SEP 15 2019 | Guests | Finding Hope in the Midst of Hopelessness

Sea Change Church · Guests · "Finding Hope in the Midst of Hopelessness" Pastor Christine Garde Denning · September 15, 2019
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Good morning, church. I'm Spencer. And I'm Michelle. We're Surf Church leaders. So the reading this morning comes from Job 8, 11 through 13 and out of Hebrews. Can papyrus grow tall where there is no marsh? Can reeds thrive without water? While still growing and uncut, they wither more quickly than grass. Such is the destiny of all who forget God. So perishes the hope of the godless. And then Hebrews 6, 19. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. The word of the Lord.

You look the part, bro. Solid. They come in indigenous costumes, so that's awesome. Very cool. Very cool. I am honored to get to introduce you to one of our missions partners, someone I've known since 1996. We were working on Young Life staff, and they sent us for a month training in Florida. So we went to this hot pan handle. It is where I decided God spoke to me and said, that wife, Carrie, is going to be your wife. And I called her from there, and we kind of talked about, no, I did not propose on the phone, but made some decisions there.

Christine, one of the things we want to do is make our missions partners visible and accessible. But as we learned in the first service, one of the reasons we do that is because it's very easy to get to inculcate yourself as a church with just what you're doing. You know, new tables in the fellowship hall, and, you know, new message sermon series, and all these different things. And sometimes we need to be challenged as well, back to our radical roots. And many of us who had an experience with Jesus where we just went full on. And I didn't know that John Maxwell led both of us to Christ.

I didn't know that. I was 12 years old, and they called me forward, and he prayed with me at the front. But then also, you were somewhere as well. So that was something I didn't know. So Christine has been on the front lines in many ways. She's going to share how she went into the inner city in San Diego. She's going to share a little bit about her history today. Went in the inner city. I'll let her tell that story. But one thing she didn't share is she continued to move.

I want you to share, I'm not going to spoiler alert for you, but I want you to share where that ended up. But she went in the inner city. Now she is in Africa working in Mozambique, has had tremendous breakthroughs working there. And in Ghana and different places in the world, she has worked with the president of Mozambique, or the former president of Mozambique, and brought them into the United States for conferences and at high levels all around the world. She didn't share a lot of those.

I wanted to set the table. She also is a dedicated friend to us and our church and one of our missionaries that you're going to get to meet. I'm so proud of our missionaries. I am so proud of all the things we're doing, and especially how God is using women throughout the world and in the church. And it is something that we are blessed to have and to have Christine Gard come speak to you today. Let's welcome up Christine Gardening. Excuse me. Christine Gardening. There's been an addition. We'll talk about that. Welcome, Christine up. Thank you. It really is an honor to be here. And so before I start, I'd like to pray. Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit would fall, that the words that I speak would be words that you would want spoken. God, I pray that hearts might be touched and that all of us might leave today wanting greater intimacy with you, a greater anchor with you, and to live a more courageous walk. I pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen. I am really excited to be here. And those of you who don't know me, I thought it would be important to share a bit about who I am and how I got here. I grew up ninth of 10 kids in upstate New York, and we were poor. And so put that in context, we had a house that couldn't always afford heat. And so during winters, I would etch my name inside the bedroom window, and it was cold, and I could see my breath. And I remember thinking from an early age, the one thing I would not be is poor. And so I feel like I set in my own mind a vision for what my life would look like. And then God had a plan that was different than mine. And so there was a point when I went to an amazing grace service that John Maxwell did. And I had never heard the gospel before. And so I sat there, and that night I heard for the first time words that he spoke that said, if you're in this room and you don't have deep peace and you just don't have deep hope, he had said, there's nothing that will give it to you other than Jesus. You're never going to find it in job, in a spouse, in money. And I remember that night praying and saying to God, if what he's saying is true, I will give you 100% of me for 30 days. Thinking that at least at the end of 30 days, I would know for sure if God is what they claimed he was. And so over the next, actually 90 days, my life radically changed. I woke up in the morning for the first time I read scripture. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. It impacted me. I was hungry for it. I began to pray. I began to be discipled. I was in a church, and a woman decided, she came up to me and she said, do you want to be discipled? I'm like, no clue what that is, but sure. And so she would meet with me weekly and just teach me things that she knew that I didn't, that God had shown her. And during this time, I said to her one day, I can't help but stop thinking about gang members. And she said, why don't you press in and said to me, keep praying. And if God is calling you to work with gang members or do something with gang members, you'll know. And so the gang activity in San Diego had not been suddenly ignited. It really was though that I could not stop thinking about that group of kids. Now, mind you, I'd never seen a gang member. I'd never worked with one. I'd never been in those neighborhoods. So it didn't really make sense, but it kept going until she said to me, I think this is God. And I agreed, right? So at that point, I went and looked in San Diego County for who I might be able to work with. Interviewed, they all said the same thing. Heck no. You are, you have no social work background. You've never had any experience. Nobody wanted me. And then one day I was in an interview with a gentleman, Ray Smith out of Southeast San Diego. And he said to me, these kids will eat you alive. Don't think you'll make it, but the job is yours if you want it.

