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Podcast: How Journaling Could Reinvigorate Your Prayer Life (Erika Allen)

March 20, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Lord Is on Our Side

In today’s episode, Erika Allen talks about the struggles of consistent prayer, how journaling can help us with that, and what God really thinks about our baby steps towards him.

ESV Prayer Journal

ESV Prayer Journal

Erika Allen

This ESV Prayer Journal will guide you in a study on peace over 6 weeks, leading you to write and pray about finding peace with God, other people, and within our own hearts and minds. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:46 - You Are Not Alone in Your Struggle

Matt Tully
Erika, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Erika Allen
Thank you, Matt.

Matt Tully
It’s good to talk to you in this context. Some of our listeners might know, but probably many others wouldn’t, that we actually get to work together on a weekly basis.

Erika Allen
That’s right.

Matt Tully
Can you tell us a little bit about what you do here at Crossway?

Erika Allen
Sure. I’m the editorial director in the Bible department, so I work with our contributors and authors and editors on our resource Bibles—any Bibles that have additional study material. I help keep those processes moving, making sure everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing and when things are due and things of that nature.

Matt Tully
You also have a master’s degree from Wheaton College Graduate School. What did you study?

Erika Allen
I studied systematic and historical theology.

Matt Tully
I would imagine that for someone listening right now, there might be the assumption of, Okay, you work for a publisher, you oversee a lot of Bible projects, you have a degree in theology. You of all people should have the prayer game really down. Maybe you and someone like a pastor would be the kind of people who would really know how to pray and have a consistent prayer life. And yet, I think it’s probably fair to say that you struggle with prayer just like the rest of us. Is that true?

Erika Allen
That is absolutely true, and I feel the same way, that I should have this down at this point in my life. I do not. I am definitely a fellow struggler. Prayer is hard for me. It does not come naturally.

Matt Tully
Have there been people in your life who you’ve looked up to, like mentors or spiritual leaders, in your life who did seem to have a really great prayer life and you’ve sort of always felt like, I wish I could be like that person?

Erika Allen
Absolutely. And even close friends. I have one in particular—she and I have been friends for about twenty years—and prayer just seems to come so naturally to her. We’ll be having a conversation and she’ll just suddenly stop and start praying about something and. I’m just always amazed. It’s not awkward for her at all. She just says, Oh, I need to talk with the Lord about this for a second or Let’s ask him. I love that. I would love to be at a point in my walk with the Lord where it came that naturally.

Matt Tully
It seems like there are two categories of prayer. One is the throughout the day, maybe that default response to some situation, like it sounds like your friend was exhibiting there. And that’s such a valuable ongoing conversation with God that we want to cultivate. But then there’s also the more intentional set-aside times of prayer that we also want to be better at. Do you feel like you are better or worse at one of those?

Erika Allen
That’s a really good question. I do feel like I’m better at shorter prayers throughout the day. One of the big struggles I face is I get overwhelmed by just the sheer number of things I need to be praying about. And so I feel like if I’m not breaking it up throughout the day, as things are on my heart or on my mind, then I can just almost get into a stage of panic over it and just kind of shut down. I have young children, and so that’s helpful because we pray with them in the evening. That’s kind of our one time that we have just real intentional, longer periods of prayer. But really what it looks like for me is just different times throughout the day when I’m alone—if I’m in the car especially, just a few moments of quiet.

Matt Tully
I was going to say, having that rhythm with kids at bedtime can be helpful for building in some of those times for prayer. And yet I also think, as a parent of young children, there are challenges with that where schedules can be all over the place and there’s not a lot of those quiet times necessarily. What are some of the other reasons—in your experience or even in your own life or talking with other people—what are some of the other reasons why you think we often struggle to pray?

Erika Allen
I’ll give you one that I personally face. One is I am a perfectionist. I think a lot of us feel like there’s a certain way that we have to be able to pray. You have to do it right.

Matt Tully
The words that you use?

Erika Allen
The words that you use, the amount of time you spend in prayer. There are just all sorts of rules we impose on ourselves, based on our upbringing and what we’ve heard and maybe misunderstood. So I think that’s one—you feel like it has to look this specific way, and if I can’t do that then I won’t pray. I think the common denominator is discouragement for all of us, and that manifests in a bunch of different ways, like why we’re discouraged or how we end up there. But that seems to be what most people struggle with, for whatever reason. For me, a big one, and it’s one where my theology doesn’t necessarily match how I live it out, where I tend to think that if I have not done a particularly good job walking with the Lord during a particular day, then he doesn’t really want to hear from me. I don’t feel like I have any business coming to him in prayer. And so there’s a shame or a guilt factor that I know should not be there.

