Every Season Sacred, with Kayla Craig

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. This is Dr.

Lee Warren here on the Self Brain Surgery Podcast.

It's almost Thanksgiving. I'm excited today because I had a great opportunity

to sit down and talk with Kayla Craig.

Kayla Craig is an author and a journalist.

She's recently released her second book which is called Every Season Sacred,

Reflections, prayers and invitations

to nourish your soul and nurture your family throughout the year.

Getting close to the end of the year and we're coming into the holidays

and there's a lot of stresses and life just seems

to be getting faster and faster and we're all connected to technology that's

distracting us and the news always seems to be bad and it just feels like how

in the world are we able to raise kids and even grandkids in today's world and

and help them find their faith in their feet and navigate the secular culture

that seems so difficult.

And it can almost feel overwhelming as parents were tasked with nurturing and guiding our children,

even as we navigate our own wonderings about faith and in the overwhelm and

constant demand of life, we wonder sometimes if it's even possible to tend to

our own souls and to our families flourishing.

Well, Kale has given us this incredible book, Every Season Sacred.

It's a weekly invitation to grow spiritually alongside our children.

And it blends thoughtful writings and essays and practical resources.

And her writing style really meets you as a parent, as a grandparent,

as a family member, right where you are, and offers honest and hopeful reflections

for every season of the parenting journey.

Encouragement to parents with intention, imagination, presence,

and purpose, and open-ended discussion prompts and prayers to explore and practice

as a family. It's a great book to use year-round.

It'll just help you develop some spiritual rhythms with your family,

give you some tools and some resources.

We had a good talk about the challenges of raising a family in the 2000s,

about the stresses and difficulties of keeping your family connected and sometimes

disconnected from technology and what that looks like in the modern world.

And it's just a very encouraging conversation that I think will be a blessing

to you. We're gonna get after it in just a second with the incredible writer, Kayla Craig.

Kayla lives in Iowa with her husband, Johnny, and her four kids.

She has an Instagram channel called Liturgies for Parents, almost 20,000 followers.

Christianity Today called this an essential parenting resource.

So I was thinking that if you're a parent or a grandparent or you love somebody

who's raising children in this modern age, it'd be a great gift for the holidays, for Christmas,

to give someone every season sacred.

Kayla's other book is called To Light Their Way. It's another book of prayers for parents.

I'm just really encouraged as we look at the news and we hear all the bad news

and all the things going on.

It can become easy to sort of think down this hole of everything is falling apart.

But the fact is, God told us plain.

Jesus said it, the kingdom of heaven will never fall. It will never be shaken.

And I'm just telling you, there are some incredible young writers and some young

people raising families and doing things well and following faithfully in the footsteps of Jesus.

And Kayla Craig is one of those people you're gonna love getting to know her.

And I hope that you'll buy her book and check it out. It's a great resource

for your family or for somebody else who you love that might be raising children.

We're gonna get after it with Kayla Craig here in just a second.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friend. I am grateful for you.

But before we get started with Kayla, I just have one question.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,

my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

Friend, we're back and I'm so excited to have a new friend to introduce to you

today. Kayla Craig is with us. Welcome to the show, Kayla. Thank you so much for having me.

That's great, and we're going to have a good talk about your book and the work

that you're doing. And before we get started, would you mind praying for us?

Absolutely, I would love to.

God, thank you so much for just the breath in our lungs, for the opportunity

to gather together even when we are miles apart.

God, I thank you that even when we have no words at all, you are with us,

and you desire here to be with us.

And God, in the beautiful and in the heartbreaking moments of our lives,

I'm just so grateful that You are with us, that You go before us, and You are behind us.

God, we love You, and we know that You love us infinitely more.

And it's in Your name we pray. Amen.

Amen. Thank you so much. So tell us about your family and your work and a little

bit of background before we get into your new book, which is so wonderful.

I'm so grateful that you're here with us to talk about. Give us a little background. Yeah.

Well, I am a parent to four kids.

My kids joined our family through birth and adoption.

They're between the ages of 7 and 13.

So I feel like we are entering into this new middle stage of parenting a little

bit, especially with our oldest. So that is a wild adventure.

