Your Secret Weapon Against Stress & Anxiety—How to Transform Your Mind Through the Power of Prayer
Episode Notes
Prayer is where self-awareness meets God-awareness. I've come to cherish it as an intimate, deeply grounding practice. But I haven't always felt that way. It used to evoke anxiety and activation inside of me as I worked to earn God's favor.
That's why I love this conversation with Kayla Craig, author of the new book Every Season Sacred. In this candid conversation, we talk about prayer in a fresh new way that will transform how you practice it.
Here's what we cover:
1. Scientific research into the effectiveness of prayer (3:57)
2. What prayer is (11:19)
3. How to pray when your emotions are chaotic (38:43)
4. Calming your nervous system (37:25) vs. hail mary prayers (10:44)
5. A simple way to pray throughout your day (33:02)
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Every Season Sacred: Reflections, Prayers, and Invitations to Nourish Your Soul and Nourish Your Family Throughout the Year by Kayla Craig
- To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers and Liturgies by Kayla Craig
- Liturgies for Parents on Instagram
- Kaylacraig.com
- Liturgies for Parents podcast
- www.liturgiesforparents.com
- The Science of Prayer from the Wall Street Journal
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Matthew 6:25-34, Luke 12:22-32
Transcript
Alison: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. We are starting a new series this week that I'm so excited about. It flows perfectly out of the last series. It's called Faith Talks, and we're going to hit on some of the big topics that relate to our spiritual well being, because here's the thing–we know that there is no bifurcation between our spiritual health and our mental and emotional, and even our physical health.
They're all connected. There's a well-researched link between our mental, spiritual, and physical health and well-being. There's a pretty large and increasingly growing body of research that shows that involvement in spiritual practices, such as prayer, weekly gatherings, forgiveness, grace, et cetera, link to improved mental health, greater well being, more hope, and even greater sense of life satisfaction. They give us purpose and we need purpose to feel healthy in our lives.
These spiritual practices feed into a sense of community and belonging, a sense of resilience. They can help us face adversity. Those topics we talked about back in episodes 72 and 73.
So in this series, we're going to unpack some of these faith topics with a psychological lens. In today's episode, we're going to talk about prayer and I wanted to share with you some of the scientific evidence related to prayer and how it benefits us. Now, the data I'm going to share with you is from a Wall Street Journal article on the science of prayer.
This is not data that is necessarily coming out of religious institutions. I thought it was so interesting. The scientific research into prayer shows some of the following: number one, it can calm your nervous system. It can help you shut down that fight or flight response.
We talk about that a little bit in this episode, how you can shift to types of prayer that actually facilitate calming your nervous system instead of activating your nervous system. Prayer can help you work with your negative emotions and prayer fosters a sense of connection with God and with others.
I thought this was so interesting that there was a 2005 study in the journal of behavioral medicine that compared, quote unquote, secular meditation with spiritual meditation. Here's how they quantified the difference in secular meditation. You might meditate on a self affirmation such as I am love.
In a spiritual meditation, you would meditate on words that affirm a higher power, such as God is love. Notice the difference between meditating on the statement. I am love versus meditating on the statement. God is love. Now, this was a scientific research project where they compared these two different groups.
In this study, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, researchers found that the group that practiced spiritual meditation, meaning, the group that focused on the phrase, God is love, that focused their attention on a higher power, on a loving force outside of myself, a God who is separate from me, this group actually showed a more significant decrease in anxiety.
All of meditation actually is correlated with a decrease in anxiety and stress and an increase in more positive emotions. But in this particular study, the spiritual meditation that focused on the phrase “God is love” showed a greater decrease in anxiety and a greater improvement in mood.
They also showed a greater experience to tolerate pain. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal says, they tolerated pain almost twice as long as the group that used secular meditation. so I thought this was really interesting where science comes in and shows we need a connection to something outside of us, to a God who loves us.
It's not only within us. That's a little bit where our culture is going. God is inside of us. While I talk a lot as a psychologist about the importance of locating your internal locus of control, you need to have a sense of yourself, you cannot do that work apart from the God who made you, the God who is actually love.
The final thing that I thought was really interesting from this article, and I talk about this in The Best of You, is that when we approach God as a partner, as a collaborator in our lives, that's when we see these improved outcomes in our mental and emotional life. But when we see a God who's angry with us, a God who's punishing us or a God who abandons us or abuses us, we start to see worse outcomes.
