Record Live Podcast

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  📍 Welcome. to Record live Thanks for joining us. we appreciate you being here. How are you? Zanita.

I'm good. Whale season has just started on the Gold Coast, which is exciting. Uh, I look every time the season is gone, but there's also dugongs around, which is cool.

Wow. Every time we, every time we speak, I think. Man, I should move to the Gold Coast. Zanita's having a, excuse the pun. She's having a whale of a time.

It's actually freezing. I feel like I need to move away.

It's, yeah, but you watching whales, it's awesome. That's cool.

. How are you?

What's, what's going on in your life?

Very good. Um, yes. Well, I've got two children who are not sleeping really well at the moment, so. Yeah, burning the candle at both hours and it's not doing much for my cognitive abilities. My brain's ticking very slowly at the moment, but we'll, we'll pray. We'll hold on by the seat of our pants and we'll, we'll make today a good conversation.

I don't know what advice to give you.

Hopefully we can ship the kids off to their grandparents and get a nap.

Speaking of which, Zanita, speaking of prayer and my need for it at the moment, you wrote something. Now it's not out yet. I think it comes out, uh, in about a week's time in record. And we're also putting it in Signs Magazine. It's some really good reflections on prayer. And I think prayer for all Christians is a really kind of key spiritual discipline.

It's an important topic. , you've got some reflections, but I, I like this article. I, read it through and I liked it because it wasn't just sort of, here's some ideas how to pray, or here's some. Scenarios of prayer that happened in the Bible. Tell us a little bit about your premise for your article and what you were exploring.

Sometimes as a writer, people ask me how I come up with ideas. A lot of the time it's just usually what I'm like thinking about or grappling with or something like that. And I kind of feel like I don't have another choice. It's like, uh, maybe that's a God thing, I don't know. And so I think this was one of those articles where I think for me, prayer has been a struggle.

It's just been not always, like I mentioned in the article that I've had seasons where it's been a joy and a delight and, I've loved to carve time out of my day to pray essentially. , but I've found over the last few years that it's been the opposite. That it's actually been a real difficult thing to kind of. Force myself to do cuz I think it just brings up stuff and sometimes you go through seasons where you don't get answers to prayer or where prayer is confusing or where you have disappointments in prayer. And so, when you get the whole just pray about it or are you praying about it, it's like, well, do you know how hard that is?

Like, like have you, have you been here? Or, and yeah, I think it was actually like, I'm relieved to hear that you enjoyed it because I think as . Someone who works for the Adventist church, there's, I, I at least have this expectation on myself that I have to have like a certain amount of faith to be writing, for the Adventist Church, I suppose.

And I guess this kind of exposes my, struggles with certain things. Like prayer is a pretty core, , element of your faith. And I think when you're struggling with something like that, it's, I don't know, sometimes it can feel like, oh, what, what kind of like, Christian, am I? Yeah. If I'm really not enjoying or really struggling through prayer or not trusting God in all that.

So that's kind of where it came from.

I think that's a really good place to start Zanita, because I think many of us, , probably have that experience but may think that we're alone, right? Because the way church is set up, it's like people are praying, , In often a different context than they are at home.

So they're in a public forum, they're saying the right things and they're, they're having to show up and it's, in some senses it's a performative prayer and there's a place for those kinds of prayers. But many of us, , and the reason I enjoyed the article was because I also have seasons where I find it really hard to pray or.

It's not that hard to pray because that's all I can do, but it doesn't necessarily feel like my prayers are going beyond the ceiling. Um mm-hmm. Not to say that God doesn't exist or there's a, a doubt or a lack of belief in God, but just is he really listening? Is he able to. Help me. Is he able to care?

And I think the logical answer, as Christians, we've been taught, and as kids we get taught like God does care. He hears every prayer, all of these things. So in one part of our brain, we've got that response that jumps out. But then in the other side of our brain, it's saying, but how do we know that's really true?

Like it doesn't feel. Real to me right now. And I think that's why I resonated with this. And I think a lot of people resonate with this. Cause I don't think it's our job as Christians to put on a show or to pretend that we've got it all together. When faith is a struggle, it can be a struggle. And you mentioned it's been a couple of years, like there's different seasons in our life.

, I was just saying how I've got two young kids and feeling a bit sleep deprived. Prayer is a very different thing for me at the moment. So my prayer consists mostly of praying with my daughter, like modeling to her, you know, making sure that we are praying regularly so that God is seen as. Oh, that's a normal part of life.

