What is prayer?

My wife asked me if I knew any good books about prayer.  As a matter of fact, I do.  But I asked what sort of book on prayer she wanted--what question was she trying to answer.  She had an impressive list of questions.

How come God sometimes changes His mind, like in the story of the good king Hezekiah?  How come sometimes He answers the prayer of one person, and sometimes He only answers after many people pray?  We are instructed to go to the elders for prayer when we are sick, but why do the elders' prayers count more than my own?  Is there a formula for how and when we are supposed to share our prayers?

Well, I'm in the process of building a shared prayer journal website, called Pray with Friends.  It turns out that I have some ideas on answers to these questions.  I think best while writing (and editing the dumb things I write in my first draft.)  So I'm writing my thoughts out here.  I'll also include a few books I liked at the end, for further study.

Pray with Friends status update II

Learning several new languages to the point of productivity is harder than I thought.  I keep backing down my goals and changing my expectations.  I'm still plugging away at it, slowly but surely.  Here's the current plan and status.

I am writing a small "coming soon" page.  This page contains a whole lot of the functional code that the application will be using, like the javascript and CSS layout code and the Ajax and database code.  This lets me conduct a functional test of my code before the whole application is ready.  If I have a bug (like it doesn't work on Macs) then I need to find that out sooner rather than later.

That page will have a pretty complete description of the application, including a short intro video and a sample prayer.  It will also have a small form that people can fill out to sign up for updates about the application.

I will start alerting you good people to check it out and send your prayer-inclined friends over once this page is posted.

Once the page is posted I will get back to work on the core application itself.  I have the framework.  I have many of the foundational functional pieces done.  And I am learning a lot about the rest of it by pushing this "coming soon" page through to completion.  There is still a lot left to do, but I have just about cleaned out all of the unknown-unknowns and gotten all of the work onto my known work list.  That is actually huge progress.

Right now it looks like the application is going to launch as a stand-alone web page.  You sign up there.  You get a prayer journal.  You invite friends.  When they sign up you get notified.  You can choose a friend (or friends) to share each prayer request with.  And after you pray you get a page with advice and suggestions for ministering to those friends that you prayed for.

I will also have a questionnaire or discussion board of some sort within the application where I can post questions about new features and ask questions.  Once I get some people in the site I will start working on new features based upon their feedback.

Version one will have a 'donate' button.  Version two or three will probably get links to buy flowers for your friends, or buy gifts for them.  That is my revenue stream--reseller/affiliate commissions on whatever people buy through the site.  It won't be much, but it should be something.

The more I look at Facebook the more I lean towards just making the application "connected to Facebook" instead of embedded within Facebook.  Facebook is opening their kimono more and letting people link in to their database more directly.  And doing that avoids the hassle of having to re-write the majority of my application in order to get it to fit within the Facebook page-frame (even though I have architected it to allow for that.)  We'll see.  Facebook is bound to change before I get ready to make that decision.....

I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas.