Why Your Prayers Feel Unanswered (And What To Do About It)

"God doesn't call you back — He texts you back." That's the phrase Aaron Rosa (The Hood Shepherd) uses to reframe how prayer actually works, and why so many of us feel like our prayers go unanswered.

In this episode, Aaron unpacks the connection between discipleship and evangelism, then dives into prayer: why it's not a "holy Hail Mary" thrown up and hoped for, but a real, two-way relationship carried out through the Spirit and the Word. Drawing on Hebrews 1, John 16, and his own story of skepticism turned conviction, Aaron shows how praying and then opening Scripture — even "Bible roulette" — is how God actually speaks back into our situations.

He also connects this directly to evangelism: how prayer trains us for the hard conversations we don't know how to answer, using stories from his time as a Naval Flight Officer to illustrate how low-stakes practice prepares you for the moment it really counts.

If you've ever wondered whether God is actually listening, this one's for you.

🔔 Subscribe for more from The Hood Shepherd on gospel-centered discipleship, prayer, and urban mission.

#Prayer #Evangelism #TheHoodShepherd #Discipleship #ChristianPodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hey guys, my name is Aaron Rosa. I'm the Hood Shepherd, and today I want to talk about a very, very helpful tool for evangelism, and it's a very helpful tool in your Christian life in general. Now, a lot of times people get discipleship and evangelism confused. We hear the word discipleship a lot in churches. We hear a lot of discipleship in our materials, or if you're scrolling Instagram, you'll see this word a lot, but we don't really necessarily know what it means. For lack of a better term, discipleship is just the act of training up another person with everything that they need in order to be able to do the mission. I'll give you a great example of this. When I used to be in the Navy, I was a lowly navigator communicator on an airplane. It was the worst job in the Navy. All the bad stuff that had to be done on the aircraft got thrown to the Navcom. And the whole mission of a Navcom was to get smart enough on all the tactics and all the systems of the airplane in order to be able to eventually lead his own crew as a tactical coordinator, a taco. Now, in order to do this, my taco had to teach me all these things that I didn't know in order to be a good Taco. So there would be things that he would invite me to, like special mission briefings, or he would sit down and he would teach me about oceanography, or he teach me about weapon systems, or he teach me about how the radios work, or he teach me how our aircraft work with other aircraft in the Navy for very special mission sets. All of this was to make me a better taco so that I could go out and I could eventually have my own crew and prosecute a submarine with my aircraft. In a lot of ways, that's what discipleship is like. Discipleship is a other believer who is going to teach a younger believer everything that you need to know to be able to do your mission. So there are things that they will teach you: things like reading your Bible, things like prayer, things like how this church is organized to be able to help people in mission. They teach you theology, they teach you all kinds of things that are useful for your mission. But what most people in a church miss is the fact that it's for a mission. You see, sometimes we can forget that there's actually a mission to be done. And we get all excited about learning more about theology, or we get all excited about learning about prayer or reading our Bibles, and all of these things are great things, but we miss that the main point of all of those things is the mission. So evangelism in many ways is the mission, it's the act of going out and doing that, whether that's here at home or abroad in global missions. Evangelism is simply telling people about Jesus while showing them what Jesus is like at the same time. And hopefully they will see the light of Christ and they will end up coming to faith, and their lives will be renewed, and the communities that they are in will be renewed as well. So that's the relationship between discipleship and evangelism. One of the things that you would learn, last week we learned about repentance. This week we're gonna learn about prayer. Now, if you remember last week, most people have like a very odd definition of repentance that has to do with more with like Catholic guilt than anything else. But last week, and I would encourage you to check out that episode, we learned that repentance is actually the engine of Christian joy in faith. And it's actually the engine for being able to be more effective in evangelism. Today we're gonna talk about prayer, and in a similar way, I have a feeling that what I'm about to say about prayer, you probably haven't heard very much before. During 2020, I used to help out a lot with children's ministry because my wife was the children's ministry coordinator for a particular campus of our church. And because