Nona Jones
6 min read ⭑
“I want people to see petty prayers not as the destination, but as diagnostic evidence. They reveal where pain is still living. Once we recognize what our prayers are revealing, God can begin moving us from vengeance to vulnerability, from rehearsing the offense to healing from it.”
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it's also about home and people and love. So, how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
I went vegan in December 2025 and it has been a challenge to find good vegan food in my hometown of Gainesville, Florida. But my favorite meal is from a local Asian restaurant called DragonFly. I love the warm spinach salad and vegan pad thai — a simple meal, but I love it. I spend so much of my life in spaces where I have to lead, teach, solve problems or have something meaningful to say. But around that table with my husband and our sons, I get to just be Nona.
Behind the public bio, I am someone who deeply values belonging. I don’t need every meal to be extraordinary. I just want the people around the table with me to know that they are safe, seen and loved.
Jonatan David; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest, or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
I have been a fitness junkie for almost thirteen years now, but I primarily focused on cardio. Over the last year, I have added strength training and I have found it to be unexpectedly spiritual for me.
At first, I approached fitness as something I needed to do to change my body. But over time, it began changing my relationship with my body. When I am lifting a weight that feels too heavy or finishing the last few minutes of a workout when I would rather quit, I become aware of how quickly discomfort triggers a conversation in my mind: You can’t do this. You’re too tired. You’re not strong enough. Then I have to decide whether I will believe those voices or believe my track record.
Lifting weights has taught me about emotional healing. We often think strength means never feeling weak, but real strength is learning that weakness does not get the final word. The same is true when we have been hurt. Healing does not mean that anger, sadness or disappointment never rise again. It means those emotions no longer determine what we do next.
Exercise also brings me back into the present. I can’t answer emails, prepare a sermon, solve a leadership problem and lift a challenging weight at the same time. I have to breathe. I have to pay attention. I have to listen to my body instead of treating it like a machine that exists only to execute my ambitions.
That feels sacred to me now. God did not give me a body merely to carry my calling. My body is part of the person he loves. Caring for it has become an act of gratitude… and sometimes an act of repentance for all the years I criticized it more than I honored it.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We're just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So, what’s your kryptonite and how do you confront its power?
My kryptonite is rejection. Full stop. Even after years of success in various arenas of life, rejection has a way of making me question what I know about myself. One painful rejection can still tempt me to wonder whether I am enough.
My instinct has often been to respond to rejection with achievement. If someone made me feel insignificant, I would work harder. If someone underestimated me, I would succeed loudly enough to prove them wrong. But I have found that the problem with proving people wrong is that it never heals the pain of what they did. Achievement can look like strength from the outside while being powered by a wound on the inside.
I confront rejection by becoming honest about what it awakened in me. Instead of only asking, “Why did they do that?” I ask, “Why did what they did have the power to make me forget who I am?” Then I bring the unedited answer to God. I let God meet me in my anger, grief, and embarrassment. This is one of the great discoveries I share in my new book, “The Power of Petty Prayers”: honesty with God is not the enemy of spiritual maturity. It is often where spiritual maturity begins.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
Right now, I am obsessed with helping people heal from relational wounds, especially the wounds inflicted by people who are not sorry.
My new book “The Power of Petty Prayers” began with an uncomfortable discovery. I realized that some of the prayers I considered faithful were actually fueled by unresolved pain. I believed I had forgiven people because I was no longer confronting them, but inwardly, I was still prosecuting them. I was silently acting as the collection agency for emotional debts people owed me.
That realization caused me to look at prayers in Scripture that we rarely discuss: the angry prayers, the retaliatory prayers and the prayers that ask God to do things we would never put on a coffee mug. Psalm 35, for example, says, “Contend, Lord, with those who contend with me” (Ps. 35:1, NIV), and requests that the people who caused harm be disgraced and humiliated.
What fascinated me was not merely that these prayers were in the Bible. It was that God allowed wounded people to bring their unfiltered pain into his presence. He did not endorse every impulse expressed in those prayers, but neither did he demand that people sanitize their emotions before speaking to him.
That matters because many of us confuse silence with forgiveness. We stop talking about what happened, learn the right Christian language, and call ourselves healed. Meanwhile, the wound continues shaping our reactions, relationships and prayers.
I want people to see petty prayers not as the destination, but as diagnostic evidence. They reveal where pain is still living. Once we recognize what our prayers are revealing, God can begin moving us from vengeance to vulnerability, from rehearsing the offense to healing from it.
Forgiveness is a decision. Healing is a process. We need both.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we're Cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God's love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it's God when it happens?
I often recognize the Holy Spirit when he interrupts the conclusion I was hoping to reach.
When I started writing “The Power of Petty Prayers,” I initially approached the subject believing the primary problem was what other people had done to me. I had legitimate pain, real disappointments and stories in which I was unquestionably wounded. But the Holy Spirit kept turning my attention from the people I wanted God to correct toward the places in me that God wanted to heal. That is not the direction I would have chosen on my own.
One of the ways I know an insight is from God is that it carries both truth and love. Shame says, “Look at what is wrong with you.” The Holy Spirit says, “Look at what is hurting you, and let me heal it.” His conviction is specific, but it is never cruel. It exposes what is unhealthy without stripping us of our dignity.
There were moments during the writing when a connection between Scripture, psychology and my own story would suddenly come into focus. An idea I had been struggling to articulate would become clear, or I would recognize that the sentence I had written for the reader was first meant for me. Those were sacred interruptions.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So, let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
The spiritual practice helping me most right now is unedited prayer. By that I mean prayer before I correct my tone, choose better words or try to make myself sound spiritually mature. I tell God what happened, what I feel, what I wish would happen and what I am afraid my feelings might say about me.
