EP007: Kevin Lee & The Arguments Against Church Online

Welcome to episode seven of From Text to Testimony. I'm Andy, I'm one of your hosts, and uh, we have a doozy for you. Let me just say I'm recording this intro after I just recorded the episode with both Megan and John, and who boy, we are going for it today. We are talking about prayer, specifically prayer that happens in digital ministry, and even more specifically prayer that happens inside of the Glue ecosystem with explorers and responders and everything kind of melding into this mishmash of how do we actually do prayer. It's one of the things I think that uh, we can kind of fake and we can kind of get by, but when we actually start to think about it, we go, oh wait, how am I actually doing the whole prayer thing? Part of being a responder is praying for those around us and praying that God's will is being done and praying that God's uh, showing people his love and his grace and his mercy and all those other things. And we need to kind of step back and go, wait a minute, how do we do that? And so through some stories and through some tips and uh, kind of some laughs and uh, really a fun kind of intro which you're going to hear in just a little bit, uh, we dive into that.

Now, if this is your first time joining us on From Text to Testimony, welcome. This is a Showp podcast live thing that happens uh, in partnership with the Church Digital, which I'm a part of, and also Glue, which everybody out there should be informed on. Glue, go visit glue.us to get a little bit more involved in digital ministry and how Jesus is really taking digital ministry by storm. How Glue is really the tech proving and providing the technological advancements to make the kingdom known in all areas of the world. Glue is this exciting, awesome platform, and we are so honored to be partnered with them. Head over to glue.us. Like I said, you can uh, check out all the links in the show notes, or if you are listening to this on podcast, you can just open up your podcast feed and you'll see all the links in there. But without further ado, let's head into episode seven of From Text to Testimony.

All right, welcome to episode seven, already in progress. John, go ahead with your uh, with your comment there. I don't know what it is, but it's something about the look in a person's face and maybe the like quality of their tone. I just feel like I can spot somebody who can sing, and I'm like, oh, Megan can sing. I may like a breathing, a breathing pattern. Like everything is intake, taken in, took into the diaphragm and exhale properly. Let me just say, let me just say Andy, no offense, because I know that you do worship as well, and that's how you do your thing. If one of us, if aliens came down and said one of you has to sing a song perfectly from karaoke to save humanity or everybody dies, I would be like, Megan, you're up. Yep, 100 percent. 100 percent. And what song would you sing, by the way, Meg?

Oh gosh, I don't know. Oh, I see. This is the reason I don't do karaoke, which is hilarious because we have Wednesday night we have chili and karaoke here at the church. Um, so everybody brings chili, it's a competition, and then there's karaoke, which we have one guy who is, I know, one of our uh, special buddies. So he has special needs adults, and he does "Your Mean One, Mr. Grinch." Oh, I would absolutely have him do it over me. Um, but I don't do karaoke well because I do have a background in music and I did go to school for that, and I feel like it has to like, got to know your, I don't know, it's it's too much. I need preparation for it.

Okay, there's two kinds of karaoke people. That's true. There's people that can't sing that go, actually there's three kinds I should say. There's people that can't sing that go in, and it's all personality. That's me, where you're just like, you know what, everybody knows "Amarillo by Morning" or everybody knows "Friends in Low Places," let's just let's do it, right? Then there's the person who is good, knows they're good, and would rather not participate on an amateur level because what do you have to gain, right, from karaoke? Well, it's like, oh, I thought you were a music major, Megan. Oh wow, that was a little pitchy in spots, okay? Then there's the third person who is good and karaoke is their personality, and they're just like, "Black Velvet" in that little bus smile, black velvet, that way, Southern style, you know, except better. Um, that was pretty good. I mean, that was like Kermit that was like Kermit singing "Black Velvet." You got to get right back in there for the chorus there. You go. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, so John, that was that was a great, quite a great rendition, and I love the fact that you took us down that rabbit trail. Uh, the one thing I need to put out there, however, Megan, you kept saying that you can't sing. Are you an instrumentalist or are you a vocalist? What did you go to school for?

