Pre-joicing as a means of finding your worth outside the results of your work
Jordan Raynor sits down with Valerie Woerner, Founder of Val Marie Paper, to talk about how she uses "pre-joicing" to remember her worth in Christ regardless of the results of her work, why Christians should be creating the most original and inimitable work in the world, and what you can learn by reviewing old prayers.
Links Mentioned:
[00:00:05] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I host a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Today's guest is my new friend, Val Woerner. She's the founder of Val Marie Paper, which produces these life-changing prayer journals to more than 100,000 customers. I loved this episode and this conversation that Val and I had. We talked about a lot. We talked about how Val uses prejoicing, to remember that her worth is in Christ, regardless of the results of her work, i.e. she's celebrating the results before she gets the results, which I think is genius, and so spiritually healthy. We talked about why Christians should be creating the most original, the most inimitable work in the world. And we talked about what you can learn by reading and reviewing your old prayers. You guys are going to love this episode with my new friend, Val Woerner.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:31] JR: Hey, Val, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:34] VW: Thank you so much for having me, Jordan. I'm excited to chat.
[00:01:36] JR: So, two people in two days, messaged me and said, “Oh, my gosh, you've got to have Val Woerner on your podcast.” And I was like, “Who the heck is Val Woerner.” And so, now you're here, and we get to hear your whole story. So, I'm really glad you're here.
[00:01:52] VW: Yeah, that's funny.
[00:01:54] JR: Let's start with the founding story. What's the founding story of Val Marie Paper?
[00:01:58] VW: Yeah, I feel like I always have to take a few steps back. But I graduated in journalism, and then worked for newspaper for a little while and then started my own wedding planning business. It was just in three weddings in three months, and I wished I could have helped them more. And literally watched The Wedding Planner with JLo in it and decided, “I think I'm going to do this.” There was luckily –
[00:02:23] JR: Classic.
[00:02:25] VW: I know, I know. I feel like that's so cliché, but I like googled, and there was only one wedding planner in town, and she didn't have a website. So, I was like, “Girls my age are looking for somebody online. Let me go. Let me just try this.” And I did that for five years. It was actually pretty successful. When me and my husband wanted to start a family, it's a really stressful job. So, I decided to switch over. I had been doing wedding invitations for clients. And I decided to just focus on wedding invitations and sell the wedding planning business.
So, I did that. We got pregnant pretty quickly and pregnancy was so overwhelming for me. I say I'm a hypochondriac, and I can feel everything. So, like pregnancy gives you a thousand things to worry about. I knew like I'm going to be breathing into a paper bag, if I don't figure out how to do this with the Lord and really pray. I think just feeling like I had so many things to pray for. I knew I wanted to cover my prayer, but didn't know how to focus on that. And I tried blank notebooks for several months. And I actually felt like I was envisioning this format of like this monthly way to use categories and everything, and I swear it had to exist.
So, I googled for two months to try to find this thing. And whenever I couldn't find it, I had been talking to my printer who did the wedding invitations, and he was like, “I can make this for you, but you have to do 50 of them.” So, I decided to just share that with my audience, never had a plan of like it becoming a business. And part of that was just not realizing that other people struggled with prayer, which looking back sounds so silly, but like I genuinely thought this was just me being scattered and nobody else struggled with this.
And it's funny looking at like my journal entries during that year, I prayed so much for like invitation clients. And there were months where I was just like, “Lord, if you don't send enough, like, why did you want me to do this if this doesn't seem to be working out?” And it's just funny to look back on that when you see seasons where you're like, I was so focused in one direction, I had no idea what God was doing behind the scenes. So, that was the start of it. Just an accidental, just coming from my own need for more focused prayer in my life.
[00:04:43] JR: It's a very typical entrepreneur story, right? You have a need, you create something to meet the need, and then you realize, “Oh, everybody has this need.” I think it's like a truth of the Christian life. I struggle with prayer. I think we all do and I used to think I was alone in this, everybody knows how to pray. But like, I'm just a bad Christian. I don't know how to do this. And then you start talking about, oh, all of us are in the same boat here. It sounds like that was your story.
[00:05:12] VW: Yeah, and talking to so many like Christian influencers and authors and different things. Prayer is like the one thing that they feel like – I can feel I have some stuff figured out as much as we can. But prayer just feels so overwhelming and I think it's just very elusive. We can kind of figure out Bible study a little bit easier, because it's on paper a little bit more, and prayer just feels a little more difficult.
[00:05:37] JR: You keep your journals, right? You keep your old prayer journals and read over them. What have you learned through that process? Because I journal my prayers in the morning, but I don't really go back and read them. So, I'm curious what you see as you do that.
