Praying in Color Kid's Edition

"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

“You will be vividly transformed.” —BuildFaith.org

This playful book helps children can get in touch with their inner artist and connect with God and others through prayer. Sybil MacBeth, a math teacher and active member of her church, shows how children can use doodling as a means of spending time with God and opening their hearts to others. She suggests creating a prayer drawing using various shapes, working with different names of God, and adding the names of family members and friends inside the shapes.

She also shows how to create a valentine card for the Creator, draw confession or thanksgiving prayers, illustrate a passage from Scripture, and much more. "Remember," she writes, "praying in color is a way to pray with your eyes, your ears, and your hands. It invites your mind, your heart, and your body into the prayer." -- Spirituality & Practice: Resources for Spiritual Journeys

Praise for Praying In Color: Drawing a New Path to God:
"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

“Dancer and mathematics instructor MacBeth's charming book may be the first to combine the pleasures of doodling with a discussion of, among other things, lectio divina. Here, she shows how simple drawings—often hardly more than circles and lines with names or ideas or places sketched in and enlivened with color—can focus the praying heart, making prayer something better than a shopping list or a chore and helping the praying believer to carry the wishes and thoughts of the prayer through the day. MacBeth's book is not for unbelievers or those who do not pray; it is directed to those suffering something more like spiritual attention deficit disorder. One of the most appealing books on prayer to appear in the last five years. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

“Sybil MacBeth, a mathmatics instructor by profession, and dancer by avocation, has written, and doodled, a daring devotional. Praying In Color: Drawing a New Path to God chronicles her 'experiments in intercession and challenges readers to take pens and paper in hand and, well, intercede. Although the daughter and granddaughter of artists, MacBeth was convinced by her own ugly artwork that something ‘had gone awry in the tossing of the genetic salad.’ Her point: The absence of skill presents no barrier to an individual's discoveries linking doodling and prayer. That's because prayer involves trust and being real before God...Her book contains balloons, labyrinths, vegetables, clovers, triangles, kites, quilts, calendars with prayer requests and names, and purposefully shaped squiggles. She recommends 15 to 30 minutes for the process, half spent in drawing and the other half in carrying the visual memories or actual images throughout the day. Instead of being a prayer warrior, she calls herself ‘a prayer popper,’ one who prays in fits and spurts with ‘half-formed pleas and intercessions, and bursts of gratitude and rage.’ MacBeth is transparent, accessible, and human. She exercises what she calls spiritual imagination as she works on, in, and through prayer. She trusts herself enough to experiment, mess up, and try again in prayer. She trusts God enough to guide her as she falters, succeeds, and grows stronger. Her book emboldens others to trust their instincts, too.” —Robin Gallaher Branch, Professor of Biblical Studies, Crichton College