Hey, I'm Natasha Crane, and I'm Elisa Childers.

Welcome to Unshaking Faith, where we equip you to live your Christian faith

boldly in a chaotic culture. We grieve along with you and the rest of the world about all that's going on with the Israel, Hamas war right now. The pain that so many

people are in is simply overwhelming. And as Christians outside the impacted region, we can feel

pretty helpless. But we also believe in the power of prayer. We can't get so overwhelmed

that we forget to turn to the Lord who is infinitely more powerful than any human force.

But we also want to acknowledge today that it can be hard to

pray in times like this. We naturally have a lot of questions like do our

prayers really have an effect on something as big as a war.

How do you pray when you don't really understand all the geopolitical and even the theological

complexities?

And where do you even start when there's just so much going on?

It just feels like so many things can go through our minds right now.

So in today's episode, Elisa and I just want to share some thoughts on those questions to

encourage you to pray through this conflict. And we also have some prayer request directly

from a mom who is living in Jerusalem right now and so we are really heartened

to hear from her and we'll be sharing those with you at the end of this

episode. So in the spirit of this episode we're each going to offer a prayer tip today

specifically in lieu of our normal tips of the week.

Alisa, what prayer tip do you have?

Well, like you said, it can be difficult to know what to pray and how to pray

when stuff like this is going on, where there's a very complicated history

...