Hey everybody, the third annual Wayfair Summer Festival is coming up on July 11th, and you are not

going to want to miss this. We're bringing in some amazing speakers like Thomas McConkey,

Christine Hogland, and Catherine Sontag to talk about spiritual attention in the age of AI, the history

and future of Mormon utopianism, and what a Latter-day Saint cultural Renaissance might look like.

Plus, just lots of amazing time to connect with friends, old and new, and we've got catered lunches, poetry readings, musical performances, breakout sessions, and art gallery, and everything taking place in the gorgeous Heber Valley. Space for this is extremely limited so you won't want to delay. You can get tickets at Wayfairmagine.org or look for the link in the show notes. Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. Today we are so

honored to share a conversation with Tish Harrison Warren on her brand new beautiful book, What

Grows in Weary Lands. From the very first pages of this book, we felt like Tish gave us language

for something

that is so familiar. She writes about aridity, these seasons of spiritual drought, exhaustion,

or distance from God, when prayer feels flat and faith feels heavy, or when the life that

once felt nourishing suddenly feels barren. And then she introduces the idea of acedia,

what the desert fathers and mothers

sometimes called the noonday demon. It's this restlessness and a belief that life with God

would be easier somewhere else, some time else with different work, different people, different

church, or a new set of circumstances. It's a restlessness that wants to escape the ordinary

demands of love in search of some

imagined future where spiritual highs are constant and faith feels effortless. But Tish says that

these experiences of aridity and acetya aren't signs that something has gone wrong. In fact,

they are experiences that Christians throughout time have understood to be normal, even necessary parts

of spiritual maturity.

And in this conversation, she helps us see that the invitation in these weary seasons

is not to force our way back into those spiritual highs, but to stay with prayer, to stay with

...