David:        As you know Karen, last week I took our 2016 Mazda into the repair shop because of a noise somewhere in the right back tire area.

Karen:        Right. We like that little car. And we also like Vince, the owner of the car service shop. Apart from yearly checkups, we had that car for nine years, I think. We’ve had no repairs to speak of for all that time. The sound in the back right tire is gone. So, what was the problem and how did Vince fix it?

Intro:           Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:        Karen, Vince very carefully explained to me what the problem was and how I fixed it. But I could no more repeat what he told me than the flight of the moon. Vince talks a different language than I do. He talks car language. I know where the steering wheel is. I know how to put things in the truck. I know how to lock the car. I know how to put gas in. Why that works?

Karen:        It’s just worked for us fine.

David:        He was very carefully. He’s so neat. He explains the whole thing to me when I…

Karen:        And you go, uh-huh.

David:        Yeah, that’s exactly what I say. But it’s running again, and the noise is gone, which is wonderful.

Karen:        I’m guessing as we head into this podcast, you may be thinking that sometimes we do that when it comes to us talking about spiritual matters.

David:        That’s exactly what I was thinking as Vince was talking. I think we probably do this as well.

Karen:        We have a professional look at the spiritual growth process.

David:        And we say things and we assume people know sometimes more than they really do. I was thinking, is that really true or not? And then I went over some of our recent podcasts and I think, yeah. Most people in church, if you say keep a prayer journal, what they’re thinking is not what we’re thinking. And it sounds probably much harder, much more superior in faith than the level they are, whatever.

But I thought, let’s go back and let’s see if we can get into very basic conversation about prayer journals.

Karen:        Ok.

David:        That’s what my agenda is for the day. Okay?

Question. Would King David’s Psalms in Scripture be an example of what you’re calling “keeping a prayer journal?”

Karen:        Wow. They’re more poetic. And I think they were songs that he had perhaps come up with and created himself and then someone got it written down.

David:        He probably wrote it, rewrote it.

Karen:        Yeah. I don’t know what the process was, but then they lasted through the centuries. And the Jewish people, I think, have put many of those Psalms to song.

David:         It is much more involved what he did. In fact, sometimes to be sung to the tune of such and such, you’ll see that little reference there. So, he’s writing a finished product and some of them may have been more spontaneous, but that’s at a level that I’m not talking about. When you say prayer journal or when I say prayer journal, that’s not what we’re thinking.

It’s more elementary than that. And a prayer journal, does a person write out his or her actual prayer or do they write out just ideas or what do they do? It sounds like it’s kind of a formal thing here.

Karen:        I looked up when I was doing a little research on this, what famous people kept journals, just journals. And it’s a very common practice among many, many people. And I don’t have the list of the names in front of me. There was a whole list of names of people. Most of us would know who they are, who kept journals.

David:        Were they publication ready? Is that what they were saying?

Karen:        No, I don’t think so. I think that journaling, at least for me, and I think it is for those people, is a way of capturing your inner life and remembering the things that have happened in your daily life. There’s a lot of reasons why people keep personal journals. Now, for me, my journals, and I’ve kept them for about 45 years, but as I begin to read them, and I’ve read maybe 10 years, and I need to read the next 30 or so, and just remind myself what I have captured in those pages, it helped me sort through my thoughts, my own thoughts.

It kept a record of my relationship with God, because my journals are prayer journals. They’re written lists, not so many paragraphs or anything like that, but they’re lists. Like for instance, if I’m praising God, I’ll start out with, I praise you because you are, and then I get very creative.

David:        You’re holy. You’re wise.

Karen:        Those would be common things, but how about you’re a God who really has a sense of humor, but…

David:        Would you actually say, but?

Karen:        Because he’s done something that I didn’t like, but it was very, very funny, and it forced me to look at myself in a different way. We get a little presumptuous as human beings about our accomplishment sometimes. So it’s his way of sort of in a funny way, kind of put me in my place.

David:        But you’re not thinking of someday someone looking at this, or you somehow going back to it and publishing. This is a more personal and more private.

Karen:        Yeah, but as I’m going back over those journals, I’m remembering the ways God worked in our lives. I’m very moved by some of the things, and I have a past memory of those things, but this is specific. These are the names of people we worked with in our churches and our ministries. Names I totally forgotten. It’s just been a journey into the past, but it was a past where I was attempting to grow spiritually. To be deliberate about my spiritual growth, and to be intentional, and to have this daily, almost moment by moment relationship with my maker. So, that’s what I’ve been going through.