I went to school, well, I went to school for contemporary worship leadership. Okay, long title. Um, I was the vocalist. I play keys a little bit, just chords. Um, don't ask me to play a lead line, it's not going to happen. It's okay. It's all on the tracks. You just you put that on the Ableton and like hit go, and then the click track happens every time I'm like, yeah, yeah. Our worship leader is like Matt. He's like, you want to learn that part? And I'm like, not really. So sorry, just I'll play pads. I'm just gonna play pads in the background. That's where my anxiety gets to like this high level, and I'll get like that. I can't. But I've always been able to sing a lot easier than talk to people. So for the longest time I could get on stage and sing, but if they were like, would you welcome everybody? And I'm like, mm, nope, sure won't. So that's changed a little bit. I've grown good. I mean, there, you know, worship leadership is a it's a qualitative thing, and your quality needs to keep going up. And so I I appreciate that. Uh, the interesting thing happens though when I, I love, so I'm a worship leader as well, was a worship pastor for about ten years. Uh, musical family, everybody's got music degrees, all the things. The thing I love is when you watch, you can spot somebody so John has that that innate ability to spot somebody that can sing and that is musically inclined. When you spot that person that is up there just because karaoke is their personality, oh, that makes, I have like a I have a bone in my like lower lumbar area. It's called the out of tune bone. I think it's L whatever fifteen, and it, you can just see me like sitting in the seat like squirming when that person starts to speak. So Megan, as long as you're not that person, I think I think we're good here.

I hope not that person just believes they can sing so well though. That's the like, nobody takes themselves more seriously than karaoke adult. Oh man, just like they put their lives around it. They drink the honey and tea before they go to the karaoke, the chili and karaoke. They like, they're doing warm-ups in the car, you know? They've been on YouTube or whatever, like learning their vocal exercises. God bless them. God bless you out there, Margaret, or whatever your name is. God bless you. God bless you. Oh no, no, no, chili for me tonight until after I sing. It messes with, no sugar and no milk either. No dairy. No dairy. Meanwhile, yeah, okay, mop, mop, the human torch, Wednesday night, a bank loan.

Well, we're going to make this our real intro. Uh, what you just heard there was um, essentially what happens before I hit record, and I just wanted to grab record. Welcome to From Text to Testimony. Uh, because this is what we do. We talk about chili and people that can't sing, and also we talk about Glue, our wonderful partner. Is Glue from the Church Digital? Uh, we love what Glue is doing. We love the fact that they are allowing us to use digital tools to reach out and respond to people in uh, all types of seasons of their life, all types of seasons of the world, actually. And we're in the holiday season. And if you heard our last episode, uh, or if you didn't hear it, you can catch up at youtube.com/churchdigital, youtube.com/glue, uh, all of the Glue social media platforms as well as the Church Digital, as well as all the podcast things. It's all going to be in the show notes. You don't have to go anywhere except just scroll down and it'll be there. Um, but you heard us talking about the holidays, and you heard us talking about the the loneliness and the things that happen in the holidays, especially with people that are utilizing Glue as you know, responders, but also as spiritual explorers. And one of the things we wanted to explore today was the other side of that. So not necessarily the explorer side, but we wanted to explore the responder side. And this actually came from a a kind of a journey I was doing through our own Glue platform. There's a little button up at the top when you sign into Glue. You've got four little tabs. You've got discover, engage, reach, and measure. And in engage, there is a, you know, you have your inbox, you have your messages, and all the things, and then you have this little thing that says prayer. Now Glue is fantastic in that it has auto-recognized words, and so if somebody says I need prayer for whatever, it'll give you the message, which is fantastic, but it'll also chuck that into the prayer bin. One of the things I had to train myself to do was to go into the prayer bin uh, because a lot of the times I was just, I had always had the messages tab open and I would just leave it there. But I started actually going into the prayer bin and going back through some of these things, and most of them have been answered either by myself or by my team. Um, but a couple of them really stood out to me. So I I chucked it to Megan and to John, and we started talking a little bit about this. So first, Megan, I want to start with you. Uh, and we're going to talk real practically this whole time. But do you have any of those stories, any of the things that come up when we start talking about prayer specifically inside the Glue ecosystem?

