A Book I Highly Recommend-the Sacred echo by Margaret Feinberg

the Sacred echo
by: Margaret Feinberg

Reviewed by: Michelle R. Burroughs

Do you hear your own voice bouncing back to you within the mysterious void called prayer? A transparent and vulnerable dialogue, the Sacred echo (Zondervan, 2008), combats frustrating feelings many of us have when it comes to prayer. Author Margaret Feinberg instills trust by openly sharing her responses from a very personal, custom-loving God. His voice, seemingly refracted in the hidden, continues to reverberate in the every day.

You’re invited to spend some time with Margaret and her Heavenly Father. Here, you can share her comfort. “If God wore a polo shirt, then I felt like I was resting in his front pocket, dark but safe” (171). Seriously, why do we treat prayer as “…so mysterious” (20); it is meant to be intimate and deeply personal? Feinberg describes prayer as conversation, sacred echoes weaving us into closer relationship with a God who does not change. For “...writers of Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Job also took their toughest questions, their heaviest weights, to God. They asked the most jarring of questions, probed the darkest issues, and confessed their hearts and betrayals without ready apology” (150). Are we not invited to approach God in the same manner?

Feinberg reminds us that when we seek him, he will surely answer, and readily keep our conversations interesting. The sacred echo is this, “… those moments when God speaks the same message to my heart again and again,” by “the same scripturally sound idea or phrase or word” that “reappear(s) until I can no longer avoid its presence” (24). For “when we allow the words of God to come alive in our hearts they unleash an unmistakable transforming power in our attitude and actions” (50).

Thankfully, our transforming God “…answers us right where we are, in a language we’ll understand” (68). We serve a God who calls us daughters and sons, friends, and he lovingly approaches each of us “in ways we can understand” (92). To us it may be a song; it may be a Word or theme, even a phrase skipping in the soundtracks of our lives. It may feel like we’re called to play an old, familiar tune, one we need to hear again, but this time we need to listen! Feinberg advocates that kind of prayer.

Therefore, “(i)f prayer was a safe place… (for men and women of the Bible)…to get brutishly honest with God, then shouldn’t it still be safe for us today?” (150). Faithfully, God personalizes our sacred echoes and “…speaks life and we hope into the darkest of situations and the most discouraged of souls” (175).

As partners, as family, as God’s friends, we need to invite Him into the conversations of our lives (177) without “fill(ing) in the blanks” ourselves!!!(178). Feinberg urges us to “cling to these sacred echoes” (163), for God is pursuing us; are we in a posture to listen? So, please, let him lead, guide, and reveal himself, and share your echoes that we may commune with God and each other, growing as His children, in relationship (190).

Nourishing food for readers and especially listeners, isn’t it?


"Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests"
(Ephesians 6:18, NIV).