Transcript of CS#98: Jim Beckman God Help Me How to Grow in Prayer

Transcript of Interview with Jim Beckman about God Help Us. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

God Help Me at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033372/God-Help-Me-How-to-Grow-Prayer/

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Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of e﷓Commerce for catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Chris Cash: And today in the spotlight, we have Jim Beckman. He is associated with the Impact Center out in Colorado but he’s been doing youth ministry on a wide national scale for quite a while and we’re very happy to have you, Jim.

Jim Beckman: Yeah, it’s great to be with you, Chris.

Chris Cash: Well today Jim, we’re going to talk about your new book, God Help Me: How to Grow in Prayer. So you want to give just kind of a brief outline of what this book is and what inspired you to write it?

Jim Beckman: I think in my life what really is the inspiration behind this book is over the last three or four years, I have started spiritual direction with a new director that really has just transformed my experience of prayer and I think it’s somewhat even transformed my spiritual life which is transform my marriage and a lot of other things in my life and it was the experience of that having been really for years during ministry and working with lots of people and praying and being even in a lot of leadership roles but still having such a powerful conversion, deeper conversion into a life of prayer that was still rich and meaningful for me, it was just something I really had a strong desire to share with other people what I had learned and how I had been brought to a new place. So I’ve developed really the inspiration for me behind wanting to write this story.

Chris Cash: Now, I know a little bit about your background at Steubenville and I know that when you’ve talked in the past, you’ve talked about how you had kind of a fake prayer life at times. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how that has evolved over time into a true spiritual life?

Jim Beckman: I think…one of the things that happened I think is we have experiences of deeper conversion in our lives. It’s easy to look back on what we were experiencing before and think of it as fake, right? In some ways, it was what we were able to experience at that point and then God just in His great mercy and love is always drawing us into deeper and deeper experiences with Him as we’re capable and have the capacity for that. So I think I would term some of those experiences when I was younger, particularly when I was in college, I was a student at Franciscan University and I still look back and remember times of really watching the clock as I would go into a room to pray because I knew people noticed how long you prayed; just stupid things like that.

Chris Cash: Right but it was a common experience especially at Steubenville, I’m sure.

Jim Beckman: Oh yeah. I think there was something a lot of people are kind of caught up into was having the image of being a prayerful person and spending lots of time in prayer so that people would look at you like that. But I remember lots of times sitting in a room and knowing like I couldn’t get up and leave because people might…I don’t want to seem like I’m having too short of a prayer time or something. And I look at that and even though I know I have some powerful experiences of prayer during that time in my life and even as I got older, the newness that I’m experiencing now in my prayer is there is something where I could tap into more of level of intimacy than I’ve really ever experienced before and some of that I’m sure is I’m in the time of my life where I have a greater capacity for that but I think some of this is just learning some new tools of how to navigate the spiritual life and spiritual depth that I just didn’t have before and now with those tools, I’m able finding myself able to access more.

Chris Cash: Now, this book is aimed at whom? Is for teens or for adults? Is it for people who have an active prayer life or who are sitting on the outside hoping to have an active prayer life at some point? Kind of who do you see is benefiting the most from what you have to say?

Jim Beckman: I think in my mind as I’m writing the book, I’m primarily thinking of teens over the years that have grown older, are now young adults, are beginning their lives. Many of them are getting married or starting careers and they’re kind of floundering in their lives and particularly in their spiritual life so that in some ways, that group is what I’m thinking about as I’m writing the book. But I think the book really would benefit anyone. I have a lot of friends of mine who are adults who’ve read the book and have found it really helpful. They really enjoyed it and I think the material is really accessible to teens as well. I’m hoping that it’s a book that a lot of teenagers could benefit from in terms of growing in deeper intimacy and greater depth in their prayer as well.

Chris Cash: Do you have any favorite prayer experiences that you share?

Jim Beckman: Yeah, I tell a lot of stories in the book. I’m using the experiences with different young adults that I have relationships with as I’ve kind of tried to help them grow in their prayer. I used a lot of stories about my children because I have experiences everyday talking with my own kids and trying to help them bring prayer into the normal everyday experience of their life. So I do in some ways in the book, I tell lots of stories like that.

Chris Cash: Care to share any of those stories with our listeners?

