When to Pray and When to Pester: How Moms Can Hear the Holy Spirit Before They Speak

When should we pray—and when should we stop pestering?
 In this honest and funny episode of Real Moms, Real Faith, Jenna Marie Masters gets real about the moments every mom faces: wanting to fix, control, or “help” the people we love. From stories about pestering her husband to praying over her kids’ country music playlists (yes, really!), Jenna shares how the Holy Spirit gently taught her the difference between prayer and prying.

If you’ve ever wondered whether to speak up, step in, or stay silent, this episode will help you pause, pray, and let God work in ways you never could. Because sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is stop talking—and start trusting.

💛 You’ll learn:

• The difference between praying, pestering, and prying
• How to invite the Holy Spirit into everyday parenting moments
• Why silence and surrender often lead to breakthroughs
• A funny (and gross!) story about what happens when we pick up things we weren’t meant to

Listen in and be reminded: God’s voice brings peace, not pressure.

📖 Key Verse: “Be still, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10

Transcript

Welcome & Fall Vibes

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This is Jenna Marie Masters with the Real Mom's Real Faith Podcast. I am so glad you're here so you can be encouraged to trust God with all the things one day at a time. Happy fall, everybody. It feels like fall. It's so, it's so

Pray vs. Pester vs. Pry

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fun. This episode is called When to Pray and When to Pester and When to Pry. These are all things I believe we should be asking the Holy Spirit every day as moms. And what do I mean by that? I'm just gonna jump right in here to Proverbs 21, 23 through 31. This is the message version says this. I want to really encourage us to practice the habit of asking the Holy Spirit, should I pray in this situation or should I pry in this situation? Should I keep pestering in this situation? And see what the Holy Spirit tells you. Spoiler alert. Usually the Holy Spirit will never tell you to pester people. And the Holy Spirit will usually never tell you to pry into someone else's business. I'm sorry if that wasn't the answer you were hoping for. Believe me, there are times where I wish

Marriage Story: Pestering Backfires

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it was. I'm going to start off by telling you a little personal story that happened probably 12 years ago between me and my husband. And there was a situation I really felt he should view the same way that I viewed it. And so daily I would come to him with my reasonings of why he should see things the way I saw things. And he would gently tell me, I just need some space. I just need some time. And I would say, okay. And then the next day I would think, well, that was enough time. And I would come back to him with the same situation and the same reasons why he should see the situation the way Jenna sees the situation. And after months of this, finally I felt the Holy Spirit just press on my heart. Shut up, Jenna. Shut up. You need to be quiet and pray. Let me deal with this. If you would spend as much time praying about this situation that you did pestering your husband about this situation, so much more power would be unleashed. It was like he was saying, if you spend as much time praying as you did pestering your husband, do you realize the power that would be unleashed in this situation? Friends, pestering usually equals problems. Prayer equals power. And we ask ourselves, what do we really believe in? Do we believe in the power of the prayer or do we believe in the power of pestering? Because no one buys a mug that says, I believe in the power of pestering. And yet it's something we so often do. I'm happy to say that

Prayer Unleashes Power

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the Lord helped me to be obedient after months of being a real nag. And I started to just pray about the situation. Just pray that he would bring us in alliance together with the Lord's will and with each other. And months later, my husband came to me on his own accord and said to me, I think we need to talk about this situation. This is how I see it. And this is how I believe the Lord sees it. And I had felt the exact same way. The Lord really did a miracle in our relationship here because my pestering had put a wedge between us and a wedge between our communication. But when I finally did shut my mouth and pray instead, the Lord did the work. And I didn't have to exhaust myself the way I thought that I had to. And it was really prideful of me to think that I could. Years later, I had a situation with one of my kids. And I know this is probably gonna sound silly to some moms, but this is my story. So I'm just gonna tell it like it is. We usually play worship

