Welcome to a special live episode of Let's Talk. I am Jackie Hill Perry and I am here with Melissa Krueger and Jasmine Holmes. Give it up, clap. There we go.

So in our last episode of Let's Talk, I was nine months pregnant. Now this one is having a baby. Melissa? No. No. My baby's out there. Okay. You know, Laura can make a twirl out of you. Okay.

Just tell us how you want us to pray. We got you. I'm good. You don't have babies. Just not right now. Normally we can take pauses and it doesn't keep recording. So this is a lot more complicated.

So today we're going to be talking about the topic of spiritual disciplines. And I think when you hear that term, it can seem automatically negative. I'm like a discipline, you know, heavy.

And so what I thought we could start talking about first is when have you seen discipline in your life, be a good thing, apart from spiritual disciplines. When have you seen actively working at something over and over and over, grow you in a good way?

So earlier we were talking about this and you were talking about sports. And I was thinking about my nerdy homeschool upbringing and how I had no coordination whatsoever. So instead of sports, mine was piano.

I practiced three hours a day and I went on competition. Can you still play? No. No. In typical nerd fashion, practice three hours a day for six months, got carpal tunnel and had to stop playing piano.

Oh, right. They're so sad for me. Thank you. You felt seen. I saw. I think when I had my first child, Eden, I had gained about 60 or 70 pounds because I just ate crispy cream every week. And it's just like that sometimes.

And I saw a picture of myself and I just felt like I look like a platypus. And so I thought I need to lose some weight. So I went in my kitchen and I just start throwing out everything that had GMOs and extra sugar. I even threw out ketchup.

And 60 grams of sugar perched is a lot. And so that I had never seen myself be as disciplined in that way before. But something switched in my head where I was like, if I want to change my body and my health, I have to become more strict about what I consume. And so that's an example.

Yeah, I think that's actually such a good example because the junk food tastes good going in, but it doesn't make your body work well in the long run. But in the short term, it feels good. And I can remember that. I grew up playing sports and I played soccer and they made us run sprints the whole length of the field. And you know, I was like, why do I have to run this whole length of the field? But then when you got in the game, you could actually run for 90 minutes.

But it took training for a week after week after week and that discipline, but then I could actually have fun. Otherwise, I would have been miserable in the game if we hadn't have done that. And so I think when we talk about the concept of spiritual disciplines, the goal isn't misery.

The goal is actually a soul that works right. And so when you think about spiritual disciplines, what are they? What do we even mean when we talk about spiritual disciplines?

Prayer. That's Bible reading. That's all I got. Church. I think that's a kind of spiritual discipline. Yeah.

I got a definition for us. I looked it up. I looked it up. Donna Whitney has a book called Spiritual Disciplines of the Christian Life. Have you either y'all read that?

Never heard of it. It's really good. It's really good. He said spiritual disciplines are those personal and corporate disciplines.

So personal and corporate disciplines that promote spiritual growth. So it could be a Bible study. It could be corporate worship. It could be.

It could even be I think like service in the body, but also our private lives where we're praying and we're in the word and we're growing in those ways.

So as you think about spiritual disciplines like being in the word and prayer, when is it hard for you to put those things in your life?

Like are there certain seasons? Are there certain struggles? How do you get that into your busy life?

It's a struggle every day. I used to think that I would somehow find some balance between work and marriage and parenthood and friendship that could somehow work really neatly together when it came to me looking for Jesus and being spiritually disciplined and engaging in all these other categories in which I'm called to.

But there is no balance. It really is no such thing. And so it's always hard. Yes.

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