Now she's only three. But I want her to know from the start of her life, like, Hey, God, God's around. God's there. But in terms of getting up early to carve out time, I think was the phrase you used or, or whatever. I'm just exhausted most of the time. And if I tried to pray, get into bed, have a, have a thought of prayer, I will probably fall asleep.

Like, um, So I guess, yeah, we, we do go through in life different seasons, but what do we do with that, I guess is where we can go. And I think this conversation, we don't have the answers necessarily. We are gonna wrestle with this, and if you've got some comments or some questions about your own wrestles with prayer or things you find helpful, feel free to drop those in the comments.

But, you know, I think it's a fairly universal experience.

I think when you are talking about like, it's kind of easy to get on stage and say a prayer and it's easy to say your prayers over your meals and so on. Um, it's easy to continue to pray about certain things because it becomes like a habit and you kind of know what to say.

I think when it comes down to that small percentage or maybe it's a big percentage of your life that isn't going well or that you've Been struggling with or you don't have answers to, or you've got I don't know, maybe you are sick or you've been sick for a long time, or maybe there's relationship stuff going on.

Like whatever it is. When it comes to those things, it's harder to be real about them with God. Whereas , I can keep praying over my meal and that's not too difficult for me. But then I guess when you deal with the other things and you start asking mm, does God . Actually listen? Does he actually Care about this, that's when it gets more difficult.

There's a couple of things that that raises for me. We differentiate between different types of prayer. Mm-hmm. And I think we put different value on some of those prayers , I don't think it's a debatable question. I think we definitely do. So why, why do you think we have different levels almost of prayer or different weight or different emphasis on certain types of prayer as opposed to others that makes some types easy and sometimes really, really hard.

I think a part of it is like habit. It's almost like when you are talking about a friend, about like, What have you been up to? It's really easy to answer that. Just be like, oh, I've been working. I've been doing this. But when they're like, how's your heart? What's going on? Like, what's really going on?

Then it's hard. Like it's harder to answer because it's more emotional and you're like struggling with something. And so I think it's kind of the same with prayer. Like it's easy to pray about my meal or thank God for little things I suppose. But then when you go to like the nitty gritty stuff that's actually causing you grief or worry in life, that's when it's hard because I think.

Like, that's when emotions come up. It's like difficult to talk about or it's like you have to face your doubts or you have to face your questions or you have to actually ask the question , does God even care? Is he even listening? I dunno. But that would be my stance on, I don't know. What do you think?

I mean, you've reflected on suffering in your piece, so I guess that's the element that you are now sort of describing when there's. Hardship, suffering difficulty in human life, I find that reminds me to pray because often I'm at the end of myself and I've got nothing left, and I just don't even know how to deal with a certain situation.

I'm just like, help me God. Like mm-hmm. And, I'm much more willing to set aside like time instead of listening to a podcast or listening to the radio on my commute. I'm like, God, help me deal with this problem. Like, how do I. How do I do it? So for me it's not so much that it's hard to pray, it's that that prayer doesn't necessarily feel productive or, it doesn't necessarily feel like you're getting an answer.

You know, when you feel alive in prayer, sometimes it can feel like a two-way conversation. It's when it feels like that one-way conversation that I think it becomes hard to persevere and to keep praying because it's like, I've been praying about this for the last three days. I've been praying about it for the last three years.

The situation hasn't resolved itself. Yeah. You get tired or you get disillusioned, or I don't know, and you just run outta steam. And I think that's part of the difficulty or the challenge. I'm very encouraged by, the psalms in this place because like we see in the poetry in the Bible, the Psalms of David and, other writers in Psalms, that it's not all happy.

Thankful Thanksgiving. You know, what we would consider, a strong or a good prayer life. It's, there's wrestle in there. There's struggle. Yeah. I'm encouraged by that. I think.

Yeah, me too. I think it's a very honest approach to prayer, which I think is like, What God wants. Like he doesn't just want our fake thank you for this and this and this, when we're actually inside.

Like, but I, I'm so mad at you. Like, I don't understand. Like, yeah. And so I think that's the cool thing about the Psalms. It's something that I've also found helpful. And I don't know, I guess try to like replicate, like just trying to be honest with God, , as much as I can instead of trying to polish this prayer.

That sounds really nice, but maybe doesn't mean anything.

I also think We, we subsection our lives, we, we put different things in different boxes. Maybe it's just a coping mechanism. Maybe it's just sort of Greco Roman sort of philosophy of how, things happen. And, so prayer becomes a subsection of our church or our beliefs or our set.