Yeah, um, I think the biggest thing is because I know that it has that automated response like you've just been prayed for. Um, I encourage our team uh, not to just click that and leave it at that, because it makes such a bigger difference when you actually can put a prayer in there. So if you write like, I want to pray for you, and then actually literally write out your words you're going to pray, um, it's really cool because not only do people, you know, feel that like comfort of like, wow, somebody actually cares and prays for me, but it's not so, it doesn't feel like a robot, like it's automated. Um, it just allows them to one, like your personality can shine through that, like showing them how you care um, through that prayer as well. But I, I don't know, it's just one of those things like any digital ministry stuff we've done, we've always um, like put that forward of like, if you say you're going to pray for somebody, like actually do it right then and because it's the thing, right? Like even just in our daily lives, you hear that all the time. You're like, well, I I'll pray for you, and it's like, why don't we just stop and do it? Like, why don't we just stop and pray for them right then? So that makes a big difference. And I think that builds the relationship within Glue um, as you're texting back and forth, because they see like, somebody really cares for me. So that's like the biggest one I know. That's more of an overarching than a specific story, but that's like our biggest thing, I think, for sure.

John, what about you?

Yeah, oh, that's so good, Megan. Um, because I'm a classic, like, if I say I'm going to pray for you and I don't do it at the moment that prayer request is gone, it's just really the backlog, like the backlog of praying for people. It's like, I mean, I might get to it, but to Megan's point, like there's no reason that I can't spend thirty seconds to a minute praying for you right now and it makes

It very personal and so the why behind prayer requests has been really interesting to me when I think through Glue and other platforms, meaning that somebody was like, "This is so important to me that I'm going to reach out to somebody else to have them pray for it." It's always important to take it seriously the way that I see it, and I don't always get it to start, but I can always just like jump in and be like, "You know what, if praying for your dog," and so in the life of a pastor, whether it's through Glue or through your own church, you get all kinds of prayer requests. And a lot of them, you know, there's a lot of the same kinds, but sometimes it's hyper specific. You know, "Pray, pray for my dog," right? Next to a "Pray for my mom who has cancer." And I think it's easy to rank prayer requests in your head of like what's more important and what's not. When part of the why behind a prayer request is it's a step of faith and really a belief in hope, right? Like it's asking for something, and it's going, "If only God could hear me about this." And so when it comes to connecting with people that have prayer requests, no matter how big or how small, I try to take it very seriously because I think it's hard to ask for prayer for a lot of people. And it's maybe not your favorite thing to do. So taking it all seriously is really important.

What do you mean by that? Like, it's hard to take it seriously on—do you mean on the responder side or on the explorer side itself?

What I mean is I think sometimes people, I think sometimes we will rank these prayer requests of being like, "Okay, somebody's mom has cancer. This is really important," and we may give a little more of a response than to the person that's like, you can tell as maybe a teenager that's like, "Man, pray for me and Bobby, and our relationship is so important, and I love him for the rest of my life." And like, we're kind of like, "Oh, okay." Or little kids that pray for other—like, my kids pray for the weirdest stuff. Like, they get in trouble, and you know, like, for example, my middle schooler doesn't have his phone right now, and he'll just pray for like, "I pray that I can get my phone back early." And it's like, "Bro, you do that to yourself." Like, like, I—but if you don't engage in those from a spiritual and faith standpoint, I think is important, and not to like pooh-pooh anybody's prayer requests of being like, "Oh, are you really sure that you should be praying for that?" And more engaging through the prayer request. That's good.

The thing that happens also, I think, to both your point is that when we—so this is in all aspects of digital ministry, I think. One of the things that has been tough for people to overlook or jump over when they talk about digital ministry versus in-person ministry versus texting versus, you know, actually FaceTime or chatting on the phone is that they think that it's not a real thing. And the fact that like somebody—and I'm going to read, I'm going to read a text message here in just a second that we got via our engage area in Glue—but the pushback that I've often heard, and I'm sure you guys have, is that, "Well, how do you know that that person's actually praying? Number one. Number two, like, does this really matter? Does that really count as prayer?" And I always push back, and this can go anywhere in this conversation, but I always push back to the fact that the Apostle Paul was literally praying for churches all across the known world at the time. Does that count? Does that not count? When he says, "I am writing you this greeting in my own hand," at the end of the book of Ephesians, and you know, it was probably big and scratchy because that dude had bad eyes and all sorts of stuff, but like, so do those prayers not count? Those prayers of thanksgiving that doesn't count from the Apostle Paul, which is in one of the sixty-six books of the Bible? Like, what's going on here?