[00:05:53] VW: Oh, gosh. Man, it's interesting. I've gone back to like eight years ago, and I've also gone back just over the last year, and I think that's always an interesting reminder, because one thing that I personally noticed over reading 2021's was how much I prayed for my health. And I've had a lot of like, different health things this past year, nothing crazy serious. But enough to where I was reading my journal, just going this consumes so much of my attention that I prayed differently in January. I actually took a break from praying for my health and asked five people to be praying for it, and got to put my attention on other people. And even that was cool.
I guess, just to give you an example that sometimes it's not like looking back and saying, “Oh my gosh, look how much God did.” But it's, “Oh my gosh, like, I can learn something from these prayers still, and do something different moving forward.” I don't know if that makes sense. But yeah, and there's the obvious, like, “Oh, you just see where you feel like, oh, I'm never going to get these things figured out.” And then you look back years ago, and you're like, “Well, I really have grown.” We would miss a lot of things if we did not write it down and like review it, or at some point.
[00:07:08] JR: But I think that's most people. I don't know a lot of people who write down their prayers, and they review them. I was actually talking to a friend the other day, do you use this app called Timehop? Do you know this product?
[00:07:19] VW: Yes, yes. I know it from Facebook. But yeah.
[00:07:22] JR: Okay. So, the gist for listeners who don't know, it's one of my favorite, it's the only app I check every single day. It shows you what you posted on social media, and what's on your camera roll for this day, last year, three years in the past, five years in the past, whatever. It's great. It makes you really depressed of how lame you were 10 years ago, and what you were posting on Twitter. So, don't scroll to 11 years ago.
But I was talking to friends today, like we should have like a Timehop for prayer. That would actually be really interested in like, “Show me everything I prayed.” I wish God could do that. Hey, show me everything I prayed for a year ago, five years ago, this day in history. I don't know. I think that'd be interesting, I think. Hopefully we'd see some development and maturity, spiritually, right?
[00:08:09] VW: We actually, at one point, we’re like, we need to do a one-line-a-day journal. You know how you could do the five years for prayer. And then we like thought about this, we plan this out as like a new product, and we actually saw that Hosanna Revival, I think is the company, they have one and it's beautiful. So, if somebody is looking to like, write one prayer a day, and then like, see that over the next five years, every time you go to like February 15, or whatever, there is a product out there like that. So, it's not an app. But yeah, I do think it's cool that they had that idea. We didn't know that they did. But we’re sending people that way now.
[00:08:46] JR: I love it. Alright, I think our audiences picked it up from our conversation, but say it explicitly in 15 seconds, what does Val Marie Paper do?
[00:08:55] VW: We create practical products to help you connect with the Lord. And we say like, we want you to have a life that flows from prayer. It's not just that, you pray for 15 minutes in the morning, and you kind of tuck it away, but that your prayer life is influencing your whole life. So yeah, we just have a lot of practical things in our shop to do that.
[00:09:15] JR: I have your website pulled up here. I just read this customer review. It says, “Prayer is a spiritual discipline. It’s difficult.” We just talked about this. “And this journal makes it so easy.” How? How exactly? I haven't looked inside of one of these journals. But what is it about these journals that makes prayer easier?
[00:09:33] VW: So, the format is basically, we have different categories for each month. So, you fill out the journal and these different sections once a month, and there's world in nation, your community, your family, and you just do this really intentionally and prayerfully once and then it's ready to go. So, like you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single morning. If you have 10 minutes to pray, like often we could spend eight minutes getting into the focus of prayer or trying to think, what do I want to pray for? And there are certain things you know you're going to want to pray for your spouse, or for the charity that you support or whatever it is. So, to be able to sit down and have this ready for you, and we encourage people to pray through like one section a day, it's not like you're covering everything at one time. So, it's very doable. I think like, I would rather see people pray for five minutes every day consistently, than have a two-hour prayer session once every, like couple of months. Because I think that consistency is just so good. We could build on that so much, and it can grow.
I think we're so used to failing at prayer that it kind of gives you the motivation, because it's just bite-size, you can do this. I don't want to say like it's failure-proof, but it really does help you to just take the small steps that are going to give you the confidence to keep praying.
[00:10:52] JR: That's really good. I love that. You touched on this before, but I want you to go a level deeper here. When did prayer become so important to you, personally? It sounds like it was during this first pregnancy of yours.
[00:11:05] VW: Yeah, so I had a mom who prayed for me growing up because I was fearful. I was afraid of robbers. I was afraid of like a fire in the house after we had the little – I don't know what it's called, the fire department comes and they show you how to stop, drop and roll. I would not go in my house after that. But I was just afraid of everything. And my mom always turned to prayer. So, I learned very early that like, I could go to God with anything.
[00:11:32] JR: So, hang on, timeout, because I have an incredibly anxious five-year-old. I mean, I know you can't remember word for word. But what were those prayers your mom prayed over you as a little girl?