Matt Tully
Unpack that for us, because I think we’ve all experienced that. It’s that ironic, so counterproductive dynamic where we feel like we’re failing in this regard, spiritually, and so our response then is to run away from God in the midst of that rather than running to him in prayer or in the Bible or what have you. What theological issue do you think is not figured out there?

Erika Allen
I think one of the most helpful things that has clicked for me is—or is starting to click. I’m still trying really hard to just get it ingrained in my heart so that it is natural, and that is that God is for us. I remember a few years ago in chapel (it was pre-Covid, so it was at least three years ago)—

Matt Tully
I wonder if pre-Covid, post-Covid is going to be this new major time marker for our lives.

Erika Allen
I think so. You’ve got to throw it in there somewhere. But at the chapel service here at Crossway, we sang the hymn “Be Still My Soul, the Lord Is on Your Side.” And we got the first line out, which is that—“Be still my soul, the Lord is on your side”—and it broke me. Which is a very unusual response for me to have to music. That’s just not really how I’m wired. But I had to leave. My soul needed to hear that, that the Lord is on my side. And that has just been something that has really been on my heart and mind for several years, just trying to really grasp that God is for me. He’s not waiting on us to mess up. Psalm 103:13–14 says, “For as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him, for he knows our frame. He remembers that we’re as dust.” And I think about that all the time. And that verse kind of motivates me, or helps me, remember that the Lord knows us. We’re sometimes shocked by our sin when we fail, like, I cannot believe at this point in my walk with the Lord that I had that thought or I said those words or I forgot to do this or failed to do this. But God’s not shocked by that. He remembers our frame, he knows we’re dust, and he shows us compassion— freely and willingly—and always welcomes us with open arms. It seems like to me that’s the thing. We forget that God is for us, that he loves us, that he’s kind to us, and that his grace and his goodness toward us aren’t contingent on how well we’re doing spiritually. So I think that’s been the most helpful thing for my prayer life. And I say it’s still a huge struggle, because I still almost daily wonder, Does God want to hear from me?

Matt Tully
That’s so interesting because there are those—we’ll call them emotional or even theological issues—that we have; wrong ways of thinking that discourage us in our prayer life. They prevent us from praying like we should and even want to, to some extent. I wonder though, for other people, maybe they would say, I don’t think I feel like that necessarily. I don’t think I feel like God’s upset at me or disappointed in me. The issue for them is maybe, I just don’t seem to care enough. I don’t feel a desire to pray like I should. I’m apathetic, or life feels like it’s going okay without it. What would you say to that kind of person?

Erika Allen
That’s a huge struggle too. It seems like that’s particularly a struggle when life’s going well, when things are going pretty smoothly. I know for me, at least, that’s often the case. My prayer life is usually the most vibrant when I’m really struggling, whether it’s a health scare or something going on with our family, or if it’s even just a situation where I do not know how to respond.

Matt Tully
What does that say about us as Christians that that’s the case, that we go to prayer when we’re struggling and that’s really the only time?

Erika Allen
We have a really hard time with dependence on the Lord. I think we all, maybe for some of us more than others, really want to be self-sufficient. We really want to figure things out or do things or I’ve got this. I think just because of our fallen nature we really fight against that need for God and just that total reliance on him. That’s what it seems like to me, but then he’s kind and he allows us to go through situations where you have to face that head on. I think Covid (here we go again) has just really brought that home. This is something we can’t control. There are so many different experts or different voices saying this is how you should act or how you should respond. And I know for me it’s just really made that very, very clear, just how much we’re dependent on the Lord moment by moment, listening to the Spirit to know how to act in every situation, how to respond, which way to go.

Matt Tully
You mentioned earlier that one of the other things that has been a challenge for you in prayer is just feeling overwhelmed by all the different things to keep track of or pray for. Is that something that you think is unique, not that common, or do you feel like you’ve heard from other people that that can sometimes be a stressor for them in prayer?

Erika Allen
I have not had anyone else tell me, so I do wonder if that an Erika-specific struggle. And it could be, but I doubt it, that, especially for us here at Crossway, we’re surrounded by other believers constantly. How many times in the course of a day do you say, I’ll be praying. I’ll keep that in prayer. I’ll remember you? So, how do we remember to do that? At the end of the day, are we keeping track?

Matt Tully
It can be overwhelming when you’re just trying to remember that kind of stuff.

Erika Allen
It can be.

11:34 - How Do Prayer and Journaling Compliment Each Other?

