April 29, 2024 • 36 mins
In this episode, Tudor interviews Alex Jones, the CEO and co-founder of Hallow, a Christian prayer and meditation app. They discuss Alex's journey from falling away from his faith to rediscovering it through meditation and prayer. They also talk about the power of prayer and the impact it can have on people's lives. Alex shares stories of how Hallow has helped individuals find hope, peace, and healing. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. I am excited about
today because you all know that I talk about my
faith quite a bit. In my faith, I've actually shared
my faith journey on the podcast and how my faith
has grown over time. And so I'm excited today because
we get to talk to Alex Jones, who is the
CEO and co founder of Hallo. You may have heard
(00:22):
of it. It is a Christian prayer and meditation app.
I've seen a bunch of ads for it. I've seen
all kinds of different people talking about it, and I
am really excited to talk about this app. But in
the midst of this time where we are talking about
prayer and meditation, we are also still recovering from these
horrible attacks over in Israel and obviously consistently seeing more
(00:46):
attacks over in Israel. It's been six months since the
brutal attack by Hamas on our brothers and sisters in Israel,
and since then the attacks have increased, with Iran and
its proxies launching an attack of hundreds of drones and miss.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is on the
ground now and addressing all of the urgent needs, and
(01:07):
that's why I'm actually partnering with IFCJ today. You guys
can help because your life saving donation can help provide
security needs like placing bomb shelters and communities in Israel
that need it the most. And when that siren goes off,
you guys can't even understand this. People have fifteen seconds
or less to get to safety. IFCJ has helped renovate
(01:29):
and insallt nearly three thousand bomb shelters to date. This
is so important as Israel and her people live with
the harsh reality of terror every day. Your support will
help address emergency security needs such as food and utility,
equipment for bomb shelters, flack jackets, and other essentials for
the people of Israel. We're asking our listeners to give
(01:51):
fifty dollars or any amount to help provide life saving aid.
You guys, really, if you can do this, think about
how much you're helping one of these families desperately needs it.
All you have to do is visit support IFCJ dot org.
That's one word. Go to support IFCJ dot org and
give whatever you can to make sure you help our
(02:12):
brothers and sisters over in Israel. And now I want
to talk about prayer because I think that's the perfect
transition from what we're seeing in the world and all
this chaos to bring in Alex, Alex, thank you so
much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Thanks so much for having me absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I was reading your story and I sort of love
your story because I think it's the story of so
many people right now, especially where you grew up Catholic
and kind of fell away from faith and then got
really into meditation, and we're like, hmmm, something's missing here.
So to walk us through.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
That a little bit, yeah, I meant you gave a
pretty good recap there, But yeah, so I grew up religious.
My saint of a mother dragged me to church every
Sunday so against my will, but fell away from my faith.
Would have considered myself agnostic or atheist for most of
high school and college. And when I started working, I
(03:05):
got really into meditation, and my mind first went to
kind of secular meditation in Eastern meditation. I was about
to go to India for a couple weeks, but the
apps Headspace and Calm, which are kind of secular meditation apps,
had just launched, and they were quite a bit cheaper
than the flight to India. So I gave them a try,
and I thought they were great. I thought there were
ways to learn this technique of meditation within the comfort
(03:26):
of your own home. You felt like you had a
personal guide. It was almost technology without technology, like you'd
press play and get your headphones in, but then you'd
close your eyes and kind of be led through this meditation.
But yeah, like you said, every time I would meditate,
my mind kept feeling pulled towards something spiritual, praise God,
something like an image of the cross, or the name
Jesus or something. And I thought that was very strange
because I would have considered myself agnostic. So I started
(03:47):
talking to priests, pastors, people I knew who took their
faith more seriously, and I thought I had a really
interesting question, which was, hey, is there any way there's
some sort of intersection here between this meditation thing and
this faith thing. And they all laughed at me and said, yeah,
we've been doing it for two thousand years. Is called prayer.
Probably should have heard about it. And I was like, no, no, no,
I know prayer, prayers, this stuff like you know that
(04:07):
that I memorized as a kid, or asking God for stuff,
and you know, I tried those before, but they'd always
just felt like I was talking to myself for just
like journaling in my own head. And I started learning
about this whole world of like what it means to
listen to God, not just talk at God. And so
this whole tradition of contemplative and meditative prayer and things
(04:27):
that I'd never heard of before. Dozens of like these
really beautiful, really powerful techniques. One of them's called lexia divino,
which is a way of meditating on Scripture. And I
randomly opened up a Bible, googled how to do it,
and opened to Matthew six, which is where the disciples
asked Jesus to teach him how to pray, and he
gives them the Our Father. And in lexiudivina, you pick
a word that sticks out to you and you kind
of try to meditate on it. And the word that
(04:49):
stuck out to me was hallow in halleba name in
the Our Father, and it just it was just ten minutes,
just in my living room, and it just changed my life.
It because it is just beautiful encounter with God. But
it was it's tough to explain, but it was this
deep sense of peace. Now you kind of feel that,
like your stress goes down when you go for a
run or you take some deep breath, so you can
(05:10):
kind of feel that. I would argue much deeper than
anything in the secular world. But this deep sense of
peace combined though with this like depth of meaning and purpose.
So Hallo means to make holy. So I was like, well,
a's God, try to make me holy? Am I letting
him make me holy? Am I supposed to be helping
other people grow closer to God? Am I supposed to
be serving other people? And really I was just doing
my own career for my own career sake. So it
was big strength. You know. I ended up quitting my
(05:31):
job and joining my four and one k to do
some crazy startup thing and all this crazy stuff. So
it was big stressful questions, but I was wrestling with
them in this place of real peace. And so I
knew how to code a little bit. I really loved
the structure of these apps, and so it was obvious
for me that I wanted to do this for the
rest of my life. And so we built the first
version of it, and that was about five years ago,
and we've just been just blown away by what God
(05:53):
has done with it. He's just reached so many folks
through it. I think we're almost a twenty million downloads
or so, five hundred million prayers have been prayed through. Wow,
Glory to God is just a it's been a but
really for us, the really cool part is we just
get to hear these stories of what God is doing
in people's lives. I mean, We've had people who have
been addicted to alcohol for decades who haven't been able
to be sober for more than a week, who are
(06:14):
able to be sober for the first time for months.
We have people who haven't been to church in thirty
years who come back to church. We have young people
who have body image issues who have never been able
to see themselves as beautiful, who are able to see
themselves as beautiful for the first time. We have people
who are deeply depressed who are able to find some
sense of hope and peace again in their life. I mean,
it's just this incredible privilege for us to get to
see what God is doing in people's lives. So it's
(06:36):
a blessing to get to be a part of.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I think just your story, though, in general, is also
such a blessing to parents out there, because I hear
so often and even when I was campaigning, I heard
people say, my kids have gotten away from God, have
stepped away like they were in the wilderness. They're lost,
and I don't know how to ever get them back.
And I think that's the beauty of the Bible always
telling us stories of the return. And I've always heard
(07:00):
stories of that child who had a foundation built and
then suddenly that foundation, they lean on that foundation later
in life without knowing it's going to come back. In
those scripture versus, they just come back to them. And
that sounds like your story. How many people have said
to you, man, my kids are really lost, give me
some hope.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, I get it all the time from you know,
parents who are praying together on the app or for me.
The funny thing is, and if you ask my mom,
like of her kids, I have three sisters of her
kids who would go on to do some sort of
faith based things, who would go on to do some
sort of Christian thing, I would be the last on
that list. By far. I probably would have been the
(07:41):
last on that list. You know of anybody in our hometown,
of anybody in our state. I mean in her mind,
and you know, I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Her uses people that you don't expect.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, certainly, but I mean it just speaks to the fact. Yeah,
I mean, and and both my mom and dad, which
is incredible, incredible parents. So I was, I was very blessed.
But it speaks to the fact of what what God
can do, what prayer can do for kids. And also
you know, for me, it's just you know, and I
have two little kids now and one on the way,
(08:11):
and I struggle with this a lot because I love
my kids so much as and it's a crazy it's
a crazy experience to love something that much. But God
loves it more and God loves my kids more than
I do. And so whenever I get stressed, I'm like, yeah,
I can hand everything over to you God, Like that's easy,
Like my job, my work, all this stuff I can
hand over to you. But my kids, like, man, I
really really care about my kids, Like I hold on
(08:32):
to those kids tighter than anything. And yet at the
same time, I know you care about them more and
you have your own plan, your own relationship with them,
and you are pursuing them more than I ever could,
and you're doing more in their life. You're trying to
do more in their life than I ever could. And
so just that trust of God's got us and pursuing
us all relentlessly is something that you know, just surrendering
(08:54):
to God as parents is really really hard, but especially
when it comes to faith, because you feel like, oh,
it's my job to like raise Christian kids and it's not.