It matters what you believe about the God to whom you're connecting. Is this a God who loves you? Is this a God who's for you? Is this a God who takes you by the hand and walks with you through the trials that you face? A God who doesn't necessarily rescue you out of everything, but who comes to be with you in the mess.
It matters what you believe about God. In today's episode, we talk about this: how do you invite God into the hard stuff? For the episode, I wanted to invite Kayla Craig on to talk with me about prayer.
I love what Kayla's doing. She's the creator of a podcast and a popular Instagram page called Liturgies for Parents, where she shares nuanced and nurturing prayers for you to borrow for what she calls your fantastic, dirty, messy, holy life.
She's a parent to four kids, and she's the author of a brand new book called Every Season Sacred: Reflections, Prayers, and Invitations to Nourish Your Soul and Nourish Your Family Throughout the Year. It's a beautiful book that's organized through the four seasons–fall, winter, spring, and summer, with reflection and insight as well as prayers that you can pray both for yourself and with your family. It's a gorgeous book. I'm thrilled to bring you this conversation with Kayla Craig.
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Alison: I'd love to go back in time for a moment. I'm sure this grew out of your own experience of faith and of prayer in particular, what was your relationship with prayer early on? Tell us a little bit about who you were spiritually, emotionally, as a young woman. Go back as far as feels right to you.
Kayla: What I'm so grateful for as I look to see who I was then, who I'm now, and who I'm becoming is that my faith has really been woven by so many different backgrounds and perspectives within the home of Christianity. I grew up in a more mainline tradition where there were some rhythms of liturgy but attended church off and on.
My husband grew up very strict, fundamentalist evangelical–his dad was a Baptist pastor, so we had very different experiences. When we got married, we really had to figure out, who are we? How do we make our faith our own? We have been part of so many different denominations.
While nobody's perfect, and there's pain involved in being human and being together, and there's very legitimate hurt within Christian circles and church communities, I do find that I'm also grateful. I'm grateful for the ways that my Catholic friends teach me to approach prayer in a different way and I'm grateful for the kind of impromptu boldness that my Pentecostal friends have.
Like all of these different expressions of faith, there's something that can be gleaned from that. I feel really grateful when I reflect on how that has affected my prayer life, because there isn't one way to pray. There's not one wrong way to pray or one right way to pray. I feel really grateful for all of the people and the ways of thinking and the approaches to prayer that have brought me to where I am and where I'm going.
Alison: Yeah, I am curious, and I'll go first, I'm curious how prayer functioned for you, if you can even think back early on. For me, for example, I wasn't raised Catholic, although my mom is actually Catholic now and was Catholic, but left the Catholic church when she married my dad.
So I was raised Protestant, but I remember a lot of Hail Mary prayers. I don't mean literally Hail Mary. God, please save me. God, please save me. I remember a feeling of activation. I wouldn't have described it as that back then, but it was from an activated nervous system state and not feeling a lot of relief in those prayers.
But it was prayer and God honors all prayer. So my relationship with prayer has changed. I'm curious for you, is there an early moment of really feeling like, because prayer right at its heart is conversation with God. It's not this weird, religious thing, it's simply a conversation with God.
So how did you begin to really experience that? Do you have a moment where you noticed, wait, this is me and God?
Kayla: I'll share one brief little story from my childhood and I write about it in Every Season Sacred, but we lived in this small house on a very busy road. My room had hardwood floors and I had this metal bed frame on the hardwood floors. if a car was driving by late at night with loud music, my bed would shake.
I remember being awake and feeling so scared in that moment. Just laying there in bed and feeling so scared and I, for whatever reason, I prayed right there. God, I'm scared. God be with me. I felt God was with me. It's a hard thing to even describe. I had never felt that way.
It's still very vivid in my mind now in my mid 30s, but it was this moment of, Jesus is with me right now. In a way that I had maybe thought Jesus is with me at Vacation Bible School, or maybe Jesus is with me when I go to church on Sunday sometimes. But really, it was this very intimate, first experience of God where my parents weren't around. Where the church leader wasn't around.
It was me, and it felt so intimate. Just this sense of peace, and I remember going to bed and falling asleep. it was like... a peace that cannot be explained. That was a really beautiful moment in my life and I think about that now. My own kids are experiencing God in their own ways and knowing that I cannot manufacture that for them.
They are going to experience the divine in their life in ways that I will not ever be a part of and so I find that really powerful and then you mentioned that I call myself a modern liturgist. I try to share my prayers as an offering for when people might not have their own, to put words to the beautiful moments in their lives or the deeply heartbreaking moments in their lives.
