Jay Breish recounts how a prayer session that helped him to process his daughter’s near-death experience, led him to not only reconsider the way that he views and approaches God in prayer, but also the way that he led a residential home for troubled teens and their families.
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Season 2 Ep 1: God is a Good Father
[00:00:00] Jay Breish: One of my children was very, very sick and we didn’t know if they were going to live. It was in those storms when I was seeking him that I began to recognize how he was speaking. God connected me with someone who was familiar with listening and inner healing, prayer. They prayed with me and I saw some radical transformations in a moment from that time of prayer. It gave me permission to say, I can talk to God about anything. And it doesn’t have to just be me whining and complaining and begging and pleading and hoping. It could be, maybe, God actually does want to give me the desires of my heart.
[00:01:04] Don Love: Scripture tells us to taste and see the God is good. And as we pray through things with folks, we’re finding confirmation that God is a good father who wants to speak to his children. Even before salvation, his spirit is working in our hearts to draw us to himself. He’s there gently waiting to carry our burdens and to give us life. My name is Don Love and today I’ve invited Jay Breish to join us, to share a bit about how his daughter’s illness and a listening and inner healing prayer session led him to uncover the lies he was believing about himself, and God and how this new understanding of prayer rippled out into the counselors in this counseling ministry and the troubled teens they ministered to. Jay’s someone we got to know over the last year. And I got to say, I really love this guy. He’s a counselor at heart, and I’ve watched him time and time again, as he and his wife come to the rescue of those in need, helping folks process life through. They seem to be especially gifted when it comes to helping people in crisis mode, bringing joy into the situation as they meet each urgent need. This makes sense because he and his wife, Hannah spent many years ministering at a residential home for troubled youth. So Jay, welcome to the show.
[00:02:15] Jay Breish: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
[00:02:17] Don Love: Jay, would you tell us a bit about how you came to discover listening and inner healing prayer in your own life?
[00:02:24] Jay Breish: Yeah. You know, , it’s kind of a long story. When I think about it, we have a tendency to say, oh, well, on this day, this is what the Lord did in my life. But the Lord has been stirring me. And speaking to me and with me and guiding me since I was a child. And I don’t think that’s unusual for us. I just think that most of the time we don’t recognize it. Yeah. , so I grew up in a Bible believing conservative church, wonderful men and women of God taught us the importance of scripture and I grew up in that environment where people look to the word of God for their truth and their direction. And that’s great. And that is true. And yet, sometimes we miss the intimate guidance and direction that God has provided for us by, indwelling us with his Holy Spirit. He’s called the comforter and the guide, the counselor. And so I didn’t have a whole lot of training in that growing up and yet I look back and somehow God was directing me ministering to me. Refocusing me in the midst of life’s challenges and storms. I just wasn’t aware of it until much later. So, for me, the journey actually began more with, I think, identity and learning who I am as a son and who he is as a good father and the gifts and the inheritance that come with that beyond just salvation and beyond, just His written word, but how in the moment he wants to be with us to comfort us and to guide us. And it was in those storms when I was seeking him that I began to recognize how he was speaking.
[00:04:13] Don Love: So, do you have some examples of those first moments where it started to dawn on you, that what you were hearing was actually the Lord leading you rather than their own thoughts or something else?
[00:04:22] Jay Breish: Yeah, I mean some of the biggest times I remember it all came out of crisis, honestly. So in middle school, my life was falling apart, I was kind of that nerdy kid glasses braces didn’t have a lot of friends was a believer, but kind of more in the church sense versus the out of my heart sense. So I was saved and I was baptized, but I wasn’t walking with the Lord. Cause I didn’t know what that looked like or how to do that.
[00:04:50] I didn’t know. That was really a thing. Yeah. But when my life fell apart and I got sick and were struggling with all these emotional issues and I, I even had suicidal thoughts for a season, it was my mom’s faithfulness who said, Jay, you’re not supposed to do life on your own. You you’re supposed to take these things to the Lord and walk with the Lord.
[00:05:11] And so what does that come to the prayers and petitions? Right. So I learned in that season to start praying and presenting my petitions to the Lord. Basically grumbling, , here’s my complaints. Here’s my struggles. Here’s my, my pains. And it was slowly through many hours of me talking at God where I began to realize that he actually had something to say back to me. If I gave him space, he actually had answers to my question.
[00:05:40] Don Love: So how do you describe what you believe to be God’s voice or God’s speaking? What do you mean that God’s speaking to you? What was those first instances, especially when your ear wasn’t honed? What was that like?
