The daughter and granddaughter of noted artists and sculptors, McBeth remembers sitting on her back porch one day, doodling with an abstract drawing while thinking of family members and friends who were sick.

"I realized I had put someone's name in the middle of it," she said in a recent interview. Then she found that, as she worked on others, she would place in her drawings the names of people for whom she offered prayers.

"I would sit with them, offer them to God, hold them with love," she said. "I would sit with them for 10 or 15 minutes, without words."

McBeth said she hadn't planned to write a book on her experience until she talked with the popular religion writer Phyllis Tickle.

"I moved to Memphis three years ago ... the only person there I knew was Phyllis," she said. "I showed her how I was praying and she said, 'You are going to write about this.' She became the mentor I never had as a child."

McBeth described her book as a little bit memoir and a little "theology lite," mixed with her own experience. She said she found it easy to create.

"Once Phyllis gave me permission to write, I just loved it. I felt I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. There was an ease and a joy about the writing," said McBeth, who taught math for 17 years at a community college.

In her book, the author describes her practice as an active, meditative and playful prayer exercise. "The process involves a re-entry into the childlike world of coloring and improvising. The product is a colorful design or drawing that is a visual reminder of the time spent in prayer."

For readers who may feel intimidated, she claims the practice requires no skill. "I cannot draw a cat. Or a dog. Or anything else for that matter. My artist mother and grandmother could only sigh and wonder what had gone awry in the tossing of the generic salad."

In spite of her so-called artistic deficiencies, McBeth says she has always loved color. "The stadium-seating of the 48 crayons on the Crayola box, the sweet smell of paper and wax and the feel of the thin cylinders rolling around in my hand were early experience of worship," she states in the book.

"A little altar was set before me with all those colors waiting to evangelize the world."
God, she says, had taken one of her passions (color) and combined it with one of her inadequacies (drawing), then added it to her improvisational personality and given her a new way to pray.

She said she hopes Praying in Color will open a new pathway for its readers. "A lot of us are visual. We hold information in our heads as pictures. Because I have done it with my hands, my mind remembers it.

"When I pray for people, I will surround them with color, and I hope I'm surrounding them with love. It's a 3-D version of praying in color."