I have four children and my daughter, Eliza, joined us through adoption. She has Down Syndrome and a variety of disabilities and significant medical needs. She had a seizure disorder when she was younger and that has left her with a variety of physical and cognitive disabilities. When she was three, she got very sick and it was a cold that kept getting worse and worse.
I ended up having to take her to the emergency room. From there she was admitted to the intensive care unit and then she was put on a ventilator and on life support. It was a very difficult and thin space for us. Then we had three other kids at home. My husband and I were trading off and on about who is going to sleep at the hospital because every single day, we were reminded that we had no idea what was going to happen.
At that moment, people were saying, oh, I'm praying for you. it felt… empty, it felt like what's the point of prayer? We were doing the trade and my husband was in the hospital staying with my daughter and I went to be with our three sons and I checked the mail and there was a little book of prayer.
Just really short prayers, and that felt like a lifeline for me. It felt like something I could hold onto. Words that I could borrow when I didn't have my own, even if I didn't believe. It was like, I believe, help me in my unbelief, so I would sit by her hospital bed. I couldn't even hold her hand because everything, all the numbers and all the machines would go off. She was so sick.
I read the prayers, I read the prayers. she got better. But I also held that tension of knowing that not everybody gets better. Not everybody goes home. I really had to reckon with the new part of my own faith journey of figuring out like what is the purpose of prayer?
What is prayer? Is it meaningless? Is there something there for us? It's very deep and honest and real and uncomfortable questions of the mystery of faith.
From that experience, I started writing my own prayers, and talking with other friends and family. that kind of grew into talking with other parents across the country about things they've gone through in their lives and what do they wish they would have had?
What words do they wish they would have had when they didn't have any? They had those wordless groans. At the beginning of 2020, I created Liturgies for Parents on Instagram, where I would share short prayers. I had no idea that we had a global pandemic coming down the pipeline. I had no idea that we would have a deep, intense racial awakening in our country.
All of these things where it felt... heavy. we were all, what do we do? What is going on? Who am I in this? Who, what is my family doing? Are we going to be okay? Where is God? That is where my first book, To Light Their Way, which is a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents, came out of. Every Season Sacred is a growth out of that.
Alison: I love that idea of borrowing words when we don't have the words in those moments, like you described in that hospital room, needing somebody else's words. You want to communicate with God, but sometimes the words don't come in those moments. I love that you were able to rely on somebody else's words.
Then you wanted to do the same thing for other people. Help create words that we can turn to when we don't.
Kayla: Yeah, I need to borrow your words and we can share and we can hold each other up in that way.
Alison: Yeah, there's a comfort in that, and that's okay. I think sometimes we put pressure on ourselves in some strands of Christianity to come up with all the powerful, beautiful words, as opposed to the groans or borrowing the words. It made me think about when you were describing that moment in the hospital where you're desperate for God.
I had a stroke a couple of years ago, I talk about it in The Best of You, and I remember vividly my husband had found me on the floor. I couldn't move. He had put me in the car and we were racing and it was during the pandemic and he's racing me down main street and I am terrified.
In that moment, prayer wasn't a friend to me because my mind knew too much. My mind was like, God doesn't always heal. so that prayer of God, I know you're with me. I know this is going to be okay, wasn't there. My mind went to, God, I don't know that this is going to be okay. I'm terrified. That activated state of almost an anxiety prayer in that moment, almost evoked anxiety versus comfort.
In that moment was the embodied comfort. They put me through the CAT scan and I was so scared. the woman whom I didn't know, I said to her, I'm so scared. She put her hands on me and said, it is scary. She didn't try to make me not feel scared. That's what was calming to me in that moment. that to me, in hindsight was a form of prayer, was a form of two humans connecting saying, yeah, this is true. It's scary. also God is with us.
That is what was calming. I love that in the book, you're doing a lot of that, a lot of, yes, this is hard and also, as parents, that's so much of what we're doing with our kiddos. We're not trying to say, you shouldn't feel that way because we love God. It's, yeah, this is real and also tell me a little bit about that.
Kayla: In Every Season Sacred, I write about how my husband and I, when we were younger, were on an improv acting team together. One of the things you say in improv is “yes and”.
That you keep building, you keep building, you keep going. I keep that “yes and” in mind. When I'm parenting, my kids have such good questions, such big questions, such hard questions. It almost seems to me like they haven't yet unlearned that curiosity that so often we do as grownups.