And then we feel bad because we see verses like pray without ceasing. And then we're like, yeah, but prayer is such a little sort of part of my life. But in your article, you explore ways of praying without words. Like don't limit prayer to words because words sometimes are hard to come by. Perhaps there are different forms of prayer or different expressions, different ways of praying that we are not, Processing or that we are not used to seeing as prayer.

Can you talk a little bit about that? What does it mean not to limit our prayers to words?

I think ideally God does want you to talk to him, but I think he also understands that there are seasons where that's actually really difficult. Like for example, if you are someone, who has gone through something really traumatic, like talking about it is actually.

Extremely difficult because it's like you're exp especially if you haven't like, gotten help about it, it's like you're experiencing the whole event over and over again. So cases like that, like God gets it. I don't think he is trying to force us to talk to him. I think it's more about quality time and us going to him and spending time with him.

And so that, I think, uh, there are a number of things you can do. Like even in the Psalms, David talks about just being still before the Lord, . And so just taking time to be quiet I guess can be like an act of prayer or something. You can do that. You're still being intentional with your time with God, but you're not having to speak it again.

Or even writing can be like, it's still technically prayer even though it's not vocally coming out of your mouth can be easier or it can be a different way for you to kind of, express things to God. Also going out in nature, but that's kind of like being still again, I suppose.

I don't know. One of the things I did when I was like super struggling with prayer is I went to other people and asked them to pray, . Like thankfully I had people who were like, yeah, let's pray now. And so they would pray when, so that's like, you're not giving up on prayer in that sense.

You're finding it hard, but you're still rallying people to , Hold you up and pray that way. Or for to pray for things for you. And I think that's , a really like powerful thing when you're struggling.

I think I need to do that better. The be still part of it, you know, or the silence.

Praying in, praying in silence. I really like the concept, the idea of it, but I often get so easily distracted by my own thoughts when I'm trying to have that silent time or that quiet time. For me, I do find journaling sometimes helpful, and again, it's at different seasons that I actually. Engage with that.

So it's not all the time that I find that easy, but certainly when I've got things that are weighing on me, I'll get out my notes on my phone or I'll get out a physical journal and I'll jot down some things and it's like a prayer to God. It's like a cry out to God. Um, I very much see that as prayer, even though it's not a traditional, , Speaking of whether it's in your head or out loud to God?

It is, it is like I, I address my journal entries or my notes. I know that God knows and that I know what I'm putting out, so it sort of feels like a conversation. It feels like there's someone else that can, carry that weight with me. So it's not just me carrying it alone. So I really, yeah. Yeah. I, I get, I get that

There was a quote that I wrote in the article by, the founder of this prayer movement that happens in America every year, and he said that remembering is at the heart of the Bible, essentially. It's why it got written. Like, uh, it's an essential spiritual discipline. So it's like what you're saying, it's like, you can write down things that have happened in the past or like things you're grateful before or things that are happening in other people's lives that just give you hope.

And I think that like act of remembering is still in a way like. Praying and showing that you are like holding. And again, it's not really requiring you to be like, dear Lord, amen.

We forget so easily. I've noticed in my own life, like when I have opened that journal or looked in my notes and seen some of those things, I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't realize how.

Deeply affected. I was by that or how, I was feeling at the time, and God did pull me out of that. Wow. Like it just gives you that moment of thanksgiving to see where you've come from. And I think as humans, if we don't record it somewhere, we fairly easily forget it or it becomes minimized and, diminished.

And the flip side of remembering for me at. The season that you're describing, the time that you're talking about when it's really, really hard to pray. One thing that encourages me is remembering what God has done for me in hard times in the past. So I might be in the middle of a season, I might be in a storm, but I'm like, well, I know that God's pulled me out of a situation in the past, which had me feeling just as bad. So I know he can do it. He will do it. In this situation, I just have to be patient. I just have to persevere and wait for him. So when those doubts creep up, I find myself reflecting on the times where God has done things for me in the past and it reminds me to wait on him in the future.

Yeah, , I think it's really powerful cause sometimes. This might sound bad, but sometimes when you read stories in the Bible, like when you are going through something really hard in life and you read stories of Bible, for some people it's uplifting. I've found certain periods of me, it hasn't really hit home that much.

