Prayers of Rest

Are you too busy to pray? Then maybe it's time to find rest in God's presence.

That is His heart for us, that we would pray more, not because we need to impress God or because He expects it of us. Rather, He wants us to find that rest that's only found in His presence. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Today, author, Asherita Choo Choo presents a respite from your spiritual to-do list. Our featured resource today is her book titled Prayers of Rest, daily prompts to slow down and hear God's voice.

Well, let me reintroduce our guest. Asherita Choo Choo is a bestselling author, national speaker, and host of the Prayers of Rest podcast. She's the founder of One Thing Alone Ministries, an online ministry that helps women all around the world find joy in Jesus through creative and consistent time in God's word. Asherita grew up in Romania as a missionary kid and studied English and women's ministry at Cedarville University. Her latest book is titled Prayers of Rest, daily prompts to slow down and hear God's voice. For more information, you can go to moodybooks.org.

That's moodybooks.org. Asherita, welcome back to Building Relationships. Thank you so much for having me again.

It's my joy to be back. This topic of prayer goes right along with your heart for people to spend time in the Bible, right? It sure does. And like you said in the intro, prayer is a two-way conversation, but for so many of us, it feels like a one-way monologue. And we know prayer is important. We hear from the pulpit every Sunday that we should be spending more time in prayer. And many of us genuinely want to pray more.

We just don't know how. And oftentimes we just don't know what to say in prayer. And that's where I think that learning how to pray God's word and learning how to listen to God's voice in prayer can have such a revolutionizing change in our prayer life and in our relationship with God too. Yeah. Why does prayer sometimes feel so natural for some people and yet such a struggle for others, even those who were raised in the church?

Yeah. I mean, I was raised in the church and I get that. I watched people pray. And the way that they talked with God was so familiar, like talking to a friend. And yet there was that proper respect and reverence and faith and belief that God hears and God will move.

And I remember thinking as a child, like, I want that. I want to learn how to talk to God that way and how to listen to his voice that way, to have that confidence that he hears me and that he moves in response to my prayers. And I really think the difference lies in practice. So much of our spiritual life, the more we pray, the more confident we become in prayer. And I'm convinced that part of what is affecting the Western church today is not that we're praying the wrong prayers, but it's an utter lack of prayer. We feel too busy to pray. We feel like God doesn't really care about the concerns that we have in our life or the things that we're facing might be too insignificant to bring up in prayer.

And our hearts are suffering for it, our families, our marriages, our children, our parenting, our relationships, our neighborhoods. All of them are affected by our lack of prayer. And so this isn't something that we add to our to do list like, oh, gosh, OK, I need to pray more. Rather, it's an invitation from the God of the universe who welcomes us to come to him weary and heavy burdened. And Jesus says, I will give you rest.

Come to me. That is his heart for us that that we would pray more, not because we need to impress God or because he expects it of us. Rather, he wants us to find that rest that's only found in his presence. Yeah, I sometimes think of this in terms of a sit down and listen time with God. Because in the conversation, if we if we're reading the scriptures and listening to God, it's just natural to talk back to God about what we just read, you know, and make it a real conversation, which is this book's going to be really helpful to people to learn to do that.

The matter of feeling natural, this kind of relationship with God. I've seen this in marriages as well, that sometimes maybe a wife will be much more comfortable praying out loud. Maybe her husband's not. Or it could be the other way around, of course. What do you think that is sometimes true? Yeah, I have seen this spirit of comparison in prayer as well, where we think that people who pray a certain way more confidently or maybe in some cases more pompously, with big words, with intonation, we tend to compare our prayers to those prayers. Like, oh, I don't sound like that. God must not listen to my prayers then. Or he must be disappointed in the way that I pray. But just like you and I have different cadence in our in the way we talk to people. My husband and I have different ways of conversing with people. So we have different ways of talking with God as well.

And that's all right. We serve a creative God, and he created us in so many creative and different ways. I think that we might have different personality types when it comes to prayer.