It's God. It's like your job is to pray for
your kids and try to set a great example. But
God's the one who's got it. And so the trust
and the surrender of that is is really hard to do.
But it's something that you know, I think we can all,
especially myself, can work on.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's such a strong statement because
you know, you as a parent feel like I have
to guide you, I have to get you there. I
have to and sometimes I mean, no matter what we're doing,
there are times when we're like I've got this, I've
got to do this, but you we're not doing it.
We need to make sure that we're giving it over
to God. So let me ask you. You talked about
parents having those conversations on hollow How does that work?
(09:36):
Is it like kind of like a social media how
do people connect?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, for us, it's really about praying together. So prayer,
you know, it's you can download the app and pray
through content on your own, meditate through different pieces of content,
through Bible studies and scripture studies and meditations and all
these things on your own. We have music and courses,
a ton, tons of different types of content on the
app for whatever you're interested in. But the really cool
part about prayer is getting to pray together. And we're
(10:03):
supposed to. We're called to. Jesus is very clear that
you're supposed to pray together. And you know the church
on Sundays that is supposed to be a prayer. We
get together on Sundays to pray together. That's the point
of it. It's the summit of it. Really, our week
should be that that prayer and prayer has real power.
So like if you pray for something, it's it's it's real.
(10:24):
It's really powerful. And so you're supposed to pray for
other people and with other people, and it's one of
the really cool parts about prayer. So we're just getting
started on it. But a lot of the stuff that
we do that's a bit unique. I certainly wouldn't call
it a social media any social media functionality. The point
is just you know, an example is, you know, for Easter,
we're praying through kind of the early Church, the Church
(10:44):
Fathers and together, and there's content that comes out together.
You can invite other people to it, you go through
it together with people, you can reflect on it together
with people. But a lot of that conversation happens offline
and in person, which is what we love. It's you know,
if you're going through a content, my mom will call
me and say, oh my gosh, this this sermon today
was just incredible. It just changed my life, and we
get to go through it together, which is which is
(11:05):
really cool. So there's pieces of it that I do
think are really important and more that we're trying to
build where you can journey through content together. But the
point is, you know, you build a personal relationship with
God and then you pray together and journey with other
people through that. But certainly, you know, I think one
of the big benefits of the app is to try
to create a place of peace, and in many ways
(11:25):
social media is the opposite of that. He's a place
of stress and anxiety, and so we certainly don't want
you know, how many likes is my prayer getting or
any of that stuff to be the focus. What we
want to be the focus is the piece that Christ
offers and you know, doing that together as a community,
but focusing on that piece.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next. On
the Tutor Dixon podcast, you talked about young people with
issues with their body and all of these things that
I mean, people go through things at all ages, but
what is there an age group? Is there an age
that you say, okay, this is the recommended age or
(12:01):
are all ages welcome?
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, an the age that Jesus is trying to reach
out to you, so that that would hopefully be all ages.
You know, when we started, you know, we built it.
We built it just for me personally, and so we
saw most of the folks who downloaded were kind of
in the young professional rage, the millennial age range. But
and that was kind of maybe for the first couple
(12:24):
of months, but then very quickly after that we started
seeing people from all over, from all sorts of different
demographics downloaded. We had people who were retirees who kind
of had a little bit more time on their hand.
We're going to a little bit more retreats, We're growing
a little bit deeper in their faith life. We had
people nearing the end of their own life, or friends
who were nearing the end of their own life who
were wrestling with that. We had parents who you know,
(12:46):
had just were new parents who were trying to figure
out how do I raise these kids? And then you
got parents with teenagers who all end up being atheist,
and so you're worried about, you know, what did I
do are my kids? You know, did I screw something up?
How can I be an example to my family of
the faith and the spiritual life that I'm supposed to live.
And then we have a bunch of you know, we
partner with schools so that we can help to pray
together with kids as kids are growing up. I pray
(13:08):
together with my daughter every night. And you know, so
we have people all over all over the spectrum, and
really it's especially over the last couple of years, become
pretty international. So we have folks in Brazil, we have
a Spanish version, we have a Portuguese version, folks in
the Philippines, folks in Europe, French, Italian, German. So it's
been really, really pretty all over. So I would encourage anybody,
(13:28):
you know, even if you're not super familiar with an app.
We have a lot of folks who have never downloaded
an app before, never really used an app before, and
we try to make it as simple as possible and
also to design it in a way where you know,
a twenty two year old will download it and say, yeah,
this seems like it's at the quality of a Spotify
or a Netflix or whatever. It is from a design
and technology perspective, which I think is important because.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
God design, Yeah, well, and you people expect to be
able to go there and be drawn in, and so
what could draw you in more than faith in God?
And so I think that's incredibly cool. But you talked
about you spend you spent ten minutes in your family room,
and that was kind of like this revelation, like, oh gosh,
(14:08):
other people should be doing this. How long do people
spend on the app? I mean, I think that's kind
of one of the deterrens for moms. My age is like, oh,
how can I spend time on one more thing? But
this is I think if you are taking time out
of your day to spend with God, you're going to
be incredibly rewarded, but sometimes it can be overwhelming the
thought of doing that. So how much time do people
(14:30):
on average spend?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, I mean it can really be anything. So we
have sessions on there that are literally a minute, so
thirty sixty seconds. We have sessions on there that are
ten minutes, twenty minutes. I mean, you can spend an
hour on there. You can spend hours and hours on
there where you have people who do you know, holy
hours every day who are praying with the app through it.
But I would say usually it's somewhere between ten and
twenty minutes. And you know, it's an interesting thing, and
(14:55):
certainly you can start with five work your way up
to ten, or you can start with one and work
your way up to five. Takes a couple of minutes
to really be able to enter into silence, which is
really the core of what we're trying to do is
is to enter into silence, which is where I think,
you know, the core is where we find God. But
the and so it takes it. It can take a
couple of minutes, especially if you're new to it, but
ten minutes can be too much for folks who haven't
(15:16):
you know, sat in silence for a while, or haven't
been guided through a scripture, meditation or something for a while,
So starting with whatever makes the most sense. But I
think there was a I think it was a saying
to said it, which is, you know, whenever you're too
busy to pray, you have to pray twice, you have
to spend twice as much time praying, which is I mean,
it's funny because you know, as Christians, we like to
(15:37):
think that this whole comes back to what we're talking
about with with kids. But we like to think that
everything's kind of like ours to do, Like we have
to figure out how to get all the work done.
And the funny thing is, even when you reflect on
like your secular job that at least for me, like
the biggest impacts certainly you have to work hard and
you can't be lazy, and working hard is very important,
very good virtue. But like the biggest things just seem
(16:00):
to come, you know, and it's from God. God is
the one doing the work when we're working for him
and with him for something that's good, He's the one
really doing the work. He wants us to be a
part of it, but he's the one doing the work
and for us to approach things with the peace and
the love and the joy. That's the job of a Christian.
It's not to you know, really crush. Your job is
to let God take over your heart and to surrender
(16:21):
your whole life to Him. And so prayer is the
foundation of everything. Everything should be scheduled around prayer in
your life, and ideally you should make your whole day
of prayer and pause for times of silence, but then
also turn your work into prayer. And so there's a
bunch of, you know, I think reasons why you should
try to prioritize prayer, but for me, it's just been
you know, days just seem to go a lot better.
You just have a lot more peace, you have a
(16:41):
lot more love when you start your day off with God,
with gratitude, with humility, and can approach the day from
you know, what God, do you want me to do today?