It's like almost when you read job and you read how Job has had everything taken away from him, and then God responds like, but I did this and I did this and I did this. It's like, sure, you did that. But I think when you're going through. Like extreme turmoil or when you've lost everything, those theological stories, they don't hold a lot of water cuz you're like, well what about me now?

Like it's, I don't know. That's been my experience anyway. But when you actually think about things that in your life or things in other people's lives that you can see around you being answered or have been answered, I think it gives a lot of hope and it can give you a lot of. I don't know, strength for your journey?

I think it does, and that's why, I've always encouraged people, like I'm a big believer in testimonies, but testimonies can have the same impact. You're like, well, God did it for you. Why isn't he doing it for me? You know, it can be quite discouraging if you're in the middle of a season of difficulty.

And so part of it is collective remembering and we remember corporately what God's done for us as a people and when we hear stories of what he's done in other individual lives, it can give us hope, but it can also be kind of discouraging. I remember writing. A piece. My wife really struggled.

Here I am complaining about my kids keeping me up at night, but we really had many years and many seasons of prayer like wanting kids because my wife has struggled with infertility. And I wrote a piece about how hard it is for Christians to struggle with that because it seems like every second lady in the Bible is barren, but then some miracle happens and God, Blesses her with a child, some gift of God.

And so when you're a Christian, you're like, you almost equate it like, I don't have enough, faith. I'm not praying hard enough. That's why this miracle isn't happening in my life. Mm-hmm. So it can be really hard. We've gotta remember they're miracles. They're in the Bible because they are miraculous.

Like it's not recorded. All the countless people that didn't get their prayers answered. And that's a hard thing that we have to, to wrestle with this question. Mm-hmm. Not all our prayers get answered. And that's something that, or they don't get answered in a way that we think they should or we expect they should.

And so we've gotta be open to, Being in the silence of God with him not responding or not in a way that, that we want because we have had those children now, and we do feel, very blessed. We had a lot of people praying for us , and we do believe that God's hand was in that. So now when I have a season of exhaustion and discontent and just uncertainty.

I look at that blessing that God has given me. I look at my kids and I go, well, you know, for me to doubt now. I just remember what God's done for me in the past. That's a specific example that I can point to and say I have been blessed. Not everyone gets the same kind of blessing, but God has done something in all our lives.

If we're Christians, he's done something for us that we can remember and almost draw on like a external power source in those times where we're feeling really flat and really unable to pray.

Hmm. Yeah. That's cool. Thanks for sharing. Can I ask when you were in that season of not getting answered prayers, what you did when you struggled to pray?

Uh, Kept praying. Okay. I wrote about it and other people prayed for us because of that. Sharing my pain, sharing openly where we were at, not just with God, but with others, was a vehicle to have, I guess some of that weight carried because many people related to the story, but also many people, started praying.

Mm-hmm. There was lots of prayer happening. These things are always 2020 hindsight. You know, the idea that you, it makes much more sense now, but when you're in it, you don't necessarily see these things. But I think God was working with me to be okay with you. I came to a point where I was okay with not having kids before I got the kids, as in it wasn't, it wasn't.

That I needed it and it was gonna fulfill all my wildest dreams, and life was gonna be so much better. All of a sudden, I had to come to a point where I was like, who am I without that as part of my identity? Who am I with? God. What can I do for God without having that as part of my identity? And I guess that's a challenge.

It's not an easy thing to wrestle through, but whatever it is you're asking God for, sometimes God has another lesson to teach you. Like I've learned about myself, God doesn't answer quickly or miraculously. But that's good for me. That means I can't blame him for things. That means I'm processing it differently.

I've learned that I need to be patient and persevere in prayer because God has my best interest at heart. But I don't always know what that is, and sometimes it takes a very long time to get to that point where I do see that he's done the best thing for me. So for me, I've learned when I'm in a season where I'm not hearing from God or I'm even just finding it really hard to pray for God, I've got a number of seasons in my life where I can look back and be like, yep, I've felt this before.

However, I know that my character, my nature, needs to be taught patience and needs to be okay with sitting in this space. And I do believe God will show up eventually. Mm-hmm. Like, maybe that's a desperate hope, but I have to clinging to that because in the middle of the the storm, you can't see that. It seems unlikely.

But, uh, because of the experiences that I've had, I have to go. Yep. I know that God will up eventually. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. That's cool. I think sometimes during these seasons it's awesome you had this experience. I think sometimes I've struggled with that idea when like, something happens and your answers to prayer aren't being heard and it can almost seem like, , God's always trying to teach you a lesson.