One of the—somebody, one of the explorers—let me put it this way. That text came in via—this was just over a year ago, actually, so during the holiday season. It was December—what was it? December 14th? December 13th? And this came through in through the CrossX over, which is typically the Jenny crowd, a little bit younger than me. I'm not going to date myself here, but a little bit younger than me. So there we go. I'm also not the one wearing an *NSYNC* sweatshirt, so that we can date everything there, Miss Megan. It's okay with me.

So this comes from Angel, and we got her—got her question, and we or we got a notification from her. And so I said, "Hey, Angel, this is Andy from Be Hope. I'm so glad to connect with you, especially about such a great spiritual question as, 'How do you know that the Holy Spirit lives inside of you?'" Because the question she had actually texted was, "How do I know for sure that the Holy Spirit resides inside of me?" Like, oh, okay. I guess we're doing this. Yeah, like, that was just that. And that was like square just right on the mouth. That was like just MMA. Okay, here we go. We're in it.

And then so I sent her a couple links and a couple of things from actually the—there's content that actually comes up in one of the suggested areas. And so I sent her some of those things, and I said, "How can I be praying more for you specifically today? Or how—going to be praying for the Holy Spirit to reveal his presence to you today." And so we had a little bit of a conversation, and in that conversation, she said, "How do I know that you're actually praying for me?" And I went, "Oh, oh, okay. Like, it's like that, Angel? Like, you're doing me dirty like that, huh?"

And so I'm going to get to—I'm going to get to my response a little bit later, but do you guys have any—have any of those where people are like actually questioning, or do you have any of those conversations that you're having with the people that are higher up in organizations or elders or, you know, board directors or anything of the church that are going, "That's not real"?

I think that was our—I don't know, a few, probably before 2020 hit. Like, because we were doing online ministry, and there was a lot of people were like, "Huh, that doesn't work. Like, how do you know? Like, they're not coming into the building." And so I think 2020 changed some people's perspective because they saw like how it can work because they had to live that for a little bit. So that's kind of a blessing that it kind of opened their eyes a little faster than we could on just like telling them, "Like, well, here's stories. Here's this." So that's helped a lot. But then also like sharing stories with people of like you just did, like talking about how it's actually impacted them. And I know that I had one person reach out, and they were just like really struggling, and we talked about a few things, and then they kind of opened up that, you know, their sister was sick and their dad, so like they're trying to hold everything together. So just being able to literally write out a prayer was the, you know, a game changer for that person because they're sitting there feeling completely alone, and then getting that response was huge for them.

John, what about you?

Yeah, I'll just go all the way in. Well, let's go all the way in on this one. One of the things that it's really revealed is prayer is not efficient. And it doesn't—I mean, it doesn't connect directly to metrics. And so a lot of times, a lot of churches, especially larger churches, or people who follow the larger churches' style, are going, "What's the return on investment here?" And it's the mindset of going, "Well, this isn't real, right?" And it's not—the reason it's not real is because what does it connect to? Where's the chain of where this benefits our ministry or benefits our church? And I think the thing that I'm overwhelmed with, especially when we have explorers, is going, "We're never going to hear the end of the story on the other side of heaven." But you never know where you were in this process. And you know, there might be people who reach out to us because of, you know, the Angel that you're talking about, going, "How do I know that you're praying for me?" And she's got this kind of skeptical response, and you're like, "Well, because of this." Then who knows? A month later, maybe that caused them to take a step into a local church, and they have the amazing story, and there's a baptism, and there's this—we don't always get to see that. And so prayer is really a kingdom metric, if you will. It's really hard for it to be a local metric. Like you said about Paul, of like, "Does this count for Thessalonica because we sent support to Ephesus? Does this count for us when people get baptized?" Right? As opposed to a kingdom mindset of going, "How is Jesus working among people that through this medium that we never could have connected with people before? How can we possibly know what seeds have been planted and what God is doing with this harvest?" It's only our responsibility to take care of what he puts in front of us. And that, I think, a lot of the online prayer part, especially, has really exposed maybe some of our more efficacy-minded attitudes, right? Or return-on-investment-minded attitudes versus our spiritual connections of going, "I can't trace a line for why this is important. I can just tell you that praying for this person did good for them. Period. That's it. It did good for them, and I don't know where it's going to go in their story, but it's worth our time."