And there's just something freeing and joyful about it.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
You know. We've had a lot of doctors on this
podcast talking about various different things. In one of them,
the overwhelming themes that we even hear from the medical
community is that they see patients who handle trauma better
who handle depression, who get out of depression if they're
able to focus on faith. And even we've had some
(17:15):
pastors on here as well who have said, you know,
it is hard for us when we have a couple
come to us and say we're struggling in our marriage,
we have these problems at home, you know, we have
a depressed child something like that. They are like, if
you focus on faith, those things will be reduced, or
get better or disappear. And oftentimes I think we do
(17:39):
think I got to do this. That's why I think
Hallo is so interesting. It kind of forces you to
have that different perspective, and then once you have that
different perspective, that can become a way of life. And
having prayer as a way of life. As you just said,
this is a very you're very calm and able to
move forward with your day. I mean, it's funny that
you started out with an app called Calm looking for
(18:02):
that and you've been able to create that as a
way of life.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, and I think it. I mean, faith is such
a unique thing because it's it's it's so deep, and
I mean it's by definition as deep as you can get.
Because what we're meditating and praying with is the source
of source of everything. So you know, the fascinating thing
is even you know, it's not like your life becomes
stress free if you become a peryerful person. It's not
(18:27):
like your life becomes stress free if you're It's not
like Jesus's life wasn't without suffering. It was very full
of suffering and difficulty. And you know, but what it
does is it transforms everything. So instead of you worrying about,
you know, your plans for your own life, all you
focus on is God, just help me to do what
(18:47):
you want me to do. And when they're suffering, which
there certainly will be, Christ Like very explicitly promises in
this world we will have trouble. But it transforms the
suffering into like an opportunity to say, Okay, God, I
trust you You're going to bring something good out of this,
and even in the midst of this, I'm going to
use this to give you glory somehow. And you know
that can be really, really hard. I mean, we've gotten
(19:09):
stories from people to your point that we had a
woman right to us who said I was in such
a deep and dark place. I am confident that over
the next week, I would have committed suicide. I would
have killed myself had it not been for the grace
that God gave me through this app I was broken
into a million pieces, and I felt like everything everyone
I loved had left me, everything I cared about was gone.
(19:31):
But I realized that Christ was still there with me,
and he scooped me up and put me back together again.
And my life is my life, is my family's back together.
All this stuff, I mean, all this joy and glory
came of this suffering. Through this suffering, she was able
to find Christ. And there's just such a you know,
it's certainly not a solve for everything. You'd certainly exercise
is still super important, and mental health is still you know,
(19:54):
a many multifaceted problem that many folks need professional help with.
But there's just something about living a life of prayer
that's just the foundation of everything that makes life a lot.
You know, it's like real peace, it's real rest. Christ
tells you it's you're going to have a cross, you're
going to let down your worries and you're going to
take up mind. But it's going to be easy, it's
going to be light, and you're going to find real rest,
(20:16):
like real peace, not like hey, I'm going to go
watch a Netflix thing at the end of the day
to de stress. It's like, no, I'm going to give
you real lasting peace that calms your mind and that
gives you. In this world that we live in, which
is just so crazy and so stressful and so angering
and so frustrating and so anxious, it's like, I think
this hung I think we all hunger for this real
sense of peace.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Well, I think it's interesting because we're in a world
where people are saying, you know, everybody's getting away from faith,
and young people are not focused on faith, and yet
here's an app that reaches number one in the App Store,
first religious app to reach number one in the App Store.
What is that like?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, I mean for us, it's I mean if I
looked outside right now and I saw a thousand people
praying with this app all together, I'd be like, Wow,
that's an incredible number of people praying like that. That's
way more than I ever could have imagined. We built it.
I built it just for me. So this is fun.
I mean, it just it's all just a blast. And
to get to pray with a thousand people, that's incredible.
That's a huge church. That's awesome. Ten thousand people is wow,
(21:19):
that's a massive crowd of people. Fifty thousand people, one
hundred thousand people. I have no I couldn't possibly I've
I couldn't even see that far. And so a million people,
ten million people, twenty million people. It's just God is
just God changing people's lives in a way way beyond
what we could ever have imagined. And it was fun
that the number one thing was a blast because Temu,
(21:41):
one of the Chinese social media apps or whatever, was
number one for a while and they ran like six
Super Bowl commercials. I think they ran exactly six Super
Super Bowl commercials and spend a billion and a half
dollars a year on Facebook advertising, and so for us
to be able to like jump up to the number
one spot was just awesome. I mean, it just speaks
to the glory of I think every app in the
(22:02):
top ten had ten thousand plus employees, and we have,
you know, eighty or so folks working on this thing,
and so it was just this sound it was just
this awesome. But for us still it's you know, I
keep coming back to these But funnily, the you know,
in the earliest so we just started hallowing like twenty eighteen,
and at the end of twenty eighteen we launched it,
and we weren't sure if we were going to do
(22:24):
this for real, but we wanted it for ourselves and
we thought it was helpful and so we might as
well try to help ourselves get into heaven a little
bit better. And we had some friends and family download
it and try it, and we had you know, there
was this the story that still sticks in my mind
to this day. My aunt had just lost her son,
who my cousin, who was forty five years old or
(22:45):
so forty two I think, and he his heartbreaking, went
to the hospital, said he had chest pains. They said,
you're fine, checked him out. He went home and died
that night in a sleep. He had just gotten married
and his wife had just gotten pregnant. And so like
my aunt, my godmother was heartbroken, just like absolutely devastated obviously,
and I couldn't get out of bed, couldn't eat, and
(23:07):
our hope. We have this big family, a bunch of cousins,
bunch of uncles, we were all just really worried about her,
and we're really focused on like, okay, well, what can
we do to try to get her to eat or
try to help her in some way. And we launched
this app. I had no idea she downloaded it, but
she did, and you know, of like a couple dozen people,
and she started praying with it, and it just had
(23:29):
a few sessions on it just about it was the
season leading up to Christmas, and so it was just
about hope and peace and love and just written generically.
And she sent us this email two weeks after we launched,
and she just said, Hey, I just wanted to let
you know I didn't think I'd be able to make
it through my first Christmas without my son. It's always
a time of stress and anxiety trying to figure out
(23:50):
gifts and visiting people and all that stuff, but like
to do it without my son for the first for
the first year, I didn't think I'd be able to
make it through it. And I just wanted to let
you know that this app has reminded me that the
little meditations on this app have reminded me that I'm
able to have hope still even in this time of
even in the worst time in my life, I'm able
to have hope still. And I just like I just
(24:10):
like broke down on the floor bawling tears, and I
remember I looked at my co founder and I was
just like, if we do nothing else, if in our
whole life, if we've worked for the next fifty years,
if we spend everything anybody, if we spend everybody at
everything we have, we ruin our reputations, everybody hates us.
But we got this one note from it like that, Yeah,
(24:33):
I would do that again a hundred times over. I
do that again. And we get those notes all the
time now of people who have lost kids, of people
who are dealing with like really dark, really tough stuff,
and who are really lost, and to be able to
see what God can do in their lives, how He
can reach out to us, especially the most those of
us who are most lost, and we're all a little
(24:53):
bit lost. We can all grow closer to God, but
especially the folks who are in the toughest places and
give them His peace. I mean it's like, yeah, so
in terms of like whether it's ten million or twenty million,
if we can get one more of those notes in
the next you know, we just got one today about
some incredible miracle that God worked in people's lives. But
if we can just keep helping God reach out to
the folks who are lost, it's it's that's really what
(25:15):
we're focused on.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
That is so amazing. Boy, God is faithful, isn't he?
When you serve him? He is faithful to his servants.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
He is good. He is good all the time.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For folks that want to check
this out, is it something you have to pay for?
How does it work?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
So it's an app if you have a smartphone or
an iPad or a computer, but the easiest is on
your phone. You go to the app store, you type
in hallow h llow like hello would be that name,
and then just downloaded it's the Purple one and you
can download it for free. We have a ton of
thousands of free sessions that you can try for free forever.
No credit card acquired, don't trial anything. The way that
we support ourselves is through a subscription. If you like
(26:01):
it and want to give it a try, it unlocks
additional content and it comes with a free trial so
you can see if it's worth it for a bit
and cancel if it's not and don't get charged anything.
And yeah, you just choose a session, choose a length,
close your eyes, and press play. But yeah, that's how
jllow on any app store.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
I love that so much. I have a daughter who
is very driven by faith, and it's funny to me
because I believe that this is all linked back to
prayer early in her life, because like you said, I
know it's not me, and I know it's something greater
than me, but and I don't know what her future is.