it was 2020, nobody was volunteering to help out with the kids. So I was the guy who had to help out with the kids all the time. One of the things I used to do when I was sitting down with the kids was I would try out new discipleship techniques to be able to see how much these kids could actually grasp. Because I firmly believe that a child who can grasp the plot of an animated TV show can probably understand the plot of the Bible. We just tend to shrug them off. So when I was teaching in children's ministry, I would ask the kids this question about prayer. I would say, What is prayer? Now, maybe where you are, you can think to yourself, what is prayer? Maybe even say out loud what you think it is. And it's probably the same answer the kids gave me. The kids would tell me, prayer is talking to Jesus. And that's a right answer. That's a good answer. I was on board with that answer. But then what I would do is I would say, Well, does Jesus talk back? Now, of course, they say yes, because all of us know that we've been told from a very early age that faith is a relationship with God and prayer is us talking to God, and somehow God also talks back. But that's something that we kind of get that we kind of get twisted. Because when I say, Does God ever talk back? The kids would say, Yes, he always talks back. Okay, another good answer. And then I would say, How? How does God talk back? And it got very, very quiet. And then one kid in the back raises his hand and he goes, Angels? And I go, Have you ever seen an angel? And the kid goes, No. I go, so does God just not talk back to you, or is he only talking to this one kid in the crowd? Right? How does this work? Now it's easy to look down on the little kids and to say, oh, well, they don't know what they're talking about. But I have a suspicion that this is making you a little bit uncomfortable too, right now. It's okay. I'm going to give you a good example. Here's another Navy story. When I was a lowly Navcom, we used to have to set up this program called ICE. Now, ICE was a very, very, very old version of text messaging from an airplane to like a ship or a tactical control center. And it was very complicated to set up, and you could only send very short messages, and it would take forever for those messages to send. And you would either have to configure it in one of two ways. You would either configure it in what we called simplex or duplex. Simplex or duplex. Now, what do those words mean? That's exactly what my taco would ask me. And I would explain. Simplex is when we just broadcast something out. It just goes out. We don't know if they got it or not. We just hope they did. Duplex means that it goes out, there's an acknowledgement on the other end, and then we receive a response. And we know that that message got through. And the way that we saw this happen in the airplane, because it was called ice, it was like integrated communications equipment or something like that. There was this little animated penguin that would go across the screen. And then if you were in duplex, it would come back. And that's how you knew that your message was sent, received, and acknowledged. Now, a lot of times in our prayer life, I think we think of ourselves as simplex, where we're just throwing up a prayer. And you know this type of prayer. You're sitting at your desk right before a big test. They're saying, Lord Jesus, please help me with this test, right? And it just goes up and you're like, Well, I hope you heard that, and I guess we'll see from the results whether or not he did. But there are some prayers that actually require a response. There are prayers where people might be in a tremendously sad situation, like the death of a loved one, the death of a child, or some sort of grievous, grievous life circumstances where you really do need to hear back from God. And you might be saying incredible, incredibly difficult things and opening your heart to God, and it would seem kind of cruel that the Lord would not actually answer. So, what's the answer? Are we doing simplex or are we doing full duplex? I'm gonna tell you that you're doing full duplex, but you're looking at the wrong place. Here's what I tell people: God doesn't call you back, he texts you back. God doesn't call you back, he texts you back. What do I mean by this? We like to call up God. We pick up the phone, we we pray in our own head, we say, Lord Jesus, you know, I'll give you an example. Lord Jesus, I don't know what to do about the situation with my wife. We're constantly getting into fights, we're, we're, we, we never seem to be on the same page. And though I really want to love my wife in the way that you love the church, it's very difficult because I don't know what to do in this particular situation. Now that's a very heartfelt prayer right there, and it kind of demands a response. A lot of us think in terms of the Old Testament, where we're going to be walking down the road and we're gonna see a burning bush, and God is gonna say, You need to be nicer to your wife. She's annoyed with you, right? Or think that we're