My second individual prayer partner was fellow Wycliffe student Paul Zaphiriou, whom I had first met in the Alpha Course at Holy Trinity, Brompton, in 1997. Then he was a successful businessman. Now he is an ordained Church of England clergyman at St George the Martyr in Holborn, London. He opened my eyes to his earlier spiritual heritage in the Orthodox Church, and it is his influence that has led me to some of the Eastern prayers in this book. Paul and I have traveled far together. Among our many bonds was the fact that having arrived at Wycliffe as rather lonely and divorced middle-aged men, both of us found love and are now happily married.

For me, marriage was a huge leap of prayer and faith as well as of love. The sad divorce from my first wife, Lolicia, in 1998 (entirely my fault) had left me bruised. I resolved to stay celibate. For over five years, with one brief lapse, this resolution prevailed. Then by a series of coincidences Elizabeth Harris, with whom I had been romantically involved twenty-five years earlier, reentered my life.

After a number of chaste dinners and theater outings together we knew we were falling in love.

When I started to tell my Christian friends that I was thinking of getting married again to Elizabeth, their reactions were mixed. It did not help matters when the paparazzi began taking an interest in us. Gossip column coverage with colorful references to Elizabeth’s former film-star husbands Rex Harrison and Richard Harris produced pained letters from Christian well-wishers, some of which read more like the correspondence of ill-wishers. Elizabeth became unsettled, particularly after a visit to a big evangelical church in North Oxford, St Andrew’s Linton Road, where my talk was followed by some sanctimonious questions about our relationship.

Such hostility was upsetting, but it was more than balanced by the tender loving care of my closest prayer partners. Their main concern seemed to be: Would Elizabeth be a supportive companion on my spiritual journey? Would we be partners in prayer as well as in marriage?

Although I felt sure the answer was yes, I committed the questions to prayer, not least with Elizabeth herself. We became regular churchgoers at St Matthew’s, Westminster, whose sensitive and sympathetic vicar, Father Philip Chester, was a tower of support to us. He married us in St Matthew’s in June 2003. Elizabeth’s faith is more private but just as committed as my own. We now pray together every night of our lives. As the dedication to this book says, she is my nearest, dearest, and closest prayer partner. I thank God daily for her.

One development in my prayer life for which Elizabeth is responsible is that I now enlarge the ACTS structure into the longer acronym, ACTORS. The additional letters, OR, stand for “Our Relationship,” which means our relationship with God. I have learned on my journey that whatever life’s pressures may be, a committed relationship with God in prayer is the answer to all of them. As this relationship is constantly developing, it seems appropriate to have a separate category of prayer under this heading, hence the section Prayers for Our Relationship with God in this book.