You know, it's like one of those things whereas they're
(26:41):
growing and you see them changing and growing, You're like,
I don't know how this is happening, and I don't
know where this is going, but I know when. And
I think I've shared this story before. When she was
five years old, she was a thumbsucker and it was
very hard for her to stop, and she wanted to stop,
and we had had all kinds of conversations about it,
and I was like, or can you just have to
give this up? And she I will never forget, she said.
(27:04):
I said to her, why don't we pray about it?
And she said, okay, let's do that. And this had
been months of trying to get her to stop, maybe
even a year. And so we sat down, we prayed together,
and she said she felt that the need to put
her blanket away that night because it was kind of
like a thing she did. She held the blanket, she
sucked her thumb. She put the blanket away that night.
(27:27):
The next night brought the blanket back out, never sucked
her thumb again. And I feel like that knowledge of
like you ask and he is faithful and he gives
to you, and she is just such a faithful kid.
The other day, she said they were going over to
a friend's house and then girls were all like, what
do you want to do? We have the day off school,
what do you want to do? And she said, why
(27:48):
don't we have a Bible study together? And of course
all of the other freshman girls were like no, because
they got to Christian school. But I'm like, there's something
about this little girl that I look at her. I'm like,
you are so much more impressive than anyone I know.
But it's just so fun to see her. And that's
why I when I talk about when I think about
(28:09):
your app and hear you talking, I'm like that security
and foundation that she has, I and that you found again.
I just I understand you're wanting to share this because
it's amazing, So thank you for what you do.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, kids are such a I mean, kids just have
a special I mean a lot of people said, a
lot of theologians or pastors or saints or whatever said,
I mean, kids are just so much closer to the
spiritual life than I think we are. I mean, I have,
like a I have a three year old and a
two year old and so and they're just you know,
they just like hear the voice of Jesus regularly. They're
just like, oh, I just heard Jesus, and it's just
(28:44):
it's just so cool. But I think what it speaks
to is, you know a lot of people fall away
from their faith, and especially people who like go to
church as part of you know, it's because it's what
people do. We go to church. That's the that's the routine,
you go to church. But so the question is like, well,
(29:04):
what what what's the strongest way to keep people in
a life long in a lifelong relationship with the church,
And it's a personal relationship with God. I mean, there's
just nothing through spirituality, through prayer, that's how we have
a relationship with God. But if you have a relationship
with God, then there's just nothing. I mean, the chances
(29:26):
of you sticking with that are just so much higher then, like, oh,
I was convinced by some argument or I agreed with
some political thing or whatever it is. It's no, this
is you know, for me, this is as real as
my relationship with my wife. It's as real with as
my relationship with my mom and my dad. It's the
person I talk to every day who I love deeply
with my whole heart. And it's like that's never gonna
that's never going to change. I'm going to love this
(29:46):
guy forever, and I'm never going to not think he's there.
He's of course he's there. It's as real to me
as as my wife is. But the kids thing for
us is a real blessing. We had some we had
somebody send us a note that they were praying with
the app there. I think it was a seven year
old or so, and she had seen something on the
news about the Chinese. This was like a year and
a half ago, maybe ad the Chinese by balloon or whatever.
(30:09):
I think that was a year ago, and she had
no idea what it was but she said she was
really stressed and so she couldn't fall asleep because she
was worried about the Chinese by balloon and this seven
year old, which just speaks to like the stress that
our life is, just our world is. But she's like,
I'm just so worried about this Chinese bi balloon. What
are we going to do? What are we going to do?
And the mom was like, it's okay, let's just do
(30:31):
a let's do a Halo session. And so they did
a Halo session and it happened to be a session
we wrote like five years ago, and it was a
meditation about let all of your worries and stresses imagine them,
and imagine them filling a balloon, filled the balloon all up,
and then let the balloon go and let it rise
up to God and let him, let him catch the
(30:53):
balloon in heaven and let it go and let it
float into God's hands. And their daughter was just so
just total random luck that that well it was God obviously,
but just totally yeah, coincidence that that was the session
that they picked. And she just looks at her mom
and she just goes, Jesus hurt me. He knew he
was he knew I was dressed about the balloon and
He's here and I let it go and it was
(31:14):
just such a beautiful But like, kids are just so yeah,
there's such a great example to us of what like
real spiritual life is supposed to be and what real
love is supposed to be. And especially when they have
the blessing of being able to have a personal relationship
with God, it's just an honor to get to journey
alongside him.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
It is true. Kids have this weird like there are.
You can't really have these discussions with them of like
what exactly is happening in your mind right now? But
you see things. I remember one night putting my daughter
to bed and she looked over and was clearly looking
at an empty spot in the room, and she said, oh,
Jesus is here, and then she fell asleep. I was
(31:53):
like what what. I like, wait a minute, let's go
back to that. You know, but what did she see?
I don't know. But their believers and they have a relationship.
I mean, like you said, this is a relationship for them.
And I didn't have that blessing growing up. That wasn't
exactly my upbringing. And it's obviously my faith journey has changed.
(32:13):
But I will never forget when I first started getting
into Bible study, a family saying they had a tragedy.
They were on the beach, one of the kids went under.
The coastguard found the baby's body, brought it up. They
started fell immediately to prayer, and the coast guard afterwards said,
(32:33):
people who drowned don't float, You don't just find them.
We don't know how this happened. Like the minute they
knew he was missing, they started immediately in prayer and
the baby was revived fine and still to this day
no issues from that. And I remember at the time thinking,
what is it like to have a tragedy and go
immediately to prayer. But once you have that relationship, it's
(32:55):
exactly like what you said, It's like going to your spouse.
It's so natural, like Jesus helped me. You've got this,
I don't. And so I think that's beautiful that you
are leading people into that. And I've grown in that
over my lifetime, and I just think that anybody who's listening,
if you are at that place where you're like, what
is missing in my life, it's probably this.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Yeah, God, God is pretty much the whole thing. So
the whole point of life is a relationship with God.
But yeah, I mean prayer is so cool because it's
and so beautiful because it can have such it's not
just you know, people often reduce it down to like
secular meditation or like going for a run? What does
this do for me? And it's like, well, does it
(33:35):
make me a little bit happier, does it make me
live longer, does it make me, you know, more resilient
to sickness or what scientific which it does a lot
of those things, which is really cool. And it's funny
because the secular world then keeps trying to pick away
pieces of prayer and make them their own trend. It's like, oh, gratitude,
you have to have a gratitude practice, and it's like, okay, yeah,
that's that's like a morning prayer. And it's like you
(33:56):
have to reflect on your day at the end of
the day, and it's like okay, yeah, that's a night prayer.
And it's like and you have to have something bigger
than yourself and it's like yeah, like God, but it's
not about and it can do really cool things. Is
the cool part. It's much bigger than just this like
mental health effect, which it is, but it's much bigger
than that. It's real, so it can change reality. So
(34:18):
you can pray. We have like dozens and dozens hundreds
of these miracle stories where doctors say this person is dead,
this person is dead, there is there's no way that
this person comes back, or this person has a disease
that is so far gone. There has not been a
person who has survived this and then through some miracle
of prayer, they survive and it's this miraculous thing. But
(34:40):
it's the really interesting part about prayer. And I get
this question a lot, is like, well, what does this
do for me? It's like, yeah, that's an interesting question.
But the more interesting question is the point of prayer
is not what does it do for you? The point
of the prayer is what can you do for God?
Like what are you supposed to be doing for God?
And sometimes that's really terrible sof and sometimes that God
(35:02):
that is God giving you incredible gifts, but it's how
can I let God take over my whole life? Like
how can I surrender my whole heart so that it's
no longer mine? And it's God's just like Saint Paul says,
and that, to me is the really cool part of prayer.
It comes without like seek first the Kingdom of God
and then yeah, you'll get all this joy and this
peace and this happiness and all this stuff. But the
point is how can I give my whole life to God?
(35:23):
And then the question of like, well can I fit
in a ten minute prayer is such a funny question
in the course of my day because it's like, well,
my whole day is supposed to be God's, so of
course I can give them ten minutes.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
I love it. I love it. It's been such a
joy talking to you and hearing about the app, and
I encourage anybody out there to go download that today
and get into those prayer sessions because it really is
so valuable because you will become the hands and feet
and that's what we're supposed to be. So Alex Jones,
thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Glory to God. It was an honor to be here.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Thanks for having me absolutely, and thank you all for
joining us on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode
and others, go to Tutor disonpodcast dot com. You can
subscribe right there, or head over to the iHeartRadio, app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and join
us next time. Have a blessed day,
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. I am excited about
today because you all know that I talk about my
faith quite a bit. In my faith, I've actually shared
my faith journey on the podcast and how my faith
has grown over time. And so I'm excited today because
we get to talk to Alex Jones, who is the
CEO and co founder of Hallo. You may have heard
(00:22):
of it. It is a Christian prayer and meditation app.
