Hey, this is Stephen Fertake. I'm the pastor of Elevation Church and this is our

podcast. I wanted to thank you for joining us today. Hope this inspires you.

Hope it builds your faith. Hope it gives you perspective to see God is moving in your life,

enjoy the message. Thank you so much. Please sit down.

I have a couple of confessions to make before we dive into God's word.

I love elevation.

I love this house. I really really love Pastor Stephen,

Pastor Holly. As a matter of fact, Holly, I had a message that was rhymed in everything prepared and then I've been doing

holly is grateful for eight and the other day I just got wrecked by

thinking of what I'm grateful for and I realized one of the one of my eighths is grief.

And I thought, what a weird thing to be grateful for grief.

And I promise I have not been smoking anything medicinal.

I know that sounds so counterintuitive

when we come from this great time of worship

to then just kind of dive into grief.

But I realized grief for me, and I'm in another season of grief. I lost somebody

I love very much a month ago yesterday. And I'm just in that

place of I trust in God and he answered but he took a wild answer

and yeah sometimes there's that gap between I trust and God and then you're waiting on an answer, waiting on answer, waiting on answer.

C.S. Lewis says sometimes we don't get the answer that we're so desperate for. We get more of a no answer.

He said but it's not uncompassionate, it's as if God is saying, peace, child, you

don't understand this because we see through the lens you know kind of blurry and so it's

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