Like I think there's always things to be learned from every season, but sometimes you can feel like they're not being answered because you have to be something or you have to do something like it can, I don't know. I've just found that sometimes like. It's made me frustrated. Yeah. And people have been like, well, maybe God's got something to teach you.

Like, sure, me does. But sometimes it's like, you know, say for example if someone gets sick at work, well, couldn't he teach anyone that lesson? Like, why isn't he just making us? Yeah. I don't know. That's kind of my

No, I get it. It's, it's a really valid point because for me, like. I don't go around telling people, well, I've learned things in these scenarios, so you should learn it too.

Like, that's not the point of my story. For me, it's like, personally, I've tried to find meaning in what God has been doing in my life, and I think as humans we look for patterns. We look for meaning. We look for correlations in things and maybe there's no pattern there. Maybe there's no correlation. But I think that's where faith takes over and takes me that last few percent.

It's like, well, I'm looking for a pattern because I believe God is there and I'm trying to find understanding and meaning in the most difficult seasons of my life. And maybe there is none because we live in a fallen world and things are messed up and God can't necessarily do everything that he would wish for us.

Because of the constraints he puts on his own love, and his own power, because otherwise he would just be like a tyrant. He would get to do blessings to his people and curses on the people that aren't his sort of thing. Mm-hmm. And so in that dynamic, it's really hard because we expect our prayers to be answered by God, but the reality is they aren't always.

And so, Just looking in my experience, my character has grown. Because of those times. I don't think it's God trying to teach me a lesson. I just think there's different ways to deal with situations and we find when we, go through something, it's better than when we try and avoid that thing or go round the thing or circumvent the thing or avoid the thing.

And sometimes if we're patient and persevere in the season of prayer, that's actually us demonstrating. That we're going through the thing rather than avoiding it.

Yeah, I agree. I mentioned that in my piece

Yeah, perseverance is a really strong theme mm-hmm. In your piece. I don't think we can wrap this conversation up with a neat bow,

yeah. Often we like to end on a practical note. I'm not sure how we can do this practically, cuz I don't wanna prescribe, Hey, here's five steps, um mm-hmm. To make your prayer life better. I think sometimes it's good for us to just have these conversations and sit in the discomfort of not knowing.

Mm-hmm. I think it's good to acknowledge, so we don't think, Hey, I'm alone. I'm the only one going through something like this. So I'll ask you what you'll take from it in a second, Zanita. But I guess for me what I'm taking from it is like I don't necessarily want to tie up this conversation in a neat bow, cause sometimes it is hard to pray.

Mm-hmm. I don't think that should stop us from praying. I think there are tips and ideas we could try and incorporate. We can try and find new ways to grapple and communicate with God, but at the end of the day, we've just gotta stick it out. Sometimes, I don't know, I don't know where that leaves us, but it's tough sometimes, right?

And we shouldn't shy away from that as Christians. We shouldn't pretend it's all okay all the time.

Yeah, I like that. When I wrote this piece and I sent it to the office in Sydney, , I think yourself and someone else both responded saying, oh, it was really relatable. Like, I can relate to this and , I can resonate with this.

Which actually helped me cuz I was like, oh, awesome. Cause I was a little bit scared of sending it. It was nice to hear that other people related it, but it's also just a reminder that yeah, we all do go through these seasons and like, Our journeys we've got aren't always easy and we go through quiet seasons, we go through confusing seasons, like we go through seasons.

We all doubt. Like it's all just part of the journey. , and so, yeah, I'm not gonna put a pretty bow on this either, except encourage people to just pray as they can and hold on and rally around.

Yeah. I think the last, it's not a pretty bow, but it's perhaps a good place to end. Jeffrey's provided. Thanks for listening in Jeffrey, but he said, remember Jesus himself prayed if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.

The cup didn't pass from him. and, in the end, his father's will was accomplished. Jesus was fully at one with his father's will. To me, it's encouraging that Jesus suffered as I suffer, that he understands the human condition and he understands the pain and the seasons of difficulty that we go through. So to me, that's encouraging in and of itself to know that in heavenly places, I have , a God who understands, who sees me in the silence and , I like the idea of the wordless mutterings of the heart. You know, the, the groans and the Holy Spirit interprets those in prayer. And so if we can just encourage you, if you're going through a season like this, You're not alone.

First of all, we are here. We've been there. We're still in there sometimes. And Jesus was there as well. Jesus has been through it all with us. Amen. Well, God bless you all. We'll see you 📍 again next week

See you later.