I've seen a bunch of ads for it. I've seen
all kinds of different people talking about it, and I
am really excited to talk about this app. But in
the midst of this time where we are talking about
prayer and meditation, we are also still recovering from these
horrible attacks over in Israel and obviously consistently seeing more
(00:46):
attacks over in Israel. It's been six months since the
brutal attack by Hamas on our brothers and sisters in Israel,
and since then the attacks have increased, with Iran and
its proxies launching an attack of hundreds of drones and miss.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is on the
ground now and addressing all of the urgent needs, and
(01:07):
that's why I'm actually partnering with IFCJ today. You guys
can help because your life saving donation can help provide
security needs like placing bomb shelters and communities in Israel
that need it the most. And when that siren goes off,
you guys can't even understand this. People have fifteen seconds
or less to get to safety. IFCJ has helped renovate
(01:29):
and insallt nearly three thousand bomb shelters to date. This
is so important as Israel and her people live with
the harsh reality of terror every day. Your support will
help address emergency security needs such as food and utility,
equipment for bomb shelters, flack jackets, and other essentials for
the people of Israel. We're asking our listeners to give
(01:51):
fifty dollars or any amount to help provide life saving aid.
You guys, really, if you can do this, think about
how much you're helping one of these families desperately needs it.
All you have to do is visit support IFCJ dot org.
That's one word. Go to support IFCJ dot org and
give whatever you can to make sure you help our
(02:12):
brothers and sisters over in Israel. And now I want
to talk about prayer because I think that's the perfect
transition from what we're seeing in the world and all
this chaos to bring in Alex, Alex, thank you so
much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Thanks so much for having me absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I was reading your story and I sort of love
your story because I think it's the story of so
many people right now, especially where you grew up Catholic
and kind of fell away from faith and then got
really into meditation, and we're like, hmmm, something's missing here.
So to walk us through.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
That a little bit, yeah, I meant you gave a
pretty good recap there, But yeah, so I grew up religious.
My saint of a mother dragged me to church every
Sunday so against my will, but fell away from my faith.
Would have considered myself agnostic or atheist for most of
high school and college. And when I started working, I
(03:05):
got really into meditation, and my mind first went to
kind of secular meditation in Eastern meditation. I was about
to go to India for a couple weeks, but the
apps Headspace and Calm, which are kind of secular meditation apps,
had just launched, and they were quite a bit cheaper
than the flight to India. So I gave them a try,
and I thought they were great. I thought there were
ways to learn this technique of meditation within the comfort
(03:26):
of your own home. You felt like you had a
personal guide. It was almost technology without technology, like you'd
press play and get your headphones in, but then you'd
close your eyes and kind of be led through this meditation.
But yeah, like you said, every time I would meditate,
my mind kept feeling pulled towards something spiritual, praise God,
something like an image of the cross, or the name
Jesus or something. And I thought that was very strange
because I would have considered myself agnostic. So I started
(03:47):
talking to priests, pastors, people I knew who took their
faith more seriously, and I thought I had a really
interesting question, which was, hey, is there any way there's
some sort of intersection here between this meditation thing and
this faith thing. And they all laughed at me and said, yeah,
we've been doing it for two thousand years. Is called prayer.
Probably should have heard about it. And I was like, no, no, no,
I know prayer, prayers, this stuff like you know that
(04:07):
that I memorized as a kid, or asking God for stuff,
and you know, I tried those before, but they'd always
just felt like I was talking to myself for just
like journaling in my own head. And I started learning
about this whole world of like what it means to
listen to God, not just talk at God. And so
this whole tradition of contemplative and meditative prayer and things
(04:27):
that I'd never heard of before. Dozens of like these
really beautiful, really powerful techniques. One of them's called lexia divino,
which is a way of meditating on Scripture. And I
randomly opened up a Bible, googled how to do it,
and opened to Matthew six, which is where the disciples
asked Jesus to teach him how to pray, and he
gives them the Our Father. And in lexiudivina, you pick
a word that sticks out to you and you kind
of try to meditate on it. And the word that
(04:49):
stuck out to me was hallow in halleba name in
the Our Father, and it just it was just ten minutes,
just in my living room, and it just changed my life.
It because it is just beautiful encounter with God. But
it was it's tough to explain, but it was this
deep sense of peace. Now you kind of feel that,
like your stress goes down when you go for a
run or you take some deep breath, so you can
(05:10):
kind of feel that. I would argue much deeper than
anything in the secular world. But this deep sense of
peace combined though with this like depth of meaning and purpose.
So Hallo means to make holy. So I was like, well,
a's God, try to make me holy? Am I letting
him make me holy? Am I supposed to be helping
other people grow closer to God? Am I supposed to
be serving other people? And really I was just doing
my own career for my own career sake. So it
was big strength. You know. I ended up quitting my
(05:31):
job and joining my four and one k to do
some crazy startup thing and all this crazy stuff. So
it was big stressful questions, but I was wrestling with
them in this place of real peace. And so I
knew how to code a little bit. I really loved
the structure of these apps, and so it was obvious
for me that I wanted to do this for the
rest of my life. And so we built the first
version of it, and that was about five years ago,
and we've just been just blown away by what God
(05:53):
has done with it. He's just reached so many folks
through it. I think we're almost a twenty million downloads
or so, five hundred million prayers have been prayed through. Wow,
Glory to God is just a it's been a but
really for us, the really cool part is we just
get to hear these stories of what God is doing
in people's lives. I mean, We've had people who have
been addicted to alcohol for decades who haven't been able
to be sober for more than a week, who are
(06:14):
able to be sober for the first time for months.
We have people who haven't been to church in thirty
years who come back to church. We have young people
who have body image issues who have never been able
to see themselves as beautiful, who are able to see
themselves as beautiful for the first time. We have people
who are deeply depressed who are able to find some
sense of hope and peace again in their life. I mean,
it's just this incredible privilege for us to get to
see what God is doing in people's lives. So it's
(06:36):
a blessing to get to be a part of.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I think just your story, though, in general, is also
such a blessing to parents out there, because I hear
so often and even when I was campaigning, I heard
people say, my kids have gotten away from God, have
stepped away like they were in the wilderness. They're lost,
and I don't know how to ever get them back.
And I think that's the beauty of the Bible always
telling us stories of the return. And I've always heard
(07:00):
stories of that child who had a foundation built and
then suddenly that foundation, they lean on that foundation later
in life without knowing it's going to come back. In
those scripture versus, they just come back to them. And
that sounds like your story. How many people have said
to you, man, my kids are really lost, give me
some hope.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, I get it all the time from you know,
parents who are praying together on the app or for me.
The funny thing is, and if you ask my mom,
like of her kids, I have three sisters of her
kids who would go on to do some sort of
faith based things, who would go on to do some
sort of Christian thing, I would be the last on
that list. By far. I probably would have been the
(07:41):
last on that list. You know of anybody in our hometown,
of anybody in our state. I mean in her mind,
and you know, I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Her uses people that you don't expect.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, certainly, but I mean it just speaks to the fact. Yeah,
I mean, and and both my mom and dad, which
is incredible, incredible parents. So I was, I was very blessed.
But it speaks to the fact of what what God
can do, what prayer can do for kids. And also
you know, for me, it's just you know, and I
have two little kids now and one on the way,
(08:11):
and I struggle with this a lot because I love
my kids so much as and it's a crazy it's
a crazy experience to love something that much. But God
loves it more and God loves my kids more than
I do. And so whenever I get stressed, I'm like, yeah,
I can hand everything over to you God, Like that's easy,
Like my job, my work, all this stuff I can
hand over to you. But my kids, like, man, I
really really care about my kids, Like I hold on
(08:32):
to those kids tighter than anything. And yet at the
same time, I know you care about them more and
you have your own plan, your own relationship with them,
and you are pursuing them more than I ever could,
and you're doing more in their life. You're trying to
do more in their life than I ever could. And
so just that trust of God's got us and pursuing
us all relentlessly is something that you know, just surrendering
(08:54):
to God as parents is really really hard, but especially
when it comes to faith, because you feel like, oh,
it's my job to like raise Christian kids and it's not.
