God's Strategies for Grief & Transition

Thank you guys for having me. Let's pray really quick. Lord Jesus, consist your anointing in this place today, Lord, that you want to do something in our hearts, in our minds, in our spirits, that you desire to speak to us today in a way that only you can. So, Lord, are you my vessel to you? Not that you would speak like you spoke at 9, but that you would do something different, that every single heart that's here that will be yielded to your voice, to your leadership.

So what you desire to speak to us today, in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. High five. Somebody telling me you look good today.

You look like leftover Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie. Sweet potato pie. Amen. I think I still smell some on your clothes. Amen.

Hey, good to see you guys. Can y' all give it up for our pastors, Pastor J and Melanie Stewart, the incredible staff of the Refuge. So much of my family still here, some of my closest friends. One of them happens to be an Eagles fan. And that means go Cowboys.

Amen. Oh, y' all don't love Jesus. Y' all don't love Jesus. I got one. Just one in the back.

Amen. Hey, listen, I'm so excited to be here. And Shonda and I, she would. Would have been here today, but she got called in the kids ministry today, so her assignment is there. But we're so excited about what God is doing in the Refuge church, which is our home church.

We were a part of this church for over a decade. They're still my pastors, and they cannot get rid of me at all. So I'm so grateful for that. And I love this house. I love this incredible church.

This church saved my life.

You know, when you find good pastors, great pastors are hard to come by. They walked with me some of my darkest seasons of my life and really walked me to wholeness. It's amazing that people can see your potential when you become the fruit that they want to eat from. But very few people can see you and identify you in seed form, and my pastors were able to do that when I was just a seed and watered me. Oh, I got so many rebukes, man, you wouldn't believe it.

But I'm so grateful that we have good pastors and good shepherds. So give it up for them one more time.

You guys are taking notes on your app. The. The notes are in the app, and if you guys are journeying with us, and maybe this is my first time ever greeting you guys. We launched the church about two years ago, and God's been doing incredible things through Promise City Church, and we're so grateful for the impact that we've seen in our city. And if I'm honest, man, we're experiencing revival in that city.

And I'm so grateful for our pastors releasing us and sending us out to be able to play at their church. And so I want to preach a message of the day entitled God's Strategies for Overcoming Grief and Transition. I want to tell you something really quick, that grief is universal. No one escapes it on their journey. In fact, when we look into scripture, we see essential lessons as even great leaders face profound loss and sorrow.

And through their stories, we can learn how to navigate and go through grief. I want us to stand. We're going to read 1st Samuel, chapter 16, if you guys have your Bibles. If not, it's on screen. And I want to read a few passages of scripture before we make our declaration this morning.

First Samuel 16, verse one says, the Lord said to Samuel, how long will you mourn for Saul since I rejected him as king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and be on your way singing you to Jesse of Bethlehem. I've chosen one of his sons to be king. But Samuel said, how can I go? Saul hears about it.

He will kill me. Before we get into Samuel's story, can we make this declaration that we make here every week? I will hide this word in my heart that I might not sin against God. This word is life to my body, health to my bones. I will be a doer of the Word and not a hearer only.

And I'm confident in this that he who has begun a good work in me will complete it. In Jesus name, Amen. You can be seated if you can.

Grief is a very natural part of life. Grief involves the physical, spiritual, relational aspects of losses. Key lessons from grief can often include learning to accept loss, seeking support, and trusting God through the pain. The Help's word study gives the definition of mourning. It comes from a word, pantheo, which means properly grieve over a death, to grieve over a personal hope, relationship that dies, et cetera, something that I love about it.

It also means comes to a divine closure. There are some seasons in our lives as we're transitioning that God just calls to a divine closure. There are some periods in our lives that some of us are grateful that came to an end. For those of you who have not throwing away those leftover turkey, dressing and stuffing, today's the last day. Amen.

I'm the exit. Okay, Queen Elizabeth II says this, that grief is the price that we pay for love. Grief is the price that we pay for love. In fact, in 2021, when I was in one of the greatest seasons of transition in my life, I went and spent some time speaking with this counselor. In fact, I sat on a chair, sat down, and I began to.