[00:11:45] VW: So, I think the biggest thing that I just remember is that nothing was too small for God and nothing was too big for God. So, as I grew up, as I've talked to lots of customers over the years, a lot of people are just afraid that what they have – there are people who are dying of hunger in different places, like why would God care about what job I get next? There are so many things that we can miss understand God's love for us because we see it in the grand scope of like everybody else around us.
So, I think having her know that just how much God loves her that she is seen and that he sees everything that's happening, and she is not out of control. She's not teetering on the edge somewhere like God is holding her. I have an anxious eight-year-old, actually. So, we have many conversations, probably trying to work through the same different things. But yeah, I think knowing just that God very early on, like he cares for me so much. And the hypochondria is something that like, obviously your daughter doesn't have hypochondria, that's a big concept for her. But I have seen that as such a thorn in my side and struggle. But in the last few months, I realized if I did not have hypochondria, I never would have created these journals, and my whole career, my whole life would be very different, and that's just crazy to think about.
[00:13:15] JR: Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot, this sense that even the curses of life God can use for blessings, right? I mean, it's Romans 8:28-29. God's using all things, even our junk for our sanctification. Think about this in the context of Genesis 3. We talk a lot about how the biblical narrative informs the work we do in the world, right? Without Genesis 3, without the curse, without thorns and thistles pushing back on us as we do our work in the world, we'd have less of a need to run to God and rely on Him daily as we do our work. And so, in that sense, it is a blessing, right? Same as true for you with your hypochondria. Your bio says, you live off of Psalm 16:11. Why that verse?
[00:14:06] VW: That verse talks about, there is a fullness of joy in the presence of the Lord, and I can have a melancholy personality. So, it's easy for me to kind of just – I’m basically like drawn to negativity, so I have to fight for joy a lot. And just to know that it is in God's presence that we find joy, and so often we're like looking for the good that God can give us and we've don't realize that every good thing he can give us is in His presence. Isaiah 26:3 talks about when we fix our eyes, that is when we have perfect peace. When we fix our eyes on Him, when we have wisdom, like all of these things happen in His presence, which is basically prayer. So, that verse is just really important to me because I do in my struggle to find joy. I want to remember that it's in His presence and it's not in the other things I tried to fill it with, and that is with Him.
[00:15:03] JR: I have a really hard time with this in my work. You've been listening to my book Redeeming Your Time, I think you could probably read through the lines here. I'm such an accomplishment-driven person. I'm always asking what's next? It's funny, I was meditating on just Genesis 1 and 2 the other day, and it just the fact that God stopped to see the creation was good. He had no need to do that. He could have easily move from creating the sun and the moon to creating the animals. But he stopped and saw that it was good. So, I've just been trying to discipline myself to find joy and appreciate the goodness of what God's already done in my work, before I move on to what's next. How do you do that? Other than prayer, what are you doing to cultivate joy and be intentional about cultivating joy in your work and life?
[00:15:58] VW: Yeah. So, as you're saying that, I guess, one thought came to mind and this is probably a little different than like a specific answer of cultivating joy. So, I had a book come out on prayer in October, and I had decided that I was going to fast, one day a week, for the weeks leading up to the book launch. And basically, just be praying for the people who are going to read the book, what was going to happen? Everything.
And the Tuesday before it came out, I decided to start feasting. And it was basically, I talked about prejoicing the book, which is basically rejoice with a P on the beginning to just say like, we're rejoicing before what we're asking God for, happens. And it's a statement of faith. And it's a statement of just like, a celebration of, I don't have to wait for the results of what's going to happen on launch day, to know that the work that we did was really good, that I loved getting to write this book. I loved getting the research. I loved getting to enjoy the whole process.
It was just so cool, because it wasn't determined by – my joy wasn't determined by launch day, which thank God, it wasn't because my book actually ended up not being in any stores at all. And I didn't find out this until the day before, which was a crushing blow. But I was so thankful that I had that Tuesday before to have been such a sweet day of like celebration, because launch day was very different. I mean, I probably could have changed my attitude a little bit more. But I was just so thankful that I got to enjoy that without other circumstances having to decide that for me. So, that's kind of a weird example. But just one –
[00:17:44] JR: This a brilliant concept. I want to make sure that listeners don't misinterpret this. You're not saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that you’re prejoicing because you're confident God's going to deliver the result that you want, right? I am rejoicing before I get the results so that I can be content, whether God brings prosperity or poverty. That's what you're saying, right?
[00:18:17] VW: Yeah. There's a bad review, a lack of sales, nothing should steal the joy that working two years on a book, and knowing that, like, every time you did that work, you're proud of it, and God worked through it. And you got to sit down and write it. Nothing should take away the joy of getting to do that work. So, that was my way of not waiting for permission, I guess you could say, permission from other people to rejoice in the work. If you wait, it's hard. You have to do it before you start hearing, I guess just the noise from the world, basically.
[00:19:01] JR: Yeah, I'm releasing my first children's book on April 5th. I'm going to do this before this. I really love this. It just goes to something we talk a lot about on the podcast that as Christians, we get the verdict before our performance. We have the father saying we are loved equally, regardless of performance.