It's God. It's like your job is to pray for
your kids and try to set a great example. But
God's the one who's got it. And so the trust
and the surrender of that is is really hard to do.
But it's something that you know, I think we can all,
especially myself, can work on.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's such a strong statement because
you know, you as a parent feel like I have
to guide you, I have to get you there. I
have to and sometimes I mean, no matter what we're doing,
there are times when we're like I've got this, I've
got to do this, but you we're not doing it.
We need to make sure that we're giving it over
to God. So let me ask you. You talked about
parents having those conversations on hollow How does that work?
(09:36):
Is it like kind of like a social media how
do people connect?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, for us, it's really about praying together. So prayer,
you know, it's you can download the app and pray
through content on your own, meditate through different pieces of content,
through Bible studies and scripture studies and meditations and all
these things on your own. We have music and courses,
a ton, tons of different types of content on the
app for whatever you're interested in. But the really cool
part about prayer is getting to pray together. And we're
(10:03):
supposed to. We're called to. Jesus is very clear that
you're supposed to pray together. And you know the church
on Sundays that is supposed to be a prayer. We
get together on Sundays to pray together. That's the point
of it. It's the summit of it. Really, our week
should be that that prayer and prayer has real power.
So like if you pray for something, it's it's it's real.
(10:24):
It's really powerful. And so you're supposed to pray for
other people and with other people, and it's one of
the really cool parts about prayer. So we're just getting
started on it. But a lot of the stuff that
we do that's a bit unique. I certainly wouldn't call
it a social media any social media functionality. The point
is just you know, an example is, you know, for Easter,
we're praying through kind of the early Church, the Church
(10:44):
Fathers and together, and there's content that comes out together.
You can invite other people to it, you go through
it together with people, you can reflect on it together
with people. But a lot of that conversation happens offline
and in person, which is what we love. It's you know,
if you're going through a content, my mom will call
me and say, oh my gosh, this this sermon today
was just incredible. It just changed my life, and we
get to go through it together, which is which is
(11:05):
really cool. So there's pieces of it that I do
think are really important and more that we're trying to
build where you can journey through content together. But the
point is, you know, you build a personal relationship with
God and then you pray together and journey with other
people through that. But certainly, you know, I think one
of the big benefits of the app is to try
to create a place of peace, and in many ways
(11:25):
social media is the opposite of that. He's a place
of stress and anxiety, and so we certainly don't want
you know, how many likes is my prayer getting or
any of that stuff to be the focus. What we
want to be the focus is the piece that Christ
offers and you know, doing that together as a community,
but focusing on that piece.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next. On
the Tutor Dixon podcast, you talked about young people with
issues with their body and all of these things that
I mean, people go through things at all ages, but
what is there an age group? Is there an age
that you say, okay, this is the recommended age or
(12:01):
are all ages welcome?
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, an the age that Jesus is trying to reach
out to you, so that that would hopefully be all ages.
You know, when we started, you know, we built it.
We built it just for me personally, and so we
saw most of the folks who downloaded were kind of
in the young professional rage, the millennial age range. But
and that was kind of maybe for the first couple
(12:24):
of months, but then very quickly after that we started
seeing people from all over, from all sorts of different
demographics downloaded. We had people who were retirees who kind
of had a little bit more time on their hand.
We're going to a little bit more retreats, We're growing
a little bit deeper in their faith life. We had
people nearing the end of their own life, or friends
who were nearing the end of their own life who
were wrestling with that. We had parents who you know,
(12:46):
had just were new parents who were trying to figure
out how do I raise these kids? And then you
got parents with teenagers who all end up being atheist,
and so you're worried about, you know, what did I
do are my kids? You know, did I screw something up?
How can I be an example to my family of
the faith and the spiritual life that I'm supposed to live.
And then we have a bunch of you know, we
partner with schools so that we can help to pray
together with kids as kids are growing up. I pray
(13:08):
together with my daughter every night. And you know, so
we have people all over all over the spectrum, and
really it's especially over the last couple of years, become
pretty international. So we have folks in Brazil, we have
a Spanish version, we have a Portuguese version, folks in
the Philippines, folks in Europe, French, Italian, German. So it's
been really, really pretty all over. So I would encourage anybody,
(13:28):
you know, even if you're not super familiar with an app.
We have a lot of folks who have never downloaded
an app before, never really used an app before, and
we try to make it as simple as possible and
also to design it in a way where you know,
a twenty two year old will download it and say, yeah,
this seems like it's at the quality of a Spotify
or a Netflix or whatever. It is from a design
and technology perspective, which I think is important because.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
God design, Yeah, well, and you people expect to be
able to go there and be drawn in, and so
what could draw you in more than faith in God?
And so I think that's incredibly cool. But you talked
about you spend you spent ten minutes in your family room,
and that was kind of like this revelation, like, oh gosh,
(14:08):
other people should be doing this. How long do people
spend on the app? I mean, I think that's kind
of one of the deterrens for moms. My age is like, oh,
how can I spend time on one more thing? But
this is I think if you are taking time out
of your day to spend with God, you're going to
be incredibly rewarded, but sometimes it can be overwhelming the
thought of doing that. So how much time do people
(14:30):
on average spend?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, I mean it can really be anything. So we
have sessions on there that are literally a minute, so
thirty sixty seconds. We have sessions on there that are
ten minutes, twenty minutes. I mean, you can spend an
hour on there. You can spend hours and hours on
there where you have people who do you know, holy
hours every day who are praying with the app through it.
But I would say usually it's somewhere between ten and
twenty minutes. And you know, it's an interesting thing, and
(14:55):
certainly you can start with five work your way up
to ten, or you can start with one and work
your way up to five. Takes a couple of minutes
to really be able to enter into silence, which is
really the core of what we're trying to do is
is to enter into silence, which is where I think,
you know, the core is where we find God. But
the and so it takes it. It can take a
couple of minutes, especially if you're new to it, but
ten minutes can be too much for folks who haven't
(15:16):
you know, sat in silence for a while, or haven't
been guided through a scripture, meditation or something for a while,
So starting with whatever makes the most sense. But I
think there was a I think it was a saying
to said it, which is, you know, whenever you're too
busy to pray, you have to pray twice, you have
to spend twice as much time praying, which is I mean,
it's funny because you know, as Christians, we like to
(15:37):
think that this whole comes back to what we're talking
about with with kids. But we like to think that
everything's kind of like ours to do, Like we have
to figure out how to get all the work done.
And the funny thing is, even when you reflect on
like your secular job that at least for me, like
the biggest impacts certainly you have to work hard and
you can't be lazy, and working hard is very important,
very good virtue. But like the biggest things just seem
(16:00):
to come, you know, and it's from God. God is
the one doing the work when we're working for him
and with him for something that's good, He's the one
really doing the work. He wants us to be a
part of it, but he's the one doing the work
and for us to approach things with the peace and
the love and the joy. That's the job of a Christian.
It's not to you know, really crush. Your job is
to let God take over your heart and to surrender
(16:21):
your whole life to Him. And so prayer is the
foundation of everything. Everything should be scheduled around prayer in
your life, and ideally you should make your whole day
of prayer and pause for times of silence, but then
also turn your work into prayer. And so there's a
bunch of, you know, I think reasons why you should
try to prioritize prayer, but for me, it's just been
you know, days just seem to go a lot better.
You just have a lot more peace, you have a
(16:41):
lot more love when you start your day off with God,
with gratitude, with humility, and can approach the day from
you know, what God, do you want me to do today?
And there's just something freeing and joyful about it.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
You know. We've had a lot of doctors on this
podcast talking about various different things. In one of them,
the overwhelming themes that we even hear from the medical
community is that they see patients who handle trauma better
who handle depression, who get out of depression if they're
able to focus on faith. And even we've had some
(17:15):
pastors on here as well who have said, you know,
it is hard for us when we have a couple
come to us and say we're struggling in our marriage,
we have these problems at home, you know, we have
a depressed child something like that. They are like, if
you focus on faith, those things will be reduced, or
get better or disappear. And oftentimes I think we do
(17:39):
think I got to do this. That's why I think
Hallo is so interesting. It kind of forces you to
have that different perspective, and then once you have that
different perspective, that can become a way of life. And
having prayer as a way of life. As you just said,
this is a very you're very calm and able to
move forward with your day. I mean, it's funny that
you started out with an app called Calm looking for
(18:02):
that and you've been able to create that as a
way of life.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, and I think it. I mean, faith is such
a unique thing because it's it's it's so deep, and
I mean it's by definition as deep as you can get.