I was able to start a gang diversion program in public housing at the border in three different communities. He did say, in retrospect, he told me that they bet on me that I wouldn't last more than two and a half months. And I lasted almost three years. And in the course of that time, I literally had nothing but me and God in that I chose to move into the neighborhood. And I would wake up every day and be like, okay, God. And I'm in my early 20s at the time. And I'd wake up and say, all right, God, what do we do? I'd read some scripture. And I'd do things like show up at the park with a bunch of gang kids and bring them pizza and be like, hey, anyone hungry? And then eventually, I set up programs Monday through Friday, nine to five with HUD. It was funded by HUD. And we taught really good things, life skills and lots of things. But then it was not changing lives. So after five, I would invite people like Victory Outreach and Young Life. And we would begin to do things in the evening and weekends.

And that's when I saw kids' lives radically change. Absolutely radically change. And I also saw kids end up in prison. We saw kids die. We saw kids never leave the gang. And so I think from my early, early days with God, God has often put me into circumstances where I have had to try to find hope in the midst of hopelessness. And the good news is in Christ and in scripture, that's where you find it. And so I did have access. And that is the topic of the message today. It is called, yes, finding hope in the midst of hopelessness. Now, one of the things, before I start that, so after I did gang work, I then worked for InterVarsity. I began to bring college students into the South Bronx to teach them about Shalom. What does it mean to be a part of restoring, bring heaven to earth? What does it mean to help broken systems be healed? And I loved that.

And then eventually, I started, I was in Young Life and did inner city work there. And then I started my own organization funded by some really godly men and women out of New York. And that is, could you? This idea, the question, could you make a mark in the world? Could you do something that might bless someone else? And we started it in 2007. And I'm going to show some pictures of some of our work. The first picture you'll see is we are, our main initiative is helping young girls stay in school. And so if you know or not, many girls around the world cannot be in school five days a month because they can't afford products for when they're menstruating. And something so small can have an incredibly large impact. And so what we've done is we've brought to them a menstrual cup that keeps, it lasts for 10 years and only costs $10. We also provide health education. And we help these girls never miss school again. And so currently, this is a picture of one of our groups in Ghana.

And we are working, last year we worked with 20,000 girls across Africa, mostly Ghana and Mozambique. The next picture is of, we partner with young boys as well because these boys will become the men in their communities. And we want to see stigma change. We want to see broken falsehoods. And so we begin to offer them a way to partner with the young girls from the very beginning around how they want to lead their own homes. The next picture is, we have been blessed that some celebrities throughout Africa, so this is one of the biggest singers in Mozambique, Julia Duarte. And in Ghana, we have one of the largest libraries, Jocelyn Dumas. Tons of people have come around us to say, we want to partner with you. We want to share, be ambassadors for helping young girls become the women that they were destined to be. And then we have a literacy program that this church has actually funded. So they haven't funded all of our literacy stuff, but this one school, not one school, there's a community in the north of Mozambique where there has been a tremendous amount of fundamental Islamic movement. Al-Shabaab has, over the last two years, beheaded and killed and burned down communities. Hundreds have been killed. And a government official at one point said, our young boys are only joining the movement because of poverty and illiteracy. So we really felt like we should be offering communities this chance to learn how to read. 80%, 70% of the country is illiterate. And so what we do is, this church helps we pay for a literacy class in the midst of that community. And it's in local churches. So they don't meet in the church because Muslims couldn't come.

