I have had to learn to be creative and recognize that in the same way that I have to be creative

with making my friendships and my marriage work, I have to be creative with how I make my relationship with the Lord work.

And it's not always going to be a cup of coffee

on your couch, and it's Instagram worthy. Like, it's just not. Sometimes you're going to be, like,

figuring out at a time to do it. And God doesn't care about how it looks. He cares about our heart.

And if we're coming to him in a posture of dependency, he cares about that more than anything else.

Courtney Reisig is a writer and teacher living in Little Rock, Arkansas. She's written for numerous

Christian publications, including the Gospel Coalition and Christianity Today. She's also the author

of Prayer, which is part of Crossway's Disciplines of Devotion series, published in partnership

with TGC.

Well, Courtney, thanks so much for joining me today on the Crossway podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So you start this new book that you've written with a confession.

You say, prayer is hard for me.

Why start there?

Well, the short answer is prayer is hard for me.

Just an act of honesty.

Active honesty, yeah.

So I have probably always struggled with prayer most of my adult life, and I became a Christian in college.

And I would often hear of people talk about their prayer life and that they were, that they would pray for long

periods of time or it just came naturally to them and their impulse was to pray. And I often thought,

like people have different gifts and prayer is not mine. And I thought, I knew I was supposed to pray

...