[00:05:51] Jay Breish: Yeah, the still small voice, right. Is what scripture calls it. I think most often he has spoken to me in thoughts. So it’s the Lord, I don’t know how do you want me to go to college? If so, what am I supposed to take or whatever. And there’s just, a thought response where a moment ago, I didn’t have any idea. I didn’t have an answer to that question. All of a sudden it’s you should go for youth ministry and a Bible degree. It can be so subtle sometimes that it comes across the front of our minds as just another thought from us. But if we reflect on the fact that we had no clue a moment earlier, and now we do, then we have to begin to acknowledge the fact that we have inputs into our thought processes that we may not have considered. So it’s interesting, in the churches that I’ve come from, it’s pretty understood that we get tempted and it’s pretty well understood that the enemy tempts us. How does he do that? It can be in circumstantial things, right. I’ve had, , a cookie for lunch and I come over to your house and you have six more presented there. So maybe circumstantially, I could be tempted by too many cookies. Right? But I think probably more often before the action, it starts with the thought. The man, those cookies look good, or wouldn’t it be good to have that fifth cookie that sixth brownie.
[00:07:21] Don Love: And the brownies are metaphorical for other things in life too. Oh man.
[00:07:25] Jay Breish: Oh man. If that was the worst thing I had it just, that would be easy. Right? Yeah.
[00:07:29] Don Love: I appreciate you sparing us the details though.
[00:07:31] Jay Breish: Yeah. So we understand, I think as believers that the enemy however, Spiritually it’s done. He can inject thoughts into our mind and most often they’re in first-person. So it’s as though I am saying it as though it’s coming from me. And yet the thought didn’t originate with me.
[00:07:48] Don Love: Yeah. And that’s something we’ll surely be teasing out here as we get to Q&A later in the season. So fast forward in your life. So you, you discover in hindsight that the Lord has been speaking to you in these ways, leading you, guiding you, teaching you, reminding you. The things that the Spirit says that he’ll do in John, and then you find yourself now in ministry. So you answered that call. You went to school and now you’re in ministry. When did this come into clearer focus, then that this was something that you should lead others to have an awareness about?
[00:08:17] Jay Breish: Yeah. So 2009 when my wife and I became missionaries and went to work in the residential program very quickly. We learned that it wasn’t our degrees, our experience. It wasn’t our smarts that was going to help these kids, these kids and families that we were serving were deeply broken.
[00:08:36] And so you quickly come to the end of yourself at the same time, I was grateful because some of my friends and my mentors were teaching this identity in Christ concept. And while that was hugely transformational. And I think perhaps one of the most important seasons of my life between that 2009 and 2012 timeframe, what identity gave me permission to do is to be a son to a good father. So it wasn’t some taboo thing. Like why would the King of Kings and Lord of Lords have a conversation with me- this little worm. It was, wouldn’t a good father want to talk to his kids? Jesus said, if you asked for, , bread, I’m not going to give you a stone or a snake, what good dad would do that? It was like, oh, this makes sense. I mean, he’s already said it, but it was kind of the connecting the dots to me as I was growing and identity learning what he said about. me – which by the way, was way better than what I thought of myself. Yeah. Right? Because I learned to think of that, , be holy as God is holy and toe the line and identity began to teach me that was perhaps more worldly bias on perfectionism than it was my kindness leads to repentance. So his grace was wooing my heart and it gave me permission to say, I can talk to God about anything. And it doesn’t have to just be me whining and complaining and begging and pleading and hoping it could be, maybe God actually does want to give me the desires of my heart. Yeah. Because he put them there. So , to answer your question more specifically, I think it was 2016after two of the hardest years of my life. Again, brokenness, where I had already gotten to the habit of an active prayer life. And of course I’ve been in the word since I was little. And I was in ministry now for a handful of years. We came out of season a two year season where one of my children was very, very sick and we didn’t know if they were going to live to the next day. And we had people interceding and praying and all this stuff. And my daughter slowly got better. So I remember stepping out of that season, my daughter was stabilized and walking back into the office and saying, I’m not okay. My heart. Is not in a position to be able to minister to these families. Well, because I can’t even take care of my own self at this point. And so, , through a friend, God connected me with someone who was familiar with prayer and listening in prayer. And so they prayed with me and I saw some radical transformations in a moment from that time of listening and inner healing, prayer.
[00:11:33] Don Love: You want to talk at all about that or not? It’s too personal or…?