gonna have a dream and someone's gonna come to us and say, We have heard your prayer, and God wants you to take her out to dinner, right? But that's not how it works. In Hebrews 1, Hebrews 1 starts off long ago and many times and many ways. God spoke to our forefathers by the prophets. So think about that. Long ago, and this is to the early church, so long ago, we're talking Old Testament times, and many times and many ways. What does that look like? It looks like burning bushes, it looks like angels showing up, it looks like dreams, it looks like visions, right? Long ago and many times and many ways, God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets. So God sent people who had heard the message of God very clearly and they proclaimed the heart and the will of God for our salvation, for our repentance and relationship with Him. These are the people like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, all these guys were thus saith the Lord, you know, you're Elijah type people. We kind of wish we had people like that in our lives today, because it seems very simple. If someone came up to you and said, Hey, I'm a prophet, thus saith the Lord, take your wife out to dinner, right? That would be what we seem to be expecting naturally, functionally, right? But it doesn't work that way. Hebrews goes on to say, long ago, at many times in many ways, God spoke to our forefathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has chosen to reveal himself through his son, Jesus Christ. So now what we see is a shift from that Old Testament kind of he's calling you right back routine to he's going to be communicating in a different way. And the way that we learn that he's communicating to us is through his son, Jesus Christ. Well, this sounds really helpful. Let me just go walk up to Jesus Christ. Now that kind of sounds a little bit laughable because Jesus Christ lives, exists in time and space. He has a corporeal body, and he's not right in front of me. He's not in Maryland, he's not in the United States. We know where he is. He is seated at the right hand of God the Father in glory right now, and he is judging the earth from that place, and he's judging righteously and he's reigning sovereignly over the world. So again, our problem really isn't solved. How do we how do we communicate with Jesus Christ? And the answer is through his spirit and his word. What do I mean by this? Well, there's a weird passage towards the end of John where Jesus is about to leave. He's about to leave his disciples, his best friends for many years, and he tells them, it is to my advantage, it's to your advantage that I go. How is it to our advantage that Jesus leaves us? Every answer we could ever want, we could just go to one guy and ask him. Well, here's the advantage to that. There's only one Jesus. And let's be honest, if Jesus was around today, you and I ain't getting anywhere near Jesus. If Jesus was around today, like people like Elon Musk, people, you know, great world leaders, very rich people would be flocking around him to like get his advice, to talk to him, to test him. There's no way you're getting, it'd be like the Taylor Swift wedding. There's no way you're getting anywhere near that stadium. But Jesus says, it is to your advantage that I go, because then I will send you the Holy Spirit. So what he's saying is the same spirit that I have, the same spirit that he says later on will reveal the things of me and lead you into all truth and come alongside you and comfort you, that same spirit will go into each and every one of you. So now it's almost like having your own personal little Jesus living with you. Great. So you have the spirit, right? But how do we understand what he's trying to say? The spirit and the word. So we talked about the spirit. Let's talk about the word. The word of God, the Bible. The word of God, right here. This, think of this, I tell people, think of this as a dehydrated Jesus. You ever get one of those sponges in the mail? Or I get them at Whole Foods. You get this sponge, it's all dried out, it's really hard. It's it's because they like to dry it out and squish it for transport. And so you take it out, and it doesn't look very spongy. You can't really do very spongy things. But to make it into a full sponge, you have to pour water on it. And as you pour the water on it, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and you can actually start using it for sponge things. The Bible is a lot like that. The Bible is like dehydrated Jesus. Think of Sponge Jesus right here. Okay? He's in here. This is who he is. This is the fullest revelation of God's heart. The fullest revelation of God's heart was Jesus Christ, and in his absence, we have the word of God. Now, there is this thing that theologians call the doctrine of illumination. This is just a big fancy word of saying, when I read this book, the Holy Spirit helps me. If I have the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit makes certain passages come alive to me. And I can interact with those particular passages. And it might convict