With The Perrys - Grieving with God with Davey Blackburn

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

Grief is hard to describe but when you’re in it, you know it. It’s something everybody will have to endure at some point in time so how can we endure it “well,” if that’s even a thing? We’re  joined by Davey Blackburn, a man who knows what grief is and how God is faithful to show up in  it.   To learn more about Davy’s ministry, go to www.nothingiswasted.com. Subscribe to the Perrys' newsletter: https://withtheperrys.myflodesk.com/zhfus4jx1s Join Preston's discipleship community for men: https://www.patreon.com/PrestonPerry/membership To support the work of the Perrys, donate via PayPal: https://paypal.me/withtheperrys Shop BOLD Apparel: boldapparel.shop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Saints and Ains. How art thou? What's good with y'all? How y'all doing? How are you today? I'm doing good. I just got some food in my system. You did. Feeling energetic. Like my little shimmy, energetic. This man ate a cabin salad.

And I'm he excited. Well, that's good. I was hungry, man. No, I was starving. You know how were you hungry and your stomach sound like a dinosaur? My stomach was literally called. Can't relate to that. Can't relate to that.

I was a whole Tyrannosaurus Rex the last podcast. Can't relate. to that at all, but I do know what it sounds like as a human to be hungry. I was a philosopher-ripped. Wow. Just in case y'all did know. A spitting di Lopidon. I feel like we said this before that you know all the names of dinosaurs species.

Dinosaurs are very interesting. Okay, name ten of them. Go ahead. Tyrannosaurs, Rex, allosaurus, brachiosaurus, bronthosaurus, spitting di Lopidon, stegosaurus, Stegosaurus, triceratops, allosaurus. Did I say allosaurus? a teradactyl and a megatron. Who would think that a black boy

from the south side of Chicago with cuts on his face, trauma in his eyes, would know all the names of dinosaurs. Hey, first of all, I don't like you stereotyping me. It'd be people in your own home. I'm just saying, you're an anomaly, young man.

Anywho Today we got Davey Blackburn Joining us What's up, Davey? Hey guys, that was impressive Crazy folk That was impressive, Preston. I'm not going to lie.

Wasn't that crazy? It was really good. Thank you, bro. No, imagine watching Jurassic Park with this man. He knows what they eat, how tall they probably were, all the things. It's crazy.

Anywho, I did a podcast, conversation with Davey maybe two months ago. Yeah, something like that. And it just was really enjoyable. And she's not saying that she came home rambling about it. Well, I was home. I went downstairs.

You're right, right, right. And this is why I do a lot of podcasts around book promotion season. So Holyer then now just came out. So I was doing all the things. And a lot, no shade to podcast hosts. But I'm going to throw shade a little bit. It can feel flat. And that's not necessarily their fault.

there's a lot of different personalities within the body. But my conversation with Davy had a level of depth and thoughtfulness and even like sensitivity to it that just felt special and cool. And then when I heard Davey's story, I was like, my goodness, this like has to be heard on 30 Minutes with the Perry's because it will bless the people. So who are you, Davey? Before we get into anything, just who are you? what you do, how many kids you got, your hair is shining, what you put in it, stuff like that.

Yeah, I guess you could call me a pastor of some sorts. I'm more of an itinerant speaker. I don't actually pastor my own church, but we have a ministry called Nothing is Wasted. And we help people in trauma, tragedy, and major life transitions. We help them find purpose in their pain. Our motto is we want to help you partner with God to take back your story, no matter what you've gone through. And so I live in Indianapolis, Indiana. That's where we station out of, but spend most of my time traveling around the country and speaking at different churches, getting to see different expressions of the kingdom of God, which is a huge blessing. I know you know about that. And it's cool to see what God's doing. I have a beautiful,