David:        Let me ask you a question. I don’t know how you’ll answer this.

Is keeping a prayer journal a fancy way of praying with a pencil? Because I think if I could get people to pray with a pencil, it might be that I can move them forward in their spiritual life.

Karen:        Well, let me say something about…

David:        You don’t use a pencil; you use a ballpoint pen.

Karen:        I don’t use a pencil; I use a ballpoint pen. But for me, and I think that discussion with a neurologist might have an answer for this. There’s something much more intimate, at least for me, about taking a pencil and putting it to a page and writing out what I am attempting to pray in my heart to keep a record of it. And then I do a lot of lists. I’m praying for these intercessions from the one, this name, two, and that’ll go down the list. But that neurological impact of your handwriting across the page, we have a friend who’s a neurologist to say to him, “What happens in our brain when we write contrasted to the times when we’re typing things out?” I think typing goes so fast.

David:        Could you do a journal on the computer?

Karen:        I would have trouble doing that.

David:        And why is that?

Karen:        I don’t know, it’s like you’re losing, for me, it’s losing something. There’s nothing wrong with doing it. It’s better to do a journal on a computer than not to do a journal at all. So, I think my point is, however you decide you want to journal your spiritual prayers or your spiritual life or your personal growth, if a computer works for you, then do it. But for me, a pencil on hand is better.

David:        If you’re going to write things down, do you need to be sitting at a desk or a table when you pray? Because if I’m not sitting there, it’s hard for me on an airplane to write things down.

Karen:        I think you sit at your desk, don’t you?

David:        Yeah, I do what I pray.

Karen:        You keep a form of journal, but you haven’t kept the pages through the decades the way I have.

David:        I probably would have, but I never did. You actually get a binder, right?

Karen:        I get a spiral ring binder. I get the biggest one I can buy. But that’s been the format in which I have kept my prayer journals through the years.

David:        See, I just write it out on paper and then if there are extra notes in it, I keep the paper. But usually, I just toss them away. Your way is better than my way.

Karen:        I think that people who don’t prayer journal maybe need to be encouraged to try it. And then sometimes we drop off in certain of the spiritual disciplines in our life. And I would just encourage them to try again.

David:        What would your prayer journal look like if somebody said, “Let me just see what it looks like.” We can’t show them, but we can talk about it. So, tell me what it looks like. Is it like a normal book?

Karen:        Well, it’s handwritten. So, as we’ve said before, first I’d record the date and the place. This is sort of the formula that I’ve taken.

David:        These are not pages of a journal that you’re going to rip out, right?

Karen:        No, there’s the spiral ring journals with the three holes.

David:        And then you store them in the bigger binder.

Karen:        Then I have bigger binders. Yeah, that will hold five or six years.

David:        If you come and look at this, how long that’s going to last you. It’s going to last at least a number of months.

Karen:        Yeah, and because I get the biggest one I can, sometimes I’ll go even a year in it.

David:        So, you’re not looking for a leather boundary?

Karen:        No.

David:        Nothing that looks like a printed book, even if the pages were blank. That’s not what you’re doing. It’s much more crude than that.

Karen:        But David, there’s nothing wrong with that. For some people that aesthetic quality is important to them. And many things aesthetics are important to me, but not this. This is kind of working pages.

David:        So, you’re writing on both sides of the page?

Karen:        Both sides of the page, right, all the way to the back until I run out of pages.

David:        So, we got it. Doesn’t have to be special color or anything?

Karen:        No, this is not fancy. But to go back through 45 years, and I haven’t done them all, I’ve gone through about 10 years of journals. It is just such an extraordinary thing. And I have the way God has worked in our lives.

David:        Do you have a special place where you keep this binder? Because I know a lot of times, we’re getting older, you’ll say, I can’t find where I put such and such.

Karen:        Well, it’s supposed to be in my writing study. So, I’ll always be able to find it on my desk in my writing study. But sometimes I work at it at night after a long day, and I put it beside the bed, and then I can’t remember where it is. So, I’m going to try and just make sure I always put it on my desk when I’m done.

David:        I would say that I would be hard pressed to pray with a pencil or whatever, sitting in a chair. Do you have a problem doing that, or is that easy for you?

Karen:        I think I do crawl into bed and take my journal with me early in the morning or in the afternoon if I haven’t had time to work at it earlier or at night. I sometimes just crawl in bed and prop the pillows up and I’m relaxed. It sounds funny, you’re supposed to pray on your knees, but I don’t think it really matters as long as our mind is attending to being in it.