My daughter, Eliza, we adopted her when I was four months pregnant with my son,

Abram. And they are two seven-year-olds.

So they keep life interesting. And my daughter, Eliza, has Down syndrome and

a variety of disabilities.

And so she is a delight and also a handful.

So she's taught me a lot. And my husband's a pastor.

We live in Iowa. My background is in journalism. And I've always just been deeply

curious and have kind of the heart of a storyteller.

And so I love telling stories about our family, about our journey together.

Yeah, so that's a little bit about us.

Excellent. And this is your second book, right? So briefly tell us about your first book.

Yeah, that's right. So my first book is called To Light Their Way,

and it's a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents.

And it really came out of a time in my life when my daughter Eliza was in the hospital.

She was very, very, very sick, and it was a month-long stay.

And it was a very thin space for us, and it was incredibly difficult.

And I was a writer, and I'm used to working with words.

My husband's a pastor, and I just couldn't pray anymore.

And it wasn't because I didn't want to. It's just because I was exhausted,

and I had so many doubts and questions and so much heartache.

And somebody gave me a little book of prayers, and I kind of experienced the

power of borrowing another person's words and making them my own.

And so in 2020, I started writing my own prayers. I was like,

well, I'm a writer. Maybe I can give this back to others.

And so I started sharing on Instagram an account called Liturgies for Parents,

and that kind of became a book.

And I talked with all sorts of parents going through all sorts of beautiful

things, difficult things, and kind of tapped into that background in journalism,

right, where I'm asking lots of questions because they've gone through things

I haven't gone through, whether that That is divorce,

whether that's the death of a child or a miscarriage or whatever it is.

Maybe it's having an older child and they're leaving the nest or they're going

to college or they're getting married.

So lots of different kind of experiences.

There's more than 100 prayers to kind of take and borrow and make your own throughout

your days and throughout your parenting journey.

And so that is a little bit of where my writing kind of was as I moved into

kind of a new season of my life.

Wow, it's amazing. I'm going to follow the Holy Spirit for a second and just

follow this trail of something you just said.

I spoke with Tish Harrison Warren on the show a couple of weeks ago.

Her book, Prayer in the Night, actually gave me some language.

It came out several years after we lost our son, but I was from a kind of an

evangelical background.

And the problem with that is you're sort of supposed to do it all on your own.

You don't have that connection of prayers that other people have prayed, like you said.

And And I found myself, like you just said, kind of prayerless.

I didn't know what to say. I was so lost.

And it's so comforting, I think, to find that, lo and behold,

the church has answers for you.

Other people have prayed these prayers because they faced these problems before.

I love what you just said.

So I guess that segues naturally into your new book, not just what to pray,

but kind of looking at the whole year as a way to keep your kids grounded and

keep your family grounded around faith.

So talk a second about what led up to Every Season Sacred and how this came

about for you. It's a beautiful book.

Oh, thank you. Well, I think as I started connecting with readers and parents

in all different kind of seasons of their own lives and their own faith journeys

and their own parenting experiences,

I started to realize that parents are really carrying so much.

I used to think maybe this is just me that's experiencing, like,

how do I absorb what's going on in the world?

How do I live out my values?

How do I pass on a faith to my kids when it maybe is a little bit different

than the faith that I grew up in?" And so all of that,

listening to story after story and experience after experience,

I heard from parents that basically they needed…

to care for their own souls so that they could pour in to the soul of their family.

So I wanted to create a resource that could be one tool in the toolbox for exactly that.

So it goes throughout the year, and it's split into the four seasons.

And then each of those seasons has a small chapter.

And they're not dated because I know parents have a lot on their calendars and

a lot going on. And the last thing I wanted to do was to add another thing on the to-do list.

I didn't want to create a how-to, but more of a handhold on your journey.

And so there's a reflection, there's a breath prayer to borrow for each week

of the year, and that's just a simple inhale and exhale.

So like a, oh, God, you are with me, you know, for those moments where we might

not have a lot of margin to pray anything else, but we want to connect with

God, and we want to stay a little more rooted. So there's that.

There are connection questions, and they are made with a lot of different ages

and stages and experiences in mind.