wonderful, amazing, brilliant wife, Christy. We have three kids, but we are an interesting bunch because we are a blended family. All three of our kids are firstborns, so you know how to pray for us. Because our older, our dog. She's eight. Her name's Natalia. She comes from Christy's previous marriage. Weston, our son is seven, comes from my previous marriage. And then we have Cohen, who is two and a half, who comes from us together. So it's like the yours, yours, mine, and ours. And so yeah, we're just, she's a PA. So she helps people, we say this. She, she helps people heal physically. And I enjoy helping people to heal spiritually and emotionally. So it just feels like our calling in life is just to help people heal. I love that. Whatever the assignment is today. Yeah. Well, let's jump in. Tell us your story. How did, like, nothing is wasted. It was birthed out of something. Yeah. Yeah. As most of our, most of our purposes, at least when you really find the niche that God has called you to, a lot of times it comes out of our greatest pain. That's what passion, right? Passion actually comes from the word pain. And that's what, that's true to our story. I was a pastor and church planter here in Indianapolis. moved from South Carolina. I was a youth pastor to church called New Spring Church in South Carolina, which is a fairly large church, so many people will be familiar with it. But they launched us here to Indianapolis to plant a church. And I was with my wife Amanda at the time. We had no kids.

And then in 2014, so that was 2011. 2014, we had our first Weston. And then in 2015, we started picking up steam as a church. I mean, I don't know if you know anything about church planting, but it feels like God calls you to plant a forest, but he drops you in the middle of a parking lot. And so you're just tilling up the soil. You're trying to meet people. You're trying to just, you know, do whatever you can to grow this little thing that's in an incubation stage. And finally, we start seeing some momentum. And we're like, man, I remember one time Amanda looked at me, and she's like, I think this is actually going to take. Like we're seeing what God called us to do come to fruition. And that was right in the fall of 2015. And then November, November 10th,

2015. I came home from the gym and I walked into what everybody would probably consider their greatest nightmare. Amanda was lying on our living room floor face down and there was blood all around her. And so kind of to make a long story short, what had happened is that three men saw me leave for the gym that morning as they were breaking into the home two doors down from us decided to break into our home. And Amanda got caught up in the scuffle of that. As investigators have told us as she was trying to protect our son, Weston, he was 15 months old at the time. And he was in his crib. He remained unharmed. But we were pregnant with our second. She was 13 weeks along. And although we were trying to see if there was any way that she could be revived or

survive. We waited for 24 hours in a hospital until test results finally came back that she had officially deceased. That was November 11, 2015, which was instantly four years to the day after we packed a moving van up to move to start this church in Indianapolis. And so overnight, I lost my best friend and ministry partner and love of my life. And I was now pastoring a church that we had started together and trying to be a single dad and figure out what was going on with life from there. Wow, man. This story was familiar to me even before we spoke via the podcast because I had soft articles about it when it happened. And I remember just being sad, bro.

sad but also mad you know because those types of injustices are unfair and are stupid and just every word possible um when it comes to grief i think i've noticed that as i walk with friends that are grieving that grief looks different for different it does yeah what what was grief like in your body well for me um it started out as show You know, there was a couple of weeks there that it just didn't seem like reality. You just felt like you were walking around in a fog. It felt like you'd wake up at any moment. You know, I'd go to bed at night and I'd be terrified to fall asleep because I would inevitably

have some kind of a nightmare. The trauma was really manifesting itself a lot. I think that, I mean, and, you know, from, I believe that there's a whole lot that manifests in the spiritual too when it comes to this. But there was a spiritual warfare at play. in all of this. And we can talk more about that a little bit if you want to. But I was having nightmares and I would wake up in cold sweats and thinking that my whole life at that point was just a nightmare. And then I'd wake up and Amanda would be right next to me. And then I would go through

that grief one more time when I realized the reality was that she wasn't there. And this had really happened. And so for a season, there was shock. And then there was this really deep, dark season of several months where it just felt like I would never emerge from it. It felt like this vortex of depression. I remember specifically for about two weeks being physically sick and just lying on a friend's couch. My house was a crime scene at the time. So my son and I were bouncing around to different, you know, kind of safe houses, so to speak, just trying to find a place to sleep and live. And fortunately, we had a really great church community, the church that was pastoring.

