What Do You Do Before Creating Content?
Imagine you’re getting ready to start a big creator project – new video, art portfolio, new podcast concept, stream-a-thon. You’ve got your equipment set up, software open, references lined up, and a carefully curated playlist in the background to keep your energy up. You even posted on social media to let your followers know something amazing is coming.
It’s fun, exciting, and you feel the juices flowing. It’s really easy to jump right into creating, isn’t it?
But then, halfway through the project, something goes wrong—your software crashes, and you lose hours of progress. You feel ill and have to close the stream. Someone comes and interrupts you. Frustration kicks in, and now you’re scrambling to handle the situation, trying to recover your work and your attitude, and all that fun and excitement is out the window.
Or let’s say you’re streaming along, or doing an interview for your podcast, having an amazing discussion about a meaningful topic, and out of nowhere, someone in chat or the person you’re recording with throws out something that catches you off guard. It’s serious, difficult, emotional, argumentative, and you’re not prepared.
What do you do?
More often than not, we try to handle it on the fly, relying on our own ability to steer the conversation, come up with answers, give advice – but after it’s all done, we often feel like the answer fell flat, the discussion wasn’t as good as it could have been, and you end up feeling like you missed an opportunity.
Again, we’ve all faced these pivotal moments, and felt these feelings, but what can we do about them to try to either prepare ourselves better beforehand or face them as they happen?
The answer is something you’ve heard a million times: Prayer. The whole point today is to remove the idea from our mind that prayer is just for starting a project or for emergencies; that it’s essential for every moment.
The Parable of the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:1-8)
Before we jump into this section, which is only one of a bunch of points we’ll cover about prayer over the next weeks, let’s talk about a scripture that has come up a few times recently:
“Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: ‘In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
‘For some time he refused. But finally, he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’’
And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?’” (Luke 18:1-8)
The Parable of the Persistent Creator
Let’s put ourselves in her shoes.
As Christians, we often start and end our day with prayer—it’s part of our routine. We ask for God’s guidance in the morning and thank Him when the day is done. But when we get caught up in work, school, life, and the flow of creativity or the excitement of engaging with our audience, it’s easy to forget that the driving force behind it all is our desire to spread God’s love and impact the world through our content. We think it, and say it, but consider whether our prayer lives actually reflect it.
In Jesus’ parable of the persistent widow, she didn’t just ask for justice once or twice; she kept returning with fervency and determination. This wasn’t just about routine—it was about passion. In the same way, if we’re serious about seeing God use our content change lives, then our prayers need to match that seriousness. Our passion should drive us to pray, not just at set times, but often, as an outflow of our hearts desire.
How Do Christian Content Creators Seize Pivotal Moments in Prayer?
And it’s not just about the consistency of that passion outflowing in prayer, but about developing the habit of stopping and talking to God during pivotal moments.
Let’s take a lesson from George Müller, the man known for running orphanages in England with no steady income. One day, there was no food left to feed the children. Anyone else might have panicked. But Müller? He simply prayed and then waited. He didn’t stress or scramble or tell people he needed help—he prayed and waited to see how God would provide. Moments later, there was a knock at the door. It was the local baker, who said he had felt led to bake bread the night before and wanted to donate it. Shortly after, a milkman whose cart had broken down outside the orphanage offered the milk he couldn’t deliver, ensuring that the children had both bread and milk for breakfast.
As Christian content creators, we face our own pivotal moments—not just in emergencies, but throughout the entire creative process. Whether it’s before a stream, during an emotionally charged interaction, when we get writers block, are invited to a conference or collaboration, or hitting burnout, prayer is what centers us and brings us in line with God’s will and strength.
Final Thought:
Let’s pause there.
Over the next few weeks we’re going to cover some observations about how mature, godly, useful people pray – how they think about and how they practice it.
I’ll close with this:
At the heart of everything we do as Christian content creators is a burning desire to see God move through our work. That passion should fuel our prayers. I know prayer can be a struggle for many – and I face that too – but we can’t let prayer become merely a habit, an afterthought, or something we turn to only when things go wrong. We want it to be the heartbeat of our creative process, the constant connection to the One who called us into this amazing ministry – and that has the power to use our content to change lives.