My husband will pray sincerely and from his heart. And yet his prayers often tend to be short and to the point. That's just the way that he communicates in day to day relationships. And it's the way that he talks with God as well. And I might be maybe more descriptive in my prayers or maybe I bring to mind verses in my prayers, because that's the way that I talk in conversations with my friends, too. I'll give examples or maybe I'll give bits of dialogue if I'm telling a story. And so that translates to my conversation with God as well. So I think we're better served not in comparing the way I pray to the way you pray to the way someone else prays, but rather coming back to the basics and saying this is a conversation with the God of the universe who created me and who knows me. Am I being honest with him? Am I opening my heart to him, holding nothing back? And am I having those conversations?

Because he welcomes us again to come just as we are and to be bold and confident and authentic in the way that we talk with him. You know, I sometimes call those two personality types pointers and painters. The pointers in their conversation, they just get right to the point, you know. And the painters, they paint the whole picture, you know, what color the room was and what the floor looked like. This is their personality. So they bring that to prayer and the pointer gets right to the point of what's on their heart.

And the painter will do more what you're doing. But I think accepting those, yeah, that's the big issue. Talk about the main challenges that people face today in their prayer lives that first century Christians probably didn't face.

And then how do we overcome those differences? Yeah, I'm sure that every generation of Christians has faced challenges in their spiritual growth. But one of the big challenges that I think is probably more distinct for our generation, for those of us living in the 21st century, is just our attention spans are so short these days. We feel busy and rushed and hurried and overwhelmed and hustling from one thing to the next. In fact, there was a research done by Crossway that asked, what's the number one obstacle in your life when it comes to praying more? What's the thing that you feel keeps you from praying? And by far, the majority of respondents said distraction.

They had every intention to pray. And yet something would ding on their phone or an email would come up or a child comes in and interrupts asking for a snack. Something happens that distracts us, interrupts us, is asking for our attention. And even when we do sit down to pray, sometimes it's not the external distractions that keep me from being focused in prayer, but my own thoughts. When I finally have a moment to sit down and talk to the God of the universe who knows me and created me, I might get 45 seconds into my prayer and in that stillness, I remember, oh, I need to pull out the meat from the freezer to defrost for dinner tonight. And oh, there's a load of laundry in the wash that I need to put in the dryer before it sours.

And oh, my friend's birthday is next week and I didn't get her a gift. And so all of these thoughts come tumbling into that moment of stillness because the rest of the time I'm going nonstop. And I think that's most of our experiences from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment our heads hit the pillow at night. We have very little time to be still, to be silent, to sit in quiet and to rest. And that level of noise pollution in our lives is something that is definitely a development in the last 100 years, 150 years where there's constantly something asking for our attention, whereas even my own grandmother and great grandmother living in the farm life in Romania, most of their time was spent in quiet and in silence, working the fields or preparing the meal. Unless there was a person with them, they didn't even have a radio to turn on for noise. Our own lives are filled with noise.

And so if we don't set aside intentional time for silence and stillness, for quiet and rest and conversation with God, it's just never going to happen naturally. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. Our guest today is Asherita Choo-Choo, author of Prayers of Rest, Daily Prompts to Slow Down and Hear God's Voice. You can find out more and hear our program again at our website, FiveLoveLanguages.com.

You can also find more simple ways to strengthen relationships right there. That's FiveLoveLanguages.com. Our guest, Asherita Choo-Choo, is a bestselling author, national speaker, host of the Prayers of Rest podcast. She's married to Flavia, her high school sweetheart, and together they raise their three children in Northeast Ohio. If you want to know more about Prayers of Rest, you can also use the website moodybooks.org.

That's moodybooks.org. Asherita, before the break we were talking about the challenges that we have today of just being so busy and just voices calling at us all along. At the very end you said, in terms of overcoming that, if we don't have an intentional time to sit down with God and listen and talk to God, we're not likely to have it at all. So is that what you see as really the way we overcome this tendency to just be too busy? You have to make time.

I think that's what you were saying. Yeah, I mean, how many of us have heard that phrase that you have time for the things that you make time for? And that's been true in my own life.

I mean, I'm married to my high school sweetheart, and we have three kids ages eight and under, and there is hardly a moment of silence in my life from the moment my kids wake up. And it's only when I build in intentional time to be with God, to listen to his voice, to tell him the things on my heart, that that happens. And I'd love to be able to have an hour and a half, two hours every morning of quiet with Jesus with my hot coffee and the sun rising over the horizon, and that's just not my life right now. And so I need to find ways to build in the habit of resting in God's presence, talking with him, being Paul says, walk in the spirit as well as pray without ceasing.