So people opened their doors up to us. but I'll never forget just being physically sick, almost like the grief, like all of my love for Amanda was now bottled up inside of me and it was festering and rotting and it had nowhere to go. And so it just started physically,

you know, there's a really great book that we refer people to called The Body Keeps the Score. And I was experiencing that quite a bit until I began to learn some of the tools of where to put that grief and how to express

that in a manner that we're not really well versed in expressing in Western culture, right? We try to bottle up and suppress our grief. We try to push it away. We don't like it because it's uncomfortable. But the reality is, is that when there's a feeling buried never dies. When you bottle up grief, when you suppress it, it ends up coming

out and coming out with more vengeance. It comes out extreme and it ends up oozing out of you, as my counselor said, it comes out sideways. And we all know people who have walked around for years and years and years and they're just bitter at life because they never addressed the pain that's going on inside of them. And so that was me for several months until I learned some of the tools of where do I need to

put my grief, where do I need to put my pain? We're going to put it somewhere, you know? Yeah. Before we get to that, I need to hear the spiritual part. Yeah. Because we don't talk about the spiritual component of grief oftentimes or even how to distinguish what is me, what is the context that I'm living in and what is just straight up demons. Yeah, right. Yeah, you know, I don't want to sound reductionist, but we've, as a ministry, I've tried to help people understand that their pain

gets put into four buckets. And we call them the perpetrators of pain. So why does pain exist in this world? There's four major reasons why it exists. The first one is because we live in a fallen and broken world. Right? The very beginning of time, Adam and Eve, swap the truth of God's word for a lie.

And at that moment, it fractured everything. that there was this, now we live in this ever-increasing unraveling of the universe. And we're kind of in the fall out of that. So that's why there's crime and hatred. And that's why there's disease and famine and all of these things that we're kind of caught up in. And it's the kind of thing that breaks God's heart more than it breaks our heart. And yet he has a redemptive plan for all of that. Again, we can get to that in a second. But that's the first perpetrator. The second perpetrator is that there is our own sinful choices, the consequences of our own sinful choices. You know, nobody's, I think I heard Matt Chandler say one time, nobody's lied to you, deceived you,

duped you, or hurt you more than you, right? And many of us live in that kind of the consequences of our own sinful choices. But then we also have the consequences of other people's sinful choices. You know, the fact that God has given all of us free will, that's part of the expression of love that he has imparted into humankind is that we have the ability to choose to accept or reject him. And unfortunately, so many people reject him in his ways. And that encroaches on other people. Their sinful choices, it adversely affects other people, and it hurts people, wounds people, destroys people. And then that's the third perpetrator. The fourth perpetrator is a spiritual battle that's happening. That there really is, as Ephesian 6 says, a battle that's happening

between ultimate forces of good and evil, between God and the principalities at play that are trying to steal, kill, and destroy our life. And the great thing about being believers is that, you know, the enemy can't steal from us what only God can give us, and that's salvation. But what he wants to do is he wants to rob from us our joy, living out of wholeness and the fullness of what God could, what God has for us, the God-given destiny he has for us. And so the enemy wants to do anything he can to try to neutralize our effectiveness for the kingdom and to rob our joy. and often he will use pain and suffering and hardship to do that, especially if we don't have a good construct for our pain and suffering,

a good theology of suffering, if you will. And so we put into those four buckets because we say it's important to be able to allocate your pain appropriately. If you don't, if you misallocate your pain, if you attribute the wrong perpetrator of your pain, you're destined to live out a cycle of unnecessary pain. So if you take, for instance, the blame for something that was not your fault, an abuse that was not your fault. But we see this happen often, right?

We see the abused begin to say, they begin to adopt shame and begin to say, man, must be my fault. This is something that I did. I put myself in this situation or they hear other voices that kind of, or, man, heaven for it, the church accuses that kind of a thing on the abused. then they're going to live out a story of shame. When the reality is it, is it that wasn't your fault. You were abused. There was an injustice done to you. You know, but on the flip side, if you put it in the wrong bucket where you begin to

blame other people for something that you did, then that's what you do. You just walk around in bitterness and blame and you fail to learn from the mistakes that you've made throughout life. And you're destined to live out that cycle of unnecessary pain as well. So the spiritual component is, you know, huge because there really is at play the enemy's work trying to neutralize us. Now, we get the devil too much credit sometimes, right? It's like, Pastor, I couldn't go to Bible study because my car broke down and you're like, well, your car broke down because you haven't put oil in it in two years.

That's not the devil's fault, right? But the enemy does want to leverage things in our life to try to neutralize us and paralyze us. The good thing is, is God has a plan to leverage. leverage our pain for for something else yeah now I'm assuming that you didn't know about all these four buckets at the time when grief was at its peak not at all not at all and so I guess what was the process kind of connecting to Preston's question of what because I don't think grief is something that's overcome per se but something more that you you learn to walk through and deal with in a really healthy way. Was that a matter of friendships,

counseling, therapy, Bible, all the things? All the above. A wonderful question, because it's all the above. You're right, you don't escape or get out of a valley. The only way out of it is through it.