One of the things that always comes up with digital prayer, at least for me, and prayer specifically by tech—so one of the key things that happens is that you're right, it's not efficient. And I think a lot of us in the digital mindset are—I mean, I've got two, I've got about eighteen or twenty tabs open on my computer screen right now, right? And I have multiple different sources of information. My daughter is texting me, and then Slack and Discord and all, and then I'm talking to you guys on a camera, and I'm also trying—like, I've got multiple streams of information coming into me. And prayer is that one thing that we're supposed to just be able to shut the world out and direct completely to God. And you know, there's all this like idealistic thing like, "Oh, I'm sitting in a monastery, and it's just me and God, and we're going to be together forever." And it's like, that's great, but also we've got a lot of other stuff going on. And our brains are hardwired to process things for survival. And so every sound we hear, every instinct that we have is going off all the time, especially in today's day and age. And one of the things I think that happens with digital prayer is that when people hear that, they go like, "Oh, well, your phone is just a center for notifications, and your computer is just a center for, you know, connecting to things that may or may not be good for you." And so that doesn't actually matter. That doesn't actually count. Those things don't—aren't actually—it's going to take up too much time, and you're going to be completely distracted, and all that. And my pushback has always been, "Yeah, but just like John just said, how do you know that? Like, how do you know that this isn't going to change somebody?"

And so the followup I wanted to have with Angel there—so we had a conversation, and it took one, two, three—what is this? Gen—December 13th to December 18th, 19th? So this took five days to get here. And we were having, you know, just a conversation back and forth, and it was relatively sparse. And she never actually answered my, "Hey, what can I pray for you?" She was just asking like, "How do I know you're praying?" And so we were going back and forth on that. And so all of the sudden, five days later—

Days later she rocks up with this gigantic prayer right here and she says, "As for prayer, my best friend and I have a mutual interest. I'm afraid of the situation that's going to come between us. She is married and sometimes someone who doesn't know or who didn't know her would question that. As for me, I am not—here's the kicker—my personality is strong and with that I believe men are intimidated by me. I will admit I may be a little needy, but I believe I'm destined to always be alone except for God. Can I get some strong prayer and understanding why I'm destined to be alone? Why are men drawn to married women? Why men only want women who is decked out in makeup and always look like they're shopping around? Get me."

And that was five days of conversation. That was five days of all that. And then I typed out this long prayer and we continued conversation about a week after that, and then I didn't hear from her again because that's what happens in groups sometimes. But the whole moral of that story is not that like, oh, all of a sudden a radiant beam or whatever, but it's just I kept up that conversation. Or it is just like, you know, this thing that's just been happening behind the scenes, and all of a sudden she believes me that digital prayer actually works.

I want to move into the practical tips. Like, what are the practical tips? Is it stringing a conversation along for five days until someone responds to you? Is it like, are there key words and phrases that you can get? Like, how do you go about doing that in your ministries and in your particular lives?

I think the biggest thing, and this comes from like my mental health background that I've done different studies in, is like validating people's feelings, whether they seem valid to you. Um, so it goes back to like, John, you were talking about like kids like praying for their dogs. Like, you hear that like with our children's directors, you hear them like have prayer requests for their dog or, you know, whatever, but like that's a big thing in their life. Like that's a big part of their life. So there's a lot of things that we may not understand, um, what the person's going through, but if we can almost give them that like, "Yeah, that like praying that, like that, you know, that did maybe hurt your feelings. That did like, you did feel that, and that's true. Like, you felt that." Um, but then trying to direct the conversation a little bit too can help them maybe gain some perspective on it as well. But if you just like, you know, the person says like, "Can you pray for you know, me and this other person to be together or we'll be together forever?" And it's like, "Well, that's not really my decision, but I'll pray for your relationship that it would strengthen." So it's like guiding them a little bit to gain some perspective. But I think that's the biggest thing is that people, they're looking like to belong. They're looking to have some people around them as well. So if you can just validate that their feelings are their feelings, um, in that, and then take that prayer into maybe a little deeper opening up, um, it can open up a conversation to go um a little bit different.