Somebody pointed out to me, I was at this event with my friend John Tyson the other day, and John was pointing out, he said, “The blessing that the Father speaks over Jesus at the baptism happened at the start of his ministry, not at the end.” At the beginning. He said, “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus got the blessing before three years of public ministry. The same is true for us and we can rejoice in that before we see the results of our work. It's really, really beautiful, Val. Hey, I want to ask you about this. You guys close your online store on Sundays. Very interested. Talk through this decision.
[00:20:04] VW: Yeah. So, this is really just a personal decision. A couple years ago, I tried to preface it with that, because we don't think that everything needs to be closed on Sundays, if it was just a personal conviction. But I was reading, and I couldn't even tell you which book of the Bible. It was in the Old Testament about, like, bringing our wares to the Sabbath day. And I just felt like, we've talked about rest, and we encourage people to rest, like we've had email series, or different blog post or a hashtag for Sundays like to make a day arrest. It kind of felt like this was our loophole of why we could rest was because it's an online shop, we don't touch it, we don't do anything with it on Sundays. But we can still make money on that day. And it just felt like if we're going to preach this, we just want this to be so true in our life that like, this isn't our way around that basically.
I know for me, like to trust God, that he can do this same thing in 300 and whatever days – I’m not going to do the math.
[00:21:14] JR: I couldn’t do that math, so I’m not going to be able to do that.
[00:21:17] VW: That he could do the same thing with 50 less days. Now, I will say like, if you go to our shop on Sundays, we share like a blog post to say like, just to encourage people if they need encouragement with rest, but we also say, “Hey, listen, we're not trying to frustrate anybody, here's the password, if you really have to log in today. This is your one day off, and you need to do it.” It's not trying to be like this added frustration for people. But we do want to encourage people in the art of resting and for them to know where we stand, and it definitely, like hurts our sales. It’s not like everybody uses the password. I think a lot of people see it as a good way to – they do pause. So, just to say, I don't know. I got to throw that in there.
[00:22:02] JR: So, you think it's had a negative impact on sales?
[00:22:04] VW: Well, on the Sundays, not overall.
[00:22:08] JR: Yeah, of course. Not overall.
[00:22:10] VW: No.
[00:22:11] JR: That's interesting.
[00:22:11] VW: Yeah, I think our business grew pretty drastically the year that we started doing that. And that's not always the case, like we had a year where we decided to start giving away 15% instead of 10%. And we felt an almost immediate drop in sales. We had a lot more competition.
[00:22:32] JR: Because God's not a genie, right? He’s not going to bless us just because we honor him in these ways. He can, but he's not obligated to.
[00:22:40] VW: Yes. I think it was a good test for me, just because it's easy to say that you don't think that God's like that. But it's also, our business, it ended up still growing that year. But it was very early on in that year, and it just felt like the faucet went off. Even random things like Amazon. I had an affiliate, I share book recommendations all the time. So, I had an affiliate link with Amazon, and we get a couple 100 bucks every month from that. And then Louisiana changed a rule and now that was shut off. So, it was like, within two months, so many things just kind of stopped that it was just like this is insane. How much of a trust experience it was? I'm so glad we didn't change anything. We didn't stop giving 15%. We have kept going and it's just been cool to see what we can do when we put that trust in God.
[00:23:33] JR: One of the things I've been thinking about that I think it's related to this, it's just the communal nature of Sabbath. When you read the Sabbath commands in the Old Testament, it's not all about the individual and you getting to rest. It's about the community being able to rest. I think by closing the store on Sunday, you're sending a powerful signal, you're encouraging customers to enter into Sabbath rest. You're not requiring, you can’t require, you can’t mandate it. But you're saying, “Hey, we're observing a period of rest. We encourage you to do so.” I think it's powerful.
I know there's a lot of believers who take this to a degree to where they just don't eat out on Sundays because they want to bless the community and having waitstaff not work now. Of course, those restaurants are still open, but it's a small symbol of Sabbath, communal rest. So, I just think that's super interesting for our audience to be thinking through. Yes, Sabbath personally, but also thinking about how we can Sabbath, how we can encourage others to Sabbath in our community.
Hey, Val, this podcast at the end of the day is really about two things. We've already hit on the first, if we believe that our work matters to God, we should do it differently. We should do distinctly. And the second part is related to that. It's part of the way that we are distinct in the way we do our work is doing it exceptionally well. So, I'm just always interested in picking the brain of people who've gotten really, really good at what they do. I would put you in that bucket. When you started this business, you expected to sell, you’re about maybe 5,000 per journals and like 50 with that first batch –
[00:25:11] VW: Fifty, yeah.
[00:25:14] JR: Yeah, that's crazy. And today you sold like 100,000. How did this happen? What have been the keys to mastering scale with a business like this?