And Psalm 23-4 tells us this, right? Though I walk through the valley of shadow death, you are with me. I don't have to fear. For me, it's helpful to have an understanding cerebrally for people, pain, but the reality is the only way that you walk through it is with the presence of God.

Right? Like I really do, I love having conversations. That's why I love, you know, my conversation with you is really good, thoughtful theological conversations about pain. But when you're in the midst of the valley, that's not what you need. You need the presence of God to show up. You need an experience and encounter with Jesus that you can't manufacture. And that's what happened for me. through multiple different ways. The first way that God showed up for me is we're there in the hospital, as we're waiting for test results to come back. I'm sitting on either side.

Me and Amanda's sister, we're sitting on either side of the hospital bed, the same sides of the hospital bed that 15 months earlier we were sitting on when she was giving birth to Weston. And we're holding her hand, and she's hooked up to all these machines, keeping her alive. And I thought if there is any way that she could hear what's going on right now,

What she'd want to hear is she'd want to hear worship music from elevation worship. She used to run and she used to listen to elevation all the time. And so I put Pandora radio station on the elevation radio station and Pandora on a phone at the foot of her bed. And you guys know how Pandora works. It's randomized. You don't get to choose what song comes off. The first song that came up on that radio station was the song, nothing is wasted. And it's like God reached into that moment, even in like the most shocking.

devastating moment of our lives. He reached into it right there and he was showing us. I remember looking at her sister and we just teared up and we both sensed it. We both felt this was not going to turn out the way that we wanted it to turn out, but God was not going to waste it. That he was going to do something profound out of it. And that was kind of the first way that God showed up for me. And then he kept showing up over and over and over. The thing that reminded, that prompted in me is that Amanda used to, she used to rehab furniture. as a hobby. That was what she did before the tragedy happened. And, you know, she would rehab furniture that Joanna Gaines couldn't do anything with. I mean, it was incredible what she did.

She'd call me up and I'd go pick up a dresser off the side of the road that someone had thrown out. And the first time I brought one back to her, I looked at her. I said, what are you going to do with this? And she looked at me and just goes, hey, trust me, give me a little time. And I'm going to turn this into something beautiful. And she would over and over and over, she'd turn it into something beautiful and she'd go sell it at some antique market for this insane profit. And I'm like, wow, how did you do that? You brought value back into that. And I'll never forget the Holy Spirit prompting me several days later.

Davy, I know this looks like something that the world would say is discarded. It's trash. You can't do anything. This is senseless. You can't do anything with it. But trust me, give me a little time. And I'll turn this into something beautiful. And over and over and over, guys, this is how God would show up for me.

and I would encounter his presence and his spirit in the midst of the valley that showed me firsthand, hey, I'm here with you. I'm here with you. And then people, great people came around me. You know, just some wonderful individuals who had walked through similar things. You know, I'll never forget a guy named Todd Irb in our city who his wife and his daughter had been murdered in our city. And he shows up to the funeral and he goes, you're not going to remember this right now.

But in a couple of weeks, I'm going to reach out. to you. And I just want you to know that you're going to get through this. And he was true to his word. A couple weeks later, he reached out. We sat down and started having coffee. Pastor Levi Lesko, many of you guys are going to be familiar with Pastor Levi Lesko. He reached out to me about a month into it. And he was the one that began helping me to start to lean into my pain and my grief, to find the appropriate place to put that pain in grief with the concept that he teaches quite a bit called Run Toward the Roar. And he helped me with that to just to know how do I take these triggers that I'm experiencing

right now that I want to box up and suppress. And how do I actually see those triggers as invitations from God into a place of deeper healing? And in those invitations. What does that look like? Well, so that's a great question. We may not have time for me to explain the whole concept to run toward the roar, but the idea is an unbelievable picture.

of running toward what scares you, what frightens you, rather than running away from it. And so for me, practically what that meant, when I heard him kind of speak that over me and teach me that, I knew there were two things that I needed to do practically to kind of kickstart my healing process, to know where to put my pain and my grief. One was this. Every time up into that point that I'd got in my car, my Bluetooth would connect with my stereo in a certain way that it plays like the first song on your iTunes. playlist. And that first song is a song that was played at our wedding. And so it caused all of this grief. I mean, you call that a trigger, right? Caused all this grief to rush up. I'd get so angry.