Matt Tully
I’ve known people who have just had these really elaborate, sophisticated, powerful systems for keeping track of prayer requests, and that was just their thing. But I know for me that’s never really taken hold. It feels too complicated. It feels too hard to keep track of stuff like that. So that’s like a nice segue into this broader topic of journaling, and journaling connected to our prayer. You have written some prayer journals that Crossway is publishing. There’s going to be a whole series of them, and we’ve done four thus far. I wonder if you could just speak to that broad topic of why journaling alongside our prayers can be a helpful thing, regardless of what exactly that looks like. Why do you see those two things as helping each other?

Erika Allen
For me, there are two ways that journaling has really helped me. We’ll probably talk about this later, but I think journaling probably looks a little different from me than maybe what it does for some people. And there’s a lot of different ways you can journal. There’s no one right or wrong way. So, there are two things that it has done for me. One is it helps me remember. That’s a huge theme in Scripture, to remember what God has done in the past so that you remember to trust him today. In the book of Deuteronomy, that’s a huge focus. He tells the people of Israel, who are really struggling, to trust and to follow him and remember. There’s long passages recounting what he did for them in the Exodus in bringing them out. Remember. Remember. Remember. And journaling is one way we can do that, because we have a written record. I have a lot of different journals and Bibles, even from college and grad school when I was studying the Bible in a formal setting, and I’m amazed every time I pull those out. I’m like, Oh! I knew that fifteen years ago, but I’ve forgotten that! And the Lord tends to help me—it’s really interesting—pull those journals out, or those notebooks or even Bibles that I’ve taken notes in, at just the right moment when I needed to be reminded of something. So that’s a really useful tool, like I said, of having that record.

Matt Tully
It is amazing to me. I’ve had that same experience with journals or notes I’ve taken in the past, and I’ve been so surprised at how quickly I’ve forgotten things, things that seemed in the moment to be really significant times that God has “shown up” and made a big impact in my life. How quickly those kind of disappear. And if you don’t have that record of them, they lose a lot of the flavor and the weight and the color that they maybe originally had.

Erika Allen
That’s right. I love those. Those are treasures that I try to keep where I can get to them easily, even though I can’t remember what all is in them. But like I said, I love pulling those out, and it is remarkable how I feel like the Lord even leads that sometimes. I’ll go right to the one that addresses whatever I’m struggling with in the moment. The other thing that I think journaling does is it helps keep us focused. Again, maybe this ties into the feeling overwhelmed by the number of things that I feel like I need to be praying about. But then my mind wanders, especially, again, having young kids so there are distractions. But there’s something about writing that just helps eliminate, or at least temper, a lot of the distractions.

Matt Tully
It kind of engages our mind in a deeper way, when you’re having to articulate something rather than just let it sit in your head in a kind of vague way.

Erika Allen
That’s right. And I feel like I’m absorbing it more as I’m writing it out. There’s just an intentionality that’s there that’s really helpful.

15:06 - Keeping Track of Our Prayers

Matt Tully
Walk us through what you would be actually writing. When you’re sitting down to pray and you’re wanting to journal alongside with that, what are you actually writing down?

Erika Allen
For me, what journaling really looks like is more note-taking. Some people will write out full prayers. I don’t do that very often. That’s not usually what journaling looks like for me. For me, it’s more as I’m reading the text, I’m underlining, highlighting, and then I’m journaling. I’m writing questions—I don’t understand what this concept means. I’m writing down other verses that come to mind—This New Testament passage seems to connect to this Old Testament passage or to this other passage in the New Testament. So I’m writing that down for further study, where I can remember that question came up. I’m writing down prayer requests. Like I said, it’s more questions, things I want to look into or that I realize I don’t really have a good understanding of this. I need to grow in my understanding. It helps me keep track of those things.

Matt Tully
So for you, the idea of prayer journaling sounds like it’s very connected to the text of the Bible as well. How would you think about that? Why is that maybe a valuable way to get into journaling and even bolster our prayer life, to do that through the lens of Scripture itself?