Jim Beckman: One experience that I share in the book is I had this great experience with my daughter once. She was really struggling really for over a period of several weeks with seemingly a lot of anger, a lot of agitation and one morning, we were driving to school and things just kind of unraveled in the car. A fight broke out and the next thing, there’s a couple of punches thrown between my kids and I’m not sure if anyone’s ever experienced that kind of meltdown but as we…

Chris Cash: I have five kids too so I know what you mean.

Jim Beckman: It’s like…very quickly things just get really out of control. We’re pulling into the school and all I could do at that point was just get everybody to keep their hands to themselves and just stop as there was a lot of crying and a lot of emotion on the scene. But that moment, I kept all the kids in the car. I didn’t drop them off right away and I ended up actually staying down on the kids’ school that morning and decided to go back and take my daughter to lunch and I was trying to talk to her over lunch about a lot of the things that I talked about in this book, about the different parts of our heart and how our heart in prayer where we need to relate to God, but most importantly how God really desires to help us understand ourselves and sometimes when we’re in a place in our lives where our emotions are sometimes seeping out sideways from us, which is what I think she was experiencing. She had all of this stuff going on inside of her but she didn’t really know what it was and where it was coming from. I think God in prayer has a great ability to kind of speak into the circumstances of our lives and really bring clarity and bring understanding and I’m drawing on napkins in the little restaurant where I took her out to lunch and she obviously wasn’t getting any of what I was talking about. You know, she had a good chance to blank stare and it was like, “Okay.” So I said, “Why don’t we go and let’s just go pray for a minute before I take you back to school?” So we sat in the parking lot of this little restaurant and I kind of led her on a little experience of prayer and really just asking her to invite Jesus into her heart and help her understand what’s going on. And that’s a lot of the tools and principles that I’m trying to teach in this book is how do you first of all get in touch with the deeper things moving in your heart, the stuff that’s really most important, how do you relate that to God and then how do you really listen to God and know what it’s really authentically Him that’s talking to you? And so, here we were in this parking lot, I lead her to a little prayer. Just open your heart and be receptive to what God would want to do. We prayed. She seems to have this really long…I actually thought she fell asleep in the car. She was quiet for so long, had her eyes closed and I was afraid she would fall asleep but after a while, she has a little smile on her face. She kind of giggles and then she opens her eyes. And I was like, “Well, what happened?” She said, “Well I heard three things.” The first thing she heard was “Claire, you need to stop hitting your brothers.”

The second thing she heard was “Everything is going to be better when the science fair is over.” And then the third thing she heard was “Claire, you’re beautiful.” Well I had just spent all of this time talking to her about her heart and how God speaks into our hearts and how do you really distinguish His voice from the other voices in our heart and then she said, “This is awesome. Like let’s just look at those three things and kind of ask where did they come from?” So I asked her, “Where do you think that first thing came from, Claire you need to stop hitting your brothers.” She said, “That was from God.” And I was like “Well, that was actually probably from you. It might have been inspired by God but God specifically doesn’t condemn us in the way that He speaks to us. God may have showed you. If it as really God talking to you about that, He probably would have said ‘Claire, you need to love your brothers.’ But like just the way that that’s worded, like that’s your conscience kind of telling you that it’s not a good thing to be hitting your brothers. That’s not really the loving way that you want to relate to them.” I said, “How about that second thing? Everything’s going to be better when the science fair is over?” And she said, “That was from God?” I said, “Well, it could have been like God and so I think that was probably from you too. Maybe God’s given you some clarity and some understanding that underneath all of this emotion over the past couple of weeks, what you’ve been experiencing is you have a lot of stress about this science fair project you’re working on and there’s a lot of fear in you maybe that you’re not going to get it done or something like that.

So maybe God’s just helping you understand that but it’s probably that human voice in your heart really giving you some clarity there. And how about that third thing, Claire, you’re beautiful?” And she said, “That’s from me.” And I was like, “Actually that’s from God. That’s exactly the way God talks to us.” I was like, “Do you realize this morning, you punched your brother in the face in the car? And like everything melted down and unraveled and you know with our whole family, for those moments in the car this morning and the first moment that you have to really connect with God in prayer, the first thing He wants to tell you is how beautiful you are. But that’s exactly the way God loves us and God, He kind of sifts through all of the problems and all of the circumstances and just comes right to the heart of “Claire, you’re beautiful”. And because you’re so beautiful and because I love you so much, I want to you to love other people the way that I love you. He doesn’t look at your failures or your faults. He just goes right through your heart and tells you how much He loves you and how beautiful you are. So that’s one story that I kind of convey in the book that if you come to that point of particularly really trying to distinguish between how do I know when it’s God that’s speaking to me and how do I distinguish His voice and really kind of hone in on what He’s saying because that’s the most important thing in prayer is to really hear God.

