![]() The phone service was started in 1994 as a memorial to Dr. Those who request prayer are not asked for money, but the toll-free phone line is publicized only to members of Guideposts' Prayer Power Club, whose donations help finance the phone line and other activities of the Peale Center. ''It's a way for us to get to know our subscribers more and really be connected to their lives,'' said Susan Schefflein, Guideposts' manager of community and public relations, who prays over about 200 letters a week in her spare time. The center, in Dutchess County near the Connecticut border, started offering prayer as a customer service for readers of Guideposts magazine. The nondenominational Peale Center, which also runs a school for ministers and leadership seminars for business executives, is the ministry and fund-raising arm of a $100 million-a-year nonprofit publishing company, Guideposts, also founded by the Peales. ![]() A lot of times when I'm praying, I'll pray peace, peace, peace, because you can deal with anything if you have peace inside.'' ''So when a person calls, worried about something, the prayer is to comfort them so that they know that God is going to take care of them and they don't have to lose their minds over it. King, who leaves the desk where she processes magazine orders and answers the prayer phone for two hours a day. Peale said that prayer doesn't always change your situation but it should always change you,'' said Ms. I have lost my husband with cancer, also a little later my only child, a daughter, with cancer'') and general personal chaos (''Please pray for Alice to receive salvation and be delivered from the forces of darkness including sexual immorality, profanity, depression, nicotine addiction, anxiety and a long-running virus that keeps her feeling tired and ill'').Īlthough the Prayer Partners do not claim to be able to solve these problems, they say that by offering their voices, they give God another channel through which to act and help give people strength to go on. Thwarted careers (''Please pray for Michael and his desire for a career in stock car racing, and for the officials and owners at Spillway Speedway who need guidance, honesty and an equal chance for all racers'') are commonplace, as are stark loneliness (''I am over 85 and a very lonesome woman. These days, the America at the other end of the prayer line is a place of broken bodies and broken relationships, drug-addicted sons and daughters, foreclosed farms and bad report cards. Peale's widow and the center's 90-year-old chairwoman, ''they could go into our warehouse and open those boxes of letters that have been prayed for, and they could find what are the real problems in America.'' ''If anybody wanted to do research on life in the United States,'' said Ruth Stafford Peale, Dr. The Peale Center, which was founded in New York in 1940 and moved to Pawling in 1952, is a veritable prayer factory, where a prayer administrator, a fulfillment manager and 240 on- and off-site Prayer Partners handle 3,000 prayer requests a week. ![]() Peale, the author of ''The Power of Positive Thinking,'' the 1952 inspirational classic that focuses more on individual endeavor than on adherence to scripture, it is hard to imagine a place where the biblical directive to ''pray without ceasing'' is taken more literally. Father, the doctors have tried all that they thought they could, and now they feel they have to open him up and have surgery, and we pray that you would be in the midst of everything that is done, that you would heal his body, completely heal his heart.''Īll through the Norman Vincent Peale Center for Christian Living, prayers and requests for prayer radiate. ![]() ''Heavenly Father, we come to you on behalf of Bob's nephew Fred, who's been going through some serious problems in the area of his heart. When a woman finishes a stack, she walks to the front of the room, places it in a cardboard tray marked ''Prayed For,'' and takes another packet from a pile on the altar.ĭownstairs, in a room the size of a large closet, Jackie King squeezes her eyes shut, leans forward into a speakerphone, and lets the words roll out in a torrent: Each reads through a stack of 25 letters, pausing for a moment after each letter. ![]() Down a carpeted corridor in a sprawling suburban office building, five women sit in red-upholstered pews on a Monday morning. ![]()
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