You’re lying in bed, and your brain will not stop. The to-do list. The thing you said yesterday that you keep replaying.
You want to pray, but you can’t even get a full sentence out before your mind is somewhere else. If that’s you, this episode is for you.
In this episode, Rachel unpacks 2 Corinthians 10:5 and what it actually means to take every thought captive. She shares the real story of a racing mind at 4 am and how handing God the parking garage, the weather, and the drive home became the prayer she didn’t know she needed.
You’ll discover:
• Why a racing mind doesn’t mean a disqualified heart
• What Paul meant by “taking thoughts captive” and how to do it at 4 am
• How to turn racing thoughts into actual prayer instead of fighting them
• Why the spin might be a spiritual battle, not a personal flaw
If your brain runs laps every time you try to be still with God, this episode will remind you: He’s not waiting for perfect focus. He’s waiting for you to hand it over.
Resources Mentioned:
• Praying the Promises of God Prayer Journal: promisesprayerjournal.com
Transcript
Welcome to the Untangling Prayer Podcast. I’m Rachel Wojo, and each week we unravel lifes notts through prayer. Here you’ll find practical wisdom and prayer encouragement to guide you through life’s hardest seasons. Join me as we untangle life’s messes together, one prayer at a time.00:33Speaker 1
Welcome to the Untangling Prayer Podcast. I’m Rachel, and I’m glad you’re here today. Okay, so I have to tell you what happened to me recently. I was in Atlanta with my daughter for the nation’s largest volleyball tournament. It was a great trip, exhausting, but great. And on the last night, I woke up at four in the morning, wide awake. I could not go back to sleep. And it wasn’t because of anything dramatic. Really, nobody was sick, nothing was wrong. My brain just decided that four am was the perfect time to solve every logistical problem for the next twelve hours. I’m lying there in the dark because I don’t want to turn on the light and wake up my daughter, and my mind starts going, how am I going to move the van from the hotel parking garage to the one closer to the convention center. How far is the walk? Is it going to rain when the tournament is over? How long are we going to sit in traffic? And then how am I going to drive all the way home on this little sleep? Because I’ve been awake. None of these things are emergencies, none of them are even real problems yet, but at four am in a dark hotel room, they felt like the weight of the world. And if you’ve ever been there, lying awake, mind going one hundred miles an hour over things you can cannot solve at that moment, then this episode is for you, because God actually has something to say about what we do with a mind that won’t stop. Before we get into it, I want to tell you about a resource that ties directly into today’s conversation, my praying The Promises of God. Prayer Journal was designed to give your mind somewhere to land when it’s spinning. Instead of trying to quiet your thoughts on your own, you anchor them in what’s true. You grab onto God’s promises. Get your copy Promises prayer Journal dot com. And now let’s get into the first segment, Questions in Hard Spaces, And this week’s question is why can’t I quiet my thoughts long enough to pray? So back to the hotel room. I’m lying there, and I’m realizing something that my first instinct was not to pray. My first instinct was to plan. I was trying to mentally map out every scenario, from the parking situation to the weather, to calculating drive times, all of that, as if somehow I could think hard enough and I would be able to control what was happening the next day. And I think that’s what a racy mind really does, if we’re honest, It’s not just a distraction. It’s an attempt to control things that we can’t control. And prayer is the opposite of that, prayer saying God, I can’t hold all of this, Do you take it? We don’t naturally do that, though, do we. We spin, and we plan, and we rehearse, and we wonder why we feel so exhausted even though we haven’t actually done anything. This is where scripture really meets us, and Second Corinthians ten to five says we demolish arguments in every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ take captive every thought. I love that Paul doesn’t pretend that the thoughts won’t come. He doesn’t say clear your mind in grab onto the meditation app He says, the thoughts will come, and when they do, grab them and take them captive and make them answer to Jesus instead of running wild in your head. And notice what comes right before that in verse four. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. That’s the word Paul uses there. A stronghold is a thought pattern that has dug itself in and fortified itself. It’s the worry loop, it’s the spinning it’s the what if cycle that plays on repeat. Paul says, we don’t just manage those, We demolish them with divine power through prayer and God’s word. So what does that look like for you? Not in theory, but I’m talking about at four am in the hotel room, or in the carpool line, or in the middle of the night when your brain just won’t shut off. Here’s what I’ve started doing, and it’s simple, but I’m telling you it works. When a racing thought comes. I don’t try to fight it, and I don’t try to make my mind glow blank. I literally give it to the Lord. Right then, Lord, that parking garage thing, it’s yours, the weather yours, the drive home yours. And what happens is that those racing thoughts actually become the prayer. I’m not trying to get past the noise to find God. The noise is where I am meeting God. And even though I’m worried, I’m handing the conversation over to him. That way, I don’t feel like it’s a failure to