And so somehow those two are connected. There are ways that I've learned that we can build in the habit of prayer, of talking with God alongside other habits like making coffee or going to drop off the kids at school. Like there are ways that we can connect conversation with God, a time of intentionally telling him what's on our hearts and listening to what he has to say for us at the same time as we're doing our regular day to day things.

And so rather than having this idealized monastic view of a whole chunk of time dedicated to prayer and holding off until that idealistic day comes, which I think will never come, I think it's so much better for us to look for ways that we can fold moments of prayer into our day to day life. Yeah. So that life becomes really kind of an ongoing conversation with God, right? Exactly.

Yeah. How do you answer the question that people have sometimes raised? If God knows everything, why do we need to pray? I mean, that's a great question. And I think it lies in how we view prayer. Like if prayer is a transaction in which we inform God of our needs and then expect him to do something about it, then yes, that question would make sense because an all knowing God already knows everything. So why would he expect us to even have to pray? He should just magically be able to take care of our situations. But if instead we view prayer through the lens of scripture, through the lens of Jesus' invitation in Matthew 11, where he says, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest, then prayer is not simply informing God about what's happening in our life.

But prayer is an invitation to come and sit and rest with the God of the universe. It is him flinging open the heavenly throne room and us being able to boldly approach the throne of grace with confidence because of our high priest, Jesus, who lives to intercede for us. And we get to be with him. We get to spend time with him. We get to tell him all the worries and the heavy burdens, not because he doesn't know, but because he wants us to lift that burden off our shoulders and place it on his and find that rest that comes only when we pour everything out to him. Peter says, cast all your cares on him because he cares for you. He wants us to tell him those things, not because he doesn't know, but because he knows that we need that.

We need prayer. We need to be the ones who put words to those burdens because in doing so, we're able to release them to him and then receive the rest and the peace that comes only in his presence. I sometimes hear people say, I really don't know what to say in prayer. I hear other people praying in public and that sort of thing and I just don't know what to say. Especially when they kind of feel like God's not listening anyway.

I've asked him for this and this and it didn't happen. How do you respond to those people? I think we've all gone through seasons where it feels like, God, are you listening to what I'm saying? Are my prayers hitting the ceiling or are they even making a difference? And the encouragement for me comes from knowing that even Jesus cried out, God, my God, have you forsaken me?

Where are you? Those feelings of abandonment, of desperation, of saying I'm not emotionally, I'm not feeling a connection with you right now. And so it's hard to even pray. But what we see Jesus modeling is that he prayed the Psalms on the cross in those last few moments. The words of the psalmist were the words that he owned them as his own. And I found that practice so helpful for me even recently with what's going on in the news, with so many heavy developments in the last few years.

It just seems like it's been one crisis after another, one heartache after another. And when I have no words to pray, one thing that helps is going to the Psalms and just starting to pray the words of Psalms. Psalm 46 is one of my favorites. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in time of trouble. And there have been seasons where that's been my whole prayer is just repeating that over and over again, preaching the gospel truth to my own heart, even when it felt like God was far away, reminding myself that God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in time of trouble. The other thing that's been so helpful to me is the assurance from Scripture that when we have no words to pray, the Spirit of God is praying for us in our own moans and groans and in that overwhelming heartache of, I don't even have a song to hold on to.

I have no lifeline. And yet I'm going to still bow my face before the Creator, bow my knees before Him instead of running to Instagram to scroll and numb the pain, instead of running to the pantry and choosing the ice cream bowl to kind of give me that momentary relief or just dozing in front of the TV. All those things that we can turn to, to try to ameliorate the pain in our life. I am still going to make my way before God, even if I have no words. And I am going to sit before Him and groan, knowing that the Holy Spirit is taking those groans and interceding with Jesus Christ before the Father. And they're making sense of it, even when I have no words. What a loving God that He still invites us to come to Him. I'm sure some of our listeners can identify with that. You know, especially when you're going through a hard, hard time and your heart's broken and you don't know what to say. Literally groaning.