And they just kind of follow different themes throughout the year.

And you can take those for your own reflection.

You can talk about them in the car as you're driving to school or practice or whatever it is.

And then there are shared prayers. So in To Light Their Way,

it's really from the perspective of a parent praying for their kids.

And in Every Season Sacred, I heard from a lot of parents, we'd love some prayers

to pray alongside our whole family.

So there are two prayers for each week of the year.

One that's a little more simpler language, maybe for younger ages and stages of development.

And then there is a prayer that's a little more maybe liturgical sounding.

And when I say liturgical, it's just a little more poetic.

Maybe it goes a little deeper. Maybe uses different imagery or language that

are for grownups, for anybody in your family. So that's kind of fun.

The format and kind of what I'm hoping that people might pull from and get throughout the year.

Yeah, I think you pulled it off. I mean, you've got language for younger kids,

older kids, parents, spouses. I think it's beautiful.

This morning on my podcast, I stole one of your lines.

We do something called, so I'm a neurosurgeon in my background and in my show,

a lot of times we talk about the neuroscience of what's happening in your brain

when you face certain problems and all So we do Frontal Lobe Friday,

and we talk about how your frontal lobes are kind of get control of those crazy

times when everything seems to be spinning out.

And God's given us this ability to pause and slow down and use reason and rationality

to figure out where He's stepping into our moments.

And I used your breath prayer example this morning, like, Hey,

show me where you are. Let me see you around.

And that breathe in, breathe out mentality, I think is so powerful.

And I'm grateful that you put it out there. So what do you hope,

like what's your ideal payoff for somebody, if there's somebody who says,

I'm going to read this book, and here's what I'm going to get out of it?

What's the 30-second elevator pitch for why a young family or an older parent.

Might want to read this book?

I think that my prayer as I was working on this is that people would feel more

connected with themselves and their own bodies, what they are experiencing,

their emotions in their actual place and time,

praying that they stay a little more connected with God,

feel a little more seen, maybe are more apt to have eyes to see the sacred in

the seemingly ordinary moments of your very real, messy, complicated lives.

And then stay more connected with your kids, right?

And pass on a relationship with God.

Introduce them to God in the everyday moments of your actual lives.

I love it. So what do you think technology is doing for us in terms of parents and families?

Is it helping us very much? Is it hurting us? And how does that play into our

prayer lives and how we spend time with our kids? Absolutely.

I mean, I can't speak for everybody, but for our family and for me,

it has often been a distraction, right?

Or almost a numbing agent. I have a son that has a chronic illness,

sickle cell, and he has to get a lot of blood draws.

And one of the things that the nurses offer him is a numbing cream, right, before.

And I feel like technology can be a numbing cream for us. It can be a numbing cream for me.

I just have my phone with me all the time. And my kids have access to so much on their fingertips.

And I feel like when I'm able to put that away, when we're able to put that

away, that's when the connection happens, right?

That's when I start actually being aware of my own senses, right?

I'm on a walk, and I start to hear the birds chirping, which when I was looking

down at my phone, I just wasn't even hearing, I wasn't even paying attention.

I think we miss out of so much glory right in front of us in our everyday moments.

Our experiences of God just don't happen only on a Sunday morning in church, right?

They're happening all the time if we're able to notice, if we're able,

with God's help, to pay attention.

And so while technology is amazing and has afforded me so much,

I get to connect with parents all over the country and the world,

but it can also really be a distraction and a numbing agent for me and for our

kids, and that's a tricky place to navigate.

It is. You tell this great story about one time when your phone battery died

and you almost canceled the trip to the park with the kids because you didn't have your phone.

That's a great reminder of how addictive we are to these things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, well, what am I going to do if I don't have a

podcast to listen to, right?

I don't have any music. I don't have any connection points. And then it was

like God was there with me saying, but look at all this. Look at the kids you hear laughing.

Look at now you're noticing them helping an elderly neighbor pick up trash at

the park. Like I wouldn't have even noticed that.

So I'm grateful for those moments and hoping to have more of them.

I am too. We just read a story recently where

there's a school in Silicon Valley where all the CEOs of all these tech companies

send their kids and they're not allowed to have computers until they're like

in the ninth grade so they don't have no screens and that ought to tell us something

right absolutely the guys who are making the technology won't let their kids

use it yeah yeah that's wild.

