David: As Christians age, Karen, I believe their prayer lives should mature and be stronger.

Karen: And why do you think that should happen?

David: Well, older age means that you usually have more free time, but also more reflection on what really is important in terms of one’s life.

Karen: But is that really what happens, or is it what we think should happen?

David: I don’t know. Let’s talk about 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: For a series of weeks, we have been more or less circling around topics related to the matter of aging.

Karen: And if these podcasts have helped others, we really don’t know. But they have certainly helped us. These discussions have been very thoughtful. We’ve been serious about saying what is happening in the old age process with us. So, David, I’d like to ask you, “What’s an area where you say your praying has improved as you’ve aged?”

David: I would say that my praying is less hurried. It’s more intimate than it used to be, less biblical words. You know, I look back on my life, and a lot of times it was, “Lord, let’s get through this quickly, because I got a broadcast to record, and they’re waiting for me at the studio, ” and so on. Maybe that’s an overstatement, but I felt that way.

Karen: Well, with a daily broadcast, and then we had a daily television show, it would be natural for you to feel that way. I mean, those were extraordinary deadline pressures that we lived with.

David: I find myself speaking more intimately to the Lord, not using the theological words. I would say in the area of worship, attributing words to God. I remember saying, “Okay, what do I know about God?” And then from the theological books, you get “God is omniscient, God is omnipresent”. You know, “God is sovereign,” and you use those words.

Karen: Well, you’re a trained theologian, too. I mean, that’s natural. And frankly, that’s not a bad prayer technique, to take those theological words into prayer.

David: Not a bad beginning, but I’m beyond that now. And it is more intimate in a sense. And sometimes I will do my praise, and I don’t use the word “praise” as much. I say, “This is what I really like about you, Jesus”. I’m saying things that are not from the books as much. I would say, especially as I’ve been reading through the gospels, “Jesus, it’s amazing to me how courageous you were”. But “courageous” is not something that you get in the theology books. I’m finding myself moving more in that direction where I’m saying it’s a personal one-on-one, much more so than, “How do I get my mind around these things?” So, I’m going to reverse: Are you learning anything as you get older? Are you any better at praying than you used to be?

Karen: I’ve had seasons in my life when I was more fervent in my prayers, perhaps. But one of the things I’m noticing about the aging process in my life in prayer is I’m much more content to pray what I call the long prayers.

David: Long prayers in terms of how long you’re praying?

Karen: Not that so much as the ones you pray for decades. The same prayer that you pray for decades. And I’m much more content to be obedient just to pray those prayers and not to have to see answers to my prayers. In fact, I think I probably may never see answers to some of them. However, there was one.

David: You’re going to give me an example.

Karen: Yes. So, for years, I divided my week up, and Monday would be praying prayers for the family. That would be the concentration. And then Tuesdays, I prayed for decades that the voice of Christian artists would rise up in their field, whatever their media was, whether it was music or film. We have a son who has his degree in film. So that’s a constant conversation in our family, or literature is my area of interest.

And I was just reading a book by a young author. He’s in his 40s, whose work I hadn’t read before. In fact, I haven’t been reading much fiction at all. I’ve been doing a lot of research. He’s a Christian author, and there’s a little distinguishing point I’d like to make about that. But he’s Christian, and he’s written fiction. So, I started to read his books. They’ve been best-selling books. He’s also published outside of the religious publishing marketplace. So, the standard houses that publish fiction have published a lot of his things. But in the first couple books I read, he had beautifully integrated spiritual meaning. It worked naturally with his characters and the dialogues that they were having and the dilemmas that they were having in their life. Now, one of the gripes that people who are literate or literary have about Christian writing or spiritual writing is often loaded into what we call message books. That’s the reason the book exists is to get a message across, and then everyone gets saved. I mean, I know one very well-known and loved writer. She started to write fiction, and everyone in her book became a Christian at the end of the book. I mean, it was a nice little result, but it felt very forced.

David: So, it’s almost, what would you say? Propaganda?

