Hey everybody, welcome to the bridge town daily for Tuesday, July 14th.

If we haven't met yet, my name's Gerald.

Thanks so much for following along.

I am here with my good friend Joseph down in the basement of our newly remodeled building.

It is beautiful.

Can't wait for you guys to see it.

It is a warm day.

The sun is shining.

Joseph is wearing all black and I have no idea why except he's deeply committed to it.

So today I want to introduce you to the Jesus Prayer.

But first, I just want to give some context for this.

I don't know where you're at in the middle of this COVID season, this long journey that

we're on and what you're learning, discovering and leaning into around racial injustice,

racism in our country and our institutions and in our own hearts.

But I don't know about you, but I get to these places where my thoughts and my concerns

are all over the place and hard to gather and sometimes dominating.

It's hard to pray sometimes in the morning and it's more like just presenting my stress

to God rather than really slowing down to connect deeply with the spirit of the living

God and of all the practices that are out there, I've ran into one, an old practice, this

prayer, the Jesus Prayer actually comes out of the fifth century and it's been really,

really helpful for me to pray and to even lean into this idea from the Apostle Paul of

unceasing prayer through memorizing and just repeating the short prayer.

...