[00:25:25] VW: Yeah. So, one thing I always come back to is, and it's a basic answer for somebody who's a prayer journal business, but like, tuning into God more than we're tuning into the world. And one specific way that, this is even creatively, I am so passionate about the idea that God is the author of every creative idea. I think often we can see somebody doing something and think, “Okay, that looks like it's successful. I'm going to, like, try to do something similar, but maybe like, a little bit different, put my own spin on it and it doesn't work.” For me, I tried to do baby invitations, like baby shower things and baby announcements and different – even like, just no pads or meal planning things and they failed miserably.
It wasn't until the Lord gave me an idea. And I always felt like, He didn't drop, download it to my brain or anything. But I do feel like if we, truly as Christians, we have the ability to be the most creative beings on the planet, and I get excited thinking about what companies are going to get started or be created, from people who are just like, “Lord use me. I don't know what you want me to do, but use me.” So, I would say just what separates like world-class, somebody who has mastered their craft, it is not looking to the world for ideas, but tuning in so much more to the Lord.
I know at one point for us, like I was saying, in 2016, we had a rough year, and I prayed a lot that year about what to do. We were getting a lot more competition. There's just a lot more in the marketplace, then whenever we had started. I felt like the Lord wanted us to cut down our products and just niche down on just prayer and we did that. Our business exploded after that. And we were able to be the person that people go to if they want to talk about prayer, and we try to, even as we create collections, we create a master list of ideas that we get from customers or that we want to do, and then we pray about that list. And we don't budge until we feel confident in one direction or the other. So, I think that sounds basic for a prayer journal girl to say, but that would be my answer.
[00:27:51] JR: No. So, this is one of the best answers have ever heard to this question, honestly. So, number one, I'm a huge fan of niching down, of knowing exactly what you do, getting really crystal clear about it, and killing everything else. That is the path to exponential growth, a lot of times. The second thing that I want you to go a level deeper on is just the difference between copycat creation, right? And in waiting on the Lord for fresh creative ideas. I mean, in a way, this is the heart of my new children's book, The Creator in You. We have the Creator God in us, the God who created platypuses and mountains, right? And the galaxies of infinite creativity. So, what does that look like for you to wait on the Lord for those ideas? Is that a lot of silence? A lot of solitude? What are the ingredients beyond prayer itself?
[00:28:54] VW: Yeah, this topic is something that I'm super passionate about, but don't talk about a lot. We had a copycat years ago, and I literally did a blog post. It’s called Creatives, Copycats, and Christians, because some of the response to the copycat was, “Oh, well, everything's glorifying the Lord. So, why does that bother you?” Almost like, I should be glad for it. There is a sense of, I'm not worried about not getting as big of a piece of the pie as I was supposed to get. I think I was more bummed at us accepting, like, taking something from somebody and like cloaking it in this way, when we know that God has created. He is not out of ideas. He didn't just stop it so and so and then now we got to go borrow from everybody. He is full of ideas. But like you said, it does require asking God to use us.
And as I looked back on my journal that I don't know if I said – I think I said this, but I prayed so much for God to grow this invitation business and the, you'd noticed at the end of my prayers, I'd say, “Lord, I don't care what you do, just use me.” I said, “Use me Lord.” And at the end of most of my prayers for a year, and he ended up doing that, not in the way that I thought at all. But we have to be wit, like that has to be our chief goal, to be used for His glory, because everything is for His glory.
I talk about this in my prayer book, but like answered prayers are for God's glory. So, if God has two people, and this is just my perspective, so there's probably caveats with this. But if there are two people, and one is constantly thinking everything's a coincidence, or it was done in their own strength. And then there's another who, every little thing God gets the glory for, who do we think is going to perform miracles? Whose life do we think he'll perform miracles in? I think about the verse of like, what they do with little, you know, the verse I'm talking about, much will be given, or whatever you do with little. And so, I think about that, like, if we want God to use us, let's praise him for every bit and give Him the glory, for everything. So, that's a couple of my tangents you got me. Those are all things I'm just super excited about. So, I’m sorry.
[00:31:15] JR: This is really good. Have you read this old book, really old book, called A Technique for Producing Ideas?
[00:31:22] VW: No, I haven't.
[00:31:24] JR: It's great, it’s this tiny little book, it's like 40 pages. And the biggest like criticism, if you look on Amazon reviews, like, “This is too simple.” But like, in my experience, as somebody who's made a living creating new things, it's pretty spot on. It's like a five-step process for how you create new ideas. In my experience, it's pretty spot on. So, if this is interesting to you, creating new things versus copycat culture, check it out, A Technique for Producing Ideas.
[00:31:56] VW: I'm definitely going to google that after.
[00:31:56] JR: It's so good. It's so great. It's like super, super old. There's like a million different editions of it now. You already talked about quitting Instagram. I want to ask you to go a little deeper on this. And since you've read Redeeming Your Time, you know why. But why did you finally decide to quit this? I mean, people will look at you say, “You got to use Instagram to grow your business, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Why'd you quit?
