Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true,

and beautiful. So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere

comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. In the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

One thing I have asked of the Lord, and this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. Well, hello everyone,

and welcome back to speaking with joy. Today I am so excited to talk to you all about what I'm

going to call modern-day monasticism, which is really an effort to integrate all of our lives,

the work, the eating, the rest, and the play

into an attitude of prayer and of offering our lives in thankfulness and in praise to God.

And to chat with me about that today, I have my dear brother, Joel.

Hello.

We are sitting in our Scottish living room. It's a living room that happens to be in Scotland.

And we were talking about these things, and I thought it would be excellent to have him as a guest

because he has some particular knowledge, which I'm excited to have him share with you.

The passage that I read at the opening of this episode is a prayer that I have prayed pretty much every morning

for the better part of

the last decade. It comes from the Celtic Daily Prayer, which is a prayer book that has

morning and evening prayers and readings for the entire kind of movement of the year.

Readings for every single day of the year. It kind of goes through the church year. And this was really kind of my first experience of integrating what we're going to

talk about today, this kind of movement of having our whole lives be offered is a prayer up to God,

and kind of sparked my interest in this more generally, what it looks like to have these kind of

more ancient rhythms that we all share together of prayer and of worship and of work.

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