51. When Prayer Feels Like It’s Hitting the Ceiling: 3 Practical Ways to Reset Your Prayer Life

Have you ever sat down to pray… and it felt like your words barely made it past the ceiling?

You love Jesus.
 You believe in prayer.
 But lately? It feels dull. Routine. Directionless.

Maybe you’re exhausted.
 Maybe you’re overwhelmed by medicine.
 Maybe you’re just spiritually dry.

If you’re a busy Christian physician trying to stay anchored to God in the middle of a demanding system, this episode is for you.

Today we’re having an honest conversation about what to do when prayer feels flat — and how to reset your prayer life without guilt, pressure, or striving.

Because prayer was never meant to be a performance.
 It’s not a “hit-and-run” download of requests.
 It’s a relationship.

In this episode, I’ll walk you through:

✨ A powerful mindset shift that will change how you approach prayer
 ✨ Why “hit-and-run” prayers keep us disconnected
 ✨ 3 simple, practical ways to reignite your prayer life starting today

And here’s the best part:
 These practices don’t require more time.
 They require intention.

🔗 Next Steps

👉 Join the Weekly Dose email for Christian physicians: https://www.ingahofmann.com/weeklydose
👉 Explore the Heal the Healers Mentorship Program: https://www.ingahofmann.com/heal-the-healers-mentorship-program

 👉 Share this episode with a colleague who feels spiritually tired

Are you a Christian physician longing for a deeper walk with God and a supportive community that truly gets it?

The Heal the Healers Mentorship is a Spirit-led program equipping Christian physicians to walk in wholeness, power, and purpose. You’ll grow in intimacy with God, walk boldly in your identity, and learn to integrate faith and medicine—without burnout or compromise.

👉 Enroll here to join the mentorship program. 

💌 Want to stay encouraged in the meantime? Sign up for my Weekly Dose—a weekly email filled with encouragement, prayer, and prophetic words for physicians, by a physician.
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https://www.ingahofmann.com/prayersupport – Visit my website where you can learn more about me, get free resources, request prayer, or schedule a prayer appointmen...