Yeah, as long as the person—like, it is so easy to ghost someone online. And I think all of our friends and family that are doing online dating right now, first of all, talk about people that need prayer. Like, I'm so sorry. Um, but it's so easy for someone that you don't have any in-person accountability. You don't ever have to see them again. It is so easy. It requires literally no effort to ghost someone online. Yeah. And where I'm going with this, Andy, is if somebody's willing to talk to you and continuing to talk to you, keep talking, because that person, that explorer, is putting forth some kind of effort to reach out for, and you might not know the reason. It might be really cryptic. It might be really weird. It might be really sporadic. But they literally could be doing anything else. Like, the time it takes for them to type this out could be spent doing anything, but they chose to give you that time. And that is—is that actually takes a Herculean effort. Like, how often do you want to make a phone call to the bill collector? Like, you have a bill to pay. You have an appointment to reschedule, or you have a whatever. It takes an effort in this digital culture to do it because it's so easy not to. And so when a person is just interacting with you, just follow it and see where it goes because there's something there. And I think of Jesus's ministry, and we get the whole story, okay, but sometimes I try to look through the lens of the disciples. And when he's sitting with the Samaritan woman, they're like, "What did Jesus get us into now? Like, where is this going? He's sitting at midday at this well and just like, what's happening? Like, what's going to happen here?" And it's just it's following that thread. There was no guarantee that all of the village would end up being saved and hearing Jesus's message. Now, Jesus might know that. The disciples sure didn't. And so I think just following these little investments—right, any reaching out to you is just a little bit of an investment. It's a little bit of, "I'm putting some more chips on the table. I'm putting some more faith on the line here." And so just follow it, and eventually the person's probably going to stop talking to you because it's so easy. The draw of life is away from that kind of connection. So when they are just—uh, not just validating the feelings like Megan talked about, which is excellent advice by the way, excellent advice—not just validating the feelings, but validating the effort of being like, "Well, if you're up for talking to me, I'll—" Because imagine if you said, uh, you know, professors have office hours. Pretend you have a coffee hour as a pastor and you show up at this coffee house and whoever shows up at that time is going to talk to you. Well, you would talk to that person. You wouldn't be like, "Hmm, I'm not going to talk to you. I know that you showed up, but I don't really want to have this conversation." Like, it's the same thing. So as much as digital feels not real, it's real. There's that.

That's all fascinating, and that's all really good. I keep hearing kind of the same refrain in all of our conversations, and I'm gonna call it out right now and I'm gonna ask, does every—so do you ever guys, what you guys ever watch the show Scrubs? Everything comes down to Pooh, okay? Well, uh, that's not Pooh Bear, uh, you know what I'm talking about. Um, it was a fantastic episode, one of the best episodes of television ever. Um, but it feels like everything comes down to mental health. Everything that we're talking about comes down to mental health. And I don't want the prayer aspect of this to seem like it's just mental health counseling because it's not. Prayer is something different. So Megan, I'm gonna kick this question to you because you are going to school. John and I, real quick, so we're just going to sit here. We're going to put the pencil behind our ears and yep, exactly. I'm—you're going to learn us. Tell me a little bit about how prayer actually works in a mental health um context. Like, what—are you guys trained on that? Are you trained to respond that way? Is that a different kind of metaphysical and spiritual thing? Like, what's the coordinating effort that happens there?

