Welcome to this week's bonus interview on the prayers of press podcast. I'm your host, Ashrida Chuchu, and in our season of praying through hard emotions, this week we prayed through loneliness, and I invited Bonnie Gray to come and share her story with us.

Bonnie is an author of the book Spiritual White Space, as well as her new book, Sweet Like

Jasmine. She's also a host of the Breathe podcast, and we have similar hearts and passions for leading listeners and readers

into genuine encounters with God through His Word and through prayer. In this episode, Bonnie

shares her story of why she struggled with loneliness, even though she had a lot of friends and was super

involved in church, and how God tenderly led her into a place of being seen and being known

and being loved. It's such a beautiful story. I especially appreciate the insight that Bonnie

shared from her therapist

about how God created our brains to cope with trauma and the very beautiful way that our

Heavenly Father brings good things out of the hard parts of our lives. All this and so much more here in this bonus interview with Bonnie Gray.

So let's jump right in.

Bonnie, well, thank you for joining me.

This week we're praying through loneliness.

And this is something that I, as I'm pondering it, I want to say, I don't know that I'd be

comfortable saying, oh, I've had lonely seasons. I feel like that's almost embarrassing to admit

because we should all have friends. Like we, it's almost a reflection on us if we have a bout of loneliness

or if we've walked through loneliness for an extended period of time because we're in a world

where everyone's connected, where everyone has friends, everyone is following each other.

And yet at the same time, what we're seeing psychologists and sociologists point out that

we are a more lonely generation than ever before. And so I'm grateful that you are coming to share

your story with us of how God has walked with you through seasons of loneliness and what that

looks like today. So I wonder if you could drop us into

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