Erika Allen
There’s something about praying Scripture. Let me actually back up and share a little bit of one of the things that was on my heart when we created the journals, because that might be helpful. I was very fortunate to be able to study the Bible both in college and grad school, and something that I realized far too late was I was spending so much time trying to figure out on my own, Well, this person that I really, really trust and admire said this about whatever doctrine, and this person that I also really, really trust and admire said something completely different. So what am I supposed to believe if these people, who are far more mature and know far more than I ever will, completely disagree with each other? I just about made myself crazy trying to sort that out. It was just a confusing thing. And far too late in the process, I realized, I’m not going to figure this out without the Lord’s help. This is not just an intellectual exercise. The reason I’m studying this is because I want to be able to follow the Lord more closely and be able to help others. Why on earth would I try to figure that out on my own without his help? Again, prayer’s a struggle for me, and the Lord was very kind to kind of expose that for me and shine a light on it. And so, coming back to your question, my prayer life since that time has been closely connected to my study of Scripture, because I don’t want to study the Bible, which is God’s word to us, without his help. And just that understanding that I need the Lord’s help to even know what questions to ask. Because sometimes we come to a passage or a doctrine and we try to figure it out, and the Lord will, very lovingly and graciously, say, That’s not where your focus needs to be at all. And so that’s how I’ve grown the most, I think, is just having that integration between the Bible study and the prayer. And then as you’re reading, you’re also thinking of all these other needs and how it relates, because the Bible’s living inactive and it speaks to us. And so as I’m reading, then I’ll think, Okay, well this speaks directly to this issue over here. The Lord is just very kind in that way, so it is connected. And I think what this hits at is our relationship with God. Journaling and praying and studying the Bible together just helps us grasp that relationship. Because the Lord is speaking to us through his word, our prayers are our way to speak back to him, to engage with what he said, to ask questions. And journaling is keeping track of that.

19:04 - Prayer Journals as a Tool for Bible Study

Matt Tully
It is really interesting to think about the unbreakable connection between prayer and the Bible. We really do believe that in the Bible, these are God’s words to us. This is God speaking to us, and prayer is our responding to him in our own words. That is such a cool connection there. It is at the heart of these prayer journals that you’ve created, and I’m sure that partly your experience there of what has worked for you has come into those. I wonder if you could just walk us through the actual format of what one of these journals looks like—how it does bring together God’s word, prayer, and journaling in a very tangible way.

Erika Allen
Absolutely. The journals are set up in such a way so that you study one foundational doctrine of Scripture. I think a lot of times the other motivation, or the other purpose behind the journals, is I’ve become increasingly aware over the past few years, especially as I’ve led a women’s Bible study for about the past seven years, how often we think we understand certain concepts of Scripture and we really don’t.
And we don’t realize that until we’re asked to articulate them.

Matt Tully
Unpack that really quick. You say it’s common that we think we understand something, but we actually don’t. Expand on that.

Erika Allen
If somebody asks you, What is grace?, we need to be able to say that it’s God’s unmerited favor toward us. But there are all these concepts—like even the gospel. We talk about the gospel all the time. It is the central message of Scripture, but I think there’s a lot of us that would really struggle to articulate that.

Matt Tully
And certainly struggle to then point to passages in the Bible that are key for that doctrine.

Erika Allen
That’s right.

Matt Tully
And so the gospel is one of those themes that you picked as one of the first Scripture journals that you created. Again, walk us through what the format looks like.

Erika Allen
We’ll take the gospel one for instance. All of them will take one theme and six key passages that really clearly address that theme. Six passages on the gospel over the course of six weeks. And so each week you’ll spend five days—you can, of course, spend more if you want to, but again, that’s five days just in the hopes that you don’t get discouraged if you miss a day.

Matt Tully
It’s nice to have little catch-up days built in.

Erika Allen
It is.

Matt Tully
We all struggle at times.

Erika Allen
Absolutely. So it’s six passages of Scripture over six weeks, intended to be studied over the six weeks for five days. Each day is broken down. There will be a short teaching (200–300 words) on a particular part of that passage. So maybe we focus on one verse, maybe it’s one phrase, maybe it’s one word. So a little bit of teaching, and then there are prayer prompts. These are ways maybe you can pray over this. You don’t have to, but if it’s helpful, because some of us need to know, especially if praying Scripture is not something that we’ve done in the past and if we’re just learning to do it, that this is what it might look like. Spend time meditating on this one word. Wrap your mind around that and your heart around that. So that’s how each day is broken down, with a little bit of teaching on one particular part of the passage, and then a prompt of how you might approach that prayerfully, and then space for journaling that you can then use however you want to. Again, if it’s note-taking, if it’s writing down specific prayer request, if it’s writing out your actual prayer—there are so many ways that you can use that space.

Matt Tully
That’s so cool. It is so simple on the one hand. There’s not a lot to it. You kind of just pick it up and you just follow along in there. And yet it also feels like it’s somewhat flexible, where people who might have different approaches to journaling and want to try different things, if they don’t know exactly what they like, they can do that.

Erika Allen That’s right.