me, it might make me sad, it might discipline me, it might encourage me, it might make me happy. But all of those things happen when a Christian interacts with this book. Now you need both, right? The sponge can't do sponge stuff unless you have the water. So this is why an atheist, an avowed atheist like Richard Dawkins or someone who doesn't profess Christ, can look at a Bible and they can read the exact same things and say, oh, this is ridiculous. It's just another book. Yet you can approach your Bible, and I'm sure you have, if you're listening to this, you can approach your Bible and you can read something like Ephesians 2 that I'm reading right here, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in the which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised up with him and seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. There are people in this world who can read that and then look at the phrasing and they can look at the punctuation, they can say, Oh, those are wonderful sentiments, and this is great historical and religious tradition, and those things are really helpful for people to understand their identity and to understand their place in society, and these are good teachings, right? But then there are some people who can read that and who can say, Oh my goodness, I cannot believe. Yes, that did describe my life before I met Jesus. And now it's completely different. And the only difference was because God actually loved me. And that truth is illuminated by the Spirit and it's worked out into our hearts and it transforms us from the inside. This is what Paul talks about when he says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. We renew our minds by reading the truth of Scripture and the Holy Spirit making it alive in our hearts, and it changes us gradually and gradually. This is sanctification. So God doesn't call us back, he texts us back. The first thing that I do when people come up to, and a lot of people come up to me and they'll say, I don't know what to do about this issue in my life. And the first thing I'll ask them is, have you prayed about it? And they will usually say yes, because they usually approach me at Bible study. Okay, cool. So you prayed on it. And then I would ask them another question. I'll say, What have you read in your Bible recently? And they'll look at me weird, they're like, I don't know, what does that have to do with anything? I say, Well, God doesn't call you back, he texts you back. So you call him, you leave a message, and he texts you back. You read your Bible and he illuminates some part of scripture. Now you might not understand what that scripture means. You might not understand how it applies to you whatsoever, and that's okay. Sometimes if you're a guy, I know that every guy at some point has received a really long text message from a girlfriend or from a wife or something that they didn't understand any of it. And they usually have to go to their friend or they have to go to their other guy friend and they'll be like, hey, can you help me understand this? Like, what does this actually mean? Okay, that's okay. So, what I tell people is if they have prayed about it, great. If they haven't prayed about it, go pray about it and then come back. Now, if they've prayed about it and they haven't read their Bible, go read your Bible, find something that like really resonates with you. Then I'll sit down and I'll help you explain it and I'll help you understand it and you can see if that helps you in your situation. But I'm not going to speak for God in the absence of you checking your text messages. So going back to the kids, going back to the kids at children's ministry. I told these kids, I said, try that this week. Try it this week. Pray something, find something that you want. And of course, they're kids. So they're praying about one. I remember this one little girl, she was praying for a bearded dragon lizard because her brothers were getting all these pets and she felt out of, she felt left out, and she really wanted a bearded dragon. I said, Okay, perfect. Pray to the Lord. The Lord will hear that prayer. Then what I want you to do is I want you to read your Bible. And you can play Bible roulette, okay? You can open this up, right? It's okay. Read something. If it stands out to you, great. If it doesn't, whatever, move on. Spend some time searching scripture. Whatever does stand out to you, write that down. Okay, that's very important. Write it down because you will not remember that. You can't remember to pick up milk at the grocery store. You're not going to remember a whole verse that you've never seen before. Write it down, and at the end of that time, go back, look at the problem that you brought to the Lord, and look at what he gave you, and then see how that starts to fit in. And I guarantee you, you will end up with an answer to that prayer. This sounds ridiculous to you. I'll tell you this, it sounded ridiculous to me too. Many years ago, I was in a small group, uh, a community group at my church, and there were a lot of really good