I love talking with them, even though they give me more questions than I had when I first started talking to them. I think we often have this pressure not only to pray in a certain way, but we also have a pressure to have the right answers too. What even are right answers?
They're not really our answers to have, oftentimes. Being able to sit in that messy middle space with my kids, with my neighbor, with myself has been a growing opportunity for me because it isn't always easy, it feels so much more comforting sometimes to feel like you have this black and white answer.
Something is either good or it's bad. To enter into that “yes and” is like entering into this divine mystery where we have to give up our desire for control.
Alison: Yeah, can you tell me some examples of what your kids might have come to you with, whether early on or now, where you've had to pause?
Kayla: I tell a story about our son going to the library and walking through the main space and seeing a headline in a newspaper. Then that night all the kids were asleep and he came downstairs in tears and he told my husband and I about what he had seen.
It was about a school shooting. It was about children in his grade having to pretend to be dead. It took my breath away. I had no words in that moment because I couldn't tell him everything was okay. You know what I mean? It is this both-and of, we have a God who is peace.
And yet, we have a world that is full of violence. To navigate with him and to not have all the answers and to sit with him and let him know that what he was feeling was so real and so valid, and I felt that way too. Yet how do we create a sense of safety?
I promised him that I would do everything that I could do to make this world a more peaceful, more safer world for him, and talked about changeable ways that we can cultivate that peace. That's a heavier story, but a very real experience.
Alison: I love that. What a moment to maybe borrow somebody else's words. This prayer that you've written in that moment, this is such a fresh thing that so many parents are dealing with–the reality of danger in our world and in their schools. How do we pray in those moments for ourselves, let alone help our kids know how to access the peace that surpasses all understanding in those moments? Tell me a little bit about how you developed a prayer for that.
Kayla: In my first book, To Light Their Way, there's a section for prayers of lament, prayers for our weary world. When I submitted my manuscript, I included a prayer for gun violence in schools. My editor was like, this is really heavy, do you want to include this and I said, I really do because when my kids come home after doing an active shooter drill, I need the words and I know that other parents do too.
So we did include that prayer and It is heartbreaking, and it makes me sad and angry how often it's used, especially after a shooting. I knew that when I was writing Every Season Sacred, and this happened with my son, seeing that headline as I was working on this manuscript, I couldn't help but reflect on that.
To reflect on how we raise our kids, and rhythms of peace and non-violence as people who claim to follow the way of Jesus. The book is split up into Four Seasons, and then each season has a weekly chapter, so there's 13 weeks for each season of the year. They're not dated or anything.
Flip through them as they're a resource to you. But there's the reflection, this reflective essay, an invitation for the parents where I share about that story with my son. Then I share a breath prayer, some scripture that if it's a resource to you, you can go look up that's applicable to the theme that I'm writing about.
Then there are connection questions where I'm dipping into my journalism background. I share a bunch of open-ended questions that are along with those themes. It's for you and your family, so pick and choose what works for you, adapt them to the language that you would use, and grab a couple and try to intentionally, during the week, work in some of those questions to go a little deeper.
They're not Bible study questions, but they're questions to go deeper spiritually, to connect about your actual lives, about how you're feeling, your emotional state, your mental health, all of these things. Then, to close the chapter, there are two prayers. There's a prayer that is shorter with very accessible language, easier to pray with young children or developmental ages and stages where that's a little bit more accessible.
Then there's another version of the prayer that's a little more liturgical, has a little more poetic feel to it, deeper themes. I knew as I was writing this prayer, speaking about, or speaking into peace, speaking into nonviolence, speaking into this tension of living in a world that is so entrenched in violence and trying to navigate that alongside our families, it was a prayer in my heart.
I write a lot of these prayers with a notebook. I don't know if you do that too sometimes where it feels so intimate, all you can do is you have to have a pen in your hand. That's how I feel. So I remember sitting with my notebook crying and asking God to do something with these jumbled cries in my heart, and I hope that it brings a sense of peace and a sense of, if you don't have the words to pray, take mine.
Alison: What I love about this offering is that you didn't shy away from these really hard topics that meet parents where they are in today's world. I think you talk about technology a little bit, which is another, how are we praying for our kids through the world of navigating technology? It's seasonal but these liturgies are very current and these are the things that are on our hearts. How do we even pray through these things?
We barely understand them, yet we're not only trying to walk our kids through them in terms of guiding our kids to have healthy boundaries, guiding our kids to be safe, guiding our kids to be well equipped psychologically, mentally, emotionally, but guiding them spiritually. That's really where you're coming in and saying, we have to guide not only ourselves, but our kids through these very different landmines than many of us faced spiritually.