I sometimes sit with a journal and write the prayer I would never pray publicly. I resist the urge to make it inspirational. Then I ask three questions:
— What am I asking God to do?
— What does that request reveal about what I am feeling?
— What wound beneath that feeling needs God’s attention?
For example, God, make them regret what they did may reveal that I feel discarded. God, expose them may reveal that I feel invisible or disbelieved. God, take away what they value may reveal that I am still trying to create justice through reciprocal pain.
Once I identify the wound, the prayer begins to change. Make them regret losing me becomes Remind me that rejection cannot reduce my value. I do not force that transformation. I let honesty lead me there. God can do more with an honest petty prayer than with a polished prayer we do not mean.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
The first is the Book of Psalms, not simply as Scripture to read, but as a school of emotional honesty. The Psalms taught me that faith and difficult feelings can occupy the same sentence. We can trust God and still be angry. We can worship and still ask why. We can believe in God’s goodness while telling him that life does not currently feel good. The Psalms gave me language for a relationship with God that could survive the truth.
The second is a tool called The Feelings Wheel. It has helped give me language for how I am truly feeling beyond the standard “okay” or “alright.” Many Christians have been taught to distrust their feelings, but feelings often reveal where care, truth, boundaries or healing are needed. Being able to give language to how I’m feeling has helped me give language to the specific healing I need.
The third is Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and shame, particularly her teaching on the power of vulnerability. It helped me recognize that shame grows through secrecy, while healing requires safe exposure. We cannot heal what we are committed to hiding. That insight is central to how I understand prayer now: vulnerability with God gives us somewhere to tell the whole truth before that hidden pain begins controlling us.
Together, these resources reinforce something I deeply believe: emotional honesty is not a detour from spiritual formation. It is part of spiritual formation.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?
I spent almost a decade working in the technology sector and I am a big believer in using technology to support virtuous habit formation. Because of this, I am a big fan of The Bible App, not simply because I once had the privilege of serving there, but because I have seen what can happen when Scripture becomes accessible in the middle of ordinary life.
I love the ability to move between translations, listen to Scripture while I am getting ready or traveling, save a verse that speaks directly to a season and engage a Bible Plan around a specific struggle. Technology cannot create hunger for God, but it can remove some of the friction that keeps us from responding to that hunger.
A practice I value is comparing translations when a verse arrests my attention. Sometimes a familiar passage becomes fresh because another translation uses a word or phrase that exposes a nuance I had missed. I may also listen to the passage because hearing Scripture affects me differently than silently reading it.
At the same time, I try to resist treating Scripture like another piece of digital content to consume quickly. I use my physical Bible 90% of the time and supplement with the app 10% of the time.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So, give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
I am a type-TRIPLE-A person, so when something stirs in me, it tends to go from a soft stir to fully awake within 24 hours. Because of that, I don’t have a dormant stirring; I have a swirling passion to create spaces where believers can stop hiding from each other and from God due to shame.
I am in the process of launching a new ministry called Known & Near, a deliverance and discipleship movement that will serve the 7 out of 10 Christians who are secretly struggling with unwanted thoughts, feelings and behavior patterns they can’t seem to break. These are people who love Jesus sincerely. They know how to attend church, quote Scripture, serve others and appear spiritually healthy. But they don’t have a safe space to confess they need help and get set free. This is what Known & Near is called to do; set the captives free and place them in healing communities to stay free!
This vision excites me, but it also challenges me because it’s easier to build something polished than to build something safe. Safety requires trust, wise leadership, accountability and a willingness to engage pain without exploiting it. I feel the weight of getting that right. I want to cultivate a movement of honest faith; one in which people discover that God’s presence is not reserved for the polished parts of their story. He is willing to meet us in the petty, wounded, weary and angry places, and love us all the way into freedom.
Often at Rapt, when we ask people what resources have impacted them most, they share incredible books, podcasts, apps and communities. So we were intrigued when Nona Jones listed a quarterly getaway as one of her favorite resources in this interview.
Turns out Nona is on to something. A study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that taking time off actually improves productivity! More specifically, 77% of workplace leaders reported that the employees on their team who went on vacations were more productive. And 78% said that the employees who took all their vacation time were happier at their jobs.
Maybe you can’t do a quarterly getaway to the beach, but it’s worth thinking and praying about how you can take time off and recharge. Your health and your work — including for the Lord — may benefit as a result.
Nona Jones is a global Bible teacher, business executive, bestselling author and entrepreneur. She is CEO of Inside Out Leadership where she helps executives and organizations build healthy identities and cultures through biblical principles. As a certified trauma-informed coach and counselor, Nona is a sought-after speaker on emotional resilience, leadership and hope in uncertainty. She has delivered standing ovation keynotes spanning government, business and faith sectors, including the United Nations, the United States Attorney General, Global Leadership Summit, Black Enterprise Magazine and more. Nona has been interviewed on Good Morning America and is a regular co-host of Better Together on TBN. She has been profiled by Essence Magazine as an “Under 40 Woman to Watch” and Florida Trend Magazine as one of Florida’s “30-Something All Stars.” Her podcast, Just Nona, has reached hundreds of thousands of viewers and listeners around the world. She is the bestselling author of The Gift of Rejection, Killing Comparison, Success from the Inside Out, and her latest book, The Power of Petty Prayers.