I'd bang my dashboard and turn it off. And when Pastor Levi told me that, I said, I've got to go listen to that song. So I got my car. I let that song connect and play and I turned it up and I listened to it on repeat for about 45 minutes. And man, just waves and waves of grief. I mean, just the most horrific ugly cry you've ever seen in your life, right? It's just awful. But what's so amazing is that after about 45 minutes of just letting that grief come out, I felt like there was this release. Like, I wasn't healed, but there was like a light, there was like something lifted, you know?

And the only way I can describe it as waves of grief happened, but then immediately following were waves of grace. And so as soon as that happened, I felt empowered. I felt like I had agency again in my healing process, that I could kind of take those invitations the Lord was extending to me. And as I partnered with him, I could kind of walk in that. He would do his work as I was faithful to do the thing he called me to do, right? That's supernatural. That's how we experience God. We take the natural he's called us to do.

And he puts his super with it and we experience the supernatural. Yeah. One time I wrote a piece and I said when grief comes out and makes room for life to come in, and it just reminded me of that when God was teaching me how to mourn. Yeah. Bro, as a father, as a husband, when I hear you talk, it's weird the emotion that I feel because I feel extreme empathy, right? And being a father and a husband and just trying to or attempting to put myself in your shoes, it's just difficult, you know. But at the same time, I feel a gratefulness of God using your situation to help so many people out of it. And just hearing you talk about this, even the fact that you can talk about this is a blessing.

Because people can't talk about it, let alone teach other people how to mourn properly and grieve properly. One of the questions that I wanted to ask you because I know that your father-in-law was, I think that, yeah, was the person in the prison. Yeah. And, yeah, we can probably explain all that and get all to that. But I wanted to know how did forgiveness play a part in your healing process? Yeah, yeah. And can you explain? Can you explain how it did?

if it did. Yeah. Well, forgiveness for me, just like for anybody's a journey, you know, it's a daily decision. Forgiveness is not an emotion. It's not something that you can wait until you feel like forgiving, right? Forgiveness is a decision and it's a decision that's based on the experience

that we've had. Right? If we've encountered or experienced radical forgiveness, which, by the way, if we're believers, we have, right? We have, this radical forgiveness that we should never deserve. that we couldn't earn or merit on our own.

If we've experienced that, then what happens is an overflow of that, right? It's a spiritual impossibility to truly experience that and not be willing to extend it as well. But there's so many other nuances within all of that. Yes, you're right. My father-in-law now, so my wife now, Christy, her stepdad is a chaplain for the Marion County prison system. And so he was assigned to the three guys. And that is one of the other ways God showed up in my story, but it's also another way that I've seen God invite me into a bigger story of forgiveness. So basically he was assigned to three guys who broke into your home.

Yeah, exactly. And that's how, incidentally, that's what's crazy about our story is that that's how, that's like the first deep conversation I had with my wife now was she was kind of holding me at bay. I don't know if I wanted like be involved here, but because I know your story. I know way more than what you think. and I'm just really kind of involved in it in a weird way. And I knew when I heard that, God's up to something. Because she had piqued my interest. She was coming to our church.

And there was something about her that seemed really intriguing. She loved the Lord. And so God has done this really beautiful redemption story that we don't have time to get into right now. But the crux of it is is that forgiveness is a spiritual thing. That we fight with weapons of righteousness, as Scripture tells us. We don't fight a battle of flesh and blood. So this goes back to that spiritual nature. And the only way for us to, as believers, to fight fire, the enemy's work, right, is not with fire.

You know, you can bring bitterness and vengeance and all of those things back on your perpetrators. You can carry that, but ultimately, bitterness is going to rot the hand that holds it. If I'm bitter at my perpetrators, I'm not doing anything to them, right? I mean, it feels like I am somehow, no matter how the varying degree of the perpetration against you, but really what it's doing is it's destroying me. It's filling me up with this almost cancer that's festering inside of me. But if I do something completely upside down, which is the kingdom that we operate in, and I espouse weapons of righteousness like love and forgiveness and empathy and compassion, then it actually begins. to terminate the very evil that was intended against me in the spiritual. So I call it like,

I call it redemptive vengeance, right? Because the real enemy is not the three men that killed my wife. The real enemy is the mastermind behind that. And that's Satan. And so his work is at play, right? And he has instruments and tools,

okay? But the more that I go and travel and share the gospel out of my story, the more people receive Christ, and they essentially are getting plucked up from the enemy's clutches, right? Getting brought into light. So now who's ticked off at that? The enemy. So what I get to do is I get to participate with God in redemptive vengeance against the real enemy.