22:52 - Pitfalls to Avoid

Matt Tully
Alright, maybe a last few questions. What pitfalls would you counsel that people try to avoid when it comes to their prayer life and incorporating journaling into that? What are some of the things that we want to be careful about?

Erika Allen
I think one is thinking that it has to look a certain way, whether that’s your prayer life or journaling. We’re always comparing ourselves to others, and if you have friends who have a really strong prayer life and you maybe think, That’s how you do that. Mine has to look just like this. So I think that’s one. Another, is that there’s two passages in particular that have been really helpful to me that I think are important for us to spend time focusing on and meditating on as we’re thinking through our prayer life. One is Matthew 6, where Jesus teaches us how to pray. And before he teaches us through the Lord’s Prayer, he says, Don’t be like the Pharisees who heap up words, who think that through many, many words that the Lord’s going to hear them.

Matt Tully
I think implied in that is these prayers that use really eloquent language, thinking that is going to impress God.

Erika Allen
You have to sound very spiritually mature and like you have everything together; polished before you can come to him. So he says, Don’t do that, because the Lord knows what’s on your heart before you even come to him. And so the Lord’s Prayer is so beautiful because it is so concise. And so I think that’s incredibly helpful to see that. And then the other one is in Romans 8:26–27, and that talks about the Spirit interceding for us. It says we don’t even know how to pray as we ought. So those two verses taken together are so interesting because Matthew 6 shows us that God knows before we even come to him, and Romans 8 shows us we don’t know. We don’t know, but the Spirit is leading us. That’s so humbling. But at the same time, it’s so freeing because it lifts this huge burden off of us and says the Lord, in his goodness and grace and through his Spirit, is directing our prayers. We can come to him in freedom. We don’t have to have it all together, because it is such a sweet, personal time of the Lord interacting. And we can come to him just as we are. So I think that’s so helpful in helping us avoid the pitfalls. One si thinking that we have to use the right words or spend an enormous amount of time all at one sitting or it has to be at a particular time of day. And just knowing, too, that sometimes we don’t even know. We’re so overwhelmed that we don’t know how to pray, and we just let the Spirit speak into that and guide us.

25:26 - Making Prayer a Habit

Matt Tully
It is amazing to look at those two verses together. I’ve never noticed that before, but it really does underscore the fact that prayer is not really for God; it’s for us. God knows what we need and what we want to pray for before we do, and he even knows what we need and how to articulate that far better than we do. So in some ways, we pray for our own sake. That’s just one of those things where we so often distort it into a duty that we need to muster up the willpower to do for some reason. As a last question, speak to those who’ve heard all this and they’re like, Yes, I do want to pray more. I have that desire. I struggle to be consistent in that. Any practical tips for trying to make prayer more of a habit for those who might be listening?

Erika Allen
I think the first thing to say is you’re not alone if you’re struggling. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a Christian for decades or four days. That’s just a struggle. So, know that. Don’t feel defeated and discouraged from the get-go because you feel like you’re the only Christian alive who doesn’t know how to pray, doesn’t have a real heart for prayer, or struggles with apathy I think the vast majority of us are in the same boat. So don’t give into discouragement there. Set realistic goals. Even with these prayer journals, they’re set up for you to do five days a week for six weeks. Well, maybe that’s not where you’re at right now. Maybe it takes you much longer than thirty days to get through one of these journals, and that’s fine. So I would say just start with something realistic. Maybe there’s one verse that you need to spend time meditating on for an extended period of time. Maybe that’s a week, maybe that’s a month or longer. But just camp out there. And God will bless that. He wants us to come to him, and he’s pleased even with our baby steps. I think we get discouraged by those, but the Lord is pleased with that. You do need to be intentional. And that’s something I struggle with as well is just laziness, if we’re honest, and just not recognizing how important prayer is and how effective it is. There’s so much grace, but we do need to be intentional.

Matt Tully
You might need to actually set your alarm for thirty minutes earlier.

Erika Allen
That’s right. Find the time that works for you. It may not look like it does for everybody else, but do be intentional. And start small. Try to kind of nip discouragement in the bud in that regard. And as we do it, I’m just always amazed because I go through periods where spending time in the word and prayer is significantly harder than others. And then when I come back to it, you realize how life-giving it is. And the Lord is very faithful in that regard. So just know as you do it, it’s going to become more natural. It’s not going to feel as awkward as maybe it does now.

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. Erika, thank you so much for helping us to think maybe a little bit more biblically about prayer, and remind us that, as you said, even our baby steps please God. God desires to commune with us.

Erika Allen
Thank you.

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