Wow. You know, Gary, maybe we could pause right here and ask you to go back. That's one of the things about the book that that's so helpful is you help you walk us through that. Could you go back to that psalm that you just mentioned a moment ago? And could you just pray that for the listener who is going through some of that deep water at this point in the program? Psalm 46 says, God is our refuge and strength and ever-present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear. Thank you that you are our refuge. Thank you that when we're surrounded by trouble and challenges and difficulties and the unexpected and the unknown. Thank you that we can run to you, that you welcome us. You don't turn us away.

You don't expect us to put on a smile and pretend everything is OK. But in the midst of our trouble and tribulation, you open wide your arms and you say, come to me. God, we confess that in the midst of the challenging times that we're facing right now, it's so easy to run to all the other things, to numb the pain, to ignore the cry of our hearts, to pretend everything's all right.

Because sometimes that's easier than than facing the sorrow and the grief and the heartache. But thank you that we don't have to face it alone. That because you are our refuge, because you are our strength, that we can go into those hard and dark places with you, confident that you will never leave us or forsake us.

So we rest in you right now. God, we trust that you will be with us in the storms, in the hardship. Thank you that we don't have to fear because you are in control. You are the God of the universe and you hold us in the palm of your hand and you will never let go. So, God, we trust you regardless of what tomorrow brings, no matter what the headlines say. God, we trust you and we will rest in you because you are our refuge. We love you, Jesus. Amen.

Amen. Hey, Sarita, there are people who will say, you know, I just struggle to stay focused when I am praying. You know, just my mind runs other places. How can we develop deeper focus and concentration in our prayers? Yeah, well, I mean, I've struggled at that, too. I am a millennial, so my phone is almost glued to my hand so I can understand that struggle of sitting down to pray and then, you know, thinking of all the other things. And in the midst of that, two things that I found so helpful in developing a habit of restful prayer.

One is something I've already mentioned before, and that's practice. In the times when I sit to pray and all these other thoughts come to mind, I'll have like a little sticky note next to me and I'll remember the meat in the freezer and so I'll write it down on a sticky note and just kind of release it. And then, you know, the other thing will come up and I'll write it down so I can come back to a place that's centered on silence and seeking God's presence.

The other thing that I found really helpful in developing a habit of stillness and quiet in prayer is something that I've read someone else doing it called Palms Down, Palms Up. And it's taking those worries and instead of ignoring them, visualizing that I take each one and I place it in God's hands, palms down. And so the friend's birthday that's next week that I don't have a birthday gift yet and so I'm tempted to start picking up my phone and researching gifts I could get for my friend instead of spending time in prayer.

I mean, this is just real life talk here. I might take that worry or that concern or that thought and visualize taking it in my hands and placing it palms down in God's hands and saying, God, thank you for this friend. Thank you for the gift of her friendship. Thank you for the ways that she makes me laugh and smile. And God, you know I'm worried about getting her the right gift to communicate how much she means to me.

Would you help me? Just just lead me through your spirit, guide me, give me wisdom, show me how to communicate how much she means to me. And then I'll turn my hands, palms up and just sit in silence with God and receive anything he might give me.

Sometimes a thought pops to mind and I'll remember like, oh, she really likes this particular book or she likes that flavor ice cream. And I'll receive that as God's spirit answering and leading me. Sometimes it's just a sense of peace and assurance that he gives me in exchange for that. And so it's really helped me to view the thoughts that come to mind when I try to pray that I used to think were distractions and I would get so hard on myself. Like, why can't I just be more focused in prayer? And it's been such a gift with palms down, palms up to take those distracting thoughts and have them be prompts for conversation with God. And those things will keep coming to mind and I keep handing them over to God until finally my mind has settled and I can be in a place of stillness.

And the cool thing is you can do this literally anywhere. You can be on the sidelines of your kid's soccer game and spend that time in prayer. You can be in bed trying to go to sleep.

And that's when so many of us struggle with anxiety. And this palms down, palms up way of having conversation with God helps us to stay focused in our conversation with him. We hope today's broadcast is encouraging you. Tell a friend about our program. They can hear the conversation with Asherita Choo Choo at FiveLoveLanguages.com. Dr. Gary Chapman is our host, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Our featured resource is the book Prayers of Rest, daily prompts to slow down and hear God's voice. Go to FiveLoveLanguages.com and click resources, then Building Relationships.