Teen Years: Music, Respect, Restraint

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music during homework time. And it was just what I was used to. It was just beautiful in the house. Everybody would get around the kitchen island and do their homework, and we would play worship music. Well, something shifted, and country music started playing every time homework happened. I have nothing against country music. It's fun, it's all the things. But what was kind of bothering my spirit is I had replaced the worship music during homework time that I just I valued it so much and I feel like it set the tone in the house for dinner, and it just is something I had really grown to love, and I didn't realize how much I valued it until it was gone. And so I really wanted to say something to one of my children about switching the music back to worship music. But as your kids get older, there is a really interesting balance when they transition into a young adult because you want to respect them, but they are still young. So the need to pray before you open your mouth, I feel becomes even more accentuated. You don't want to put a wedge between your communication with them either, like I had done with my husband years ago. So I remembered the situation that had happened in my marriage, and I decided, you know what? I am not gonna say anything. I want to pester so bad and say, turn off that country music, turn back on the worship music. We're not doing this. But something held me back. I do believe it was the Holy Spirit, and I decided to pray instead. And I just prayed that the Lord would move in that situation, that He would turn their hearts to want to hear worship music

Let God Work In Their Hearts

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again. Two days into praying this, while the country music was blaring, one of my children turned off the country music and said, You know, I think I'm gonna fast from listening to country music for a while and only play worship music. In that moment, I just felt like God was like, see, Jenna, see what I can do? If you stop pestering and pray instead, it gives me room to work. He can take care of it. There is a lot of noise in our kids' lives, just like there's a lot of noise in our lives, right? And a lot of the noise that goes on in our kids' lives is actually our voices. And I'm not saying it's it's bad. Clearly the Lord has made his parents for a reason and we are to shepherd them and guide them. But there are times I do believe God wants us to quiet the room a bit and soften our voices a bit. I think we'd all agree it's better for them to hear from God than from us in most cases. But that means sometimes we gotta be quiet. So here's the whole point to me telling you these stories. Before you pester your child or your

Pray or Pry: The Dead Mouse Lesson

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husband or a coworker or a friend, anything like that, before you do that, before you fall into that, like I so often do, stop and pray. Ask the Lord, should I say something right now? Or should I shut my mouth right now and just keep praying for a season? We're told in John 16, 13, when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own, he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. Psalm 46, 10 says, Be still and know that I am God. Even in the little situations, like country music versus worship music. I think that we treat prayer like a one-way conversation. It's like, imagine calling your friend and dumping out and vomiting all of your worry and all of your problems on this friend, and then hanging up the phone before you even listen to a word they said back to you. Sometimes I think we treat God like that when we pray. It's like we come to God and we tell him everything we're worried about, and instead of stopping after we speak and waiting to listen for his answer, we just end the prayer and walk away. That's not a relationship. I don't even know what that is, but it's not a relationship. And God really wants to be in a relationship with us. He wants to give us answers. And so when I came to the Lord and I asked him, Should I be pestering my kids about this or should I just pray about it? He was very clear. I want you to just keep praying about this and I will do the work. And he did, and he did it in an awesome way. It was so much cooler to see my child come to that on his own with the Lord than for him to do it because I made him do it. So before you pester, pray. The second thing I want to talk about is do you pray or do you pry? Do you pry into someone else's business or into a situation? So I'm gonna tell you a little story.