And so instead, they meet in a pastor's home and they're learning to read. And so there's something beautiful about what you all have been providing for them in Mozambique. So thank you. And then the last picture is I have been partnering with a for-profit godly group of men who created a mosquito repellent that is the world's best. So it lasts three to five times better than deep, but it's nature-based. If you don't get bit, you will not get malaria or other mosquito-borne diseases. And the poor are dying in terrible, terrible numbers because of malaria. $12 billion a year is spent to prevent it. And yet over the last five years, it continues to increase. So we have been working with them to bring the product to the poor. That is our white-labeled brand. It's called Max Repellent, and it's Kudu's Repellent that we partner with Ministries of Health. And we begin to just show and share and even produce ways where the poor can be protected no matter how much they earn.

And so that leads me to just today and our message. There are two kinds of hope. There is worldly hope and there is biblical hope. Now, worldly hope is the kind of hope that is like wishful thinking, positive thinking, this real sense that I know things are going to be good. The problem with worldly hope is it's incredibly easy to have it when things are going well. It's really hard and impossible to have when everything is going terribly. Or as Adam said earlier, what if God takes everything? What kind of hope do you have then? And so that's where you have to have biblical, certain true hope that can only be found in Scripture.

I love the Scripture they read today, the part that says, so is the destiny of all who forget God, so perishes the hope of the godless. And again, that doesn't mean that you cannot have hope if you don't know God. It just means you can't have certain hope. It means that you can't, in the middle of a storm, know that God is good and that you can trust with certainty the promises of God. And that is the kind of hope that we have access to and that's the kind of hope that we are going to be talking about today. Now, keep in mind, biblical hope doesn't mean that everything is going really well. If you know me, you know that I'm an optimist.

I really believe things are going to be great. I believe the best in people. And it's real until all of a sudden life gets so hard that you find this doesn't feel optimistic. And so I'm going to share with you an ex-season, and it's not a day, it was a long season, in New York that was one of hopelessness. So here I am living in New York, and I had put everything I had into building Could You, all blood, sweat, tears, finances. And I woke up one day, and we had run out of money.

Prayed, and I felt like, God, are you in this? Am I supposed to keep going? And I looked back, and God was putting me in the right rooms. We were building relationships with governments, with presidents, with ministers. And I'm thinking, this isn't me. I know nobody. So there's no way that I made this happen. I felt like, God must be in the middle of it. But then why do we not have really enough money for me to have a good salary? And living in New York is expensive. But I prayed, and I felt like God was saying to keep going. And so I chose to do so with little or no pay for a lot of years, which is really hard to do in that city. Took my money out of retirement. And what ended up happening, though, is that I knew I had enough to survive, but I couldn't eat lunch and dinner.

And that went on for a long time. And people didn't know about it, but for me, I woke up every day knowing what my resources were. And I would think through which meal I felt like was going to be my meal. And so walking around daily, I was reminded that I didn't think I had enough. I was reminded that I was hungry. And this went on for so long that there was a part of me, too, that was just angry. I couldn't afford rent always. And so when I couldn't afford the rent, I would sublet my apartment, and I would stay at a friend's house and sleep on her floor in Harlem until I could save up enough money to have another few months in my own apartment. I was engaged, and it got broken off, and I was devastated. So here I was, really yearning to be a mother. And I had mothered a little girl that was not mine, but she was from the neighborhood when I did the gang work, and she felt like mine.

And this one season, she was taken away and brought back to her mother. And so I lost her. I lost this hope for a husband. I had no money. I was hungry. And so I was hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. That is not a good place to be, because I was hopeless. And so I remember, here I am yearning all these things. God, why can't you give me a forever home? Like, why can't I do love someone and have someone care for me? I also knew that the intention for the nonprofit was good. And so, God, why aren't you giving us crazy breakthrough? But what ended up happening is, in my anger, I started to isolate a little bit from God. And so I don't know if it was I couldn't pray or I wouldn't pray, but I didn't pray.

I stopped. I stopped reading scripture. It was hard to do it. And I think it's because I was just so angry that things were not working the way I thought they should. And the point of that, it leads me to this night when I'm in my apartment, and I had just had enough. You know that breaking point when you think, I can't do this one more day. And I remember that one night thinking, I get why some people come to the point where they don't want to wake up in the morning. It was that bad. And I laid on the bathroom floor, hysterical crying. At the end of everything, and remember finally having nowhere else to go, and I started praying. Some scripture came to mind, and I begged God to just intervene. And he did. He had been nowhere this whole time. It's just, he was, you can access the hope of God every second of every day, but I just wasn't accessing it. So I prayed, and the Holy Spirit fell, and I was able to have a peace that surpasses all understanding. I remember getting up, getting in bed, and sleeping the first solid night that I'd slept in a really long time. My mind wasn't racing. I wasn't fearful. I wasn't worried.

