Welcome to Verity Podcast. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Himer, and I am here to

teach you how to know what you believe, to live it boldly, and to communicate it

graciously to the world around you. I believe that women are ready to go deeper in

their faith than ever before, and they don't have to go to seminary to do it. I am

so glad you're here, and I hope you'll join me on this journey because every

woman is a theologian. Hello friends, and welcome back to Verity Podcast. This

week we are talking about prayer, and I was thinking back through all of the

seasons and episodes that we have done on this podcast in the last two years,

almost a hundred episodes now, and I realized we've never done an episode

dedicated to prayer, and obviously I could do an entire series on this. We could go

so in-depth, but per my usual, I'm going to try to keep it kind of high level

and 20 to 30 minutes. So we're going to look at what prayer is, what the goal of prayer is,

and how we can pray practically, because a couple of weeks ago I sent out my weekly newsletter,

the Conlectio, and talked about how there are several phrases in Christian

world that make me crazy, and one of those is just pray about it without teaching people how to

pray. And I was only talking very briefly about about that topic, so I didn't get into depth

on prayer in that newsletter, but we got some replies to it saying, well, how do I pray? So I had

already worked up the notes for this episode, and I thought, you know what, let's just make sure

this one gets out there as quickly as possible. Now, I'll be the first to admit that there have

been periods of time throughout my Christian life where I definitely felt like and knew that my

prayer life wasn't what it should be. As in, it wasn't as strong as I knew would be good for me.

Based on everything we see in scripture about prayer, which we'll be reading in just a second,

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