Friend Drama, Offense, And Wisdom

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Please don't stop listening to my podcast after this story because it's probably because it's kind of a gross story. A while back, I was in a rush because someone was gonna swing by the house. And if you ever had somebody text you and they're like, I'm gonna swing by, and you look at your house and you're like, oh my gosh, should I tell them I'm not home? Should I pretend I'm in the shower because it's just like a mess? So this happened and it's happened more than once. I was in a rush to clean up. My youngest had a bunch of her little toys on the ground, and she always used to play with these little toy dinosaurs. I mean, they were tiny, like the size of my thumb tiny. So I was grabbing up all the toys and throwing them into this toy basket really quick, and I saw one of her little dinosaurs over by the garbage. And so I went and I went to scoop it up, and it wasn't a hard plastic dinosaur. In fact, it was really soft and furry and kind of mushy. And I looked at it, you guys, I had picked up a dead baby mouse. Like I picked up a dead baby mouse in my hand. I dropped it and I screamed so bloody murder. My husband ran down the hall. He thought I had hurt myself. It was so disgusting. But here's the thing: if we don't slow down and listen to God, we often pick up things that we were not meant to pick up. Believe me, it is better to pray than to pry because not everything is our business. Not everything is meant for us to pick up. James 1:5 says, if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. So you ask for God in the situation. He is going to give you wisdom. And I will think of that mouse every single time someone comes to me with a situation, and I think to myself, hmm, am I supposed to pick this up or is this a dead mouse? I have an example of this, and maybe some of you can relate, because even as adult women, there is some drama sometimes that can happen in women friend groups. And there was a situation where I had a friend who was hurting, and I just wanted to know why she was hurting. And she alluded that some other person that I knew had hurt her. She didn't tell me the whole story, and I kept asking her, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me what happened, tell me what happened. I just want to know what happened.

Parenting Boundaries With School

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And when I found out what happened, I wish I didn't know. It wasn't my business. And then I found myself judging this other woman that I loved for something that she did to another friend. And now I wanted to get involved. And you know, the Lord was just showing me in that moment, you should have not pried into this situation. It's not your business. I didn't bring this into your life. And now I'm carrying an offense for someone else that didn't even happen to me. And thirdly, I didn't even have the whole story because I only got one side of the story. So I just say this to all of us moms. Don't pry into a situation unless the Lord has led you to do so. Because a lot of hurt can come from it. And then sometimes you're carrying burdens that you were not meant to carry. Even when we look at our children and their lives, there are some things that I want to fix for them and I want to pick it up for them, especially with school. Sometimes if they get a bad grade or on something, now that they're in high school, I want to. Should I email the teacher? Should we talk to them about different study guides? Sometimes that makes things worse because the teacher really wants the kids to be doing it on their own. And now they're going to judge your kid because the mom stepped in to help her little baby when they should have been more mature to do it themselves. See, every time we pry into a situation that we're not supposed to be in, things can avalanche out of control. And they were never supposed to do that. I'm not saying that we don't get involved with certain situations. There are many times that God has told me you need to intervene.

Ask Before Acting, Listen For Guidance

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And there are many situations with friends where I felt like the Lord has been, I want you to mediate. Before you do that, I just encourage you to stop, to slow down, and ask the Holy Spirit, am I supposed to pry or am I supposed to pray? And he will be faithful to give you wisdom every time as long as you don't hang up that phone before he answers you back. I hope this is encouraging and not discouraging to the moms listening because I truly believe that the Lord wants to speak to us in these everyday situations because he loves us and because he wants us to be free from things and he wants to give us power in our relationships, he wants us to see change happen, we get in the way and we don't need to. God is more than capable of handling things as long as we keep handing the things to him first. I hope you all don't judge me about the mouse situation. I hope that it is something, a story that you remember in a good way and not a gross way. Truly, it was the grossest thing ever. I'm a little embarrassed to share it, but if this episode was encouraging to you or you think of a friend as you listen to

Encouragement, CTA, And Sign-Off

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this, please send it to them. I really am hoping and praying that this podcast just gets to every single ear that the Lord wants it to get to. And also, if you have a moment to jump on and rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, it really helps other moms to find the podcast easier and faster. I really appreciate it. And happy fall. Go get yourself something delicious at Trader Joe's. I will talk to you next week. Also, email me if you like. Hello at Jen Mmerie Masters.com. Okay, bye. Don't forget to follow, save and share, and subscribe. You're awesome. Give it up for our mommy! Love it.