Chris Cash: All right, we’re going to take a short break to hear from our sponsor but when we come back, we’ll be speaking more with Jim Beckman about God Help Me: How to Grow in Prayer.

Chris Cash: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Jim Beckman talking about God Help Me: How to Grow in Prayer. Now Jim, I assume that you’ve kind of had some sense of a lot of different people’s prayer lives and maybe what would you find to be some of the biggest stumbling blocks and road blocks that people get in having an authentic prayer life with God?

Jim Beckman: Well, I think that one of the greatest gifts that we have in the Church, in Catholic tradition and Catholic spirituality is some of the principles of the Ignatian spirituality particularly the rules for discernment that St. Ignatius gave us and I think a lot of times they get overlooked because people look at different spiritual streams in the Catholic Church like Franciscan spirituality, Ignatian spirituality, or Augustinian spirituality or *** [00:16:31] prayer and they kind of lump things into those big categories. There’s been a lot of work I think done over the years on things with prayer and temperament and different personality types and how people have leanings towards certain types of prayer experiences which all of that stuff is good but in some ways, some of the principles that St. Ignatius gave us in the rules for discernment, I believe that they apply across the board no matter what your personality type. In some ways they aren’t so much a part of the Ignatian type of experiences which involve much more imaginative prayer and things like that.

That part I can understand how it might be more of a personality type thing and somebody might not lend themselves to more of that Ignatian type of prayer experience but these deeper principles particularly in the rules for discernment, I just think they are critical foundations for anyone to understand the spiritual life and how to really grow in the spiritual life, how the enemy works, how consolation and desolation in the spiritual journey affects your ability to pray at certain times, how to understand desolation when you’re in the midst of it and I really try in this book to break open a little bit of particularly those first fourteen rules for discernment and talk about how they become such a critical part of understanding the way that we grow spiritually and to understand the way that the enemy is trying to keep us from growing. I personally believe that that’s one of the biggest road blocks for many people in their spiritual life is without an understanding of that foundation, particularly younger people, they get a kind of desolation in their life where circumstances or things start to go wrong and what’s the first thing that they do? They stop praying and then circumstances in their life actually cause wounds and cause them to interpret things in certain ways which that’s all part of the way that the enemy tries to deceive us and that sometimes can cause them to get off track and flounder for months and months, even years in their life and it really could have all been averted if there is just a basic understanding of some of these principles of spiritual growth.

Chris Cash: So once you understand the principles of spiritual growth, then that’s going to help you to push past any roadblocks that you come up against, right?

Jim Beckman: Yeah, I think in some ways the natural even swell of the spiritual life involves consolation and desolation. There are certainly times in our life where you feel really close to God and prayer is actually easy. It’s natural; we’re still inclined to it. There are other times where we feel exactly the opposite and you can have the tendency to interpret those times as I don’t know if I believe in God anymore and instead of looking at it like this is the period of time where God is going to help me grow deeper in my spiritual and deeper in my conviction and you can actually use those times of desolation to grow stronger instead of allowing it to knock you off the track altogether.

Chris Cash: So where do we look to get our strength up during these times of desolation?

Jim Beckman: Well, I have a whole chapter in the book where I really try to go into this in a lot of depth but there is a way that if you really understand desolation and what St. Ignatius talks about as the reasons for desolation, obviously desolation can happen in our lives because we’ve gotten lazy or we aren’t really sticking with our spiritual discipline and our prayer and things like that. So there’s a way that we can actually contribute to being in a place of desolation just because of choices that we’ve made. But the other two reasons for desolation are one, sometimes God allows us to experience desolation because he wants us to remember that He is the giver of the gift. Consolation is a gift from Him and sometimes we can appreciate the consolation more than we can appreciate who gave it to us. Does that make sense?

