Philip Yancey is known for asking hard questions about the Christian life. Bestselling classics like Disappointment with God, The Jesus I Never Knew, and What's So Amazing About Grace? have made him one of the contemporary church's most compelling voices. In his new book, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? (Zondervan), Yancey once again explores a profound subject from the perspective of a curious and candid observer. Today's Christian recently chatted with the author about Prayer and his journey as a writer.

Where do you get off writing a book on prayer? Hasn't everything to be said on the topic already been done?

I'm one of these guys who has a hard time praying more than seven minutes a day, and I've talked to many people who have similar experiences with prayer. So I started to wonder about the importance of prayer in the Christian life. Why do we pray? How long should we pray? Should we always sense the presence of God when we pray? These are things I wanted to know, and as a full-time writer I have the ability to go where my readers can't. They have jobs. They can't think deeply about prayer all day. They can't read 200 books and interview dozens of people. But that's my job—I like to explore things that I don't know the answer to, because I've got this privilege as a journalist of spending a year and a half trying to figure it out.

So what was your game plan for tackling such a massive topic?

I bought or checked out hundreds of books on prayer. The great books on prayer were old ones by people like Amy Simpson, Martin Luther, George Mueller, and Charles Simeon. And they all talked about prayer as the essential human act, that there is nothing more fulfilling we could do. If you're busy don't pray three hours that day, they'd write, pray four hours. Then I started interviewing people on prayer. My wife, Janet, and I would take people out to lunch and I'd ask them about their prayer lives. It was interesting to see the differences between what the books were saying and what people were saying about their real-life experiences, and that's when I knew I wanted to write a book that goes right down the middle and asks, "If prayer is supposed to be this, how come it's really like this for most people?"

You're known for asking questions about God and faith that many of us are afraid to ask. How did you develop that intrepid curiosity?

Let me explain it this way. I recently read Eugene Peterson's book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, in which he tells the story of growing up in a Pentecostal church. There was an old woman in the congregation named Sister Lychen who would have a word of prophecy every Sunday. She'd stand up and say, "The Lord has revealed to me that I will be caught up in the clouds of glory." She would stand up every week and say this. Eugene's parents would make him take her cookies, and when he'd get to her house, all the blinds were down, and all the shutters were closed. It was a house of gloom. She was always waiting to die. For Eugene, that represented the brand of Christianity where the whole purpose was to just get through this life so that life could really start in heaven. Later on, Eugene said he had this fantasy of bursting into Sister Lychen's house and opening all the blinds and saying, "Sister Lychen, look! There's a whole world outside! There's a world of turtles and hummingbirds and hawks and grizzly bears." When I read that, I thought, That is my life. I grew up in a cloistered, narrow church with the blinds down.