Sikeston native Jami Geske writes daily prayer book

Praying can be a mystery for even the most faithful.

"I've heard so many people say, 'I really don't know how to pray,'" said Jami Geske, author of "Coming Home to You," a daily prayer book.

Not that Geske considers herself an expert on the subject. However, good is sometimes borne out of pain, and after certain painful events in her own life, she felt led to write the book.

After one of her grandchildren was born and tested positive for meth, Geske and her husband, Mike, became custodial guardians when both parents admitted to being addicts. Geske knew her son had been struggling since his previous marriage had ended in divorce. All she could do was pray.

"I used to walk 3 miles every day," Geske said. "I prayed a lot for him. For his eyes to be opened, and to have a spiritual healing. God works in his time and not my time. It wasn't an instant answer to prayer, but when this happened with this baby, he started coming back to church."

A few Sundays later, a Teen Challenge bus was in the church parking lot. Jami's son turned to her and said, "Mom, those fellas are here for me today." He stayed and talked with them for a while after church. They laid their hands on him and prayed for him for three hours.

"They literally changed his life," Geske said. "That really changed things for me."

Geske grew up a Christian but had never experienced such a personal link to an answered prayer. Not long after that, the 2016 presidential election was ramping up. Seeing how ugly people were being on the news and in social media, Geske said she felt called to write a daily prayer on her Facebook page for the month of October leading up to the election, calling for unity and caring for others.

People responded, saying how much they loved her prayers and asked whether they could share them with their friends and church groups.

"Absolutely," Geske said. "Because they're not my prayers, they're His prayers."

After the election, Geske felt that posting those prayers was God preparing her for something else. That something turned out to be writing a book of daily prayers.

Even though she'd never written much before, Geske felt it wouldn't really be her doing the writing.

"It was truly a miraculous thing," Geske said. "There was one evening, when God gave me six weeks of prayers in one night. They just poured onto the page."

In the evenings, after the grandchildren had gone home, after dinner, and while her husband took care of washing the dishes, Geske settled behind her computer in their living room and wrote until it was time for bed.

"Every day I would just pray, 'What do you want me to write about today?'" Geske said. "I waited for guidance from him."

Three and a half months later the book was finished.

Through an acquaintance, Geske received advice on how to get her book published and has since been sharing her story and "Coming Home to You" with local prayer groups.

"There have been several miracles in the writing of this book," Geske said. "Since it's come out, several people have contacted me to say, 'I want to thank you so much. Your prayer for today just fit so much with what I'm going through in my life.' I tell them, 'I want you to know, God gave me those prayers over a year ago. He knew in advance what you were going to be going though at this point in your life.' I also say, this is not my book. He allowed me to put my name on it. They were all gifts from him."

Though the prayers came from God, Geske did have a vision for the shape of the book. For one thing, she wanted to make sure "Coming Home to You" wasn't a "woman's" book.

"It's pretty gender free," she said. "If I use a personal experience, I refer to my 'spouse' or my 'helper.' So, it was not male and female, so that anyone would feel comfortable reading it."

Geske wrote the prayers in order from the first day of the year to the last -- she was mindful of the time of year each prayer would fall.

"The new year focused on new beginnings," Geske said. "February, of course is love, and December is about the birth of Christ because it's Christmas month."

The book also contains difficult prayers.

"When I say difficult, I'm thinking of one specifically. God calls us to pray for our enemies, and that's always the hardest thing. I've struggled with that myself, in that, I don't like to think that I have enemies," Geske said.

One of the biggest reasons people have given Geske for a lack of a consistent prayer life is not being able to find the time.

"All of our lives are busy, and they're busier all the time," Geske said. "It's just so important for us to find that time of day. I think God listens to all our prayers, whether were driving the car, and we see a wreck up ahead and we drop that snippet prayer for the people in that accident. For myself, lots of times when I'm cooking in the kitchen, that's my only time that it's me and God. We'll have a little short conversation about what happened that day either to myself or somebody that I care about."

Geske said she doesn't have any other writing projects in mind right now.

"The prayer book was nothing that I had planned, either. Writing was never an aspiration in my life, and here I am fixing to turn 69 so it's kind of exciting and humbling to start a new journey at this point in my life."

Though it was pain and division that started Geske on this journey, there has also been so much good along the way. Her grandchild is now healthy, and her son has begun his own journey back to God. Then, of course, there is "Coming Home to You." Geske hopes the book will help people build a prayer life and that they are blessed like she was while writing the book.

"Sometimes our lives get so bad, we don't know a starting place. And this book is a good starting place. I find myself using the book even though I wrote it, because it was such a gift, and I want to utilize that gift and not take it for granted."