I woke up that next morning, and I wanted to listen to worship. I wanted to be in the Word, and I was. And I promise you, it was suddenly I was reminded of the anchor of God. And yet, nothing had changed. I am still single, broke, motherless, and the organization still had no money. And so nothing had changed, only I knew that God was real. He was enough. I knew he had done for me plenty in the past, and that if nothing else, I could get through 24 more hours and keep doing what I thought God was calling me to do. And so during that time, I remember really holding on to a worship song that I heard over and over and over and over again. If you haven't heard it, I would go home and listen to it.

It is by Cutlass, and it is called I'm Still Yours. And it says in the lyrics, If you washed away my vanity, if you took away my works, if all my world was swept away, would you be enough for me? Would my beating heart still sing? If I lost it all, would my hands stay lifted to the God who gives and takes away? And there was something in those words that gave me the reality and the reminder that I had access to true and certain hope. And so, again, we have access to that hope, but we have to do something to access it. And so I would ask you, do you know what kind of hope you have? Do you know if the hope that you have is centered in God? Do you know if he did take away the things you value the most? Your marriage, a child, your job, whatever it is that you really know is good in your life? If God took it, I wonder if you would still have hope. And so I would love to just say that that would be a question we should be asking ourselves. If you wonder what kind of hope you have, maybe think back this week on when is the last time you really did have something awful happen in your life? Because all of us have had something awful happen. And just think about how you responded and who you ran to. Did you run to scripture and God and community? Did you run to your job and worry and alcohol and whatever? And I think that will begin to be an indicator of where is your hope? And the good news is it doesn't matter where you ran. What really matters is where you're going to choose to run today and tomorrow when it happens. Because the one sure thing is all of us, no matter what, will face trials. But the closer that we are to God, the more hope that we have and the bigger anchor we have, therefore the bigger storms we can thrive through. And so all of us, I think, probably know some really hopeful people. People that you just love to be around. People who are kind of contagious in their joy. And when I was thinking today, the other day, about who do I know that embodies, I thought right away of Bev and Kai Adler. I feel like they have this true, deep joy, right? And Zach, sorry, and Zach.

This true, deep joy that is not dependent on circumstances, that is just dependent on God. It means that when things are going fantastic for them, they're filled with joy. Even when things are going hard, they still have that steadfastness. And that doesn't mean in that anchor that you don't experience pain. You don't experience all the emotions that come with loss and grief. But it does mean that you know that the God of the universe is bigger than your pain. Another person that I think about when I think about this kind of biblical hope is our country director in Mozambique. His name is Manuel Jaco Francisco. He is such, I wish he was here, he is such an incredible man of faith. He runs our work in that nation. If you don't know anything about Mozambique, it is one nation that has about 80% of its people living on less than $2 a day. That means the majority of the people don't have access to things like clean water and electricity and basic needs. If you also don't know, March of this year, the largest cyclone to ever hit the southern hemisphere destroyed the city of Betta in Mozambique.

If you saw it on the news, you saw the most devastating pictures of destruction. A community that had so little lost everything. 90% lost everything. And then two weeks later, they ended up having another cyclone in the north. Unbelievable. The news commentators were using these words, it is a storm of biblical proportions. Unbelievable. And so I sat in the home, the luxury of my own house in Carlsbad, and was angry at God because it felt like, what are you doing? There is no way that you can do that to this nation. We couldn't find our country director. We had just worked two years to build a school. The school opened. 30 days after the school opened, that's what it looked like. Completely destroyed. When I finally got in touch with my country director, his name, Manuel, I said to him, you know, how are you feeling? And he basically had said to me at that point, I was trying to give up. And what's the point? And he was like, he reminded me that the point is, God is bigger than this. God has always been faithful. God will remain faithful. And so here he is in the middle of devastation, reminding me, don't give up. Don't give up hope. He's continuing to remind me to stay on the path that God had a plan. And now, mind you, he didn't say this from the comfort of a hotel room in Mozambique, or even from his own home. He had just lost his home. He was in transitional housing.