godly men around me in this community group. Now, I had not yet encountered Christ. I would profess to be a Christian, I went to church, I did all the right things and everything, but it was just, it was not a live faith, it was a dead faith. We would say I hadn't really been born again. And in one of these small group meetings, I remember hearing them say, Oh, the Lord really met me in my quiet time, or oh, the Lord told me this the other day, or the Lord really like answered this prayer. And I remember thinking about this, and we had this group chat, and I and I texted them and I said, Hey guys, like what is this the Lord met me? Like, like, what are you talking about? Like a burning bush showed up, see, long ago, many times in many ways. And they said, No, no, no, no. What you do is you you pray and then you read your Bible, and then God answers your prayer through the Bible. I was like, get out of here. They said, no, no, no, it's true. I was like, so you're saying I can write down any prayer, and then I can go to my Bible and I can read it at random, and God will answer that prayer. And they're like, Yeah, that's how that works. I go, I think that's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard. And they go, why don't you try it? I go, I'm going to. So I went out, and one day I had a I had a very big backyard and nothing else to do in the day. So I took a chair and I put it in the middle of this big backyard. And then on one side of the chair, I put a Bible, and on the other side, I put a journal. And I had a lot of things going on in my life at the time. And I texted the group. I said, I'm setting a timer for one hour. One hour I'm setting this timer. I'm going to write down all of my prayers in this journal, and then I'm going to spend the rest of that time flipping through the Bible and writing down whatever gets illuminated and see if that has any bearing on what I'm actually on the things that I had prayed for. And they said, All right, talk to us in an hour. I was like, all right, cool. So I write these things down. It was really there were many things on my heart at the time. I wrote them down and then I started looking through my Bible. And there it is, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And I and I wrote that down in the under the appropriate one that I thought like applied to it. And you know, it took a while, and I went down a rabbit trail and I looked up cross-references and I saw stuff I never saw. I saw like little corners of the Bible that I'd never heard of before, right? I read books like Zephaniah, right? Who reads Zephaniah? And at the end of that hour, I looked at my journal and I realized that there was some really amazing wisdom that was practically for every single, very practical wisdom for every single one of my prayer requests. And I felt like even though I didn't understand how any some of these things would come to pass, I felt like there was I was further along in my understanding of that prayer than I was before. Now, Baba roulette ain't for everybody. Whatever. That's fine. You don't have to play baba roulette. Most people play baba roulette because they don't know their Bible. It's okay. God can work with that. There are some places in the Bible, let's say the marriage thing, right? You might end up in Ephesians 5. You might end up in Proverbs. You might end up in Proverbs 31 or in Psalm 111 or Psalm 110, 112, you might end up in Genesis 2. You might end up in the book of Ruth. There are places that you can go where you can find information about that particular subject. But the point that I'm trying to make is that if you really, really want an answer to prayer, the answer is not praying, throwing one up in a holy hail Mary, and then just hoping that the answer shows up. That's not a God that we have. We don't have a God like that. That right there is more akin to paganism than it is to Christianity. You see, paganism says, I don't know what God's up there, but I know something's out there. And I throw up a prayer and I hope it works. And after you see enough prayers that kind of seem like they work, you turn that into a ritual. And you just do that same thing over and over and over. But the problem with that is there's no personality, there's no relationship. See, the problem with that is when something goes wrong with your ritual, you think you did something wrong, or you think that God is angry at you, and you never have any sort of resolution. When most people read the Bible, they in January, everybody starts reading their Bible, and they try to read through it all the way. And they usually get to like Deuteronomy or Leviticus and they tap out. Because it seems like there's all these rules, there's all these like weird, you know, stories, there's all these, you know, this is who God is and this is who I am, and I gotta keep myself clean in this way, and I gotta bring this sacrifice, and it's just, it's just, it's boring, right? But do you understand how amazing that is if you're in the middle of a pagan culture and the only way that you know of to pray is to