[00:11:38] Jay Breish: No…No, I’d love to share. So our friends, there was a husband and wife couple that were good friends of Hannah and mine. And , I reached out to them and said, Hey I’m struggling. I don’t even know exactly what I’m struggling with. I just know I’m not okay. And they said, yeah, we’d be happy. We pray with people all the time. So let’s just invite the Lord in this, in this space. And, we believe he’s here and we’re just giving permission to work on the heart. And so they started, I remember they started asking the Lord, I guess, to, to reveal kind of like, what am I feeling? And when I responded, I’m feeling numb. I thought, for sure, like this was game over, like what’s God going to do with that. But as I began asking the Lord questions, which I think. it must’ve been led by the Spirit through them, right? The Spirit was giving them insight as to where we kind of need to go. They began asking questions about, Lord, where’s this coming from? What’s this connected to, and immediately what came to my mind was one of the most tragic scenes of my daughter being sick. And as a dad, having to care for her in the low point of her life, That feeling of no one else can do this. So I have to do this. And yet no dad should have to care for a kid this way. Right. Tragic traumatic for everyone. For my wife, myself, my daughter involved. This is like how we have to medically care for her. And this is what you have to do. And it was ripping, just ripped that my heart. So. By asking the Lord a question. “Where did this come from?” A moment before, I was clueless, I was emotionally numb. I just knew something wasn’t right. Now, all of a sudden what comes to my mind is a very specific event that was highly traumatic. And we started praying into that. We started asking the Lord what’s Jay believing about this? Lord, how do you see this event? Where were you in the midst of this? Right. So the disciples had Jesus in the boat. They thought the boat was going down. They wake him up from the sleep kind of thing. He was always in the boat. He was there. His sleeping was actually a testimony to the way they could have been responding. Yeah. So I remembered these same kind of things for me because I was the one saying, God, where were you? Like I had to do this on my own. And through prayer, the Lord said I was there in the midst of it. Some of the things that I was thinking and perceiving were lie based. Right? And yet he’s not condemning in his corrective. It wasn’t like Jay you’re an idiot. Why did you believe that? It was like my son, that wasn’t true. There’s something powerful about when God says it’s not true. That all of a sudden this lie that’s controlling my life. That I didn’t even know was there. It gets put on the table. And now all of a sudden you can interact with it. You, you name it? Oh, I believe, , some of, , my daughter’s pain was caused by me. That wasn’t the case. I believe that I was fully responsible and kind of alone in that responsibility. That wasn’t the case. I believe that God was nowhere to be found in that moment. When he was right there in the midst of it. And as God began, speaking truth, revealing the lies, speaking truth, all of a sudden that numbness, the emotional pain, the heaviness, the almost the disconnect, between my head and my heart. Those things started coming back together again. And I left that prayer session thinking and feeling totally differently specifically. The most painful memory of the last two years. And at that point of my entire life, I could remember it. I can see it, but I had clarity about it and I didn’t have pain in that memory. So I walked out of that room transformed and I said, oh my goodness, what, what is this?
[00:15:41] Yeah. And so what was that? So what did you do with that then after you, after you started asking that question? And you saw those hurting around you that you’re ministering to, or trying to minister to out of your brokenness. What do you do from that then?
[00:15:55] Yeah, the scripture that comes to mind is “taste and see that the Lord is good.” And I think, , I’ve experienced him before in that right at salvation at baptism at all of these critical moments in our life. We know God is good. Yeah. Sometimes that’s a little bit in our head, but we know it. In this moment, it became very, very personal and intimate because His concern for me was very real, His concern for my daughter and my wife was very real and it was obvious that he had me there, not because of the amazing man and gifts and whatever I had. He had me there to be a part of what he was doing in these kids and these families lives. And he was going to empower me and guide me to do His work – His way. So I came out of that room saying, oh my goodness, I understood prayer. I understood that the Lord can speak even more so he loves to speak. If we give him time, if we give him space. And he really does want to be our comforter and our guide, , and I think of how like every day. We need comfort and guide, as we, as we work with our kids. So here I am going back to the ministry saying, okay, this is a missing piece. Not to make it too mechanical, but it was almost like we can use prayer as a tool for people to encounter the goodness of God to hear His heart. Not just, black ink on white paper. But like personally experiencing him in a way that will transform them. Yeah. And so at the ministry, we just began giving space and opportunity for however he wanted to minister and to speak to people.
[00:17:44] Don Love: And so how did that change the ministry then?
