People ask me this question more than any other: why would a guy who writes techno-thrillers about cyberattacks and compromised aviation systems suddenly start writing devotionals about prayer?
It is a fair question. On the surface, the two worlds could not look more different. One involves encrypted communications, zero-day exploits, and a protagonist racing against a fifteen-minute clock to prevent catastrophic loss of life. The other involves silence, waiting, and the deeply personal act of speaking to God when you are not sure He is listening. One demands relentless pacing. The other demands stillness.
But the truth is, these two worlds are not as far apart as they seem. And if you will let me, I want to explain why.
The Path Nobody Predicts
I did not wake up one morning and decide to pivot from thrillers to devotionals. That is not how it happened. What happened was slower, quieter, and far more honest than a career pivot.
I was in the middle of writing the second book in The CRITICOM Files series — Radar Shadow, the one about surveillance networks — when I realized something that stopped me cold. The themes I kept circling back to in my fiction were not really about technology at all. They were about trust. About what happens when the systems you depend on fail you. About the human being who has to make an impossible decision when every safety net has been stripped away.
And I realized I had been living that exact story in my own life, not in a control tower or a cybersecurity operations center, but in prayer.
I had been praying the same prayer for years. Not casually. Not as a morning routine I could check off a list. I mean the kind of prayer that wakes you up at three in the morning, the kind that sits in your chest like a stone, the kind you have repeated so many times that the words have worn smooth like river rocks. And for a long time, the answer was silence.
That silence — the sacred space between asking and receiving — became the most important landscape I had ever encountered as a writer. More important than any server room or radar facility I had ever described in fiction. Because this was real. This was mine. And I knew, with the same certainty I bring to my technical research, that I was not the only person living in that space.
What The Sacred Between Collection Is
The Sacred Between is a five-book devotional collection. Each book addresses a different dimension of the life of faith — not the polished, Instagram-ready version, but the real one. The one where you doubt. The one where you wrestle. The one where you keep showing up even when you cannot feel anything.
I named the collection The Sacred Between because that is where most of us actually live. We live between the prayer and the answer. Between the promise and the fulfillment. Between the diagnosis and the healing. Between the loss and whatever comes after it. That in-between space is not a waiting room. It is holy ground. And I wanted to write books that treat it that way.
The five books in the collection are:
- The Long Amen — Prayer and the silence between asking and receiving
- The Honest Hour — Worship when your heart is not in it
- The Narrow Rest — Sabbath and the discipline of stopping
- The Steady Hand — Faithfulness in seasons of invisibility
- The Final Word — Trust when the story does not end the way you prayed
Each book stands alone. You do not need to read them in order. But together, they map the full terrain of what it means to hold on to faith when faith feels like the hardest thing you have ever done.
The Long Amen — What It Is and Who It Is For
The Long Amen is the first book in the collection, and it is the one closest to my own experience. It is a forty-entry devotional organized into four movements: The Asking, The Silence, The Wrestling, and The Amen.
Each movement corresponds to a phase of the prayer journey that most devotional books skip over. Most prayer books will tell you how to pray. They will give you frameworks, acronyms, and bullet points. Some of them are genuinely helpful. But very few of them will sit with you in the part where nothing is happening. The part where you have done everything right — you have prayed, you have believed, you have waited — and the answer still has not come.
That is where The Long Amen lives.
The Asking is about the courage it takes to put your deepest need into words. The Silence is about what happens to your faith when heaven seems closed. The Wrestling is about the moment when continuing to pray becomes an act of defiance against despair. And The Amen is about the resolution — which does not always look like the answer you asked for, but which always, always looks like faithfulness.
This book is for the person who has been praying the same prayer for years. It is for the parent who has been praying for a child who has walked away. It is for the person sitting in a hospital waiting room who has run out of words. It is for the believer who loves God deeply but is exhausted by the wait. It is for anyone who needs permission to be honest with God about how hard this is.
I wrote The Long Amen because I needed it. I needed a devotional that did not rush past the hard parts. I needed one that said, plainly and without flinching, that sometimes the silence lasts longer than you think you can bear — and that the silence does not mean God has forgotten you.
Writing About Faith Honestly
Here is what I have learned about writing devotionals: the temptation to perform is enormous. There is a version of this work where every entry ends with a neat resolution, where every struggle is wrapped in a bow, where the writer always sounds like they have it figured out. That version sells well. It is comfortable. And it is, in my view, dishonest.
I did not want to write that book.
I wanted to write a devotional that sounds like the conversations I actually have with God — the ones where I am not performing for an audience, where I am not trying to sound spiritual, where I am just a man sitting in the quiet with a question that will not let me go. The conversations where I say things like, “I do not understand why this is taking so long.” The conversations where the only prayer I can manage is, “I am still here.”
That kind of honesty requires the same discipline as writing a technically accurate thriller. You cannot fake it. Readers know. They can feel the difference between a writer who has lived the material and a writer who is assembling it from research. In my thrillers, I bring twenty years of experience in air traffic control and cybersecurity. In my devotionals, I bring twenty years of praying prayers that have not yet been answered.
Both require the same thing: telling the truth about what you know, even when the truth is uncomfortable.
Why Prayer Books Deserve Craftsmanship
One of the things that bothered me about many devotional books I have read over the years is the assumption that the writing does not need to be excellent. That because the content is spiritual, the craft can be secondary. That because readers are coming for encouragement, the sentences do not need to be precise, the structure does not need to be intentional, the language does not need to be beautiful.
I reject that assumption completely.
If anything, a book about prayer deserves more craftsmanship, not less. Because prayer is one of the most intimate acts a human being can perform. It is the moment when a person stands before the infinite and speaks. That moment deserves writing that honors its weight. It deserves sentences that have been revised and refined until they carry exactly the right meaning. It deserves a structure that mirrors the journey it describes — not a random collection of thoughts stapled together with Bible verses.
I brought the same editorial standards to The Long Amen that I bring to every CRITICOM Files novel. Every entry was drafted, revised, read aloud, revised again, and tested against a single question: does this sound true? Not true in the abstract, theological sense — true in the three-in-the-morning, sitting-on-the-edge-of-the-bed sense. True in the way that matters when you are the person doing the praying.
That is the Caliana Press standard. It does not matter whether the book is a thriller or a devotional. The craftsmanship is the same. The honesty is the same. The commitment to the reader is the same.
Two Worlds, One Writer
I will keep writing thrillers. Radar Shadow is coming, and the rest of The CRITICOM Files after that. Daniel Ochieng’s story is far from over, and the threats facing our critical infrastructure are only growing more sophisticated.
But I will also keep writing devotionals. Because the person who stays up late reading a techno-thriller about compromised radar systems is often the same person who wakes up early to pray a prayer they have been praying for years. We are not one-dimensional. We carry both the thrill and the faith, the action and the silence, the urgency and the patience.
I write both because I live both. And I suspect many of you do too.
The Long Amen is the first book in The Sacred Between collection. It releases May 19, 2026 in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook formats.
Learn more about The Long Amen →
Keep Reading
- The Long Amen — Book Page — Formats, pricing, and pre-order links for the forty-day devotional.
- The Sacred Between Series — The full five-book devotional collection that maps the terrain of faith.
- Poems — Original poetry from Caliana Press exploring faith, silence, and the spaces between.
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