I think it's just mostly knowing that they can work together. Um, it's not that you may have heard like, "Just pray it away," like, "Pray your mental health away." Like, that's not. Like, we're created. We have mental health. We have physical health. We have spiritual health. They all combine and they all intertwine with each other. Um, so that's a—if you can realize that and not realize that it's like mental health is one thing and your spiritual health is another, like, they do work together. And obviously God created us, so he created us with all these intricacies. Um, so why wouldn't we add those things into our prayers? Um, I think with it you do want to be careful and cautious just a little bit because there's a lot of explorers who may not be believers, obviously, that's what they're exploring, right? Um, so there's a lot of times I will—unless they're asking for it—I will ask and kind of like you did, Andy, that you know, "How can I pray for you?" or "Can I pray for you?" rather than just being like, "Well, here's a prayer," and then just go through it. Um, I don't know. It makes a difference. And when you do know, like, there are some—I think I've had one response that's kind of like, "Well, you know, your thoughts and prayers are great, but I really need help." And I'm like, "Okay, but I'm also gonna pray for you." So it—I don't know. It's I don't think it separates. Like, they do combine. But you wouldn't just pray like, "Well, I pray that this mental health issue you're dealing with just goes away," and it's like, "No, I pray that you get the tools to manage it and you have people that come alongside you. Um, have a support system." Like, there's a lot of different areas that you can take that to. And I think that's where you can guide them to, even in that prayer, um, that's not just, you know, not just related to mental health, but there's all kinds of areas of people dealing with grief and um different things. Just because I think it's easier to sit behind a keyboard or sit behind your phone and write something out. And so like, John, you were saying, like, "Take that opportunity. Take that opportunity to just take some time and respond." Um, but yeah, I don't think they completely separate, but I think just so many people deal with that right now. Um, it's always been there, but so many more people are talking about it. So I think that's why we talk about it a lot.

There's that. That's awesome. Um, and I I guess I need to ask this question as well. What about the people that feel like they're not good at praying? Like, my wife, for example, is when I first met her, you know, eleven, twelve years ago, she was terrified to pray out loud. Now she's gotten better. She'd been married to a pastor for ten years, like, of course. Um, but but she was terrified to pray out loud. And like, even now, asking her to pray through a text message or pray through anything is just kind of like anathema. How do you get people comfortable doing that?

Uh, oh, this is fun. This is fun. Go for it. Yeah, let me jump in. Uh, I tell people that prayer is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's good. Oh. Um, yeah, you could substitute other things for pizza. Um, but this is a family-friendly podcast. Milkshakes. Yeah. Um, and so even when it's bad, it's good. And so part of what people are dealing with—we have a Catholic context in where we are—and so a lot of people feel that prayer is very formal and they think of it very liturgically. And so sometimes there's a barrier to, "If my prayer isn't right, God isn't going to hear it," um, because we're supposed to pray a certain way. And so for our context, some of it is just taking the risk out of prayer is being like, "Hey, even like your three-word prayer is better than not praying, right? Your whatever it is, even if you don't know what you're doing, is better than not doing it." And just, uh, some people are so stressed out about it because of perfectionist tendencies or religious trauma or their own anxiety. Um, you know, because some people don't know how to start a conversation. Like, they practice on how they're going to talk to employees at stores or what kind of conversations they're going to have. And so having a conversation with God feels like really overwhelming. And so I think it's trying to just depressurize a lot of prayer and make it just a regular kind of thing and an outlet. And I've seen people who struggled to pray um and would want me to write out prayers for them if they were helping other people or whatever. I've seen people go from that to being the most powerful people praying for with and

For other folks, not because they went to seminary and got a degree, but something just unlocked in them. And I think prayer is so supernatural in some ways, and I think this is a little bit of what you were getting at, Andy, and that prayer is like its own separate category to a certain degree in that what we believe is not just that praying consistently changes us, it's also a way that God can miraculously change your situation. And there's nothing else like that. Therapy doesn't do that. I mean, it can, but that's not the guarantee of therapy, right? Working out doesn't do that. It's this like it's this moonshot that we have in our spiritual armory that we're going straight to God himself to, going if you can take away this cancer, take it. If you can cure me of alcoholism, take it. And we hear these miraculous stories that are one in a million where it happens, but it costs us nothing to try. And I think like not forgetting that part can be super powerful when we come when it comes to prayer. Go ahead, Megan.

Yeah, um, I completely lost my train of thought because that was so good.