She asked me questions about what I was feeling and how I was feeling and all the things. And then she analyzed my words and told me that I was grieving. And I looked at her like she was crazy because I hadn't lost anything. Nobody had died yet in my life. Now I would come upon a season that there would be great loss in that up and coming year, 2022, the significant losses that my wife and ourselves would lose.

But in 2021, I hadn't lost anything of great value as of that. But sometimes our bodies can be grieving transitions. We can feel transitions before we actually walk into them. Maybe that's not your story. Maybe you've been working a career for 25 years and God has called you off of your job.

Maybe you've been in a marriage that came to an end. Maybe you lost a child, miscarried a baby. Maybe you've been in the season of transition to move into a different state. Or you just move from a different state to being in this location that you're in right now, and you're having trouble adjusting to what you feel. And you don't have language to meet your emotions or your fears or everything that comes along with it.

And maybe you didn't recognize that you were in a season of grief. And transition and loss can come to us in many forms. It could be the end of friendships, it could be job transitions, it could be moving into a new community. And these losses can shape us and even influence our future. In Samuel's experience of grief, there are three core perspectives that emerge that we'll explore today.

Number one, we're gonna examine Samuel's process of grief. Second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about how grief can impact our reality. And. And lastly, we're gonna talk about how God's perspective of Samuel's grief, that God also has a revelation concerning our grief. So we're gonna examine Samuel's process of grief, how grief impacts our reality, and how God has a unique perspective of grief, not only in Samuel's life, but in our lives as well.

Samuel has his own process of grief. In 1st Samuel 16, verse number one, it says, the Lord said to Samuel, how. How long will you mourn for Saul? Since I rejected him as king over Israel. He says, fill your horn with oil and be on your way.

I'm sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem. I've chosen one of his sons to be king. But Samuel says. He says this. How will I go?

Saul hears about it. He will kill me. God asks Samuel a question. How long will you mourn for Saul? He asked him a question.

Not. At first glance, it seems extremely invasive. How long will you grieve from the loss of a loved one? How long should you grieve? Which means.

It means that maybe grief should have an ending period. Maybe grief should have a closure. How long should I grieve over the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, the ending of a friendship, the moving to a place, the transition in ministry or in life? Should grief have an ending? Should there be a period of closure that God invites us into?

He wasn't being insensitive. In fact, God wasn't trying to be invasive. God is not being insensitive to Samuel's grief. But there's something that God requires Samuel to deal with in his grief. And most of us have not given ourselves permission to grieve.

Cause we don't like how grief makes us feel. I'll never forget the worst thing that I did as a husband. I've done a lot of worse things. But this was probably by far, Mother's Day. My wife's first Mother's Day without her mom.

And I thought it would be a great idea to get all the kids together and let's go in the room and get her out of the bed for Mother's Day. It's the first Mother's Day without a mom. I was like, man, I'm doing a great job. Hey, man, come on, let's eat together. The kids are coming up.

And she's like, I don't want to get up. I'm like, come on, man, get up. He's like, I don't want to get up. And I went and talked to somebody like, hey, if the person that normally never wants to lay in the bed desires to lay in the bed, let them. Okay, okay.

Y' all don't get the answer. Oh, God, I missed that one. I didn't get the memo. Because her body was grieving in a way that it wasn't in the form of tears. It wasn't even in the form of words.

It was her giving herself permission to lay in her grief for a minute, to give herself permission to feel it. And so many times in our Lives we've been taught, hey, just coach yourself up. Just keep pushing through it. What happens when you push to the point of breaking and nobody sees it? She could be breaking on the inside, internally.

And nobody says, hey, just lay in the bed today. You know, take a day off. Ooh. Culture says, keep going and stay busy. But you have to give yourself permission to grieve.

Can I ask yourself the question? When is the last time that you've given yourself permission to grieve the ending of something so that God can speak into your next? Grief does require us to process the emotion and not just paralyze the event. The funeral was the event. The death, the instancy of the death was the event.

