Think of the moment you last expe­ri­enced God. Do you know him that close­ly in this moment?

Tru­ly expe­ri­enc­ing the love of God gives us a taste of his good­ness and his love for us, but often those moments are fleet­ing. We get dis­tract­ed by life. Our aware­ness and under­stand­ing fade while our long­ing to expe­ri­ence him that way again increases.

In these pages you can begin to fill that long­ing by devel­op­ing your capac­i­ty to receive and respond to God’s love. Spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion is the process through which one’s inner self is opened to the work of the Holy Spir­it, who forms us into the image of the Son. Here Richard Fos­ter and Gayle Beebe, both expe­ri­enced lead­ers in spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion, intro­duce you to peo­ple from the past who have known God deeply. Each per­son helps you to grasp one of the sev­en pri­ma­ry paths to inti­ma­cy with God that have been devel­oped through­out Chris­t­ian his­to­ry. Chap­ters are divid­ed into sec­tions, each seg­ment sur­round­ing a key fig­ure and con­clud­ing with a reflec­tion and prayer.

This rich resource can guide you into the same deep inti­ma­cy with God, open­ing you to the Spir­it’s work of transformation.

2009