Yeah, that was dope. Uh, the prayer as pizza analogy, uh, is a pizza. Yeah, that's that's good. I uh, yeah, I yeah, wink wink, nod nod, elbow elbow, all those things. Um, the so so we've we've packaged all this stuff about prayer together. I've actually um, Pete Greig wrote an amazing book. Pete Greig is this guy who founded the International House of Prayer, or 24 hours, or 24, yeah, 24-hour prayer, International House of Prayer. Uh, this English guy, he's super cool. Uh, wrote a book called How to Pray, followed up with How to Hear God, both just incredible books, and they break it down. But one thing that I have found, I've been going back through How to Pray just over, it's one of those things I think we just need to review and review every couple of years anyway. And the thing that I keep finding myself doing when I'm praying, so for example, this is like in an online service, not necessarily during you know a text conversation, but there's a million different things happening. There's a chat happening and all this other stuff, and you get the hey, somebody wants to, you cool, I I automatically find myself trying to manage three things at once. And instead, what How to has been teaching me is no, no, no, no, no, like just focus in on that one thing. And even if it's just for five minutes, focus in on that one thing because that one thing, again, we don't know the answer, and we get the we get the Bruce Almighty, you know, Jim Carrey sitting there hammering out all the prayer requests uh with all the You've Got Mail things, and we get this idea that like, oh, God's just putting him in an inbox and he'll get to him, and he gets to him, but that's not how God works. And God, if we if we simply give five minutes of our time, we don't know how an eternity is going to change. And so that right there is like the thing I keep carrying forward into all of these conversations, especially you know this conversation with Angel. I've got I got probably eight or nine other conversations here that are are roughly the same thing where I don't know how those people are being changed, but I do know that God has actually heard them, even though they are in a text format, and God is going to do what God is going to do, and it's now out of my hands. And that sounds like I'm abdicating responsibility, and maybe I kind of am. Uh, any final words on digital prayer, on prayer using the Glue ecosystem, anything in this on this in this vein before we close up shop here?

I think the the piece that I was going to say came back to me. Good. Um, was just continue to do it. Like, how do you get good at something? If you want to call it getting good at it, but like, you just you do it. And the one great thing about with Glue or texting a prayer is you can edit it. You can go back through it and read it. You said perfectionist, and I was like, yes, I completely, I am there. I have written out what I've wanted to say, like, okay, here's my birth date, here's this, what I need to tell the doctor. Um, so I get that. So you can write through, you know, write it and then make sure like what you're wanting to say is coming through, and then push the send button. Cuz we could sit there and sit on it and try to make it perfect over and over and over, but as long as it makes sense to you, send it, cuz it's going to mean so much to that person on the other end. And like you said, even if we don't know how that affects them, so just continue to do it.

That's good. That's good, John. Any uh, any closing final thoughts here?

I'm so relieved that Megan remembered what she was going to say because I felt really bad here. Here's the thing. Here's the thing that happened last episode that's happening this episode too. I say, hey, is there anything else? And Megan comes with a hammer, and it's just like, nope, we're we're not going to end that way. Like, Andy, I, we're going to end way better, better than what you thought. And it's like, dang it, I, you're not wrong, Megan. Um, yeah, yeah, hey, the hammer, Meg, the velvet hammer, the Scarlet, like, where are we going with that? The instinct there we go. The hammer, Megan, the hammer. T, are we allowed to do that?

Yeah, we can do that.

Megan, Megan the hammer. Yeah. Uh, hey, everybody, Merry Christmas if you're listening to this before Christmas. Uh, John, Megan, Merry Christmas. Thanks, guys, for being part of this. We uh, I'm so thankful to have both of you guys on this podcast, and I'm so thankful to everybody that's listening and uh has been following on this journey. We've had seven episodes. Actually, it's been fun watching our viewer numbers go up and to the right and our listener numbers go up to the right. And uh, when emails and newsletters and things go up, we're actually getting hundreds of views, which I think is fantastic. I mean, it's you know, we we need to get there. So do me a favor. If you're watching this, just hit the old share button underneath. I don't care if you, if people don't, yeah, like John's pointing to it right there. If you're listening, and if or if you're watching, if you're listening, John has been pointing down uh with which you can go into the show notes and find the things there. But until next time, Merry Christmas, we'll see you here on From Texas.