But the emotion that comes typically does not come in the moment. And most of us have moved past the funeral, but we've never grieved the death. We've never grieved the loss. And some of it feels just like it happened on Yesterday. That's how fresh it is because the event paralyzed you and kept you from leaning into the moment of what you feel.

You didn't just lose a grandmother. You lost memories, you lost moments. You lost things that you could never get back again. You got things that you can never put in place again in your life. And some of us are challenged because no one has ever given us the permission to say, it's okay not to be okay.

It's okay not to be okay. Samuel's processing not just the loss of Saul as a king, but also the possibility of Israel's future. Samuel doesn't know God's plan. He's still processing his pain. It's difficult to process anything concerning God's plan for our lives when we're in pain.

When you're in pain, you can't grieve. You don't give yourself permission to grieve because of the feeling of immense pain that you feel in the moment. But there are two distinct things that Samuel is processing while he's grieving. Number one, there's the prophetic aspect of his relationship, which is what God says. God has been speaking to Samuel about the future of Israel and Saul's future as the king.

And then there is the relational aspect of his grief. It's what he feels. So God has not only given us permission to grieve what he has said about Israel, it is God's first opportunity to use Samuel in a profound way. He is the first to ever do this. There's never been a king in Israel before until Samuel anoints Saul, and now he is upset because what he feels now is a feeling of rejection and hurt and pain.

He's disappointed because the thing that he has anointed operates in the spirit of disobedience. Have you ever did something, anointed something, touched something, and it failed and it made you who feel like a failure? You showed up for the marriage, but your partner didn't. You showed up for the things on your job and for people in their lives. And you feel like the failure and you feel disappointed because you didn't give enough, but you gave all you had.

How does it make you feel when nobody's processing the emotions, the feelings the same way that you are. You don't have language to express what you feel. In the prophetic aspect of their relationship, Saul is Israel's first king, not God's first choice, but God allows it, which is the permissive will of God. It's not God's desire, but God allows it. And there are some things that you've experienced in your life that were not exactly in God's plan, but God allowed it.

Remember that ex that you got away from in high school? Aren't you glad when you look on Facebook that God didn't allow you to? You don't have to say anything right now, but aren't you glad that God lets you get away from something? Let's talk about love. Amen.

But there's some things that you did not experience, you experienced and that were not in God's plan, but God allowed them. God tells the people in 1st Samuel 8 what type of king that Saul would be. He says he's going to take everything from them. In 1st Samuel chapter 8, he tells them all of the things that he was going to take. He says he's going to take your women and your children.

He's going to take all of your possessions. He's going to take it. He's going to strip the dignity. Because he's not a man after God's own heart. He's a man that desires possessions and notoriety.

He looks good on the outside, but on the inside he's shallow. How many of us are attracted to things that look great on the inside, but when we get it, it doesn't hold the value that we thought it would hold. You got the promotion, but you're working more hours than you ever dreamed that you would. You're doing the things that you but you still feel empty on the inside. You married the person of your dreams, but you still feel hopeless.

Same time because you're grieving the transition, the Ending of something. Now Samuel is entrusted by God to help mentor Saul. And Saul comes from the tribe of Benjamin, which was considered one of the weakest and smallest tribes of Israel. And Saul is discovered by Samuel through loss. His father lost his donkeys.

In 1st Samuel 9. 3, Saul's father kissed at one of his servants to go Saul to help locate his donkeys. In the process of his father was losing his donkeys. Saul discovers his calling. Not every loss is a loss.

Some things God is allowing you to go through so that you can find the thing that God has purposed you for. How many know some of those things? If a door didn't close in your face, you wouldn't have found your purpose. If somebody hadn't walked away from you, you would have never found the destiny that God has come on has in store for you. Some things are not a loss, they are an opportunity.

