I wonder if you just give us an example of one or two movements in the Lord's Prayer where you're taking that movement and then putting it into your own life.

Yeah, so I think it's very important.

I think a great definition for prayer, I think this is Dallas Willard, he says, prayer is talking about matters of mutual concern between people and God.

So I think it's important to be very conversational in how you pray.

You should pray with the way that you talk, like John Tyson's line, pray what you got.

That's pretty good.

So I think that's an important part of it.

so i'm coming in to have this meeting with

[laughs]

Um, yeah, I've...

You know, I'm 48 years old, parent of four.

I'm an immigrant to the United States, so I spent the first 28 years of my life in Australia.

Moved here with a six-month-old child who we later found out, uh, is on the autism spectrum, which is a big part of...

Man, gosh, that became the meta-narrative of, uh, the last 20 years, uh, of our life.

And then we have, uh, three, three younger kids.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

... "Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed.

His mercies never fail.

They're new every morning." So th- th- this, Lamentations does something really important.

It's showing us that faith doesn't ignore suffering, it, it brings it to God.

And somehow even in the darkest moments, it holds on the possibility that God's mercy is still at work.

So Lamentations teaches us that it's possible to both be deeply honest about pain and quietly anchored in hope-

Mm-hmm.

Just tell us a bit about that.

Yeah.

So I'm the lead pastor at our church, which means I'm, I'm preaching over half, half the Sundays, uh, in, in a year.

And at the start of 2025, uh, on the docket, we've got, we've got churches around the city, um, and, and, and we teach, we teach the same series at the same time.

But on the docket was a seven-week series on the Lord's Prayer.

And, you know, come January 1, I was, I was feeling a fair bit of imposter syndrome because the truth is, um, for various reasons, like I've loved Jesus deeply since I was probably 16 or 17 years old, taken following Jesus very seriously, uh, that whole time with a bit of a season of, uh, deconstruction tied to a miscarriage in my 30s.

Um, but what I, I realized that, um, I'm about to teach a series on prayer and, and really knew that I wasn't very good at it, um, that I'd been very haphazard in it.

Yeah.

Like, what, what was that moment, that aha moment for you and the idea for the experiment to then pray a particular way for an entire year?

So I'm part of a, a movement of churches called Church of the City, and one thing we've always tried to be is honest.

Um, we, one, one of the things is we don't try to stand up there and, you know- Fake our way through that we've- we've got it all together or, or anything like that.

And we, we work on sermon series together.

So every now and then there's a series that comes up that you know a lot about and have some mastery over, and then there are other times where a series is coming your way, we're going, "Oh man, you know, I'm gonna be learning this alongside the congregation." So at the-- in January of 2025, I was feeling a fair bit of imposter syndrome because, uh, we were gonna start the year with a series called Teach Us to Pray, which was a, a slow journey, uh, through the Lord's Prayer.

It was gonna be seven weeks long.

And as it was getting closer, I was just feeling this, a little bit sick on the inside because I've never felt great at prayer.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

... um, "and you've given it to me." And, and when you get reps in over the years, you s- you really do see the, the unanswered prayers that I've had in my life, I'm, as long as they're, like, far enough in the rear view mirror, I'm actually really grateful for almost-

Yeah.

And you look at some of the seasons you've had or that your friends have had, and you go, "They, there is some torment going on here." There's, there's, I think the world only makes sense to me when, when I surrender to the idea that there's an evil force who, who hates me and is coming-