Kayla: I tried to create the resource that I need in my life right now, and not because I am an expert, but because I am working through this journey with you and with my kids alongside you. I'm really grateful for the authors, the theologians, the pastors, the artists, the poets, the activists, all of the people that I was able to reference and draw their work into.
I feel really grateful for that opportunity and in the back of the book, you might be going through a season of, like Catherine May says, wintering. It might be summer, so if you go to the back of the book, you can find those themes if you're really struggling, maybe with seasonal depression or grief. It's this isolation that sometimes happens in the winter. You can go find that and read that even if it's the 4th of July, so I want it to be this resource that serves you when you need it and how you need it.
Alison: That's so powerful. What are some rhythms that you rely on? Obviously writing and creating art is a rhythm for you. But how do you incorporate that in your day with four kids? Your life is busy. Life is messy. How do you keep those rhythms up?
Kayla: I think it changes all the time. It changes by the day, it changes by the season that we're in, now that we've gotten into the fall and looking to winter my days are a little different than in the summer when my four kids were home every day, so I have a little more margin in my life.
But sometimes the best I can do is–I talked about my daughter. She's in diapers. I have made it a spiritual practice that when I change a diaper, that is a prayer. Because that can be really hard, and my brain can immediately go to, what if, and what is this going to look like 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now?
For me, it's a diaper. Looking at her as a prayer and remembering that she is beloved and that I am beloved and that all we need is every day. We need God for right now. We need manna for the day and I love the verse about the lilies and the sparrows because it brings me a lot of hope.
If God cares so deeply for the sparrow, how much more does God care about me? Sometimes I have to remember that and let my breath become a prayer. Breath prayers are a great resource for me. I often fall back on simply breathing in, God, and breathing out, you are with me. Sometimes that's all I have the margin for and that's okay.
Alison: I love that. I love that every diaper that you change is a prayer. I love that. It reminds me of that moment in the ER when it felt like a prayer when the woman put her hands on me and said, it is scary, honey, I'm here. It's those moments that are sacred.
It's not always the eloquence of the words or the number of minutes on the clock that we spend quietly with our eyes closed and our hands folded in a quiet time, it's those moments. I love that. I love the very concrete, every time I change a diaper, this matters. There's great meaning in this moment. I'm honoring that with God.
Is there anything else you would want to share about your heart for prayer, your heart for folks whose lives are messy, who are struggling, maybe are feeling the disappointment of unanswered prayers?
Kayla: My book is called Every Season Sacred, and what that doesn't mean is every season is comfortable, easy explainable, what you wanted, happy, all of these things. That's not what I mean when I say sacred. When I say sacred, I mean that we can experience God even if, even when.
I hope, and I really pray, that if somebody cracks open the book, that they would feel an exhale, and not feel any sense of shame but if they're holding frustration or doubt, that they would feel not alone in it. Even though I cannot answer those questions, because I have my own questions, and I'm sitting there right alongside you in the unknown.
But I will be there with you. Above all of that, we have this divine presence who won't leave us, and won't forsake us, even when it really feels like that's not the case.
Alison: Yeah. It's the not-aloneness that is also a form of prayer. When we think about, again, this idea that prayer is closing your eyes, folding your hands, a certain number of minutes going through (and there's a place for that, there are times when that's really meaningful to me), but we think about group prayer as being with a bunch of people and closing our eyes, what I love about what you're getting at is this almost deeper, what's the thing beneath the thing, which is it's feeling not alone.
It's not so much about the way we're able to put things into words. It's the “I'm not alone in this'' that takes us a little bit closer to God. The goal of prayer is to take us a little bit closer to God. So reading someone else's words and saying, oh my gosh, she's articulating exactly what I feel in this moment–I'm not alone. Our nervous system relaxes and we're experiencing a little bit of a glimmer of God. I love that not-aloneness being a form of offering of collective prayer.
Kayla: Yeah, I wonder, do I need to draw nearer to God, or is God already so near to me, and all I need to do is be awake to it. All I need to do is notice, to pay attention. There is no prayer that is going to make God love us anymore, or give us extra blessings, or extra presents.
But we have that very intimate Immanuel, God with us, all the time. But it can be hard to notice that and to feel that sometimes.
Alison: Yeah. That moment of, oh my gosh, that's what I'm feeling. God, you are right here right now, in this moment. We need each other. We need each other to usher that in and again it's so much a part of my own experience.