Again, go to FiveLoveLanguages.com. Asherita, what you were just talking about a minute ago in that last segment was so freeing about the palms up, palms down. I think a lot of people beat themselves up for having these thoughts and, you know, I've got to do this and that.

And I think having a piece of paper right next to you where you can jot that down, you can remember it later, or I got to send this email, that kind of thing. But rather than saying, oh, you know, I'm no good at prayer. No, you just say, thank you, God, for bringing that to mind. And I'm going to leave that with you. What you're doing is you're engaging what's really going on in here and leaving it with him, right?

Absolutely. And it really has been so freeing in my life to change the way that I think about those thoughts. It used to be beating myself up like, I grew up in a Christian family.

I should have this figured out by now. Like, I feel like I should be so good at praying. And yet these thoughts keep coming to mind. But instead of viewing them as distractions, once you reframe these thoughts as, no, these are prompts for prayer.

Like, they are coming to mind for a reason. And again, this is the beautiful thing about God's invitation to prayer. He wants us to bring all those things to him. There's nothing too small, too insignificant, too big, too hard, too embarrassing to talk to him about. And so there might be a conversation that comes up.

Maybe, for example, just this morning as I was talking to God, I just woke up brushing my teeth, getting ready for the day, talking to him about the day. A conversation came up that I had last night and there was something unsettling in my heart about it. And so I just asked him, would you show me? Did I say something wrong there?

Did I do something wrong? I love praying the words of Psalm 139, search me, O God, and know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is anything that's not the right way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. And so instead of allowing that conversation to cause anxiety in my heart or to cause a sense of restlessness, I bring it to him and I say, God, would you show me? I'm going to trust that God's heart for me is good. And if I did something wrong, his Spirit will convict me so I can ask for forgiveness.

And 1 John 1 says, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us. And that's been such a freeing perspective shift for me that I can bring all of these things to him in prayer. I can lay them before him. I can ask questions. Jesus says, my sheep know my voice. They hear my voice. I talk to them.

They follow my voice. He said he would send his Spirit who would lead us and guide us in everything we need to know. So if there is ever a sense of restlessness in our hearts about something, if there's something that's distracting us from prayer and we try to shove it down and ignore it and it keeps popping up, maybe that's the very thing that God is inviting us to talk with him about so that we can experience the rest that he wants to give us in that situation.

This is so good, Asharita. In the book, you talk about the rest prayer format. What is that and how does it differ from other prayer models? Yeah, so the rest way of praying is something that I developed for my own personal prayer life, because like I said, I grew up in a Christian family. I learned to pray by watching other people pray. And I grew up on the acts model, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.

And that was so helpful for me as a child and as a teenager. But what I found as an adult is that when I'd make time to pray, I would talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, tell God all the things, and then I'd run off because we live busy lives. And I found that I never really had time to be still with God, to be quiet with him, to rest with him. And my soul was craving that stillness. Psalm 46, 11 says, be still and know that I am God. Matthew 11, Jesus invites us to rest in him.

And I wanted that. I wanted to remind myself that prayer is a two-way conversation, that God invites us to tell him what's on our hearts. But he also wants us to be still and to listen to his voice as well. So the rest prayer format is what I developed to help me and other listeners on the podcast and readers of this book to build an intentional time in our prayer to truly rest and be still with God.

So the R stands for recite God's goodness. It's a time for us to remember who God is and what he's done and to praise him for that. I love praying scripture. I love looking at a verse and saying, what does this show me about God? And how can I recite his goodness in this passage? And sometimes it's just one or two things, but it really helps me to frame my mind on praise and worship as I begin talking to the God of the universe who knows us and loves us personally.

So that's the R in rest. The E is express your neediness, and this is the part where God invites us to be honest with him, to confess our sins, to be honest about the hard emotions that we're facing, whether it's anger or bitterness or judgmentalism or worry or fear, depression. So many hard emotions that we feel like good Christians shouldn't really struggle with, and yet we do. So we have the opportunity to express our needs to God, to be honest with him, to tell him what's on our heart and to ask him boldly for those things that we need. Jesus says, if you who are earthly parents, your son asks for bread, you're not going to give them a snake.

