

• Praying for Our Enemies 

• Hodgepodge Prayers 

• Twelve-Step Prayers 

• Praying with Scripture 

• Praying the Liturgical Year 

• Praying in Community 

• Sending and Sharing Prayers 
  And so much more. 

More than 150,000 people have discovered a delightful way to pray with the right side of the brain. Praying in Color has forever changed the way people pray—and will change your life, too. 

“It would not be an overstatement to say that Praying in Color rescued my devotional life from nonexistence. . . . I’ve given away more copies of this book than I can count.” —Lauren F. Winner

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781640604810

Sybil MacBeth

Sybil MacBeth is the author of Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God (2007) and Praying in Color Kids’ Edition (2009). Praying in Color uses doodling and coloring as a way to get still and listen to God. Sybil combines her lifelong love of prayer with her experience as a community college mathematics professor to offer workshops and retreats throughout the U.S. and Canada. Her workshops, both prayerful and playful, engage people of varied learning styles. Sybil is married to Andy MacBeth, an Episcopal priest, and is the mother of two adult sons.

Book preview

Introduction

—Prayer and Play

Almost two decades after my first doodle morphed into a prayer, I’m still praying in color. It is the way my hands, eyes, brain, heart, and whole body nestle into prayer. Although praying in color involves color, it is not an exercise in coloring. Pen, paper, and colored markers or pencils are the tools for the organic growing of a visual prayer.

When I first started praying in color I wondered, Is this really prayer? It feels serious, but also light and relaxing. It feels prayerful, but also playful. Can a spiritual practice be both prayerful and playful? When I look at the words pray and play I notice they are almost physically identical. They differ by only one letter, with three letters in common. And they have other things in common, too. Pray and play are both about becoming childlike, being vulnerable, being open to the new, letting go, and surrendering to the moment. Jesus touts being childlike. He said: Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3 NIV).

When I was a kid, my playmates in the neighborhood and I were willing to be led by the leader of the day into unknown territory. We traipsed into the alley, the woods, the next street over, a construction site. We trusted another kid to take us on a new adventure. We were willing to look foolish and to risk skinned knees, scratched arms, and bruised legs.

In the best of my prayer times, I let go of my need for control and allow myself to be led by a power greater than myself.¹ God and the silence take me to new places. Returning unscathed is not guaranteed. The places I go in prayer and meditation can be liberating and wonderful, but they can also be risky and threatening to the life I know. If I am looking to have my opinions, beliefs, life, and knees untouched, I should probably avoid the surprise encounters of prayer altogether. Prayer assumes my willingness to listen, to be vulnerable, to follow, and to change. Prayer and meditation can keep me on the right road, but they can also take me off the map. I trust God to lead me in this adventure.

Prayer and play are also both about relationship. Relationships are based on ongoing connection through a full range of daily experiences and emotions—joys and sorrow, laughter and tears. So why do we often get serious and sober and pious when we pray? A human relationship based on just seriousness and pretense gets boring and cumbersome. Play is an important ingredient in most of my healthy relationships. In What the Body Wants, Cynthia Winton-Henry says, Play is honest. You can’t play unless you are yourself.² Same with prayer. I cannot pray if I offer a fake, spiffed-up version of myself to God. Honesty involves offering my dreams, my sins, my skepticism, my fears, my humor, my failures, my successes … the whole of me. I want my relationship with God to be healthy, joyful, both serious and playful, and most of all honest.

The biblical writers witnessed to an understanding of this lush relationship with God in their frequent use of the word delight. This word is used throughout Scripture, especially in the Psalms.

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Ps. 37:4 NRSV)

Will they take delight in the Almighty? Will they call upon God at all times? (Job 27:10 NRSV)

I delight to do Your will, O my God, And Your law is within my heart. (Ps. 40:8 NKJV)

One of the best gifts I receive from praying in color is a renewed sense of delight in my prayer time. Delight does not mean blind and giggly happiness; it means expectant enthusiasm and energy. Prayer no longer feels like an obligation. When I draw as a way to enter prayer, I feel a sense of hopeful and grateful anticipation for this time with God—even if the subject of my prayers is serious or scary. Prayer can be the heavy labor of my heart and mind where I am sometimes the foreman on a job site. Or prayer can be my joy and freedom, the place where I get to play in the presence of my Creator, where I get a taste of the glorious liberty of being a child of God (paraphrase of Rom. 8:21). Maybe God even delights at the puny efforts I make to show up in