I can almost get into a nervous system fight response to try to get to prayer, as opposed to the deep breath of, all right, God, you're already here. I don't have to fight so hard and I don't have to work so hard to get to the answers that I feel like I should have. Instead, I can breathe in your presence, the fact that you are right here.
That is a really powerful integration of spirit and body in that moment. Those are powerful moments throughout the day of noticing.
Kayla: In the back of the book, when I was writing Every Season Sacred, I kept thinking, this could be a resource or maybe this could be a resource. In the back of the book, there are these practical, very tangible resources that you can flip to.
One of them is a very gentle and brief introduction into praying the Examen. And, we won't get into all of that here, but it's this kind of at the end of your day. We all eventually, hopefully, go to sleep, and before going to sleep, reflecting on our day, and where God was with us, and making that a practice.
It doesn't have to be this big thing, and I'm really grateful for the people that have introduced that to me, because it helps me. Otherwise I'm moving on to the next thing, and it is so helpful to be able to reflect on that.
Alison: It's inviting God to be with me where I am, as opposed to getting myself into a state of telling God where I think I should be. It's inviting what I'm thinking about, which we're doing anyway, right before we go to sleep. We're replaying the tape of our days, it's becoming mindful of that.
Here's what I'm worried about. Here's what I'm thinking about. Here's what's on my mind, God. When we're ruminating or we're worried or we're in a big emotion, sometimes we do need to take that deep breath to become aware. Oh, I'm worried. Oh, I'm anxious. Oh, I'm sad. Oh, I'm scared. Then it's almost like that comma, God, I'm worried, that becomes a prayer.
That's what I love about that daily idea of the Examen. You do a great job in the book of describing it. I love that. In my own life, I've almost simplified it to, this is what I'm already thinking about. This is what I'm already worried about. Here we are.
That deep breath of inviting God in becomes the best sort of prayer. Suddenly when you start to do that, you're praying all day long. Even when you're in the car pickup lane and you're thinking about, how am I going to get to this? How am I, all the things that are going in our mind, it's that pause. A little bit of that differentiation.
We talk about where we are pausing to notice, Oh, I'm frantically rifling through my mental to do list right now. Oh God, that's what I'm doing. Can you come join me in that? Can you come join me as I take a deep breath? Could you join me in my to do list? As opposed to what's wrong with me? I should be praying vigilantly for all these children I'm seeing in front of me. The shoulds.
As opposed to actually, I'm really worried about all the things I have to get done. God, join me in that moment. So again, that's so much I love about what you're doing and recasting prayer as growing out of what we're already facing throughout our days.
Kayla: I pray that this would be you know an invitation into contemplation, but also a resource for you and your actual messy, complicated, busy, overwhelming, here and there and everywhere lives, like this is accessible to us right now. Yeah.
Alison: Amen. I feel like this whole conversation in a way has been a form of prayer. We're present to each other as we're trying to unpack what is a simple concept but also, sometimes a complicated concept, this idea of prayer. Even as we're talking, my sense is God is here, you and I are talking, we're trying to think about how prayer functions in our lives and also God is right with us as we're unpacking that.
Suddenly this conversation becomes a living form and we're inviting those who are listening, as you're listening, that's our hope that you would even right now begin to notice. Oh, wait a minute. God is right here as I'm listening. I don't have to shift gears. I can notice where I am and invite God into that. Just as we, you and I are doing right now.
Thank you. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for creating this space for people to connect to God in all of these ways. Tell people how they can find you, how they can find your work.
Kayla: I love having a thoughtful conversation like this. I feel like it ministers to my soul and it offers me an exhale. Thank you for your thoughtful questions and conversations. I love connecting with people in real life. I love hearing your stories, and you can find me at kaylacraig.com, that's where you can find my newsletter to sign up for. I call it a care package of prayers. I have a Liturgies for Parents podcast, that's a weekly kind of meditation, where every Monday I offer a prayer, some scripture, and a benediction, if that is a resource to you in your busy days.
You can find me on Instagram @liturgiesforparents. My personal account is @Kayla_Craig, where I share glimpses of my life. I really love connecting with people. My new book is Every Season Sacred, which is a resource to use throughout the year.
Then my other book is To Light Their Way, which is a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents.
Alison: Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing all of your hard earned wisdom with so many and we're grateful for you and for your family and for all the work that you're doing and sending you with lots of love as you head out into your day.
Kayla: Thank you.