Mm-hmm.

Well, I really believe that eventually you can get to more of the same place as you begin to pray.

So we would encourage couples to just start praying together.

Now, maybe, you know, if you're the one who sees yourself as more spiritually mature or it's easier for you to just talk to God, then start, we say, like, start with simple sentence prayers.

Just things like, you know, dear God, thank you for, and name your kids.

That's it.

And then say, man, just start really, really simple so that the spouse who isn't as spiritually mature doesn't, you know, isn't put up against a five or 20 minute long prayer by the other spouse that they just know they can never match.

Or do you want to go? Well,

You might want to tell just a window of that.

Well, he came to me after I'd been at his parents' house for a couple days because my family traveled all across the country, and they had dropped me off at his house because I was friends with his sister, and our parents knew each other, so it was a safe place to drop me off at.

But within about two or three days, he came to me, kind of cornered me and said, what are your plans for our life? And I'm like, my plan? I'm like, you're the guy, you know, you should have the plan.

I didn't say that, but that's what I was thinking.

And I said, I don't know, what are your plans for us? And he said, well, I would really like to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you.

And I'm like 14 years old.

And I said, You know, I'm thinking in my mind, I would love to marry a godly guy who comes from a godly family.

Would you talk to us about the power of prayer and what it has looked like in the landscape of your healing journey?

And then, you know, kind of have your plan of action for what could be next to invite him into that.

And I think tell him how important it is to you that you feel like it's an area that you're really missing out on in your marriage.

And you think that you could be spiritually and just relationally more intimate by praying together and then i would say make it as easy as possible like yes yeah sometimes we just say you know you don't people have such misconceptions they think they have to pray for 20 or 30 minutes you don't when you're starting you can do sentence prayers you can just say let's pray let's just say dear god i'm thankful for and you rattle off the name for your kids he says dear god i'm thankful for my job or my family or whatever, and you're done.

That's it the first time.

Or then you can work up to maybe getting like a prayer book by somebody like Charles Spurgeon or Oswald Chambers, who we mentioned before, and just go through that and pray out loud so that you hear each other and you become accustomed to each other just what it sounds like to pray even if it's not your own words you're still praying before god or open up the bible pray the um lord's prayer together yeah or some scripture that you really love just say god you know help us to focus on whatever is lovely whatever is true whatever is right whatever is encouraged you know Do something like that.

And don't have this.

You may have the end goal in sight of how you'd like to pray for 20 or 30 minutes and you want to work towards that.

And I just

Was there a crisis of faith for either or both of you going, "We had, we were praying, and then this still happened"? And then what did it look, what did the, kinda the repair and the restoration of that prayer life together look like after the crisis? Like, how did, how did that discipline, if I can put it that way, look very different from before the crisis?

I think for me, when that crisis happened, I realized, at that time I didn't know if I was gonna stay married to him, so I was like, "I have got to draw close to God," because even closer than I've ever been.

I'd always prayed, but I was like, "I really need God's guidance.

I really need God's directions.

I need His wisdom, because I don't know what's gonna happen with us." And so I just poured out my heart to God.

I immersed myself in scripture, and I really started praying and working on myself and my own spiritual life.

And I think he, in a different way, was doing the same thing.

So that's one of the reasons why we chose 40.

Well, maybe just the first thing I'd wanna ask you guys is just really what inspired you guys to write the book? Because, uh, I think as we talked before, you guys are like Nancy and I and know how important prayer is for a marriage.

Well, prayer was always important for us in our marriage, but it evolved and we got stronger in it over the years.

But we would go out and speak, we would do conferences, and we would really encourage couples to pray.

And after we spoke about this [laughs] for a while, we noticed a pattern because people would come up to us, like we might challenge them on a Saturday night, and then Sunday morning they'd come to us and they'd say, "You know, you challenged us to pray last night.

My wife and I never did this, and we spent some time before we went to bed last night praying, and it was so good.

We think this can revolutionize our marriage." And so we just thought, you know what? As we heard this over and over, we thought, people really wanna do this, but they kind of don't know how.

They, they can feel, you know, intimidated or whatever.

Mm

Well, maybe just the first thing I'd want to ask you guys is just really what inspired you guys to write the book? Because, uh, I think as we talked before, you guys are like Nancy and I and know how important prayer is for a marriage.

Well, prayer was always important for us in our marriage, but it evolved, and we got stronger in it over the years.

But we would go out and speak, we would do conferences, and we would really encourage couples to pray.

And after we spoke about this [laughs] for a while, we noticed a pattern because people would come up to us, like we might challenge them on a Saturday night, and then Sunday morning they'd come to us and they'd say, "You know, you challenged us to pray last night.

My wife and I never did this, and we spent some time before we went to bed last night praying, and it was so good.

We think this can revolutionize our marriage." And so we just thought, you know what? As we heard this over and over, we thought, people really wanna do this, but they kind of don't know how.

They, they can feel, you know, intimidated or whatever.

Mm-hmm

Yeah

... that would be one goal of my life checked off.

And so I said, "Okay." And I really liked him.

He was from a Christian family.

He was a believer.

So I said, "Okay, how will this, you know, work, and what's your plan?" And he said, "Well, I'm two years older than you.

We could go to college together.

Yeah.

That wouldn't be very good for this segment, but talk to us a little bit about the book because it's really needed now more than ever.

Well, we wrote the book because we just realized a lot of couples don't pray together.

And prayer is really the most important thing that you can do to strengthen your marriage.

We had met pastors, we met pastors' wives, ministry couples, missionaries who, believe it or not, don't pray together.

Only 6% of all ministry couples actually pray together, 5% in the general population.

And so we decided this is something that we needed to talk about and we needed to write about.

What's some of the tips there?

You can pray independently, still do it because sometimes we've disagreed and we prayed independently and you know what? We've come back together and lo and behold, we agree.