He had enough money to leave the city. Most everyone who was capable and able to leave that city left when they could. Not Jack. He stayed there because he said he knew that that's where the need was, and that that's where God called him, that he would be a blessing to those who needed him, and he stayed. In the staying, the transitional housing got broken into, and he got brutally stabbed. In the head, and the arms and legs, brutally stabbed. At one point, he's talking to me on FaceTime from his hospital bed.

Not even a great hospital, because keep in mind, there's no electricity. There's no, so it's a hospital bed, but there's like no, the roof is blown off. And from there, I say to him, Jack, can we relocate you to the city where you can be safe? And there's plenty of need there. And he says, no, Miss Christina, this is why we will stay here and continue our work, because it is poverty and desperation that causes these young people to turn to drugs and crime, and we will be here to change that reality. And now Jack didn't speak those words because he thinks he's great. He spoke those words because he spoke from an anchoring God that said, God is big enough. God will change this reality, and that God is enough for him to stay, and stay he did. And the next picture you will see is school reopened, and this is a picture of some of the kids, and they're doing really well. Now, mind you, we haven't built the whole school still, but Jack said, who cares? Let's not wait for rebuild. Let's just show up. So right after the devastation, he got the whole community together. We got some donors, and many of you in this church have been part of those donors. And we were able to bring clean water to 1,500 people through that community. So every day, they could at least show up in chairs outside of a devastated building with a teacher who taught, and they continue to learn. And as we continue to build the school for however long it takes till that school is built, they will continue to come every day, and Jack will continue to show them that there is hope beyond what our circumstances say. I think knowing Jack, and knowing some of these gang members that I've known, or just all the work that I've been able to do since I've become a Christian, I have seen Scripture come alive. When I have no thing, nothing to know if God can speak to me through Scripture. So Romans 5, 3 to 5, has been life for me through this devastating cyclone. It says, we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has given it to us. And so I understand that in this room, there are people who are really suffering. And I'm not saying that Jack's suffering is worse than your suffering, or my suffering. All suffering is hard. So whatever we are experiencing, I believe, though, that we can hold true to the promises of God, that that suffering will be for the glory of God, and for we will gain perseverance, character, character, hope. And so there are times where you do what you can. You come to church, show up, do what you can, and it's still not enough. And so I would like to suggest that sometimes we need community. If you're not in a small group, I know that there's a table out there that's signing people up. I really suggest you get involved in a small group.

Surround yourself with men and women who love God and who will love you, because we need each other in community. And Exodus 17, 11, 12 says, as long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning. But whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. When Moses' hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up, one on one, one side, one on the other, so that his hands remained steady till sunset. And the commentary, one of them said, left to himself, Moses had become exhausted and mentally and physically.

And when his hands dropped, he ceased to pray. Sustained physically by his two companions, his mind was recovered, and he was able to renew its supplications to continue. The result was victory. Now, mind you, Aaron and Hur did not provide hope for Moses. No one else can give you hope except for the God of the universe that you can find through Scripture. However, Aaron and Hur did give Moses what he needed to be restored to then find his hope in God. And so, I have experienced that kind of community.

I have Aaron's and Hur's getting in my life when I felt like I couldn't do it anymore. I can tell you, when I came to this church, I was in a season where I thought, God, am I supposed to give up? Am I supposed to stop doing the charity? Am I supposed to shut it down and go get a real job? What am I supposed to do? I showed up here, and people I did not know, I knew Adam a little bit, I knew Eileen, but no one else. And I get here, and people brought me in to pray for me, invited me to their house.

They cared about me. They joined a prayer team who was committed to pray for me every week. And then, I met Friendly, and I didn't even know her very well. And she comes up to me, and she's like, I want you to know I'm praying for you every day. And that idea of, wait, every day? She's like, I'm praying for you every day. And she showed me a stack of index cards. She pointed out two. One of them, she said, I am praying that God is going to bring you a husband. And I am praying that God is going to bring you $500,000 for the organization. Now, mind you, I thought, that is really nice of her. That is absolutely nice and absolutely never going to happen. But I was like, oh, thanks. And, but you know what? Thank God that he knows there are people out there who can believe for us when we don't believe in ourselves. When we think, I can't do it one more day. Friendly didn't. She prayed, and she prayed, and she prayed. And mind you, people have been praying forever, and it didn't seem to work. But at some point, I was given this sense of hope because Friendly had hope for me, and this church had hope for me. And Adam reminded me earlier in the message that there was truly a connection that came out of this church that led to us having another year of funding to keep going. So the church, the body of Christ showed up in a really beautiful way.

