I Say an Affirmative Prayer (for Writing)

Creating a personal affirmative prayer.

Bill Holmes
3 min readNov 2, 2023
Photo by West Kenya Union Conference Adventist Media on Unsplash

Have you ever heard of an affirmative prayer?

According to Wikipedia, an “affirmative prayer is a form of prayer or a metaphysical technique that is focused on a positive outcome rather than a negative situation.”

I never heard of this expression until I began reading Julia Cameron’s Walking in This World after coming across this term during my weekly chapter reading of this writing resource. The author notes that an affirmative prayer “works by singling out each negative situation and ‘claiming’ divine attention and intervention upon our behalf” (Cameron, 2002).

There have been times in the past when I’ve written letters to God asking for things that I need or requesting a solution to a challenging situation I was experiencing. Back in October 1999, I remember writing a post-it note to God in a bathroom stall at my job asking Him to give me a sign that I was meant to be a writer after experiencing doubt about writing and feeling stagnant running around to open mic poetry events in Philadelphia, PA, Trenton, NJ, and New York City. Later that evening, I received confirmation when my friend Angela Kinamore who was the then Poetry Editor at ESSENCE called me to let me know that two poems I wrote and submitted to her a month ago would…

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Bill Holmes

Writer. Poet. ESSENCE Best Selling Author. Filmmaker. Personal development aficiando who lives and breathes the mantra "I will not be denied!"