Transcript

0:00

Have you ever felt like your prayers are just bouncing off the wall or hitting the ceiling, or you just sit down and you have just no idea what to even pray? If this is you, stay tuned for after the music and we will be right back. Well, welcome back healers and Christian physicians. This episode is all about when prayer feels like it's hitting the ceiling. I don't know about you, but. Perhaps you ever felt like a time where prayer just felt really dull? You were feeling like you're sitting down and you maybe finished your Bible reading plan, and now it's time to pray for a few minutes, but it feels like it's. Going nowhere. Your prayers are hitting the ceiling, you maybe don't even know what to say, or it feels sort of like a dull routine and like a Christian. Sure. But you're really longing for. More meaningful prayers to actually connect with the Lord. So if that is you, you are not alone. We all have been there. And I wanna share today some practical tips that really help you reset your prayer life. So we'll give you three practical tips that you can try out today. But before we go into that, the practicalities and those three little nuggets, I wanna give you a brief kind of foundation to maybe shift your mindset a little bit about prayer. I feel a lot of times we have. A bit of a misconception about prayer, and that used to be very true for me too. I just felt like, okay, as a Christian, I'm supposed to pray, so I am supposed to make that time of my routine. And I tried various things over the years. A prayer list of items. I never really was a fan of pre-written prayers, although came to appreciate them later. And a lot of times it felt like, oh, I'm just gonna say some stuff to God that is on my heart. And that's it. And if you ever felt like that, you are in the right place. Prayer is. Not a hit and run operation. I see this all the time and people laugh at me. What do I mean by that? It's a lot of times the scenario where we sit down, we pray, we give our requests to the Lord, God, help me with this. Help me have a light call schedule. Help me with my patients today. Please be with my kids at school or whatever it might be. So we bring our requests to the Lord and then we might even have some questions and things we are struggling with, but we usually just mention them and then we run, which means we just dump our request to the Lord. But we actually never sit, wait, listen. What he actually has to say about any of these things. And that's probably worthwhile a higher episode that I should maybe get on docket for the next week. What I wanna focus on today is really on the tips. So. Prayer is not a hit and run operation where we just dump our request to the Lord. Although we should bring our request to the Lord with prayer and politician with Thanksgiving, we should make our request known and the Lord hears them and he wants to hear about them, but it's not because he just. Wants to hear a list of things because he already knows them. Prayer is all about relationship. It's not a performance. It's not how long you sit. It's not how perfect your words are, or how many words do you even pray. In fact, when you remember the story of Jesus, he kind of discourages those long prayers with long winded words. So. I encourage you to do the same to just be mindful of what he actually speak to the Lord. Prayer is all about relationship. I know as physicians, we are really wired to solve problems, to look at performance, to optimize everything and move on to the next thing. And prayer can feel a little bit like this. Let me just pray and then I'll go about my day. And sometimes we just have to learn to sit simply and still in, Lord, I'm here. I need help. And sometimes prayer can be just sitting in silence and wait for his presence. So I want you to think about just your relationship when you. Sit in prayer, are you there to get something done or you are there to build relationship with the Lord? So remember, prayer is not a hit and run operation. It is for you to sit and build relationship with God, get to know him, and so the next few tips are gonna be all about that. Just that, you know, this is actually something, I. Write about in my weekly dose emails, so if you haven't gotten my emails and you are not on my email list, I strongly suggest to sign up. It's totally free. Usually in my weekly dose email, I send a weekly email, more or less as the name suggests. And sometimes it is a prayer, sometimes it is a takeaway or an aha that I'm learning. Sometimes I have a prayer for you or maybe even a prophetic revelation that I'm just cheering where I'm like, I sense the Lord is moving in this direction and medicine. Or maybe as physicians, we need to focus on this right now. So these are really just. Emails from my heart to yours with a focus on encouraging you, equipping you as a question physician to integrate faith and medicine. So how to sign up you go to my website, Inga, INGA. Hoffman, H-O-F-M-A-N-N, inga hoffman.com/weekly dose. I put it in the show notes as well. So moving back to prayer. So here are my three tips. If you have a pen and paper, you can write them down. And I encourage you, take a. About these three tips and actually pick one specific thing in the end that you wanna implement. So tip number one is pray scripture. And you may use a framework for this. I like to use a SOAP framework, which stands for scripture. Read the scripture, O for observation, A for application, and p for prayer. So how does this look like in the practical sense? When you read your scriptures, whatever passage in your Bible reading plan and your devotional, read a short passage. Notice one thing that stands out to you. Ask the Lord, how does this apply to me? Just enter conversation with him and then turn this application into your prayer. So for example, be still and know that I am God. You're like, okay, what can I learn from this? There have a few applications maybe, but one big one for us physicians is perhaps that it's really hard for us to be still. So you could pray the following. Lord, I realize that being still is really difficult for me. Help me and teach me to trust you and be still in the moments of uncertainty. What could be a prayer like, Lord, help me to be still and slow down and listen to your voice. It could literally be one specific sentence, but make it applicable to the scriptures that you just read. You can keep this very simple and really do it just in a minute or two, and obviously if you read a whole passage and it's a longer passage, you can pause in between and pray what comes to mind. So in that way. Scripture becomes a conversation and you know for sure that you're praying the will of God and nothing else because you're actually praying the scripture. So that's a beautiful way to be anchored in the truth of the Word of God and not just your emotion. And pray the scriptures over you, which means you are praying truth and you're building faith. So that's tip number one. Pray the scriptures. Based on what your Bible reading plan for that day is. Tip number two is similar but unique in its way. Pray the Psalms. The Psalms are very beautiful ways for us to actually pray. With different type of emotions because when you read the Psalms, you will notice that there is a lot of emotion embedded in this. Sometimes struggles, lament, gratitude, worship. There is a whole spectrum of things that the psalmists are expressing in their ways, and there are different ways. I suggest that you could pray the Psalms, so you could incorporate this also very easily in their Bible reading plan, which means you maybe read ab psalm per day. And then you meditate on that scripture. So the first version on how to do this is you are doing basically what I would call a line by line contemplative prayer, which means you start reading psalm, read it slowly, I suggest read it out loud, pause and respond. So this could look like this. Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. Now you can just meditate and pause for a moment and ask the Holy Spirit what comes to mind? How does that resonate? And then you could just say, thank you, Lord, that you are my shepherd today, that you are my leader today as I go into clinic. That's it, and you go line by line through the psalm and contemplate on each of those verses. The next version of praying the Psalms would be more reflective and soaking. So you read the entire Psalm again, perhaps out loud. I find that very powerful. And turn it more into a conversation with the Lord. So for example, Psalm 1, 2, 3 says, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and harness law. He meditates day and night. He's like a tree planted by streams of water. So you can just meditate on this entire passage. Oh, the Psalms writes about being delighted in the law, which is the word of God to meditate in it. Day and night is like a tree planted by streams of waters. You can read it section by section, or you can read the Hope Psalm and let the words just wash over you and be still, you don't even have to say anything in the moment and just read these words and be still and just say, holy Spirit, show me what these words mean to me in my life right now. And he might just give you a total new awareness in your heart, in your mind, what it means to be. Planted like a tree by streams of water. He might give you visual images even. This is how you build relationship with the Lord so that these meditative reflections on scriptures really soak in and fill your soul, and then you could pray something out loud later that came from that reflection. And then the third tip I wanna give you, use memory cards. So I found this wonderful, especially for us busy physicians. I mean, all of these work and honestly, all of these don't take a whole lot of time. They're great starting place, but memorizing scriptures is so important because we really want to get the word of. Into us so that we instill the truth into our very being as a foundation for our life. So what I have done often, I just. Started to write little index cards during my Bible reading. Perhaps there was a verse that stood out in a certain season or perhaps there were specific things I struggled with that I felt like I need to memorize scripture so I have them handy when I'm struggling, let's say with fear or worry about provision or my children, whatever it might be, that I have as. Scripture at hand. That speaks a better word than my emotions. And I have these on memorization cards and typically, most days I go through them every day. There are seasons when I'm like taking a break from it. But in in general, I practice the memorization of these scripture cards sort of after my quiet time fairly routinely. And this is awesome. So not only. I am memorizing scripture, but then if I'm really stuck, I actually utilize them for prayer. And I discovered this by accident One day I was done with cry time. I felt stuck in my prayer. I was like, okay, let me just memorize my scripture cards. And so I practiced and then as I read the verses, as I recited them to myself. I suddenly made them a prayer. So in a way it is similar to what I mentioned in the first version, which is to basically pray over the scripture passage you are reading. But this is more specific because these are verses that stood out to you in the past that you may wanna memorize. And that you want to instill truth in and that you also want to pray. So in certain seasons there might be certain scriptures that you start to really pray over yourself. And with that, that's wonderful. Be pause. You're praying the word of God over yourself. So let me give you an example. So I have right here in front of me, my Romans 1513 card. You're probably very familiar with the scripture. It says, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. So as I now memorize this card and have. Practice the murmuration And now I can say, okay, Lord, thank you that you are the God of hope. Please help me. Please fill me with your joy and with your peace so that I can overflow with hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit and be a testimony to others. So I acknowledge God is the God of hope. I ask him to fill me with his joy and peace, and then that I can overflow with hope and be a witness. Now, I prayed in this short amount of time, three substantial things. I acknowledge to God as I ask him to fill me with his joy and peace, and now. I pray over the result, meaning well, I acknowledge the result because the word of God is true, right? It won't lie. So the result of if I filled with joy and peace as I trust in him, that hope will overflow in me and through me by the power of the Holy Spirit. And now I prayed in the third part a real application so that I'm actually a light, so that maybe even I can evangelize. So that I attract people to the gospel. See how that one verse gives me a multitude of ways to pray. Very scripturally, but very powerfully. So I encourage you to do that because it's like a double Grammy. You memorize scripture and you pray the scriptures, and I would pick scriptures in your life right now of seasons that you really need the Lord's strength in. Maybe it's something you're struggling with, maybe it's something you want to grow in areas of your faith. Memorize the scriptures and pray them. There is no more biblical way than praying the scriptures, and I think that is so much more powerful than us just babbling a bunch of requests. Now we can still. She, our crest, our heart, our, our difficulties with the Lord. He wants to hear them. He cares about your emotions and your needs. But I would encourage you start this practice. Pick one of these three to just try them out. In summary, you can either pray the scriptures that you are already reading as part of your reading plan, whether that is a devotional. A year through the Bible or whatever you are doing, just take a section of that scripture. Use the soap method of read it, then observe. Look for the application for you, and then pray that specific thing out. That's number one. Pray the Psalms either by line, by line contemplation, or by a more reflective soaking where you let the script just wash over you and actually really be still in that moment. And then number three, use memory cards to not only memorize. Scriptures, but also pray what those memory verses are actually saying. So I really wanna encourage you with these practical tips. Start them today. You could even do this. As part of your quiet time, of course, but really anytime during the day if you will have a short lunch break. I know it's sometimes hard for us physicians, but let's say you eat your lunch for 10 minutes and instead of scrolling on social media, we could just say, okay, I'm gonna read one verse. And I'm quietly pray that over myself. This also works great in the car. Let's say you have a commute in, you could put an audio bible on. That's how you put on the Psalms and you just listen and contemplate and prayer over the scriptures, or stick one of those memory cards in your white coat and just pull it out when you need a moment. So perfect time to enrich your day with prayer and it's a perfect way to create a practice. Of praying without seizing. So let me just pray for you right now. Lord Jesus, I thank you for relationship with you, and I pray that every physician that is listening and even listener right now will be encouraged to pray. Give them a specific strategy that you know already is most powerful for them right in the season where they are. Give them encouragement to follow through and we real through your Holy Spirit. So those scriptures come to life. In them and through them. And we pray that all in Jesus' name. Amen. So if this feels like, wow, this is so helpful and I wish, uh, we could talk. Every day, all the time, and I wish you could mentor and help me in my walk as a Christian physician. Then the Heal the Healers Mentorship program is exactly for you. In my mentorship program, I actually mentor people every week. That means, we are talking about scripture. We are usually doing a series on a specific topic relevant to ask as question physicians. There's mentorship, teaching, discussion, accountability, a community once a week and then once a month on top of that I'm doing a coaching call where you can bring your questions or things that you're stuck with that you need help with. I'm a professional trained coach, have been for nearly a decade, so you get basically a double whammy. You get it. Professional, Christian physician coach, and somebody who is also being able to mentor you in a spiritual capacity as a Christian physician. So if that's of interest to you, go down to the link in the show notes and find out more about the Heal the Healers Mentorship Program. Would love to welcome you. It's a wonderful community. And with that, I wish you a wonderful day and talk to you next week.