[00:32:20] VW: Yeah. So, first caveat, we still have a business account that my team runs. But my personal account was the bigger one that definitely had more engagement. And obviously, I was on there, growing the business. But I honestly never thought I would get off of Instagram. I have seen a few other people get off and I always was really inspired by it. But that in the back of my head, it was always still like, there's just no way. And I attribute this to praying, it was the first time – yeah, I'll go somewhere with that. But I started praying every day. We actually, created a new journal where you could write in it every day. It's called the signature journal.
So, I started that in January, and I started praying every single day, not related to Instagram at all. And my husband's always like, he's out of the Instagram world. So, he's fine with it, but he wouldn't hate to see me on it less. But I've always felt like, I just need to do this. I felt like the Lord just planted the seed in my head and I felt comfortable with the idea. And it was so weird. Like, whenever I tell you, I knew it was God, because I knew that if I had come up with that idea, I would have just talked myself out of it. But I felt confident. I even thought, “Okay, well, I'm going to just make a decision to do this.” And then even after, you know, you kind of think, am I going to regret this? There were no regrets. It was the cleanest cut that I ever think I've ever made, and it was only because I knew God wanted me to do it and I felt confident that decision.
So, when things came up where it was like, I spent a couple weeks just thinking, “Okay, well, what about if this happens? I'm going to miss the interaction with people or different things.” I was still like, “No, this is the right decision.” Yeah, it was definitely a prayer and it wasn't like I prayed about like, “Hey, Lord, should I leave Instagram?” It was just, I just felt him moving my heart towards that.
[00:34:27] JR: You posted a great blog post about why you did this and there were a couple things that really resonated with me. Number one, you said, the benefits just aren't worth the cost of Instagram anymore. I talked about this in Redeeming Your Time. Most people don't think about things in terms of cost benefit analysis, right? We say social media is valuable. It's like nobody's debating that. The question isn't whether or not it's valuable. The question is, how valuable is it relative to the cost? And the cost is exorbitantly high in terms of distraction, our ability to focus, our ability to you subside anxiety, right? The news that we get on social media is making this crazy anxious. And there other thing I really appreciate about your post and kind of your rationale for this is you were just like, I'm not good at Instagram. I know what it would take to be good. I don't think enough people think like this, and I really respect this.
[00:35:29] VW: Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad you brought that up. Because that is something you know, at the end of the day, it's what it would cost to be good at Instagram, because I was probably like, far behind whatever. I could have stayed on and I just think I could have tried, but it would be a whole lot of striving in my own flesh, basically.
[00:35:53] JR: Yeah. But this is like such a valuable lesson not just for Instagram, but about anything we're doing professionally. We are called to the pursuit of excellence for the glory of God, not the attainment of it, but I do believe all Christ followers are called the pursuit of it, right? Because excellence is winsome. And winsomeness, attractiveness, brings people – opens up doors for sure, the gospel review for the world. And so, I just don't want to do anything that I'm going to be really crappy at for a long, extended period of time. And if there's something I can cut, so I can focus more of my energy on the things God has equipped me to do really well. Yet, to me, that's a no-brainer.
So just, round of applause from me to you, on this. I just respect the heck out of this decision. Alright, hey, I'm curious. I always love to ask high performers this question, what is your day look like typically, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, Val?
[00:36:47] VW: Yeah. So, I start pretty early. My alarm probably goes off at five and I hit snooze a little bit. And then, but I'm usually up by 5:30. I’m just an introvert. So, getting up early is more important to me then sleeping in really late, just because I love having like an hour to myself. So, after my quiet time, we'll get the girls ready for school. And then I've been trying to go to the gym a couple of days a week. And I spend more time in the sauna than I do actually working out. I'm not bragging about the gym. I literally spend more time in the sauna, which is good for anxiety and some other health issues I have. So, I can justify it that way pretty good.
I then work on my two or three things that I need to do for the day. I check in with my team and I usually work – so, that's usually, I work from like 9 to 12, maybe 9 to 12:30. And then, I normally have a slow lunch where I will watch a Seinfeld while I'm cooking some chicken for a salad or I'll do that for a little while. I'll go sit outside on my porch and then I actually go to the [inaudible 00:37:59] an hour early. I actually don't go straight to the [inaudible 00:38:03]. There's this church nearby that has this lake, and I go and just park in front of this lake and read books or look over my to-do list. I kind of just wrap up my day that way. And I've already said I'm an introvert, so like being able to not like fly in on two wheels from my work to picking up the girls, is really helpful. Because it's hard to switch your brain from work to kids and genuinely be paying attention to them. So, that's been really helpful.