I'd also like to say that yesterday was my second wedding anniversary. I actually did, after 48 years of not being married, I did meet a really godly man and loved being married. And he has two 12-year-old twins that I adore that is a gift to get to mother, the times that I get to mother. And we have raised that money and more. God has opened it up so that we can be in eight countries. We're partnering with ministries of education and ministries of health. We are, God is moving in a really, really beautiful way. And so if you're in this congregation, and you've prayed for us, and you have just stood by us, we needed it because it is, we're only as good, I think, as the entire community. And so I am really grateful for this community. And yet, life happens. So the last two years have been the best years of my life. And you start thinking, I could get used to this. This is really nice. I will say, I am not hungry ever. It is really fun. And yet, June 20th, I ended up experiencing the greatest loss. My sister unexpectedly passed away. And I'd lost my mother and my father and other siblings. But this might sound weird, but she was my adult. Like, she was the one person in my life that was looking out for me. And so it was really hard to find hope again, and just missing her. And so this is where my errand and hers showed up again, whether it's the little boys who bring me flowers and chocolate, or whether it is a woman who called me one day to pray for me from New York. And we pray. And I say to her, I can't hear from God right now. I'm just sad. And she was like, I'm going to pray that you hear from God. And so I woke up the next morning, which was last week, to an email from her. And in it, she had been on her knees before God, praying for me. And God gave her a vision for reminding me of his faithfulness, reminding me of the mountains he'd moved, reminding me of his goodness. And so she also said, hey, listen to this song. And the song is actually the song that the worship team is going to come up and sing. I'd heard this song before. It is called Do It Again. But it didn't mean the same thing to me as it did a few days ago, when I was just feeling a little bit hopeless again, and sad.

And the words resonated, because God is big. And it reminded me that he did move mountains in my life before. He will move them again. He is bigger than my grief. And he is really the anchor that we need. And so as we worship, let us enter into these words, and may they touch our hearts and give us courage. Amen. So before we go, just got a couple things. One in Ezekiel, it says, Lord says to Ezekiel, I will make your forehead like flint. Harden your forehead, because there's stuff ahead. And Christine, he's done that for you. It's such a powerful story. You didn't even tell him that you ran for city council because you wanted to change it in one in San Diego. You adopted a daughter out of the ghetto as a single woman. Total bad day. Sorry, but just so, so challenging. I want to speak to our youth group that's here right now. Because the Lord's just been hammering me all day. I hate crying. Actually, I don't hate crying. I'm a bit of a crier. My daughters know that. But this core of kids that are here, Nelson girls especially, and Jordan and Chloe, our resident, from afar, and Lily and you guys, God's brought you together for a reason. You're such a powerful group of kids. We're so proud of you. There's a verse where the king, and I'm not the king, but the king says, like, up to half my kingdom. Like, come up with an idea. You guys have a small season where you're all together, and you know it. My daughter talks about it all the time. You have a small season, and then you move on. But come up with an idea. We'll support it.

I can't promise half the kingdom, but I want you. What do you want? What do you guys want? You want Africa? You want orphans? Mason, I'm so proud of you, dude. You thought three years before you got baptized, bro. It was not spur of the moment. It was awesome. I just want to say, if you guys go for it, you work with Harry, you work with your leaders, we're going to support it. Come up with a big idea. You want to go anywhere in the world? We'll support it. I know this congregation. We'll support it. You're the future. I love you guys, and so bless y'all that are here, and I just had that, so there's that, and I'm going to ask Christine to come up and bless you because some of you God has spoken to and said, hey, man, you need a course correction.

It was so encouraging today. I feel like we're on the right track here, but we just got to get more. I challenged the elders earlier, and Eden that was here in the finance committee. We got to make sure that we're not just church building. We're changing the world in really powerful ways. We're so proud of you and our missionaries, and so Christine, come up and bless us, and then we're going to send you out to a picnic. Come bless us. You got a crier here, sorry. Thank you, and so I'm going to close with this scripture from Romans. It is Romans 15, 13, and let this be our prayer for this week.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, be with us this week. May we live courageously. May we trust you deeply. In Jesus' name, amen.