go sacrifice something and be like, okay, I hope this, you know, pleases you. I hope we have rain this year. But if you look at something like Deuteronomy and God gives you a scripture and he says, if you sin in this way, this is the atonement. If you uh make yourself unclean, this is the way you make yourself clean. These are the things that make you unclean, these are the things that make you clean. That kind of specificity and detail gives you so much encouragement. It makes you so happy. That's the kind of God we have. Let us not go back to this prototypical pagan concept of throwing up a prayer and just like hoping for groovy vibes to see if like it actually worked. No, we have a God who promises to answer every single prayer, and he does it through his spirit and his word. So, what does this have to do with evangelism? Well, you might not know what to do. That's okay. That's actually from God. He will intentionally put you in places where you don't know what to do and you don't know what to say. You might be talking to your teenage son, and your teenage son says something so out of left field that you have no idea how to answer it. You might be talking to a guy online at the movie theater and he's like, Oh, you're a Christian, yeah? He's like, Why do bad things happen to good people? And it just shuts you down because you don't know how to what to what to say to that. I think a lot of times we think of those as like our nightmare scenarios. And I can understand why. But here's the thing is remember, discipleship is all about training you to do the mission. Everything that God is trying to teach you, every situation that you are in is meant to get you a little bit better at doing the mission. So if you're in line with the guy, you might say, you know what, I don't know the answer to that. But I know there's a book in the Bible called Job that's all about bad things happening to a good person. Maybe check that out if you want. Let's trade numbers and we'll go through it together because I'd like to know the answer to this question too. I never thought about that as well. Perfectly acceptable response. Or you might say, My son or my daughter seems so far gone, seems so lost. Nothing I say, he won't take anything that I say seriously. So, Lord, would you give me some sort of hope that you're working on my son's heart? And then you might write that down, and you might go check your text messages, and you might, just might, end up in 2 Timothy 2 22, which says, stay away from heedless or stupid quarrels, for the servant of God must not be quarrelsome, but must be gentle, able to instruct, patiently enduring evil, in hopes that one day the Lord might grant this person the gift of repentance so they may see that they've had their eyes blinded by the devil to do his works without their knowledge. You might end up with something like that. You might end up incredibly encouraged in that way and realize that the message of salvation, the the job of salvation is God's job, but your job is to just be a disciple and to share Jesus in word and in your deed. Now, if this sounds like it's a lot of work to do this every day, it is, and that's the point. You see, another thing I hear a lot about is people say, Well, I don't know how to keep to stop myself from sinning, or I need to read my Bible more, or I need to pray more, or I need to, you know, uh I need to love people more. Granted, that sounds awesome. Those are great desires to have. You know how you do that? By going out and being evangelistic. What do you mean? Well, nothing will get you deeper into the word than having a conversation with someone, they ask you a question about the Bible and you don't know it. You better believe you're gonna go back home that night. You're gonna look up the answer to that question and you're gonna tell it to that person, and you never forget that particular passage. There are whole chapters of the Bible that I can quote, not because I go through and I just randomly memorize them, but because somebody asked me something or I had a question that came up when I was reading, and I had to go back and forth through all the scripture and I had to hunt down this one answer, and that answer was like gold to me. And those particular verses are just seared on my heart. Nothing will get you better at prayer than having an annoying coworker or having an unrepentant child. Those things will drive you into prayer because you realize that you can't do anything about it, and thus your prayer life grows. Nothing will make you want to love your neighbors more than actually going out and being amongst your neighbors. Because then you realize that things are broken and they're annoying and they're like sheep without a shepherd, and all of a sudden you're moved with compassion just like Jesus was. Do you see? Everything you're getting trained for is for the mission. When I was flying, the way that I would learn all of these things, the way that the oceanography would stick in my head, the way the weapons envelopes would stick in my head, the way the tactics would