Yeah, anyway, best thing aside, but I think it's important to say,

you know what, God told us to be still.

There's an incredible power in presence and being present in the moment and being still.

And you've done a really good job of giving us some language to use in these

moments and gather the kids around and sit down. I saw your dog go by.

I like the dog. We just lost her too. We had two German shorthairs and they

were killed by coyotes about a month ago.

It's one of those little life wounds, you know. Yeah, it is.

And I have a prayer for that and to light their way, because we've also had that happen.

And it's such a heartache for the whole family.

You know, so I got an email last night from a woman named Emily,

who today, she asked for prayers, and she said today she's giving birth to a

stillborn child, and it's her third consecutive pregnancy that's ended with a stillbirth.

And that's just devastating. Maybe talk us through a way to pray into that kind

of a moment, Kayla, when somebody is really hurting and in the acute phase of

something so traumatizing and tragic.

Maybe give us some language there. Yeah, yeah.

I think those moments when prayer can feel really out of reach is when it can

also be the most profound.

We have a God that enters into our suffering. We have a God that wept, you know?

Jesus is not unfamiliar with grief and with sorrow.

And, you know, we are made in the image of God. And when we weep for the deep,

deep pain that we have to hold and that breaks our heart, I find...

A comfort. And it's not a cheap comfort.

It's not a comfort that ties everything up in a bow or makes everything okay, right?

It's not that kind of icing on the cake of toxic kind of positivity,

but it's a deep comfort that even in our heartache and in our tears when we

have no more words, that we have a God who is with us.

And so I've talked to a lot of parents who have experienced exactly what she is experiencing.

And they said, looking back, right, looking back, here's what I wish I would have had.

Here are the words I wish I would have had. Here are the words that I wish somebody

would have prayed over me.

And so it's my prayer that I can take that and I can steward that so that when

you or Or when somebody you know is going through something really awful, really,

you know, you just don't have the words for it, at least you can say,

here, like, here, somebody else has prayed this.

Somebody else has gone through this. Maybe somebody else is going through this right now.

You are not alone. I don't pretend to understand what's going on, but I'm praying for you.

You know, we so often say, I'm praying for you.

And at least for me, I can often then just go on to the next thing. it.

Here is something that we can turn to that I hope is an offering in some of

those moments where all we have are those wordless groans, like Scripture says.

Wow. That's beautiful. Well, I thank you for writing this book.

I'm going to use it for my grandkids.

Our kids are all grown, but we're going to give it as a gift to our kids for Christmas.

And maybe they won't hear this in time to spoil that present,

but we're going to give them that.

Because it's such a beautiful collection, we've already given it to another

set of friends who have young children.

And I just thank you for writing it and for following the leading of the Spirit

there to put this together. It's a great resource, and it's a perfect time of

the year for it to come out.

Where can people find more out about you, Kayla? Yeah, absolutely.

Well, kaylacraig.com is the easiest place to go to find everything.

But I have a weekly podcast that is like 10 minutes.

And all we do is read a scripture and pray together.

And I send you off kind of with a blessing or benediction. And so it's just

one of those things where you can listen to it as you're commuting to work or

driving the kids to school or maybe at the end of the night you're loading the dishwasher,

whatever it is, just a small offering to stay rooted.

So you can find that, Liturgies for Parents. You can sign up for my newsletter,

which I kind of consider to be like a care package of prayers as we journey through.

And you can find my books to light their way and every season sacred wherever books are sold.

That's great. What do you think is the number one thing that young families

who want their kids to grow up and know who they are in Christ,

what's the number one thing that you would share to other parents that would

help their kids have something to hold on to as they're growing up?

I think that as parents, we're very hard on ourselves and that we feel like it's all up to us.

Like, we have to say just the right thing, or we have to have just the right

answer for questions that maybe don't even have an answer on this side of heaven.

And so I think I would tell parents, like, your presence matters more than you know.

And when you are with your kids, and when you are honoring them by just being

with them and seeing them and loving them with a love that comes from God.