David:        Well, if you pray on your knees, it’s hard to keep a prayer journal that way.

Karen:        Plus, I have arthritis in my knees. In some other places, let’s forget about that.

David:        Okay.

Karen:        Record the date and time. That’s really important. And the place. I mean, I’ll take my prayer journal with me as we’re traveling on vacation. Just to get my mind in the mood of praying and of the Lord’s presence. I will start a section that says, Lord, I praise you for. I praise you that you are always interested in us, even when we’re not paying attention to you. Things that come to mind about who God is and how he’s interacted in our lives. And I can find, sometimes as I’m reading scripture, there will be a scripture that states who God is or praises him out. So, I’ll just copy that out of my Bible.

David:        Okay.

Karen:        So, it’s not always the same, but that’s the intent.

David:        But you could do this, say, when you’re on a plane.

Karen:        Yeah, easily. I have done prayer journaling on it.

David:        That prayer journal you’re talking about, it’s a little bit big on a plane.

Karen:        Well, I stick it in a folder. I have a carry on that I take with me because I often do work on an airplane when I’m traveling. Then I do the God hunt.

David:        You’ll have to explain that.

Karen:        Okay. When our kids were growing up, we had four, we didn’t want them to be raised with spiritual truths that were onerous. There was a principle in education, what’s learned with pleasure is learned full measure. So, we came up with the concept of the God hunt, sort of like hide and seek.

David:        God’s hide even we’re seeking.

Karen:        And we’re seeking. So wanted to put it in more of that kind of environment in our family was we’re talking around the table. Does anyone have a God hunt sighting today? And after a while, frankly, they became better at it than we were. I mean, it was amazing what children could see as far as God working in their lives. So, in my prayer journal, I always include the God hunt. How have I seen you.

David:        I don’t know how you did it because we look forever, but you found the car keys this time, Lord. If you hadn’t worked the way you did, we probably never would have found those.

Karen:        Yeah, that’s true. Yeah.

David:        So that’s a God hunt sighting. This is a very earthy thing you’re doing. You’re not trying to impress anybody. It’s a great God hunt sighting thing. Thank you, Jesus, that kind of thing.

Karen:        And I write those in my journal. So, I don’t forget how God is interacted in my life. And sometimes in 24 hours, there’s a list of them. I saw you this way. I saw you answer this prayer. I see your handy work as I step out the front or back door because our garden is beautiful and the beauty of it pushes me into worship, worshiping the Creator God. So, you know, obviously.

David:        Can you probably have a list of family, people and close friends and say if you’re on a plate, do you write out, here’s say Elias, who’s a grandchild, do you write out a prayer? You just write his name down and then you…

Karen:        It depends. It just depends on what I’m feeling.

David:        There are no formal rules.

Karen:        Not really. Although my prayer journal looks very orderly in the written part of them. They’re not messy. If people have tried prayer journaling and then stopped or gotten out of the habit of it, I think sometimes we have to find the form that fits who we are. Not the one that someone else has suggested to us because this is a very personal thing.

David:        Would you write a confession?

Karen:        Yes.

David:        Because confession is a big part of one’s prayer life over a period of weeks and years.

Karen:        I write those out. Yep.

David:        Okay. That doesn’t intimidate you that.

Karen:        Well, who’s going to read my prayer journals and then we all have human error in our lives. I think it would be a good thing to know that.

David:        Somebody’s probably dying to ask this. Do you think Jesus kept a prayer journal?

Karen:        Well, someone was journaling or keeping, you know, the account of Jesus life.

David:        Somehow His prayers, like The Lord’s Prayer, they got written down somewhere. Either he wrote it, or they said, “Okay, say that again, Jesus.”

Karen:        Thank goodness that all of those words of Christ and his teachings were recorded for posterity. So, someone was either sat down after he had been crucified and risen again and said, “We have to capture all of this, so we don’t forget it. We need to pass it along.”

David:        That’s a better answer than I was going to give. I don’t know what Jesus would have done.

Karen:        But it has been recorded. Yeah.

David:        Okay. Do thoughts come up that are not necessarily prayer thoughts? That is like the Lord popped a thought in your mind.

Karen:        Yes. Sometimes reminders. Oh, I forgot about that. And so, I’ll make a little list on the side.

David:        So, it’s still in the prayer journal, but it’s not really a prayer.

Karen:        Yeah, it’s not really a prayer, but I don’t want to forget it when I get out of my prayer time.