You ought to bless God for an opportunity wrapped up in loss, in disguise and failure, which is God's opportunity to take you to something next in your life. God is anointing you for something. And in verse 15 in chapter number nine, God reveals to Samuel to anoint Saul as king in 1st Samuel 9. Now, the day before Saul came, the Lord had revealed this to Samuel. About this time tomorrow, he says, I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin, anoint him ruler over my people Israel.

He would deliver them from the hand of the Philistines. I've looked on my people, for their cry has reached me. And when Samuel caught sight of Saul, the Lord said to him, this is the man that I spoke to you about. This is the one who will govern my people. Verse number 18.

Saul approaches Samuel in the gateway and asks him. He says, would you please tell me where the seer's house is? God is giving him language to Saul's future. He's setting him up. And he is prophetically preparing Saul for his destiny as the future king of Israel.

He says, I'm the seer. Samuel replied, go up ahead of me to the high place, for today you are to eat with me. And in the morning I will send you on your way and tell you all that is in your heart. As for the donkeys you lost three days ago, don't worry about them. They have been found.

And to whom is all the desire of Israel turn, if not to you and your whole family line? God was changing Saul's future through this moment. First Samuel, chapter 10. After that you will go to Gibeah, God, where there's a Philistine of Outposts. As you approach the town, you will meet a procession of prophets coming down from the high place with liars.

God is prophetically prophesying over Saul's future, getting him prepared for for this. But even the greatest prophecy cannot outweigh rebellion.

God can have a profound plan for your life, and we can still choose to operate in the spirit of rebellion. So now Spirit of God comes powerfully upon him and says, you will prophesy with them and you will be one who is changed into a different person. Saul has encounters with God. He has this massive encounter with the presence of God. And he sees God.

He says, once these signs are fulfilled in verse number seven, do whatever your hands find you to do, for God is with you. Verse number eight, go down ahead of me in Gilgal, and I will surely come down to you. A sacrifice, burnt offerings and fellowship offerings. But you must wait seven days until I come and tell you what you are to do. There were instructions that were connected to Saul's development because Samuel was invested in the process of Saul's becoming.

Some of you are not just grieving a loss. You are grieving the investment of what you lost. Because time is currency. And time is the one thing that you can never get back. And some of the hardest part is not what you lost, who you lost, or even how you lost it.

It's what you gave away. Your investment you can't get back. People are currency, people are in investment. And God is allowing Samuel to take time to develop. This boy who saw himself in the baggage claims as nothing becomes the future of Israel.

And now all of a sudden, it feels like a wasted investment. Have you ever showed up to something that you've given everything to and it does not give back what you poured into it? Keep showing up, keep being consistent, you keep being faithful. And it seems like the seeds of unfaithfulness is what you receive in return. Grief hits you differently when you've invested and given a part of yourself in someone's development.

When you've given your heart and your soul to helping people become who God says that they are, it doesn't mean that you want anything in return, but you want them to fulfill the prophetic destiny that God sees over their life. It's invested in the college student on the campus, or invested in a grandkid in your family, or invested in somebody in your job. When you don't see the results of your investment, it makes you feel at fault. And you begin to ask the question, did I give enough?

What is it that I did not Do? Did I call enough? Did I check on them enough? Did I pray enough? I gave everything that I have.

And it does not matter because obedience is our decision.

It doesn't matter about your investment. And some of you have been beating yourself up. What could I have done? Can I tell you something? There's nothing that you could have done differently than what God told you to do.

So Samuel developed this connection heart for Saul, Israel's first king. And Samuel loved Israel even more than he loved Saul. He loved Israel because Israel was God's prosperous possession and anything that he was willing to do was to sacrifice. I will invest in Saul because I know how much God loves Israel and he still loves Israel today. You don't just love a loved one.

You don't just grieve over the loss of a marriage or a career or a child. I'll never forget when my daughter Rudy got married. I love Joe. Joe's my son in law. He's right here.

