John H. Doe (and yes, that is his real name) found Jesus — or rather, Jesus found him — while he was working on a farm in South Korea, a couple hours drive outside of Seoul. He prayed for, really, the first time in his life, on a path leading into a forest outside the farm’s main building. The discovery of said savior he immediately denied, denied that anything had happened to him that fateful night, but try as he might to go on living the life of an atheist, that prayer (and its consequences) followed him, slowly making him a believer. Slowly. It was several years, in fact, before he first voluntarily attended church services on his own. But it did happen, sure as night turns to dawn.

Of the sins he commits (and he knows he will always commit sins), the Lord saw fit to reform him of some of his most serious ones — but they were nowhere near instantaneous processes for any of them, with relapses aplenty into his old, bad ways of living and behaving. The one good thing about him, he might say, is something that never was his doing: he never lost hope. Of that, he is sure that someone up there kept that lone candle lit through the darkest of nights and the starkest of winds.

The author has written The Sinner’s Prayer Book as a book he wished someone else had written that he himself could have read and used. He knows of nothing like it in existence. The hope he never lost — if that comes through at all in the words he has written, if someone who reads the book and can feel it to some small degree, to him that would be the success of the highest caliber.

John H. Doe currently lives and prays in the San Francisco Bay Area. Further writings of his (religious and otherwise) may be found at his online journal, palad1n.

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