I know we talked about it before, just reading your book and being reminded of that think time, I do want to do that more with that card time like to where it's not even like I have to be reading, but I can just be sitting and thinking and processing the day. After that, we get home and do homework, dinner and bed, and then it's usually reading books or watching a show or hanging out with my husband. I've mentioned anxiety. So, I like take a hot Epsom salt bath, I get my weighted blanket out, and I do some deep breathing. And then I journal just kind of reflecting on the day, not every night, by any means. But I tried to. I noticed I sleep the best whenever I just journal a little bit and pray before bed. And that's usually around, I would like it to be, by 9:30 but it's usually probably closer to 10.
[00:39:25] JR: Yeah, I love it. I'm super convicted about the transition from work to kid time. I'm terrible at this, like really bad at it. I got to get better at it. So, you're going to encourage me to do that. Hey, when I emailed you to invite you into the show, you mentioned that you were listening to Redeeming Your Time on Audible book all about routines, obviously. And you asked me, you said, I'd love to hear if you have any thoughts on how you could talk about prayer and Redeeming Your Time you asked me that. I'm going to turn the question on you. I want to hear your thoughts on prayer and Redeeming Your Time. What do you see is the connection there?
[00:40:03] VW: Yeah, so I think, honestly, I hate saying our product is like a catalyst for that. But the idea that we do not have to reinvent the wheel, and make it harder, so often, we just make stuff harder than it needs to be. Even in the book, I have a chapter about, we're sometimes so afraid to use tools or resources, because it feels like, we're supposed to be able to have this really beautiful prayer life. I'm supposed to just think of prayer every single day, and if I don't – the idea of scheduling time to pray for some people feels like it's legalistic or it's taking – you can't mean that if you're scheduling it. But it's not. It's developing a habit and getting good at a craft. I mean, not to call prayer a craft, but –
[00:40:57] JR: It is.
[00:40:58] VW: Okay, good. I'm glad you say that. But we don't want to rely – the idea of relying on these, like, amazing mountaintop prayer experiences that can happen once in a blue moon, if we're relying on those to grow our prayer life, it's going to be hard, because we're going to have dry days, and we're going to have – if somebody is like, I want to start praying, or I want to get started, and then they have one day, and it's like, not very emotion-filled. Or if they just don't feel like much is happening, they're not going to keep going.
But if they say, “You know what, I'm going to pray for 30 days, every single day for five minutes,” they're going to see fruit, maybe not for the first couple of days or even the first week, but they're going to start seeing fruit and it's going to come with that commitment. Just sticking with something beyond like expecting things to just happen in these really romantic ways. I know people talk about that with writing, you can't just like wait for creativity to spark. You sit down at your computer and you write every day.
[00:42:04] JR: It's the way anything worth doing is done in this world. Discipline over time. That's it, right? I wrote about this in my previous book, Master of One. It's the answer nobody wants to hear, but it's the answer with anything, with any craft, whether it's your vocational craft, whether it's praying, whatever. Just discipline over time. That's a really, really good answer, Val. I like that. We get to have a longer conversation about this connection between Redeeming Your Time and prayer at some point. I'd love to do that.
Hey Val, three questions. I wrap up every conversation with. Number one, which books do you find yourself recommending or gifting most frequently?
[00:42:45] VW: Okay, I'm going to give you three business books and one spiritual book, if that's okay. That’s my love language, giving book recommendations.
[00:42:54] JR: Yes. Me too.
[00:42:55] VW: Blue Ocean Strategy and I don't remember the author's name.
[00:42:59] JR: Oh, my gosh, you're the first person to recommend one of my all-time – it’s actually not that great of a book, but the concept is critically important. It’s everything in business, in my experience.
[00:43:10] VW: Yeah. It shifts your whole idea of like – this goes back to that creativity and not just seeing like the competition thing. I think, there's always going to be competition, but I think we could get – we just have no idea the creativity that's out there because of the Lord. So, Blue Ocean Strategy, story brand.
[00:43:29] JR: I don't know where I got this quote, but it's related Blue Ocean Strategy, I think about all the time. “Only is better than best.” Originals, inimitables, are better than 1%, 5% better than something that's already out in the market. And you're tapping into God's creative energy and creating something new in the world, so only is better than best.
[00:43:53] VW: I love that. I had to think about that for a second. But I love that.
[00:43:56] JR: Alright, so Blue Ocean Strategy, story brand.
[00:44:00] VW: And that's just very practical, trying to get your language down. And especially if you have a team, it's just super helpful. And then Ryan Holiday’s, Perennial Seller. And I think, for us, I just wrote a book on prayer, I've written one on motherhood, but like this book, we keep calling it my legacy book, because it is based on what I've learned from eight years of talking to people like what they struggle with. So, we feel like, even as I've written and done podcast episodes, I just keep saying just go get the book. It's got everything. And my plan this year is to work on creating a perennial seller out of it and like, what does it look like to keep selling this book knowing it doesn't have a like a timer on it. This could help people for a hundred years. I'm actually going to be revisiting what I've read in that book to kind of help me do that this year.
