Hello, friend. You're listening to the Prayers of Rest podcast, and I'm your host, Asherita.

Right now we're in the midst of a mini series called Refresh Your Prayer Life, and I had so many

fun ideas of creative ways we can pray, and I think we'll get to those eventually. But there just seems to be so much heavy news going on these

days and just talking to other friends and listeners in our community, it can really feel like

the weight of human suffering and brutal oppression and just ongoing conflict can it just feels

like it can crush us.

And so on the one hand, we can turn off the news and tune it out and pretend like it's not

happening.

But is that really a faithful response as Christians?

I think we know that we should be praying, but how? How do we pray the news? How do we pray about

what's happening in current events? Because on the other hand, if we keep listening and watching and keep the intake of bad news nonstop,

it can really be depressing.

So I think a faithful response and what God is calling us is not to ignore the news and not

to just mindlessly take it in, but rather to allow the heavy things that are happening

around us.

And this is in our personal lives too, to allow those hard things to press us to our knees

before Jesus. And so what I want to share with you today are ways that I have been

learning how to pray about what's in the news. And I've heard from a number of listeners

that last week's episode on praying for Afghanistan was so helpful to you because it gave you

words to know what to pray for and how to pray for a really difficult situation. So my hope with

this episode is that I can walk you through the process that I use as I

learn how to pray through the news stories of the day and that you can also develop your

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