Podcast as Spiritual Discipline

Today I finished recoding the first two weeks (28 episodes) of the period pastor podcast. If you saw the blog post Lenten Spiritual Discipline: Remembering the Women, you know that I started the period pastor podcast as a way to make myself read daily prayers as part of a Lent. Here is how that’s going…

First, I should confess that I am not doing these daily as I intended. There were some hiccups early on. I missed recording on Wednesday. It is the day I go to church and work on the Days for Girls project and I was too tired to make a decent sounding recording when I got home. I underestimated how my work week would affect recordings. So today, I woke up early, put coffee in one yeti and ice water in the other and recorded 6 episodes to get ahead for days when my voice and body aren’t up for recording. If I wasn’t recording, I wouldn’t care how my voice sounded but likely I wouldn’t be reading out loud and more than likely I would have stopped doing the prayers daily because I’m not good at holding myself accountable for things like that. Doing the recordings and giving the to my husband to edit is like having an accountability partner.

My husband is editing these episodes, adding the music, picture and posting it to the appropriate places. He’s awesome and I wouldn’t be doing this without his help. He needs me to be two days ahead in recording so that he can stay a day ahead in editing and publishing. His part of the production takes longer than my recording. My hope is that this becomes a daily practice now that we have figured out what we need to have done and when.

Some of the aspects of recording are a little distracting from the practice, like rereading when I flub up a word. In real life, God knows what I meant, I’m moving forward, but because I’m recording I’m rereading. Even though this was distracting at first, I’m being more intentional about my pronunciation, breathing, and pacing which is actually adding to my enjoyment of recording and feeling like I am giving my best work to God. (Kurtis points out that my first recording had 114 splices and the one he edited today only had 22). I’ve noticed that I do have some of the prayers nearly memorized and yet I find something new in them each time. I did once go back to make sure I had actually read a line in a previous recording because it sounded so new to me the next time around. I had recorded it. But I think that is the beauty in scripture and in well-crafted prayers, they hold something new for us each time. And I believe that God breathes new life or new understanding or new messages even into familiar words. I’ve enjoyed this practice of repetitive (mostly daily) prayer and I hope my listeners (hopefully someone in addition to my mom) enjoy listening to this practice too.

So, aside from having a spiritual practice for lent, I wanted the podcast to be well done, so I did the white presbyterian pastor thing and bought a book on the subject. I picked up a few tips from Kristen Meinzer’s book “So You Want to Start a Podcast”. It’s been helpful and there are some ideas I can apply now, some I wish I knew before I started this adventure, and things to think about for future (maybe) podcasts. I particularly liked her words about finding an authentic voice. This applies for podcasting and for life in general, be you. To keep things simple this time around I chose prayers that I had not written and I don’t have cohost. After reading her book, I think I would love to write my own script and have co-hosts. I’m overwhelmed by that idea too. Again, like so many things, the prospect of the next podcast is exciting and scary all at once. So is asking for feedback….. so if you are listening or reading or following me on social media or however you are interacting with period pastor, let me know what you think of the podcast and what you might like to hear (or read on the blog) going forward. I would love your prayers and good vibes you want to send my way too. This is hard stuff and I’m grateful for your support.