And then spiritually, we've talked about just tuning into the Lord and hearing his voice and Priscilla Shirer wrote a book called Discerning the Voice of God. And it was so good on making clear on how to hear His voice and what that actually sounds like, because we don't audibly hear His voice. It's different than that. I just think it would be really helpful if people are just feeling like, “I want that clarity”, it would be encouraging.
[00:45:34] JR: Alright, so I haven't read the Priscilla Shirer book. I have read the other three. And you and I are now best friends. Because not only do I love Blue Ocean Strategy, I read Perennial Seller probably every other year.
[00:45:50] VW: Wow. Yeah.
[00:45:50] JR: And I love Ryan Holiday. This book, like nobody's heard of this book. Nobody read this one. Ironically, it's the worst. It's not the Perennial Seller in Ryan's cannon. It's phenomenal. And not just for writers. If you make anything, anything at all, you've got to read Perennial Seller, by Ryan Holiday. It's phenomenal. Hey, you just published a new book. I want you to tell everyone, you mentioned it briefly, but Pray Confidently and Consistently. What's the gist of this book?
[00:46:24] VW: Yeah, it's based off the verse and Hebrews 12:1, I think I haven't done an interview specifically on it in a while. But it's about throwing off everything that is entangling us and running, just fixing our eyes on the Lord. And basically, the book is broken up into 15 weights, the things that are holding us back in our prayer life, and we just dive into them. We talk about facades, and monologuing, which facades is like putting on this front with God and not understanding how to lament, and then monologuing is doing all the talking and not the listening.
But yeah, we just cover a lot. And it's very practical. I don't know if you know, Gretchen Saffles with Well-Watered Women. But we've been friends for a while. She has a business that's very similar to mine, but it's Bible study material. And we're each other's biggest cheerleaders. One day, she was just like, “I think you need to write a book on prayer.” And in my mind, I was like, “Tim Keller's got a book on prayer. There are so many people with books on prayer, way smarter than me.” And she was basically like, “There are people who are intimidated to pick those books up. They love to hear in a more accessible language from somebody like you.” And that planted a seed. And then the Lord planted an idea for these weights and everything, months later. And so yeah, that's the book. It's just very practical and accessible. If you want to learn about prayer, but you're intimidated by it, it would be a great place to start.
[00:47:57] JR: That's great. I love it. Hey, Val, who do you want to hear in this podcast, talking about their faith in their work?
[00:48:03] VW: Yes. Okay. So, I don't have a specific person. But I have two types of people that I was thinking about. I want to hear somebody from the health space. And the reason for that is I'm diving into my health a lot right now, and it can be a very woo-woo space. It's hard to find a voice that is super solid. I will actually say Meredith Fletcher and Megan Byrd would be two people that I'd want to hear. But just that idea, somebody in the health space. And then the design space. I'm sure people have said Joanna Gaines, but I don't necessarily specifically mean her, but like somebody who does design from a Christian perspective, because that it's so easy to get sucked into the material of that, and to not be content. And I just think it'd be really cool hearing from somebody from that angle.
[00:48:58] JR: It's a really good answer. I got people in mind for both. So, that’s terrific.
[00:49:02] VW: Yey, I can’t wait.
[00:49:03] JR: Last question, what's one thing from our conversation today that you want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?
[00:49:12] VW: If we truly do what this whole podcast is about, of pursuing mastery and pursuing excellence, and doing it for the Lord, we can't do that apart from the Lord, and we can't do it for ourselves. We’re not trying to be masters for our own glory, just to feel good. It has got to be for the Lord. And we can only do that with Him. So, pray and do that alongside him.
[00:49:42] JR: Yeah, prayer is one of the main ways that we do it with Him. Val, I just want to commend you for the exceptional redemptive work you do every day. For literally helping us redeem our prayer lives so we could commune with the Lord and do our work with Him. Guys, you can learn more about Val at valmariepaper.com. Val, thanks for joining us.
[00:50:02] VW: Thanks for having me.
[OUTRO]
[00:50:05] JR: If you're not subscribed to my weekly email devotionals, this episode may have been the first time you heard me mention my first children's book, which is coming out April 5th. It's called The Creator in You. The whole book is designed to help your kids, help my kids connect their work to God's work, so that they can see their work, their current work, chores, homework, whatever, and future careers with renewed purpose, enthusiasm and joy, right?
If that sounds like a message you want your kids to hear, go preorder the book on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Again, the book is called The Creator in You. And trust me, buy it for the artwork, not for the words. Jonathan David, who we partnered with on this book is one of the most extraordinary illustrators. I believe in the world, one of the most extraordinary I've ever seen. This is a real treasure of a book. So, go find that now. Hey, guys, thank you so much for tuning into the Call to Mastery this week, I'll see you next time.
[END]