stick in my head, was we would go out and we would do simulated missions on real submarines. We would go into the simulator and we would do end-of-the-world scenarios where people are shooting at us and we had to track submarines and the whole airplane is falling apart. And through doing those, we would fall and we would make mistakes and we would learn and we would practice and finally we would get in the groove. And I'll finish on this note. I had my my taco. He really, really cared about me really deeply. And he cared about training me up the way that he had been trained up. And he was very, very difficult on me. He was very, very hard on me. He expected so much more of me than anyone else expected of me. I would have friends that would come out of simulator events, like, oh, that was easy. The submarine was going a straight line the whole time. I was like, seriously? My event, like, people were shooting at me, my my whole like acoustic system broke down, you know, somebody had a heart attack in the back. That was that was the scenario I got. And sometimes you can be a little bit resentful of that and be like, I don't understand why that person's life is so much better. But I'll tell you where it mattered. A couple years later, when I had my own crew and my taco was long gone, he's now the skipper of a squadron, but when my taco was long gone, I was in a situation where I actually found a Russian submarine and nobody expected us to find it. And the second I found that Russian submarine, everything went wrong. We've dropped down so low to track this submarine that we didn't have enough time to get a radio call off to a ship or a helicopter to come help us because of the line of sight of the curvature of the earth. So we were flying blind. We had no help coming. Our my acoustic system was recycling every five minutes. I could barely get any information off the Sono buoys that we were dropping in the water. One of the doors that dropped the Sono buoys got stuck. I had a guy in the back who just didn't want to do his job and was kind of incompetent. These are all the things that, and oh, and I had to, yeah, I was so chalked up with adrenaline, I had to go to the bathroom really bad. So I was like sitting there trying to track this submarine and like hold everything in the whole time. But I'll tell you what, in that moment when that was happening, I had been trained so well that I was able to tell another guy, hey, pull that circuit breaker over there, because I know that when you pull it, that door automatically cycles open and then leave it open so we don't have to worry about that thing working anymore. I knew that I could tell these guys, hey, it takes six minutes for that acoustic system to reboot. So for those particular six minutes, we're gonna have to track using a different sensor. And I told the other guy, get out of the chair, I'll put another person in there so that he could actually start doing the job well. I hung on to contact for two or three hours to that submarine before we ran out of buoys, and there's nothing else I could do. But when I flew back, the skipper was waiting for me at the bottom of the ladder. And he said, Tell me everything that you did. I said, Okay. And I told him every single thing that I did on the mission. And at the end of it, he started, his teeth, his eyes teared up. It was the skipper of a squadron, his eyes teared up, and he looked at me and said, You did everything right. One day, we're going to realize that every week when you go to church and you learn something there, and you go into a community group and you have friends who teach you the Bible and teach you how to pray. And when we have these conversations with our coworkers, or we have these conversations with our kids, or we have these conversations with our friends, or a kickball league, or whatever, we will realize that these things are little low-stake scenarios for us to be practicing these tools of discipleship for the mission. And then one day you will find yourself in that mission, and you will be doing it so well. And then we're gonna die, and you're gonna do your best for until you lose contact, and you're gonna come down the ladder, and your heavenly skipper is gonna be waiting at the bottom. He's gonna say, Tell me everything you ever did. And you're like, Okay, this is this is what I did. And he's gonna look at you, and his eyes are gonna well up, and he's like, You did everything right. So, my encouragement for you today is that prayer is an indispensable part of discipleship. Prayer is an indispensable part of evangelism. And for some of you, that might feel condemning because you don't feel like you're good at prayer. And you might think that you're not good at prayer because you're not getting the results that you think you should be getting from prayer. But your logical conclusion from that is that God's not hearing your prayers or God doesn't hear. I'm telling you, you're looking at the phone, waiting for it to ring when your cell phone is buzzing in the back and he's texting you back. So go check your phone.