Does that make sense? So it's not this like passive like, oh, you know, we'll just forgive and forget kind of thing. No, no, this is like me actively enlisting in the work that God has called us to do, but in a very upside down way that brings light into darkness. Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. And it's such, I think it's an interesting perspective, but I think it's such a gaudy perspective because we don't often think about a spiritual fight

when someone in this physical realm has harmed us or hurt us. But to think about, you know, these people were sinners, you know, by sin in a particular way that I wasn't effective by sin and unfortunately your wife was taken but we don't think like that and so I think to have that perspective to truly believe that perspective in your art because I think it's one it's one thing of knowing that but it's another thing to accept it in your heart and to act on it and so I think a lot of times we kind of know yeah this person is a sinner but not really accepting and embrace it so we can you know forgive and so yeah that's very

interesting. Very interesting. Before we close, I was thinking about trials and suffering. And obviously, trials and suffering has a different level of intensity, right? I think what you've been through is different than what, with a different intensity than what others have experienced. But I think one of the functions of trials is that we see God better and or a belief that we've held about God becomes real.

And so is there something about God that you knew, but that just was solidified for you through this situation? Yeah. This is going to sound so trite, and I hope you understand it with the depth of struggle and wrestling this comes with, but that God is faithful. Right? that he, the end of Psalm 23 says,

surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Well, the psalmist has a lot of confidence in the fact that goodness and mercy you're going to follow him. It says, surely it will. Well, how do I know? Well, because the best predictor of God's

future faithfulness is his past provision. And when we see God show up in situations that we never, like how in the world could you show up and yet he is faithful and he shows up? And we look back and we see that. How do you know something's following you? Goodness and mercy are following me, how?

By looking back. And when we look back and we see the faithfulness of God, even though we may not feel it in that moment or right in that season, we can hold on to not just here, but here, that he will be faithful in the future. And so, I mean, that's probably the most, I mean, there are hundreds of things I feel like that I've learned about God through this whole thing.

But that one I hold on to, because no matter what I go through in the future, he's going to be faithful. Yeah. One last question. For the person who's listening, who's also experienced, like, extreme suffering, who has the temptation to believe that God, that he doesn't see them, like, what is your encouragement to those people who feel like, man, like, why should I serve

as God who allow me to go through such extreme suffering? Yeah, my encouragement would be that you're not alone, because that's how every one of us feel when we go through suffering. That's the nature of suffering. That's why the psalmist cries out, you know, how long, oh Lord, how long, where have you, where have you gone? Why have you forsaken me? I mean, over and over and over, we've seen the Psalms, these laments where us in our

humanity, we, we have trouble reconciling what we think we know to be true, but what we're experiencing right now. And so you're not alone. And I think sometimes that's just helpful to know, like, you're not a bad person because you are doubting God. you probably have a lot of questions for God or about God right now. And my encouragement would be take those questions to God and let him have the raw, real questions, the anger, the frustration, the rage, the malice, all of that stuff. Take it to God. Because we said earlier,

you're going to put your pain somewhere. Take it to him. And in that wrestling, I promise you, you're going to find him. You're going to find him in that wrestling. And it may feel silent right now. It may feel absent right now. But as you bring it to you, to him as you wrestle and you, you know, dig in with him. He's going to show himself in a way that nobody else. I can't show you, you know, Jackie and Preston can't show you. Like, we can't show you these things. God will show himself to you in a personal, intimate, real way. It's good. Hey, man, Davy, Blackburn.

Man, that was so encouraging. Yeah, your story is so encouraging. It's so good to see God. It's such an encouraging to see God take something that was so tragic and to use it for its glory. That's just indicative of the God we serve. He takes ugly things. It makes them beautiful. And so, man, your story is beautiful. Yeah, I'm encouraged by you, brother, for real. Thank you, guys.

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