I mean, but I didn't like Jill when he was marrying my daughter. I mean, you know, I am grieving the aspect that even though I'm giving her to a man who is capable of taking care of her future, our relationship changes in the way that I've had her up until the day he met her. I am grieving the aspect that I have to give my prized possession away. And even though I know she's in good hands, it doesn't stop the fact that I am grieving the transition. Some of us are grieving transitions because we're at the stage of life that we're becoming empty nesters.

And now we don't know what to do with our time. So God is saying, number two, how does grief impact our reality? Because when God finds Samuel in 1st Samuel 16, he finds him sitting in his reality. He doesn't just lose a mentor, Israel loses a king. And because grief sometimes blinds our view, we don't see what God has in store for us next.

How many of us have been sitting there like God? I've been praying, but I can't really see because I'm bitter. I can't really see what you desire to do for me because I'm living in resentment.

I'm crushed by a fence. And I can't really see nor hear what you desire to do in my life because I've been blinded by grief, paralyzed by fear of what's next. And Saul, Saul is the prized possession of Israel at this time. And Samuel's like, but God, did I miss it? Have you ever asked yourself the question did I miss you, God, that I missed my assignment?

What else could I have done in this situation? He doesn't just lose this mentee. He loses what he invested in. And he can't see past his pain to see God's future plans. Have you ever been so deep in grief that you don't care about the future?

Have you ever had a loss impact you so profoundly? Profoundly that it made you question God? I know, I know that's not everybody's story because maybe you hadn't lost anything significant enough to make you sit in and say, God, what is going on? But I've lost some things that, that. That I'm still recovering from because it was so unexpected and aloft.

Samuel's grieving the process of crowning Saul King Samuel is grieving what is not even his fault. Samuel also shared God's grief for Saul, feeling the Lord's sorrow, because a part of his prophetic grace was to feel what God felt concerning Saul. That's what he does. He's mourning Saul deeply because of what he meant and anointed. He's mourning his repeated disobedience, especially with the Amalekites, when Saul didn't do all that God told him to do.

He's mourning someone that knew God's commands but disobeyed God's commandments.

He's mourning somebody that was chosen by God, initially appeared to be well suited for leadership, but later pride and fear and disobedience led to disappointment. And now Samuel and all of Israel is grieving.

And now he's sharing the same grief of how God feels.

But God has a perspective of Samuel's grief. The worship team is coming out first. Samuel 16, verse one, says the Lord said to Samuel, he asked him a question. He says, how long will you mourn for Saul? Since I rejected him as king over Israel.

He says, fill your horn with oil and be on your way. I'm sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem. I've chosen one of his sons to be king. But Samuel asks the question. He says, how can I go?

Saul hears about it. He'll kill me. God wasn't being insensitive to Samuel's grief. God wasn't being insensitive. He was being intentional.

And sometimes when it feels personal, it feels like God is being insensitive because he doesn't care about our feelings. And it's not really that he doesn't care about our feelings. He actually understands our feelings, but he's actually trying to get us to the next place that God has in store for us. And sometimes because you're paralyzed, you stop moving in purpose. Some of us haven't moved from the event of the loss of what we lost.

And some of us don't even feel like we can get up again and feel qualified to do what God has qualified us to do because of what we lost. I was sharing this story earlier in the first service that when my grandmother died, it changed the way that I showed up for people. Because grief changes the way that you open up your heart for other people. Can I be honest? I started fearing that every single time somebody called me late at night that they were calling me to tell me that somebody had died.

I started when I couldn't get my kids on the phone and I would call them more than twice and they wouldn't pick up. In the back of my mind, even though it wasn't anything wrong, there was something in my mind that questioned, are they okay? Because grief changes how you show up for people in the future.

Can I be honest? You don't know what you need until you experience it. You don't know what you need until somebody tells you and shows you something different. And now we're here in Jewish culture, most Shiva observances Judaism lasted a maximum of seven days. And in 1st Samuel 15, the Lord rejects Saul as king.

He tells him something powerful. The word of the Lord came to Samuel says, I regret that I made Saul king because he's turned away from me and has not carry out my instructions. How and why are you still grieving? What God regret He made Think about that. There's some things that God says, I'm done.

