You Don't Have to Carry This Weight Alone.

For Fifteen Years, a Cup of Coffee Told Me What to Do. Then the Holy Spirit Set Me Free.

I need to tell you something a little embarrassing.

For more than fifteen years, I could not write a single page without coffee. I called it a professional tool, a little help for clarity. Everyone has something, right? And a quiet voice kept me comfortable: You need this. God understands.

I loved Jesus. I read my Bible. I prayed. And yet the first chair of every morning belonged to a cup.

I did not see how deeply it held me until the Sabbath. My mother and I keep the Sabbath together: no food, no drink, no nap, only prayer and the Bible. That was the day I discovered I was afraid. Not hungry. Afraid. Afraid of the afternoon, afraid of a single day without it. And when you are afraid of a day without something, you are not simply using it. It is using you.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I brought it to God. Sabbath after Sabbath, I kept coming back, to the fast, to the Word, to prayer. Not to earn anything. Not to force God's hand. Only to draw near, and to stop pretending that the chain was small.

On September 27, 2026, the Holy Spirit gave me victory.

I did not become stronger. He did what I could not do. I am writing these words without coffee or caffeine in any form.

This book is not about coffee. Coffee was only the chain I could see. Yours might be fear, or shame, or bitterness, or a person you cannot let go of, or a prayer that never seems to be answered. But the Jesus who set me free is the same Jesus who is waiting for you.

I did not learn the great art of prayer by being clever. I was raised in a Buddhist home, surrounded by images and horoscopes. I am a Christian today because my mother prayed for me for about twelve years and never stopped, even when it looked like nothing was changing. I know what persistent prayer can do, because I am the answer to one.

I have not mastered it. I am still learning. But I finally know where powerful prayer begins, and I wrote this book so that you do not have to spend fifteen years finding out.

Meet Diep Pham

Diep Pham is a Vietnamese Christian author and digital publisher based in Saigon. She was born and raised in Hai Phong, a working-class port city in northern Vietnam, in a Buddhist family, the daughter of a hardworking father and a mother who came to faith in Christ and prayed for her for years, including more than a decade working far from home in Hong Kong, before returning to Vietnam in 2025.

Diep failed the Vietnamese university entrance exam four times. She watched small businesses fail, and in 2014 a financial collapse forced her to leave Hanoi for Saigon. She spent nearly a decade working online, mostly alone. Along that long road she found the one thing no business, strategy, or book could give her: the nearness of God.

Today she is the author of faith-based books including Jesus, Called to Salvation and a devotional series, and she runs DiepPham.Org, where she has published more than sixty digital works with one mission: to carry the Gospel to readers around the world from an Asian perspective.

She gives a tenth of her income to Phuoc Kien Church, where she worships with her mother, and she keeps the Sabbath with her in prayer and fasting. When she is not writing, she walks the streets of Saigon, the city that became home after the long journey from Hai Phong.