You are doing deep, important work, and God loves your kids.

You feel like you would do anything for those beautiful kids in your lives,

and God loves them even more than that.

And that is a comfort to me, that it doesn't have to all be on my shoulders.

And I hope that that is a comforting reminder to parents too.

It is. That's very comforting. And you've got, you just share with us,

you have two children with special needs and chronic illness.

How does that play into your relationship with your other children and your family?

And what words of advice would you have for families who are dealing with a challenge like that?

One of those challenges that doesn't go away or change or evolve over time,

get better over time. Yeah, yeah.

It can feel really lonely.

It can feel lonely for them. It can feel lonely as a parent to see your child

hurt, to see your child be in pain or suffer or not be able to do what their peers are doing.

My daughter is nonverbal.

She had a seizure disorder that left her with even more disabilities than what

you would typically experience having Down syndrome.

And so I have learned to let go a lot.

I have learned to let go of a sense of control, because I have seen that no

matter how much I kind of want to strong-arm things into happening a certain

way, even with the best intentions,

I am not in control, and I have to trust God.

I have to trust that God is with us even here, even now, even in all of the

wondering. And so, for parents that are also walking through that, I think I would just say.

It's a loosening, it's a letting go. And in that letting go,

there is a comfort and a freedom, almost, in just saying, we are going to be

still and know that God is God, right? We are going to be now in the present.

And those worries about the future, you know, Jesus talks about those worries,

right? Don't worry about the future.

Tomorrow has enough worries of its own. Let's be present in today.

So I think my kids have helped me be present, because I can so often start to

worry, start to go down those what ifs.

And it really is taking it day by day and having enough just for the day.

Mercies are new each morning. And somehow, that can be enough to get us through.

Amen. There's so much. You look around, and you see the culture,

and you see the struggles, and all the bad news, and all the things that are

going on. I can start to feel like everything's falling apart,

like even the church is falling apart.

It's encouraging to me to see a younger generation like you,

and there's a bunch of young authors in I think your generation,

Natasha Crane and Alyssa Childers that I can think of, Tish Harrison Warren.

It's super encouraging to me to see the church being so strong and the faith

being so strong in your generation.

And what would you say to other younger Christians to say, hey,

there is a way that you can navigate culture and raise your kids to know who

God is and know who they are?

What would you say to people who are concerned about our society and that kind

of big geopolitical kind of stuff? And how do you keep yourself grounded there?

Well, it's so easy, right? We talked about technology. We have so much at our

fingertips all the time, right?

It can just feel like the world is on flames. Like, everything is on fire.

And I feel like my relationship with God, you know, like getting into those—the

message paraphrases—unforced rhythms of grace.

But when we get into those unforced rhythms of grace, it helps me stay rooted, you know?

It helps me feel like if I didn't have God, if I didn't have Jesus in my life,

I'm not sure I could metabolize all the pain of the world. I'm not sure.

I think I would just be pulled in all different directions.

And so for me, it's a real anchoring. It's a real rootedness when I can say, you know what, guys?

I don't have all the answers for why things are the way they are,

for why we're seeing on the news what we're seeing, why we're grieving war or

injustice or whatever it is.

But what we do have is a God that understands and is with us.

And we can trust that God is good and compassionate.

And so that is a hope for me. And I hope that that is encouraging to other parents, too.

You did a great job with the book, and I'm so thankful that you took your time to be with us today.

We're going to make sure that a few thousand new people hear about you and your

book, and I'm praying for your success and your family.

And just good job. Thank you for being with us today, Kayla.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

That's great. God bless you. Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you. You too.

What an incredible talk. I

can't encourage you highly enough to go get a copy of Every Season Sacred.

It would be a great gift for you to give somebody else if they're raising children

And I think we had an incredible talk and I'm very grateful that Kayla took

the time right here before,

Thanksgiving to visit with us and share her encouraging message and her deep

insights with you friend.

We love you. We're praying for you I hope you have a great Thanksgiving holiday,

and we'll be back tomorrow with something new for you.

God bless you friend Have a great day and don't forget you can't change your

life until you change your mind, but the good news is you can start today.

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Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

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2014 helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world I'm Dr.

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you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.