Karen: I don’t think hers was propaganda, but I do believe that much of what I read where there has been an attempt to have a Christian meaning is propaganda. They’re selling the Gospel, selling Christ in whatever way they can in that literary formula.

David: Not in a meaningful way?

Karen: It’s almost offensive, you know, because it violates what would be good literature. So, for years, I prayed that the Lord would raise true Christian artists who have come to faith, not since childhood, but outside of it—young adult, adult lives—and then begin to use their artistry to integrate and express that faith in ways that truly fit the literary formula.

David: Okay, and you could say the same thing as far as praying in terms of, say, the world of theater or the world of films.

Karen: So, Charles Martin is one young writer who is a novelist, or I’ve been reading his novels, who has done this very well, but most of all, he’s just writing well. He’s a popular writer, and I don’t know if his literature will stand the test of 500 years where it becomes a classic, probably not, but it’s still very good work. And so, as I was reading this stuff, I thought, “Oh my goodness, maybe I need to write him and say, ‘You owe me’”. Which I wouldn’t do.

David: Why? Why does he owe you?

Karen: Because I prayed that these Christian voices would be published and manifested in the literary fields. But there was another writer, Anne Lamott, who is an absolutely delightful voice.

David: You don’t know personally any of these people.

Karen: I don’t know any of these people, and they don’t know me. She has a voice that is extraordinarily unique. And one of her first books, she did write about her conversion experience. And because she was not used or using the Evangelical parlance, it was refreshing and delightful. It’s a best-selling book. Many people have read Anne Lamott’s book about a conversion experience. So, it was just the opposite. It wasn’t propaganda. It wasn’t a message book, “I’m going to tell you this because I want to get you saved”. It was her story. It was her memoir. And so, as I was reading those books and thinking about them, I thought, “Oh, maybe God has answered not just my prayers, but the prayers of us who were concerned about a Christian voice in modern literature being written in the right kind of way” that we are seeing many of those voices now coming forth. And that’s very exciting to me. I hope my long prayers—that’s the topic of this, the things I’m learning about prayer and aging—learning to be content with long prayers that take decades to pray, and you pray them faithfully, and you don’t know whether you’re going to see an answer to them. And that’s okay. It’s in God’s hands. You’re simply being obedient.

David: Well, that’s very fascinating to listen to you. And it’s saying again, as we age, we should become more mature in terms of the way we pray. I have found, still thinking about what you said, I have found that I am becoming more attuned to the Lord’s voice in times other than just when I’ve set aside those minutes, or sometimes their hours, to pray. Give an example. In fact, this is something that I talked about in a previous podcast, watching the news. There were 10, at the time that we first talked about that, I thought there were seven. I found out there were 10 Republicans a part of the House of Representatives who voted to impeach President Trump.

Karen: Let me make a little addendum here. You’re not proponing that they should have voted to impeach.

David: It has nothing to do with the politics.

Karen: But what you are looking at is people who had the courage of their convictions to go against the way the whole other rank and file in that place were going. So, looking at it is an extraordinary example of following your own deepest meaning or conscience in that environment.

David: It wasn’t even that, Karen. It was beyond that. It was neither Republican nor Democrat. It was these people received death threats because of voting their convictions. They voted their convictions. Even then I wouldn’t have probably prayed for them. But when I heard that not only were they threatened by people—we don’t know who they were—”Better look out because we know where you live and where your children are.” I mean, those are horrendous things.

Karen: Sometimes they have phone numbers and addresses that are given out over the internet.

David: So, at that point, it was kind of like the Lord said, “Christians should pray for them”.

Karen: It doesn’t matter what your politics are.

David: Totally apart from that. But then I thought, “Well, who’s going to do that?”

Karen: Did you feel the finger pointing at you?

David: Or to the crux of it: “David, you’re a guy who ought to do that. You’re far enough along in your prayer life. You could do that”.

Karen: Well, and let me just also mention that you do spend hours every day in intercessory prayer.