David:        That’s exactly. Don’t want to forget it. Because when you’re praying, you say, now what was it I was going to remember? You can’t remember the call. So, you just write it in the journal.

Karen:        Yeah. Sometimes it’s called, so-and-so.

David:        Yeah, that’s a very good illustration.

Karen:        Things like that. And that person will come to mind. And the fact that they’re going through a hard patch, or I haven’t talked to them for a while. So, there’ll be things like that.

David:        What do you do when you’re praying at home, and you get interruptions? You just put the prayer journal aside and then you can go back to it, I guess, and be at the very place where you left off.

Karen:        Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the advantages of a prayer journal, as you know where you’ve been that day, as well as for the rest of the months and years that you have been prayer journal.

David:        Describe for me one more time. If a person sees, say, not just the given prayer journal you’re working in, but say four or five of your prayer journals, are they going to be impressed or are they going to say, “Golly, I could do that!”

Karen:        Yeah, I think they would say, “Golly, I can do that.” Another area is God I need help with.

David:        Okay.  So, these are things you go back over, not the same I need help with, but as a category.

Karen:        As a category. And sometimes I can’t get things done because I don’t have the capacity to do it. We don’t have the money to pay for someone to do it. And so, I just take it to the Lord and say, “I need help with this.” And very frequently, that’s exactly what happens. There’ll be a gift in the mail or a royalty check or something that comes to help me pay for that. Generally, it’s an improvement or something’s broken.

David:        Other categories, as I ask you to list them?

Karen:        In the past, I’ve divided the days of the week up on Monday, I intercede for my family. On Tuesday, for our church and the church in the world and gone through Saturday.

So, that may help people to organize their thinking more. I certainly did when I was younger and had four kids in the house and people who had me living with us. And we had such a much busier broadcasting schedule. And I was traveling every other weekend out speaking. And so, that was more helpful to me to have an orderly way of handling our lives.

And then the next category, the last one is I review and check off answered prayers. So, I go back through the pages of my prayer journal and then I’ll give a little note of as far as how those prayers went.

When I am doing my daily prayer journal, I will have a section that says, “I thank you for…” and that will often cover those same requests I’ve had that have been answered. But it helps to just in the journaling process to go back and relook at the little note.

David:        You and I, we have different ways we go about it. The biggest difference between the two of us, as far as I can tell, is that I have a God Hunt diary and those I record. And those are fun to look back on, whether it’s a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, whatever.

Apart from that, however, all the prayers that I write out, I write on a single sheet of paper twice a day. And then I have a stack of people who through the podcast have asked for their prayer. And I go with it. There may be 50 names.

Karen:        Yeah, you’re really interested in those people.

David:        Yeah, I do. And they’re appreciative. I don’t say, did you know that I prayed for you again?

Karen:        But, but you’ll often, because some of them are donors.

David:        Yes.

Karen:        When they send in a cheque, you will write back on the receipt.

David:        I always do. I always do.

Karen:        “How are you? I’ve been praying for you.” And because you’re interested, and in knowing how they’re doing in that area of your life. I think that people appreciate that so much David. And it’s a, this stage in your life, a wonderful ministry that you have.

David:        I think it’s great. The biggest difference between the two of us is: we’re both writing, I’m just not saving thing. After I’ve finished my prayer time, I pull the page over and put in the waste basket.

I don’t know. I like yours better. I probably will go to a drug store and get one of those 8-1⁄2 by 11 spiral notebooks. And I’ll start to say, “Doing this…” and I may get bored with it. I don’t know.

I probably like yours better because when you talk about 35 years ago, these are people whose names I would never have remembered. It’s interesting to go back and look at that.

Let me put it to a sentence. What we’re saying, keeping a prayer journal is a time-honored path to spiritual maturity.

Are we spiritually mature? I guess we probably are compared to what we would have been…

Karen:        …without this practice. Yeah, I think we’ve reached a level of spiritual maturity. You’re never as wise as you could be or as kind as you can be.

David:        Depends on who you compare us to.

Karen:        Yeah, but there certainly has been decades of spiritual growth in our life, partly because of you handling your prayer journaling in your way and me handling my prayer journaling in my way.

David:        And I think that I have heard the Holy Spirit say, “Karen’s way is better than your way, David.” I say, “That’s often the case. I married a great lady.”

Karen:        Yeah, well, I can return that count.

David:        You know, believe me. Good talking with you, kiddo. Let’s let Dean talk, okay?

Outro:        You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.

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