You love your kids. How much more your heavenly father, when you ask him, how much more will he give you good things when you ask that of him? Even his own spirit, he will pour out on you. And so we recite God's goodness, then we express our neediness. And then the S is the time when we seek God's stillness. And this is what has changed so much for me is after I praise God and worship him, after I bring my needs to him, I'll just take some time to be still, to become aware of God's presence around me and within me through his spirit that he has placed in our hearts. God is with us.

So we just get to be with him. And it might not be more than 20 or 30 seconds of quiet and stillness. In that time, those distracting thoughts might pop up. And I used to panic and now I don't. I bring them to God in prayer and I come back to a place of stillness, just being loved by the God who made us and knows us.

What a beautiful gift. And then we end with a T and rest, which is trust God's faithfulness. And I noticed this pattern in the Psalms that so much of the Psalms has praise and worship at the beginning and a time of the Psalmist, David and others being honest with God about what they're struggling with.

The Selah, the part in the Psalms where you're pausing and pondering and being silent about what you just prayed. But then so many Psalms end with this declaration of trust. God, in whose name I trust, he's worthy of praise, he's going to do these things. And so we remind our own hearts and souls of the good news of the gospel.

And we can go back into our day in a spirit of prayer, trusting that those things we entrusted in him, those things we rested in God's care, he'll take care of them and he'll take care of us, too. Thanks for joining us today for Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Asherita Choo-Choo is our guest and our featured resource is her book, Prayers of Rest, Daily Prompts to Slow Down and Hear God's Voice.

You can find out more at fivelovelanguages.com. Asherita, tell us about your experience during COVID with this rest model of prayer. Yeah, well, we were about two weeks into the lockdown in March of 2020. And like much of the world, just not really knowing what would come next, what tomorrow would hold. And also, as much as I love my husband and children, we had been locked up together for two weeks straight. And that was more than this introverted heart could handle. It just felt like I had not had a moment of quiet to myself and just that on top of all the anxiety and the unrest and our lives in our world being upended overnight. And I remember being at the kitchen sink and my heart started racing and my palms got sweaty and I got really clammy and I started shaking all over. And I remembered just being so frightened by what was happening to my body because I'd never experienced anything like that. And later I Googled it and Dr. Google told me it was a panic attack. I was like, oh, OK.

I'd never had a panic attack that had affected me so physically. But I really think it was the culmination of everything just being pushed together. But there at the kitchen sink, the kids were playing in the living room and I think they were arguing over whose toy was who and whose turn it was to play with it. And there I was in the midst of just being shaky and feeling like the world is spinning around me. And I went to my laundry room and shut the door because that was the only place in the whole house that I could have a moment of quiet. And I slumped against the wall to the floor and just started sobbing. And I remember over and over again saying, I can't do this anymore.

I can't do this anymore. I don't I don't know how I'm going to get through an endless row of days of children wanting to know what's for breakfast and lunch and snack and dinner and the laundry and the news and the unknown and not seeing my family. And this global pandemic and the division between friends and family and the politics and just everything. It felt like the walls were closing in. And the only thing I could say is I can't do this anymore. And the future felt so dark and bleak. And I remember thinking I should be praying right now, but I have no words.

I don't even know what to say. I just know I can't do this anymore. And after a few minutes of just a rapid down spiral, the words that came to mind were Psalm 46. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in time of trouble. And my heart responded, I can't do this anymore. And again, God is our refuge and strength. And for minutes on end, it felt like a back and forth, my heart saying I can't do this anymore. The voice of God through his spirit bringing words to mind that I had memorized long ago, reminding me God is our refuge and strength.

And he is a very present help right there on the laundry room floor when everything felt so bleak. And finally, my heart rate settled down and my body just kind of settled in its space and my breathing kind of returned to normal. And I remembered thinking this unique moment in history, at least in our lives, I sensed God's invitation saying, come to me. Let me be your refuge.

Find your hiding place in me because you have literally nowhere else to go. All those excuses of being too busy to pray, they were all taken away in an instant. And suddenly so many of us had more time on our hands than we knew what to do. And that day I made a commitment that I'm going to wake up before the children and pray.