David: I’m always uncomfortable when you say those things. But yes, but this was not while I was in any formal prayer time. I was watching television, and that nudging that you’re talking about became more regular. “When are you going to start praying for these people?” Insistence is good. And it’s just this needling. So, I said, “Okay, Lord, if nobody else does, I will”. And I’m sure there were other people who were wrestling with this even as I was. I found out who these people were and I wrote a letter to each of them. A two-sentence letter.

Karen: And let me do a little addendum here. We had run out of official stationery, and no one had been on top of it. So, your letter went without any kind of…

David: Plain white paper. And I didn’t have business envelopes that matched. So, the letter had to be folded in a different way to get in little envelopes, which didn’t then fit the machine so we could print out those things. I had to write them by hand. I felt very tacky about it all. But then I thought, “That really doesn’t matter”. What I just want these people to know is that somebody is praying for them. And this is what I wrote: “Dear Representative,” and then the name. “I am an 84-year-old recovering workaholic who has found both meaning and ministry in extended daily times of intercessory prayer. Hearing the news about death threats on your life and those in your family, I have felt prompted to pray daily for the protection of you and your loved ones. Stay strong”. And I signed it, “Reverend Dr. David R. Mains”. So, I was committed. I put my words on paper. I sent those letters off, and then as I started to pray—and it sounds probably dumb, but every time I do pray in a sincere way for someone, I mark it down. I had a fellow the other day, he said, “You know, do you still pray for me?” because he’d asked me to pray months before, and I could show him I did. I know that I have prayed for these 10 Congresspeople eight times. Which is no big deal. But as I’ve started to pray for them, I thought, “You know, I don’t know a whole lot about these people.”

Karen: You don’t even know their name.

David: I had no idea where they were from.

Karen: What part of the country they were representing.

David: There was one from Illinois, and I had no idea. In fact, I kind of mentally put him in the wrong part of the state. But I looked all these people up on the internet, and now I know a whole lot more about it. They are incredible people. Not because they’re Republicans. I thought to myself, there are so many people who are a part of the House of Representatives, 100 Senators. But a lot of them are absolutely incredible people. And now I’ve learned more about them, and that has been very interesting. One of these individuals, two generations back, the people came from Cuba.

Karen: His family came from Cuba, fleeing from Castro.

David: Now this guy, he’s gone through college, he played football at Ohio State, which is, I mean, that’s one of the top teams in the country. And then he was in the initial first round of the draft picks by the pros. He played tight end, which is a tough position in the pros, three years. Then he went on to get further degrees, and now he’s a representative. I mean, that’s wonderful.

Karen: So, did you do the same research on them?

David: Every last one of them?

Karen: My goodness.

David: Well, it wasn’t that big a deal.

Karen: I know, but you’re praying about people you know something about now. It’s not just a name on a page.

David: You find out they have children, you see pictures of them, and so on. And I probably will never hear from any of them. I may get to send this guy the form letter. I have no idea. It doesn’t matter. But these are people who I feel I have an obligation, I should say, I have a divine obligation because the Lord said pray for them. Which in my mind says, those were death threats. Those were things where there is a battle going on in the heavenlies. I will probably pray for them until such time as I get a release. And every day I bring their cause to the Lord and say, “You know, Lord, you have angels. I’ve never seen an angel, but I believe in them. You believed in them. So, you need those protective angels to thwart any thought”.

Karen: I have an idea. It might be good, after—I don’t know how long you feel like you might even do this, but it would be long—after a certain amount of time, just to send a little postcard and says, “I wrote and said that I was urged to pray for you. I want you to know you have been prayed for,” a reminder that that’s happening. Because I think a lot of times people say—Christians often do—”Well, I’ll pray for you,” and then they don’t. They forget about it, or maybe it’s one or two brief prayers, or even a little bit longer than that. But for the long haul, David, I think that’s very unusual.

David: If something were to happen to any of these individuals or family members, I would be devastated. And I didn’t even know who they were. There’s a bond there that is taking place.

Karen: So, this is part of our topic of how you’re going to be maturing in your prayer life.

David: That’s right. You ready with another one? Are you going to talk about your nighttime prayers? I mean, that’s something I know. You don’t know much about praying for politicians. I don’t know much about you’re praying in the middle of the night.