prayer. It’s taking a captive. It’s exactly what Paul was talking about. Thanks for listening into this segment of Questions in Hard Spaces. We’ll be right back after this brief word from our sponsors. Thank you for joining in for that word from our sponsors, and now for this week’s Pray More worry Less encouragement. This week’s Pray More worry Less principle is a racing mind is often a battlefield, and the weapon is the word of God. I want to dig into this a little deeper because I think we’ve been thinking about racing thoughts the wrong way. We treat them like a character flaw, Like if we were just more disciplined or more spiritual, our minds would be calm during prayer time, and then we wind up feeling guilty and anxious, which does not help. It doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t help our prayer lives, and it doesn’t help anything. So what do we do? What if there’s a reason that your mind goes into overdrive, specifically when you’re trying to connect with God, Paul wrote tewod Corinthians ten, in the context of spiritual warfare. He’s not giving some kind of self help advice. This is a real battle for the territory of your mind. And I hope that that takes the pressure off of you. Because if racing thoughts are part of the battle, then I’m not broken. I’m in a fight, and God has given me the weapons for that fight. That’s a completely different posture. So let me give you a couple of things that have helped me. And these aren’t necessarily from a book. This is from sitting in a hotel room at four am. The first thing is name what’s actually happening when I’m lying there in the spinning I have to say this is anxiety. This is not problem solving because there’s a difference between actually working through a real issue and rehearsing worst case scenarios in the dark. So naming it pulls its out of the shadows. You can’t take something captive if you have it identified exactly what it is, and then secondly give that thought a place to go. Your mind is going to land on something. It cannot be empty. So instead of trying to stop the racing, redirect it. In Atlanta, after I handed God the parking garage and the weather and the drive home, I started with scripture Filippians four six and seven. Do not be anxious for anything, but in every situation, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds. In Christ Jesus I quoted Psalm one twenty one. I quoted some twenty three. That’s exactly what we need it for. I am right. God wants to guard the very thing that feels out of control, but we have to take it to him. We have to present our requests, not just think about them endlessly, but hand them over to our God. And they’ll let the peace come. By the way, I don’t want you to hear me saying that I did this perfectly and then drift it off into a peaceful sleep with a halo over my head. I didn’t hand God the parking garage, and then five minutes later I was thinking about it again, and so I had to hand it over again. And that’s the process. It’s not a one time fix. It is a discipline in continually giving it back to God. And he’s not grading us on how many times that we give it back to him. He’s just glad that we keep coming back to him. For our final segment, each week, I share an answer prayer story, and this week I just wanted to finish out this Atlanta story because I’m laying there at four am and I’ve done the thing. I’ve handed God the logistics one by one, and I’ve whispered scripture over my heart. I have taken thought, taken the thoughts captive as best that I could. And I’m not going to pretend that I got this miraculous five hours of sleep after that. But here’s what did happen when morning came and we got up and started the day. Every single thing that I had worried about was working out. A walk wasn’t so bad. It didn’t rain, traffic moved. But here’s something interesting. When I got to the van, there was a note on the back windshield. Someone had scraped the van while trying to park their car and left their phone number. Now a few days earlier, maybe even earlier the same day, that would have put me into a spiral. It would have been one more thing to deal with, one more problem I didn’t plan for. But in the moment when I saw that note, I thought, Okay, Lord, this is yours too. Somebody did the right thing by leaving their number on the van, and we will get this figured out. And I got in the van and we left the parking lot. And that’s when I knew that something had shifted inside of me. Not because the trip was going perfectly because someone had scraped to the van, definitely, but what previously would have put me in a tailspin didn’t. Why Why did that happen? Because I was practicing handing things to God, and when a real curveball showed up, my muscle memory was already warmed up. It wasn’t a dramatic miracle story nobody was healed. There was no check in the mail this time. Nothing huge. But this is what answered prayer does. It changes how you live when you repetitively hand things back to God. The parking garage, the weather, and the traffic. Those are training ground for when a real test comes. You’ll be ready. If today’s episode resonate it with you, then check out the Praying that Promises of God Prayer Journal. It gives your mind an anchor the next time your mind starts racing at four am or two pm, or whenever yours decides to take off. Remember you don’t have to solve it all in your head. You just need to hand it to the one who already has a coverd. God sees you, hears you, and he knows your need.12:42Speaker 2
Thanks for joining me on the Untangling Prayer Podcast. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who could use a little hope, and be sure to subscribe for more. Until next time, keep seeking, keep trusting, and keep praying.