And I invited my friends on Instagram. I said, I don't know if any of you feel this way, but I feel like I need to set aside time to pray. And so I'm going to wake up every morning at seven a.m. and I'm going to go live here on Instagram and we're going to pray for a half hour. And we used the rest prayer format to pray through scripture. And the next morning I woke up and my heart was shaking a little bit, like, I don't know if anyone's going to show up.

I don't know if I'm going to make a fool of myself. And my finger hovered over that go live button. But I thought, you know, even if no one else shows up, I need this and the accountability is good for me. And so I hit go live and dozens of women from around the world joined in to pray that first day and then the next day and the next day. And for eight weeks straight, we gathered to pray every morning and to start our days by resting in God's presence.

And it wasn't just my experience. It was so many of these people in different countries around the world saying this is our lifeline. And gathering together to pray in the morning and seeking God's face first thing helps settle our hearts in the assurance that God is trustworthy. He is our refuge. And so no matter what the news headlines show, no matter what the numbers or the pandemic or the politics, regardless of what's going to happen, we can rest in our God. And that was such a beautiful way to experience the upheaval of the pandemic with our feet solidly planted on the solid rock. And then after those eight weeks of life prayer calls, we transitioned to a weekly podcast so that people can join from around the world any time of day. People gathering together to rest in his presence for a year and a half now. And that then became the prayers of rest book. Just such an incredible experience of seeing how God took a moment of weakness and vulnerability on that laundry floor and saying, I can't do this. And him inviting us to find a rest in his presence because when we are weak, that's when he is strong.

If there are listeners out there who would like to join that podcast, how do they do that? Sure, you can go to prayersofrest.com and that's where you can find links to listen to the podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts or even listen to it online. That's prayersofrest.com and you can also get a free prayer bookmark that outlines the R-E-S-T so that you can print it off, stick it in your Bible and rest in God's presence this way. Hey Sarita, as we come to the conclusion of our time together today, can you lead us through one of the prayers in the book so that we can see the type of prayer that we've been talking about?

Absolutely. This prayer is called Rest for Your Soul and it comes from Matthew 11, 28-30. And Jesus says, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. So let's begin by reciting God's goodness. Thank you, Jesus, for your invitation to come to you, even when I'm tired and have nothing to offer. You are gentle, you are humble, and you promise not just comfort or assurance, but rest for my soul.

Thank you, Jesus. So we move now to express our neediness. Oh God, I need you. So often I rush through my life, collapsing at the end of the day, exhausted. You know how tired I am. Help me to slow down and acknowledge the weight of my burdens. I'm worn out. I'm weary.

I know I can't do this on my own. God, I need you. So now let's seek His stillness and take a few moments to become aware of God's loving presence surrounding you this very moment.

Just be still with Him. And you can take as much time as you want in the seek His stillness portion. And then we move to trust His faithfulness. Precious Jesus, you do not turn away anyone who comes to you. So I bring my heavy burdens and lay them at your feet. I trade all my big expectations for your simple expectation to love you and to love others. And what a light, Lord, because you have loved me first.

So God, I trust you and I love you. And then for further prayer and study, there are passages at the bottom of the prayer that if you have more time, you can look them up. You can read and pray and study. It's just such a beautiful way to continue that prayer. So these prayers from the book can take as little as two or three minutes. And I love for them to be springboard prayers where you read the words and then you continue to put your own words of prayer and just spend time even writing in the margins, writing out your heart to God. He's the one who invites us to find rest in Him.

It's such a privilege. Well, I believe that this book is going to help many people, not just women, men and women, find prayer to be more what God intended it to be. And that is an ongoing conversation with God. Thanks for being with us today and thanks for taking time to write this book. Thank you so much, Dr. Chapman.

It's been my joy to be with you today. What an encouragement for anyone who wants to spend focused time in prayer. If you'd like information about our featured resource, go to moodybooks.org. The title is Prayers of Rest, Daily Prompts to Slow Down and Hear God's Voice. It's written by Asharita Chuchu. And you can go to moodybooks.org. You can also find out more at the website prayersofrest.com. And next week, how to hold on to love after you've lost a baby. Our thanks to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Todd. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.