So God will allow us to go through a kind of desolation just to remind us or allow us to be reminded of that reality. And the other reason for desolation is to give us a test, to give us a time of…and it’s not so much that God needs the test just for you to know how strong we are but He allows us to go through those times because we need to know how strong we are. We need to know that we can endure times of hardship and inconvenience and even feeling distant from Him and so He allows us to go through these times to prove our spiritual strength. When you understand desolation in light of that then when you start to experience those feelings of being far away from God or feeling like God’s not there, instead of panicking, you can look at those times like “Okay, it’s time to strap up and use this as an opportunity to really grow and I’m not going to stop praying. I’m going to pray even a little bit more because the Lord is going to be my source of strength. He’s going to assist me through this time and I know at some point, the consolation is going to return and that’s what I hold onto and cling to during those times of my life.”

Chris Cash: Now one phrase or word that you use quite often in the book is intimacy in prayer. You want to talk a little about what is intimacy with God in prayer and how is that experienced?

Jim Beckman: I think that this is what I experienced and we were talking earlier about just going through times in my life where I felt like my prayer really was pretty staged. I think we can go through times in our life where prayer becomes more of a formality and we’re just going through the motions and not really connecting heart to heart and in some ways, I think about prayer a lot now in my life like my marriage. If I went too long at the time where I was dysfunctional in a relationship with my wife and I wasn’t really sharing my heart with her, after a while, our relationship would get pretty distant and we would start to experience tension and there would be a lot of ramifications of just being functional and kind of going through the motions in our relationship and not really connecting and sharing the beatings going on in my heart, what things am I afraid of and what things am I anxious about and what am I really joyful about and what I am really hoping for. Well, the same principle is really true in prayer. If I’m not relating to God consistently in my prayer with those deep things going on in my heart then after a while, my relationship with Him is just going to be very functional and it’s not going to have the kind of impact that God wants to have in our life through a relationship of prayer because we’re not really relating on that deep intimate level. And I think one of the things that I’m really trying to convey in this book is if there’s one thing that I think our culture in this country has had such a big effect on is our capacity for intimacy. I think it’s one of the ways we’ve really been crippled particularly younger people, there’s just so many things in our culture that cause us to be kind of distant and functional and kind of utilitarian in some ways in the way that we relate with other people and I think that all translates into our experience of prayer as well.

Chris Cash: All right, well we’re running out of time. Was there anything else that you wanted to share with our listeners about what’s going on with the book or what’s going on with Impact Center or anything else?

Jim Beckman: I’m excited to…this book has been kind of a long project in the works and it’s exciting to be out there. I just hope that it really helps draw people into greater intimacy in their prayer and draw them into more fruitfulness in their relationship with the Lord and I’m excited to share that with people, the gift that it’s been to me in my own life.

Chris Cash: Well thank you so much, Jim for coming on the Spotlight to talk with us about this. All of you Spotlight fans out there, we have started a new program right now where we are trying to promote Catholic podcasts around the net through votes at Podcast Alley as well as by doing reviews of the podcast over at iTunes and I don’t know if all of you recognize the impact that we can have here but over at Podcast Alley, when you vote for a podcast, it brings it up higher into their listings of the top 50 or 100 podcasts or however many they list to people who come in and have a look and a lot of those top 50 podcasts, they’re either sex-related, left wing political, or pagan. And we could have such an impact if we can get not just the Catholic Spotlight but several other Catholic podcasts to rank up higher over there and push some of these other less holy shows a little farther down in the rankings. So if you are interested in helping out with that, go over to catholicspotlight.com/vote and you’ll see where we’re starting to develop a list of Catholic podcasts where you can just go straight down the list and vote for all of them or vote for the ones you like to help all of us rank a little higher and helpfully give us more chances to evangelize those who need to hear these messages. Obviously, this message about prayer is an extremely important message to get out there, don you think, Jim?

Jim Beckman: Yes, absolutely.

Chris Cash: All right and by the way, today is show number 98. We are creeping up on show 100 and we will be there, I guess in two more weeks assuming everything goes all right. I still haven’t figured it out what we’re doing if we’re going to do anything special for show 100 but stay tuned, two more weeks and we will be at least throwing a little raise in the roof for show 100. Jim, thanks for hanging out with us and you have a great day and God bless.

Jim Beckman: Thanks, Chris. Yeah, God bless you too, thanks.

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Transcript of Interview with Jim Beckman about God Help Us. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

God Help Me at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033372/God-Help-Me-How-to-Grow-Prayer/