I'm over it. No amount of prayer or sacrifices is gonna change my mind about the decision that I made about my future. I've given him multiple chances, Saul, but he still disobeyed me. And now I'm at my wits end. What happens when God is at his wits end and you're still holding on?

What happens when God is done with it, over it, through with it? Does it mean that he doesn't care about Saul? Or does he care about Israel more than Saul? And my question is, are we holding on to people more than we're holding on to God?

It is possible to grieve the people that we lost, but it's dangerous when we begin to grieve the Holy Spirit.

And God is saying, samuel said to him, I will now go back with you. Verse 26. He says, you have rejected the word of the Lord. Can I be honest? It's not about the Church.

It's not about how nice you've been or how nice you were. It's about Saul's rejection of the Lord's commandment. There's something that God is maybe telling you to do in your life and you hadn't done it. There's something that God maybe is trying to get you through to your next. And you.

You keep holding on to your past.

You are spiraling in your grief. God says, how can I anoint you for your future if you keep holding on to your past?

Verse number 27. Samuel turned to leave. Saul caught Ahold, the hymn of Israel, and he tore it. Samuel said to him, the Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to one of your neighbors. Here's the line to one better than you.

He who is the glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind, for he is not a human being that he should change his mouth. To tear a garment in Jewish culture meant a divorce. That very act symbolized the kingdom being torn away from Saul and not only from Saul. It will be torn away from any of his future lineage that nobody else in the house of Saul would be able to reclaim the kingdom. What if I told you your disobedience doesn't just affect one generation, it can impact all generations.

You have to ask yourself the question, is it worth it? Is it worth what you're willing to give up for your future? Is it worth not fully obeying what God has told you to do? Not doing the thing that God is calling you to do for one bad decision can impact legacy. There are two types of grievous that we see in scripture.

It's the intuitive griever, which is Samuel. It's the emotional worker, the feeler, which is what Samuel feels. He feels his emotion. He's working through his feelings. And then there's the instrumental griever, which is the thinker.

It's the cognitive. It's the person that thinks through their mind. Not every one of us grieves the same way. We, some of us are processors. We process it in our mind before we ever allow ourselves to feel it in our heart.

But here's the thing. When God made up his mind, there was no change in his mind.

Oh, I hear the Holy Spirit say, what are you trying to convince God to change his mind about when he's already made up his mind 1st Samuel 15:29. He who is the glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind, for he is not a human being that he should change his Mind. And here's the reason why. Because God grieved at first. The loss of the job, the loss of the marriage, the loss of the child.

God is not asking you to go through anything that he hadn't already grieved first. Because God grieved it first. God knew it first. God felt it first. He knew that when they cried out to have Saul as their king, he knew it would be bad for Israel.

But because of the permissive will, he allows it even when he knows it wasn't best for them.

So now I am not surprised at your loss, even though the loss is deeply impacting you. Because I knew the nature of the heart before the sin ever showed up.

God is challenging us in our own heart.

Doesn't mean that Saul was a bad person. No, it means that Saul made a bad decision.

Bad decisions don't make us bad people. But it can change God's perspective concerning our lives.

Before you've ever had the loss, a divorce, the disappointment, God grieved it first.

I was writing this message and God woke me up in the middle of the night. And can I be honest? I was stuck in a season of grief. I was paralyzed by it. I was still functioning, still affected.

But I knew I had been deeply impacted by grief. And the Holy Spirit came to me in the middle of the night and when woke me up and he says, how long will you mourn for Saul?

Like Pastor Derek, I hadn't lost anything. Maybe you gave it up, hope on the dream.

Maybe you're in a season of transition. You feel God is ushering to do something different. But you're still stuck in the place that God has you in. And you don't want to be a disappointment and a failure. So you're staying out of commitment and loyalty.

