Welcome to this week's bonus interview on the prayers of press podcast. I'm your host, Asherita

Chutu, and today we're talking with my friend Val Marie Warner. You might know her from the company

Valmarie Paper. She and her team create beautiful prayer journals that I have used to become more

consistent in my own prayer life, specifically in praying for other people. Val has such a heart

for prayer, but also in her most recent book on prayer, she shares about some of her struggles with anxiety.

And for that reason, I wanted her to come on our podcast this fall season and talk with us

about what it looks like, to be honest with God about that anxiety and how God meets us in that place. So I am so excited.

Let's jump right in. So I have a twin sister and I have a husband and I have a mom who none of them

struggle with anxiety or profound like worry. that's not their struggle they they might

struggle with other things but I am the worrier that they all know I'm the one who's always

asking for prayer who you know freaks out when something happens and I have felt that my

anxiety looks like a weakness or like something that shows a maturity

of faith. It's just kind of a frustration that I can feel that like, man, why am I the only one

who struggles with this particular thing in my like, you know, close circle of like people

that I like constantly go to.

So I don't know if that answers the question, but that is the feeling, that has been the struggle,

like how that has been compounded, a feeling like that.

And I feel like the Lord has really shown me a lot about, you know, like what anxiety is and that it's not, you know,

I've heard it said, like anxiety is like temporary atheism. It's like we're forgetting God

in our life. And I think that that can be true. Like we are, we are temporarily forgetting that.

But I think having those moments

just reveals that we're human. It doesn't reveal that like we feel that way all the time.

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