Karen: I generally get to bed, if I can, by 9:00 or 9:30 because I’m really tired by then. I’m an early riser. But between 12:30 and 2:30, every single night, there’s a wakeful period. I rarely sleep through. And so, you can lie there and toss and turn, and I have a lot of little exercises I use to try and get back to sleep: deep breathing and all kinds of stuff. A word that will come to me, and I will repeat it over and over in a sort of a mantra. But I’ve realized that this is a gift recently. That this is a gift, and this is a time for me to listen to the Lord, that nudge that you talk about, and see if there are things he’s wanting to whisper to my heart. What’s quiet, and I have rested. I’ve slept three or four, maybe five hours, and I can hear better. Or it’s a time to really begin to intercede.

Now, one of the things I’ve self-corrected on that I was better at more the beginning of my life, was more of a habit, was when I went to prayer, I would start with praise. And that kind of fell by the wayside. So, in the middle of the night, I’m being reminded to go into a time of praise, and that’s been really beautiful. I was praising the Lord a couple nights ago that he’s triune. Well, this is a theological concept, but it is who God is, and way beyond our minds to even comprehend. I mean, we get the words down and maybe a little bit of the meaning in our hearts, but I did spend a long time praying and thanking him that he’s a triune God. And you know that he manifested his godliness on earth in the human form of Jesus Christ. And it was a form that came to suffer and die for.

I mean, you go on with that, and then the meaning begins to just enfold you and capture you, and you stay there kind of stunned. Because you’ve thought maybe those thoughts during the day and maybe in a prayer time, but at night when you’re alone and nothing is going on and the room is dark for the most part, it takes on a different kind of format, and it’s not so formulaic. So, as I age, that has been, in this last year or these last months, one of the things I’ve done with that wakeful period in the middle of the night is just to make it more a time of prayer. And then I’m also trying to memorize scripture, passages of scripture.

David: I’ve noticed this, good for you.

Karen: And then so I’ll go over that in the middle of the night and say, “Okay, did I get that down?” or, “Oh, what is that second verse I still don’t have?” But that’s how I’ve been spending that time.

David: Yeah, that’s neat. It’s neat. I don’t know, you know, I’m going to give you my sentence again, and I don’t know if I can say scripture teaches this, but I’m going to try to defend it as a sentence anyway. As we age, our prayer lives should mature. They should get better. They should ripen. I can’t quote a verse for that, but I would like to give an illustration.

This is Daniel. Daniel is an old man when this happens. He’s lived an illustrious life. He’s a guy who knows how to pray. “In the first year of Darius, or Darius son of Xerxes, a Mede by descent who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom, in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the scriptures, according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last 70 years”. Now he’s beginning to say, “Wow, we’re coming to the end of those 70 years”. “So, I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting and in sackcloth and ashes”. I’m no good at fasting. That is a confession, and it’s an area where I want to learn more, but I haven’t. I know absolutely nothing, Karen, about sackcloth and ashes.

Karen: Sort of like the rest of Evangelicalism, some of them may, but not many of us.

David: Yes, but it’s this extreme contrition, and it’s not about himself, it’s about his people. I’m just going to read now—there are a number of paragraphs—and I’m just going to read the first sentence in each one of them. “I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed: ‘O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands, we have sinned and done wrong’. Next paragraph: ‘Lord, you are righteous, but this day we’re covered with shame—the men of Judah and the people of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far, and all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you’”.

Karen: So, this is like a prayer of lament, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s a prayer of bringing into the corporateness of the situation.

David: Yeah. Next, first sentence of the paragraph. “Therefore, the curses sworn judgments written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us because we have sinned against you”. Just the first sentence again in the next paragraph: “Now, O Lord, our God, who brought your people out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and who made for yourself a name that endures to this day, we have sinned, we have done wrong”. “Now, O God, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of your servant”.