Because what we're meditating and praying with is the source
of source of everything. So you know, the fascinating thing
is even you know, it's not like your life becomes
stress free if you become a peryerful person. It's not
(18:27):
like your life becomes stress free if you're It's not
like Jesus's life wasn't without suffering. It was very full
of suffering and difficulty. And you know, but what it
does is it transforms everything. So instead of you worrying about,
you know, your plans for your own life, all you
focus on is God, just help me to do what
(18:47):
you want me to do. And when they're suffering, which
there certainly will be, Christ Like very explicitly promises in
this world we will have trouble. But it transforms the
suffering into like an opportunity to say, Okay, God, I
trust you You're going to bring something good out of this,
and even in the midst of this, I'm going to
use this to give you glory somehow. And you know
that can be really, really hard. I mean, we've gotten
(19:09):
stories from people to your point that we had a
woman right to us who said I was in such
a deep and dark place. I am confident that over
the next week, I would have committed suicide. I would
have killed myself had it not been for the grace
that God gave me through this app I was broken
into a million pieces, and I felt like everything everyone
I loved had left me, everything I cared about was gone.
(19:31):
But I realized that Christ was still there with me,
and he scooped me up and put me back together again.
And my life is my life, is my family's back together.
All this stuff, I mean, all this joy and glory
came of this suffering. Through this suffering, she was able
to find Christ. And there's just such a you know,
it's certainly not a solve for everything. You'd certainly exercise
is still super important, and mental health is still you know,
(19:54):
a many multifaceted problem that many folks need professional help with.
But there's just something about living a life of prayer
that's just the foundation of everything that makes life a lot.
You know, it's like real peace, it's real rest. Christ
tells you it's you're going to have a cross, you're
going to let down your worries and you're going to
take up mind. But it's going to be easy, it's
going to be light, and you're going to find real rest,
(20:16):
like real peace, not like hey, I'm going to go
watch a Netflix thing at the end of the day
to de stress. It's like, no, I'm going to give
you real lasting peace that calms your mind and that
gives you. In this world that we live in, which
is just so crazy and so stressful and so angering
and so frustrating and so anxious, it's like, I think
this hung I think we all hunger for this real
sense of peace.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Well, I think it's interesting because we're in a world
where people are saying, you know, everybody's getting away from faith,
and young people are not focused on faith, and yet
here's an app that reaches number one in the App Store,
first religious app to reach number one in the App Store.
What is that like?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, I mean for us, it's I mean if I
looked outside right now and I saw a thousand people
praying with this app all together, I'd be like, Wow,
that's an incredible number of people praying like that. That's
way more than I ever could have imagined. We built it.
I built it just for me. So this is fun.
I mean, it just it's all just a blast. And
to get to pray with a thousand people, that's incredible.
That's a huge church. That's awesome. Ten thousand people is wow,
(21:19):
that's a massive crowd of people. Fifty thousand people, one
hundred thousand people. I have no I couldn't possibly I've
I couldn't even see that far. And so a million people,
ten million people, twenty million people. It's just God is
just God changing people's lives in a way way beyond
what we could ever have imagined. And it was fun
that the number one thing was a blast because Temu,
(21:41):
one of the Chinese social media apps or whatever, was
number one for a while and they ran like six
Super Bowl commercials. I think they ran exactly six Super
Super Bowl commercials and spend a billion and a half
dollars a year on Facebook advertising, and so for us
to be able to like jump up to the number
one spot was just awesome. I mean, it just speaks
to the glory of I think every app in the
(22:02):
top ten had ten thousand plus employees, and we have,
you know, eighty or so folks working on this thing,
and so it was just this sound it was just
this awesome. But for us still it's you know, I
keep coming back to these But funnily, the you know,
in the earliest so we just started hallowing like twenty eighteen,
and at the end of twenty eighteen we launched it,
and we weren't sure if we were going to do
(22:24):
this for real, but we wanted it for ourselves and
we thought it was helpful and so we might as
well try to help ourselves get into heaven a little
bit better. And we had some friends and family download
it and try it, and we had you know, there
was this the story that still sticks in my mind
to this day. My aunt had just lost her son,
who my cousin, who was forty five years old or
(22:45):
so forty two I think, and he his heartbreaking, went
to the hospital, said he had chest pains. They said,
you're fine, checked him out. He went home and died
that night in a sleep. He had just gotten married
and his wife had just gotten pregnant. And so like
my aunt, my godmother was heartbroken, just like absolutely devastated obviously,
and I couldn't get out of bed, couldn't eat, and
(23:07):
our hope. We have this big family, a bunch of cousins,
bunch of uncles, we were all just really worried about her,
and we're really focused on like, okay, well, what can
we do to try to get her to eat or
try to help her in some way. And we launched
this app. I had no idea she downloaded it, but
she did, and you know, of like a couple dozen people,
and she started praying with it, and it just had
(23:29):
a few sessions on it just about it was the
season leading up to Christmas, and so it was just
about hope and peace and love and just written generically.
And she sent us this email two weeks after we launched,
and she just said, Hey, I just wanted to let
you know I didn't think I'd be able to make
it through my first Christmas without my son. It's always
a time of stress and anxiety trying to figure out
(23:50):
gifts and visiting people and all that stuff, but like
to do it without my son for the first for
the first year, I didn't think I'd be able to
make it through it. And I just wanted to let
you know that this app has reminded me that the
little meditations on this app have reminded me that I'm
able to have hope still even in this time of
even in the worst time in my life, I'm able
to have hope still. And I just like I just
(24:10):
like broke down on the floor bawling tears, and I
remember I looked at my co founder and I was
just like, if we do nothing else, if in our
whole life, if we've worked for the next fifty years,
if we spend everything anybody, if we spend everybody at
everything we have, we ruin our reputations, everybody hates us.
But we got this one note from it like that, Yeah,
(24:33):
I would do that again a hundred times over. I
do that again. And we get those notes all the
time now of people who have lost kids, of people
who are dealing with like really dark, really tough stuff,
and who are really lost, and to be able to
see what God can do in their lives, how He
can reach out to us, especially the most those of
us who are most lost, and we're all a little
(24:53):
bit lost. We can all grow closer to God, but
especially the folks who are in the toughest places and
give them His peace. I mean it's like, yeah, so
in terms of like whether it's ten million or twenty million,
if we can get one more of those notes in
the next you know, we just got one today about
some incredible miracle that God worked in people's lives. But
if we can just keep helping God reach out to
the folks who are lost, it's it's that's really what
(25:15):
we're focused on.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
That is so amazing. Boy, God is faithful, isn't he?
When you serve him? He is faithful to his servants.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
He is good. He is good all the time.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For folks that want to check
this out, is it something you have to pay for?
How does it work?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
So it's an app if you have a smartphone or
an iPad or a computer, but the easiest is on
your phone. You go to the app store, you type
in hallow h llow like hello would be that name,
and then just downloaded it's the Purple one and you
can download it for free. We have a ton of
thousands of free sessions that you can try for free forever.
No credit card acquired, don't trial anything. The way that
we support ourselves is through a subscription. If you like
(26:01):
it and want to give it a try, it unlocks
additional content and it comes with a free trial so
you can see if it's worth it for a bit
and cancel if it's not and don't get charged anything.
And yeah, you just choose a session, choose a length,
close your eyes, and press play. But yeah, that's how
jllow on any app store.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
I love that so much. I have a daughter who
is very driven by faith, and it's funny to me
because I believe that this is all linked back to
prayer early in her life, because like you said, I
know it's not me, and I know it's something greater
than me, but and I don't know what her future is.
You know, it's like one of those things whereas they're
(26:41):
growing and you see them changing and growing, You're like,
I don't know how this is happening, and I don't
know where this is going, but I know when. And
I think I've shared this story before. When she was
five years old, she was a thumbsucker and it was
very hard for her to stop, and she wanted to stop,
and we had had all kinds of conversations about it,
and I was like, or can you just have to
give this up? And she I will never forget, she said.
