It's about cultivating a relationship. It's about respite in God.

Filled with personal stories, stories of the Bible, and stories from her contemporaries, The Sacred Echo talks about our growing sensitivity to God and how He's working through repetition in prayer--both our repetition and His. It's about the balance of talking and listening in prayer. Feinberg ties the question of waiting for answers to prayer to the bigger picture of prayer. "God is waiting," she says. "Creation is waiting. Humankind is waiting" (p. 59). Then she turns the question around. It's not just about us asking God, "How long?" It's about God asking us, "How long?"

Feinberg also addresses issues such as learning to read and reread Scripture with a sensitivity to how God uses it in our lives and God's calling to follow Him.

I found this book to be refreshing, beautiful, and challenging. I found my unbelief sneaking out at crazy stories--and conviction quickly following. For example, Feinberg tells one story when she and a friend prayed for a woman with a lump in her neck. They laid hands on her, not to conjure magic but as a gesture of physical presence. After the prayer, the lump was gone. What do we do with stories like that? Feinberg herself struggled with that. We may not understand, but we go to God, and we bring others to God. Sometimes God does miraculous things. Sometimes we can't see the miraculous. Always, we trust.

As Feinberg explores these themes, she expounds upon Scripture in a manner that is both well-researched and personal. She draws upon her Jewish heritage to understand Old Testament Scriptures. For Feinberg, Scripture is our authority in understanding God's sacred echoes and full of love letters beseeching us to see the heart of God.

The one thing I found wanting in this book was the presence of the Body of Christ--of community--in God's sacred echoes. Feinberg brought up the idea of serving others, but in her emphasis of a personal communion with God, she left out a communal communion. What about the sacred echoes heard in prayers of the people, in joining together and praying as one body? Because of this, at times the book felt almost individualistic.

Also, in some spots, the themes jumped. The titles were more suggestions or general guidelines. On the other hand, these jumping themes occurred because one thought, in an almost stream of consciousness manner, related to a thread in a previous chapter. While I sometimes wondered how a theme related to the previous one in that same chapter, it created a larger fluidity throughout the book as a whole.

Despite these minor weaknesses, this book will become one of the books I will regularly recommend to new believers and ancient believers alike as we seek to know and relate with God. An appendix laden with questions for each chapter makes this a great book for small groups and discipleship relationships.

Review by Heather A. Goodman