I want to introduce you to Micha Boyett and her beautiful book, Found: A Story of Questions, Grace & Everyday Prayer.
Found is Micha’s memoir about finding the rhythms of prayer after her ways of being were swallowed whole by motherhood.
“My first year of motherhood I lost prayer,” the preface begins. And that’s where Micha’s story begins, too. But as she spirals into the core of her story, she is met with a gnawing unrest about her choices to study poetry, get married, and have kids instead of save the world. So the book is not just about confronting her loss of prayer but also confronting her loss of self and her assumptions about God’s deep disappointment with her.
What speaks to me more than anything in this book is Micha’s slow, steady assimilation of reality and her slow, steady release of the fantasy. What’s more, her revelation that God was finding her through the slow beats of her day-to-day just as much as she was trying to find her way back to prayer.
I wonder if Micha and I are both 4s on the Enneagram because I relate so much to her longing and her overwhelm and her tendency to hold up the fantasy against the stark plodding of ever day with young children. I just so relate to that aspect of her story. And it’s been the road I’ve walked these last five years—finding myself all over again, finding God all over again, finding the truth all over again.
Micha’s great triumph in this book is the way she brings us back to what matters, what’s essential, and what is needed in a prayer life. A gentle returning, over and over again. She winds her story around St Benedict and his monks and she shows us how meaning can be found in the smallest moments. She demystifies the essence of prayer and, yet, she opens our eyes to prayer’s great mystery and power, too.
In my own life, when I am most overwhelmed, the simple rhythms become the hardest to hold onto. I want large, sweeping gestures and brand new strategies and grand initiatives. Sometimes those are required, but usually what we need more is for God to help us return to our rhythms. Taking care of ourselves. Taking care of others. Allowing ourselves to be loved. Turning toward Christ. The quiet moment-by-moment conversation of prayer.
If you are someone who finds it easy to lose your way in the haze of life’s daily-ness, and you need a gentle guide to help you hear the rhythm again, recapture the beat, I so recommend Micha’s Found.
She includes this quote from Paula D’Arcy, “God comes to us disguised as our life.” Yes. And, Amen.