(27:04):
I said to her, why don't we pray about it?
And she said, okay, let's do that. And this had
been months of trying to get her to stop, maybe
even a year. And so we sat down, we prayed together,
and she said she felt that the need to put
her blanket away that night because it was kind of
like a thing she did. She held the blanket, she
sucked her thumb. She put the blanket away that night.
(27:27):
The next night brought the blanket back out, never sucked
her thumb again. And I feel like that knowledge of
like you ask and he is faithful and he gives
to you, and she is just such a faithful kid.
The other day, she said they were going over to
a friend's house and then girls were all like, what
do you want to do? We have the day off school,
what do you want to do? And she said, why
(27:48):
don't we have a Bible study together? And of course
all of the other freshman girls were like no, because
they got to Christian school. But I'm like, there's something
about this little girl that I look at her. I'm like,
you are so much more impressive than anyone I know.
But it's just so fun to see her. And that's
why I when I talk about when I think about
(28:09):
your app and hear you talking, I'm like that security
and foundation that she has, I and that you found again.
I just I understand you're wanting to share this because
it's amazing, So thank you for what you do.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, kids are such a I mean, kids just have
a special I mean a lot of people said, a
lot of theologians or pastors or saints or whatever said,
I mean, kids are just so much closer to the
spiritual life than I think we are. I mean, I have,
like a I have a three year old and a
two year old and so and they're just you know,
they just like hear the voice of Jesus regularly. They're
just like, oh, I just heard Jesus, and it's just
(28:44):
it's just so cool. But I think what it speaks
to is, you know a lot of people fall away
from their faith, and especially people who like go to
church as part of you know, it's because it's what
people do. We go to church. That's the that's the routine,
you go to church. But so the question is like, well,
(29:04):
what what what's the strongest way to keep people in
a life long in a lifelong relationship with the church,
And it's a personal relationship with God. I mean, there's
just nothing through spirituality, through prayer, that's how we have
a relationship with God. But if you have a relationship
with God, then there's just nothing. I mean, the chances
(29:26):
of you sticking with that are just so much higher then, like, oh,
I was convinced by some argument or I agreed with
some political thing or whatever it is. It's no, this
is you know, for me, this is as real as
my relationship with my wife. It's as real with as
my relationship with my mom and my dad. It's the
person I talk to every day who I love deeply
with my whole heart. And it's like that's never gonna
that's never going to change. I'm going to love this
(29:46):
guy forever, and I'm never going to not think he's there.
He's of course he's there. It's as real to me
as as my wife is. But the kids thing for
us is a real blessing. We had some we had
somebody send us a note that they were praying with
the app there. I think it was a seven year
old or so, and she had seen something on the
news about the Chinese. This was like a year and
a half ago, maybe ad the Chinese by balloon or whatever.
(30:09):
I think that was a year ago, and she had
no idea what it was but she said she was
really stressed and so she couldn't fall asleep because she
was worried about the Chinese by balloon and this seven
year old, which just speaks to like the stress that
our life is, just our world is. But she's like,
I'm just so worried about this Chinese bi balloon. What
are we going to do? What are we going to do?
And the mom was like, it's okay, let's just do
(30:31):
a let's do a Halo session. And so they did
a Halo session and it happened to be a session
we wrote like five years ago, and it was a
meditation about let all of your worries and stresses imagine them,
and imagine them filling a balloon, filled the balloon all up,
and then let the balloon go and let it rise
up to God and let him, let him catch the
(30:53):
balloon in heaven and let it go and let it
float into God's hands. And their daughter was just so
just total random luck that that well it was God obviously,
but just totally yeah, coincidence that that was the session
that they picked. And she just looks at her mom
and she just goes, Jesus hurt me. He knew he
was he knew I was dressed about the balloon and
He's here and I let it go and it was
(31:14):
just such a beautiful But like, kids are just so yeah,
there's such a great example to us of what like
real spiritual life is supposed to be and what real
love is supposed to be. And especially when they have
the blessing of being able to have a personal relationship
with God, it's just an honor to get to journey
alongside him.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
It is true. Kids have this weird like there are.
You can't really have these discussions with them of like
what exactly is happening in your mind right now? But
you see things. I remember one night putting my daughter
to bed and she looked over and was clearly looking
at an empty spot in the room, and she said, oh,
Jesus is here, and then she fell asleep. I was
(31:53):
like what what. I like, wait a minute, let's go
back to that. You know, but what did she see?
I don't know. But their believers and they have a relationship.
I mean, like you said, this is a relationship for them.
And I didn't have that blessing growing up. That wasn't
exactly my upbringing. And it's obviously my faith journey has changed.
(32:13):
But I will never forget when I first started getting
into Bible study, a family saying they had a tragedy.
They were on the beach, one of the kids went under.
The coastguard found the baby's body, brought it up. They
started fell immediately to prayer, and the coast guard afterwards said,
(32:33):
people who drowned don't float, You don't just find them.
We don't know how this happened. Like the minute they
knew he was missing, they started immediately in prayer and
the baby was revived fine and still to this day
no issues from that. And I remember at the time thinking,
what is it like to have a tragedy and go
immediately to prayer. But once you have that relationship, it's
(32:55):
exactly like what you said, It's like going to your spouse.
It's so natural, like Jesus helped me. You've got this,
I don't. And so I think that's beautiful that you
are leading people into that. And I've grown in that
over my lifetime, and I just think that anybody who's listening,
if you are at that place where you're like, what
is missing in my life, it's probably this.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Yeah, God, God is pretty much the whole thing. So
the whole point of life is a relationship with God.
But yeah, I mean prayer is so cool because it's
and so beautiful because it can have such it's not
just you know, people often reduce it down to like
secular meditation or like going for a run? What does
this do for me? And it's like, well, does it
(33:35):
make me a little bit happier, does it make me
live longer, does it make me, you know, more resilient
to sickness or what scientific which it does a lot
of those things, which is really cool. And it's funny
because the secular world then keeps trying to pick away
pieces of prayer and make them their own trend. It's like, oh, gratitude,
you have to have a gratitude practice, and it's like, okay, yeah,
that's that's like a morning prayer. And it's like you
(33:56):
have to reflect on your day at the end of
the day, and it's like okay, yeah, that's a night prayer.
And it's like and you have to have something bigger
than yourself and it's like yeah, like God, but it's
not about and it can do really cool things. Is
the cool part. It's much bigger than just this like
mental health effect, which it is, but it's much bigger
than that. It's real, so it can change reality. So
(34:18):
you can pray. We have like dozens and dozens hundreds
of these miracle stories where doctors say this person is dead,
this person is dead, there is there's no way that
this person comes back, or this person has a disease
that is so far gone. There has not been a
person who has survived this and then through some miracle
of prayer, they survive and it's this miraculous thing. But
(34:40):
it's the really interesting part about prayer. And I get
this question a lot, is like, well, what does this
do for me? It's like, yeah, that's an interesting question.
But the more interesting question is the point of prayer
is not what does it do for you? The point
of the prayer is what can you do for God?
Like what are you supposed to be doing for God?
And sometimes that's really terrible sof and sometimes that God
(35:02):
that is God giving you incredible gifts, but it's how
can I let God take over my whole life? Like
how can I surrender my whole heart so that it's
no longer mine? And it's God's just like Saint Paul says,
and that, to me is the really cool part of prayer.
It comes without like seek first the Kingdom of God
and then yeah, you'll get all this joy and this
peace and this happiness and all this stuff. But the
point is how can I give my whole life to God?
(35:23):
And then the question of like, well can I fit
in a ten minute prayer is such a funny question
in the course of my day because it's like, well,
my whole day is supposed to be God's, so of
course I can give them ten minutes.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
I love it. I love it. It's been such a
joy talking to you and hearing about the app, and
I encourage anybody out there to go download that today
and get into those prayer sessions because it really is
so valuable because you will become the hands and feet
and that's what we're supposed to be. So Alex Jones,
thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Glory to God. It was an honor to be here.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Thanks for having me absolutely, and thank you all for
joining us on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode
and others, go to Tutor disonpodcast dot com. You can
subscribe right there, or head over to the iHeartRadio, app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and join
us next time. Have a blessed day,
Host
Tudor Dixon
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