When God is calling you to do something different and because you don't want to disobey, man, you are grieving the Holy Spirit by staying in a place that God is calling you to exit. Maybe it's you. It was the hardest thing in my life to have to go tell my pastor, hey, I think God is calling me to plant a church because the last thing I wanted him to do is to make him feel like what God gave him wasn't good enough. But I had to also reconcile in my heart that what God was speaking to me, the burden of what I felt was stronger. And I loved him as a father.

He's still a father. One of the greatest voices in my life, one of the greatest example of godly men that I've ever Witnessed in my life is J. Stewart. But what I'm telling you is I could not prioritize his voice over the voice of God.

I had to lean into what God was saying to me concerning my future. And because of that, yes, hundreds of souls have come to Jesus Christ. Hundreds of souls. 676 people have given their lives to Christ in less than two years.

It is, but it did not come without grief. It didn't come without pain.

Here's what I feel in the room today, and I'm almost done. There's somebody in the room today. You've been grieving a loss.

You've been grieving a transition. And the reason that God is asking the question wasn't because he was trying to be insensitive. He was permitting Samuel to stop grieving. Today is the day that your season of grief comes to an end. So you can anoint what God is calling you to anoint for what's next.

Hey, listen, I sit here today and we want to open up the altars for somebody to come that just says pastor Derek. The holidays are hard for me. This season has been incredibly hard for me. And I need somebody to pray with me. I need somebody to touch and agree with me.

The elders are here, the deacons are here, and we want to pray for you. But I want to pray for you collectively for someone who has lost more people than I can imagine. I see tears, running, grabbing somebody with an arm. If there's somebody close to you that you can sense, can you just put your arm around them? Just somebody that you see here.

I want to pray for you. One of the most impactful deaths that I ever faced in my life was the loss of my grandmother.

It felt like the best word to describe it was that somebody cut my chest open and I had open heart surgery. I never felt anything of that magnitude before in my life. I was no heartbroken. And it wasn't that I did anything wrong. I felt like the exit was amazing.

Spent time with her. I was there to the last moment. I rolled her in the hospice. I'll never forget the day. And I asked God to do me one thing.

I said, hey, God, I can do everything, but I cannot watch her take her last breath. I said, I can't do it. I said, I'll do anything else she asked me to do. The one thing I can't do is I cannot watch her take last break. I was still on staff at the Refuge.

We had a campus. Our campus was in Greensboro. I just made up an excuse to run up to Greensboro to drop something off. I pulled back in the driveway of my house and my phone rings and it said, she's gone. And I thought that the moment of the event would be.

Man.

The moment of the event was the catalyst for the next two years that I would have to process in my mind. Life without something. Some of you right now are processing life without the child. You're still grieving the memory of the baby that you didn't get a chance to hold or the house that you were preparing to buy, the marriage that you never saw coming to an end. You never saw your life ending up this way.

You never prayed for this. You prayed that people. You thought that people would be with you until the end, and now they're not. And you're grieving. For every head in here, we want to pray.

Bow your heads, Lord Jesus.

Hallelujah. Thank you, Jesus.

Lord, I pray for every single individual in this place, that someone's heart who would be open, somebody's heart that's been shattered by the news of the loss, the fear of the unknown. I pray that you would heal them today. Pray for every person that has a shattered dream or something that they never saw coming, transition that they feel in their hearts. They feel a call to a new season, but they don't exactly know what that new season is. They sense you doing something new, but they still been attached to the old thing.

God, I pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to them with clarity, that they wouldn't move ahead of your timing, that they would only move in the step of your wisdom. Because the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord. So, Father, we pray that we don't get ahead of your timing, that we don't get ahead of your way. Lord, if there's any seas of bitterness or resentment inside of this church today, anybody that's holding on to something that they need to forgive or let go. Pain of the moment, pain of the failure, pain of the disappointment.

Father, we pray that you would heal every single heart, that your holy spirit would come in this place today and search us out. God, heal us, Lord. Cleanse us, Lord. And we pray that healing will hit this house. In Jesus name we pray.

Amen. Grieving the loss doesn't mean that you forget. Just frees you so that you can do what God has in store for you next. I love you guys. Have an amazing rest of your Sunday.