And this next paragraph, and this just almost brings me to tears: “While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and making my request to the Lord my God for his holy hill”. He’s talking about Jerusalem, the holy hill. In fact, he’s way, way far away in Babylon, but he’s praying for where they belong. “While I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in a swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. He instructed me and said to me, ‘Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. As soon as you began to pray, an answer was given, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the message and understand the vision’”. And then that goes on as he gives one of the great prophecies. It’s just, “Here’s this old man, you are highly esteemed”. And he sends an angel. A powerful angel.

Karen: Supernatural being. Wow, that’s gorgeous. David, one of the things that we need to understand, those who are looking toward the aging process—you know, they’re not there yet—brain science shows a lot of things that are advantageous about aging. Just this little paragraph from the book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, by Ashton Applewhite. She writes, “Especially in the emotional realm, older brains are more resilient. As we turn 80, brain imaging shows frontal lobe changes that improve our ability to deal with negative emotions like anger, fear, and envy”.

David: Improve our ability to deal with those.

Karen: “Elders experience less social anxiety and fewer social phobias. Even as its discrete processing skills degrade, the normal aging brain enables greater emotional maturity, adaptability to change, and levels of well-being.” These are the neurological underpinnings of what she calls the happiness curve, that older people are often more happy than they were in their younger years. But I think that we can impose upon that the spiritual meaning that the spiritual life has the possibility as we age—and we’re talking particularly about prayer today—to become richer, fuller, more replete with those moments, those God moments, where we really say, “Oh, God must be in this place,” you know.

So, I think those are the things that we need to look forward to and open ourselves up to, to avail that sort of spiritual experience in our lives, to expect that it will be rich and deep, and those supernatural incidences—you know, we can’t describe them, we can’t prove them—will occur more and more, and we should just expect that it’s going to happen.

David: Well, that’s pretty neat. I didn’t get through just maybe the beginning of my list. Did you have more things on your list? We’ve run out of time. I’m going to give you a quote from scripture, and I want you to tell me whether you know who said this, and I bet you won’t get it right.

Karen: I probably won’t, you rascal.

David: “Only a few years will pass before I go on the journey of no return”.

Karen: Oh, wow. Well, that is pregnant with meaning. Read it again.

David: You’re stalling for time.

Karen: No, I think it’s extraordinary, so because of where at this point we—I mean, this podcast is called Before We Go.

David: Yes. “Only a few years will pass before I go on the journey of no return”.

Karen: Who was it?

David: It’s Job. Such a tough life, and he had many years, actually. He didn’t know. He had a lot of years, and everything would be restored to him in God’s providence. “Only a few years will pass before I go on the journey of no return”. That’s in his terrible, terrible days of suffering and so many loss.

Karen: Extraordinary loss. Yeah.

David: I don’t know how many years you have or I have, but we will go on the journey of no return.

Karen: We know that it’s coming sooner and sooner. That’s one of the really… that’s one of the gifts of old age. It heightens what you do or why the way you think about how you want to invest what you have remaining of your life.

David: It gives you focus.

Karen: It gives you focus, right?

David: Yeah, my dad, my dear dad, he died when he was 91. I haven’t reached that. If I do or not, I have no idea. You know, your folks died when they were.

Karen: They were both 69 years of age. I mean, I’ve outlived both of them.

David: Yeah. So, when that will come, we don’t know, but it will come. But it causes you to kind of slow down and say, “I want to make these years count”. And I don’t want to do that on my own. I want to do it with you, Lord. I want to walk as close to you as I possibly can.

Karen: You know, David, I don’t think that is a thought that is exclusively for elders, or as this woman says in her book, the olders. I think it’s a thought that every stage of life should think because we have no guarantees. We have no guarantees that the next day will be given to us. And so perhaps we can learn it more from the eldership around us because it’s more imminent. That last day is more imminent for them, but it is one that heightens all of our living, and we should be able to say, “I want to look back in this decade and say, ‘I lived it well,’ or I want to look back in the last 20 years and say, ‘I did what God asked me to do’”. That is a reality that we can learn from those who are facing it more imminently, like you and like I are doing now.

David: Before We Go. I like that. It kind of fits Job’s words: “Only a few years will pass before I go on the journey of no return”.

Outgo: 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 lowercase letters, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2021 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.