[00:17:47] Jay Breish: It Radically changed the ministry. When you live 24 7 with a bunch of broken kids. For, not that long of a time, you realize that you and all your staff are a bunch of broken adults. And so even though we had great teaching, we had great structure. We had great scripture all throughout everything we did, we really were Christ centered and we had this message of identity, which is so relational and beautiful. My staff were just deeply hurting and broken because some of them have never seen some of the horrific things that had happened to these kids and in these kids’ lives. So it was like second hand trauma. Some of these people had experienced the exact same thing, but never walked through healing with it. It just had been buried. So now all of a sudden you walk into the room as the minister, as the adult and you realize, oh my goodness, they’ve got the same stuff that I have that I’ve never dealt with. So we began praying a lot with the staff praying and asking the Lord for His insight, asking, am I believing a lie here? Asking father what’s your perspective? Because my perspective is pretty grim. It’s kind of game over, but what’s your perspective, Lord? And time after time after time, it was hope it was love. It was joy. It was the fruit of the Holy Spirit, those nine fruits. Started showing up in my staff’s lives. And when we made space for God, we didn’t even really have to teach any kind of methodology or system for the kids. The kids started saying, oh yeah, now that you mention it, God’s been speaking to me this way too. And by the way, it’s not always just a still small voice sometimes. It’s I feel like the Lord said something to me in a dream and I’m thinking, can God do that? Is that okay? And I’m like, okay, well, let’s look at the fruit and compare it to scripture. Sure enough, it’s leading them out of sin and it’s leading him into dependence on him. It’s bearing good fruit. God is doing this mighty work. We had a girls home and a boys home, couple miles apart, intentionally. And we had a school and counseling offices and things like that. But I remember one time just before dinner at the girls home. I was standing at the kitchen counter and we had 10 girls around the room. And five staff and myself, and one of these girls came and said, Hey Jay, can I share with you something from my journal? And I’ve said, yeah, sure go grab it and then we’ll, we’ll take a look at it. Assuming it was going to be, this is my favorite Bible verse, or I’m looking forward to, talking with my parents again or something like that. So she comes up, she opens up her journal and she said, I was having this conversation with the Lord, which was totally unprompted by any of us. And I feel like the Lord told me that I’m not actually a lesbian and he didn’t actually make me to be homosexual. And the first thing that goes through my mind is, okay, well, we don’t talk about each other’s stuff here with all these other kids. And the second thing is like, some of the kids struggle with sexual identity or just identity things in general and is this even appropriate conversation? So my mind started going to all those, like, you have to be the adult and the leader and what’s appropriate, but very quickly that was changed when I looked into her eyes and I could see freedom. Hm. Like God, the loving father. Had done a work in her, apart from any of us, as ministers, as staff, as leaders, he had reached out to her in a way that she could understand it and brought transformation on a deep level that honestly, I don’t know, outside teaching and training and counseling can even do. He said to her, something into her heart about who she really was, that just by His voice, it brought transformation. And she was free. And Don that’s, one of the things I’ve seen is when we begin to listen and God begins to speak and heal our hearts, the stuff that we were ashamed of, the stuff that we did in secret and tried to hide the stuff that brought fear no longer does, because God separates out the behaviors from the core of who we are.
[00:22:13] Don Love: So, if you look across the ministry, as it developed during the whole time that you were there, what would you say to other folks who were trying to get into praying through things with people, any bits of advice that you would have getting started, anything you would do differently?
[00:22:31] Jay Breish: Oh yeah. Great. Great question. Loaded question. I would say , people are going to be listening to your podcast and coming to the pray through at website for probably different reasons from different backgrounds. But I would say, start with relationship with the Lord, start with identity. scripture says eagerly desire the gifts, and I definitely think there’s some Holy Spirit gifts involved here, but we can, we can get focused on stuff on the to-dos on power, on that kind of external thing, and miss the internal stuff.
[00:23:06] If we focus on identity, if we focus on knowing God for who he really is, what’s His agenda. If you will, what does it mean to be about the kingdom of God and who am I? What’s my part in it? I think that for most of your listeners, they’re going to have that aha moment and say, oh, it’s only natural that a good dad knows how to communicate and when to communicate and will communicate with their kids. And it’s not going to look the same for every kid, which is a little tricky for us because we’d like to put things in, you know, a box sometimes, but he knows how to speak my natural language. Based on my age, on my maturity. He knows how to reach me. Am I willing to give him space? From there. We can talk about advice and stuff, and you mentioned a bunch at the beginning of the season, there’s lots of methodologies to prayer and in one way you can see it as a tool. But I hope that only comes if you already are grounded in relationship in intimacy.
