Supporting Those Who Are Struggling

I'm going to get into God's word today.

We started a series called The Struggle is Real.

We started it last week and we uh we we we opened up with a verse in the book of Matthew, chapter 26, verse 38, and it says, uh, he being Jesus told them, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

Matthew 26:38

Stay here and keep watch with me.

And we see uh some of the greatest evidence of Jesus' humanity.

He's in that place where he's hitting his emotional pain threshold.

And he said, I my my body feels like it can't handle my emotions.

I feel like I'm gonna die.

And then he asks his friends to help him out in the process.

So that's what we're gonna talk about today.

I told you last week uh this message is gonna be about how to support somebody as they're walking through a struggle, walking through a tough time.

I want to be careful I don't just jump into the middle of the message and take for granted that you you caught last week.

So I'm gonna use a visual here to kind of get us all on the same page and level set before we move forward and kind of build off of last week's.

Go ahead and bring that up uh on the center.

Um last week we talked about the five stages of grief, and we're we're looking at both Jesus and this Old Testament character named Job.

And in the book of Job, it's 42 chapters of a guy who lost everything.

He lost his kids, he lost his business, he lost uh his house, he lost everything.

And we see over 42 chapters him walking through what we now would call the five stages of grief.

So denial, okay, when something bad happens, you lose something uh huge for you.

What happens is your brain can't handle all of that.

Um it's so it's overwhelmed.

And so you literally kind of just like this can't be real.

And sometimes that lasts a long time, if especially if it was a really traumatic thing.

Uh the second is anger.

Once the reality starts to hit what happened, uh people often become very angry and then work through bargaining, you know, just any every chip you have, you try to play it, you know, even prayers like Lord, I'll if you'll fix this, I'll never do that, or I'll always do that.

Uh and then next is depression.

You start to come to grips with the loss, and you might get caught up in a memory or get caught up in uh really just what you'll never get back.

And then the last is you get to a place of acceptance, and there's a new kind of a new horizon, new, new world in front of you.

And uh not that you feel great about what you lost, but you come to peace with it and and you develop maturity and frankly, emotional depth.

Uh, we talked about emotional depth comes through um working our way through our emotions, working our way through our struggle.

And so that was the next part we talked about last week was how do we work through?

Well, the first is you have to experience it.

You have to actually allow yourself to feel what you feel, but you don't just bring your heart with you, you bring your head.

One of the reasons people avoid feelings, especially bad feelings, is because they don't want to get stuck in them.

Well, how do we get stuck?

We get stuck when we only bring our heart in there, we don't bring our head, and and so you got to bring both.

So you experience the depth of the feeling and you study it.

You figure out what's going on here, and eventually you come to a place of better understanding.

And you can't control anything you don't understand.

Everything from a vehicle to a uh a piece of technology to a weapon.

If I don't understand it, I can't control it.

And so emotions are the same way.

If I if I deny them or I push them down, I act like they're not there, they become volcanic.

And I've got to be able to understand them to eventually control.

When I say control, I don't mean you have your emotions on a string and I can you know pull them out if I want and I can throw them away if I want.

It's it's really emotional control is the ability to work your way through an emotion or a feeling or a struggle and not get stuck in it.

Okay, that's what we're talking about.

All right, so what we're gonna do is talk about how to how to help each other work our way through this.

By the way, in two weeks, March 24th, I'm gonna talk to you about sort of the nuance of like supporting someone or working your way through something that is still alive, right?

So we would think of a stages of grief with, say, someone who has died and we know that they're not coming back, and we have to we have that clear closure.

But what about something that's like, what about a relationship that we could get back together?

Or what about um, you know, an idea that might have been the right thing at the wrong time?

How do I know if I'm in denial that this thing is done, or if I should hold out hope and faith that maybe, you know, maybe this thing can come back, and then how do I support someone in that?

So we're gonna talk about that in a couple of weeks.

But today what I want to look at is I want to look at both Jesus and Job's support systems, and we're gonna kind of learn a few things to be careful of, and then I'm gonna give you a tool and equip you in uh supporting the people around you, all right?

Um, I want to start with this idea that I think we need to calibrate our expectations of the support that we receive in our struggle, that we expect it to be an imperfect process with imperfect people, and we need to be ready to give grace.

Um, you know, even the most well-meaning people sometimes will say too much or will not say enough.

Uh, sometimes they'll be there in your face, and you wish they would leave you alone and give you some space, and then uh, you know, sometimes they'll do the opposite.

And so we need to kind of expect it to be imperfect.

Um, Jesus, we see this from uh Jesus actually in Mark chapter 14.

Mark 14 · chapter mention

Look at this.

It says, Jesus, this is on his way, ultimately, he's uh he's about to go to the cross.

This is before he goes to the cross, this is before he was let down by his friends.

He says in Mark 14, 27, on the way, Jesus told them, All of you will desert me.

For the scriptures say, God will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.

But after I'm raised from the dead, I will go ahead of you to Galilee and meet you there.

Now, notice this Jesus expected that his friends in their humanity were at some, we're gonna let him down.

And yet you don't get this woe is me attitude, right?

It's not like, well, people always let me down and nobody's ever there for me, and it's just a matter of time before everybody.

No, he didn't get it.

That was not the energy.

He ultimately said, Look, I know you're human beings, we're heading into some hot water, and I want you to know, even before you desert me, I want you to know I'm gonna give you grace.

I've already decided to give you grace.

And after the failure, if you want to know where I'm at, I'm gonna be in Galilee waiting on you.

And when you see me in Galilee, I'll have an armload of grace for you.

And it says, look at this in verse 29.

Peter said to him, Even if everyone else deserts you, I never will.

And Jesus replied, Pipe down, Peter, I tell you the truth.

This very night, before the rooster crows twice, you'll deny me three times.

No, Peter declared emphatically, even if I have to die with you, I'm a ride or die, I will never deny you.

And look at this, look at this.

And all the others vowed the same.

I think they meant it.

I think they meant it.

I think they believed it.

I don't think they were trying to pull one over on him.

I don't think that they were trying to overpromise, under deliver.

I think they believed that when the going gets tough, we'll be there for you.

And yet Jesus knew, hey, there are some times you wish people were there for you and they don't.

You wish people would stand up for you and speak up for you, and they actually end up denying you.

And it doesn't mean they don't love you, it means sometimes people disappoint you, and so you've got to be kind of expecting some of that and to be ready to give grace.

So we're gonna look at Jesus and Job's support systems and what we can kind of learn here, all right?

Um, all right.

The first thing is uh we need to be careful of a few things.

The first thing to be careful of is to know when your own pain is affecting your ability to support someone else in theirs.

All right, sometimes when you are close to someone, the same tragedy hits you both.

And we see this from Job's wife in Job chapter 2, verse 9.

Job 2:9

Um, Job is trying to take the high road.

He's trying to work his way through anger and depression and denial and all this.

And his wife says, Are you still trying to maintain your integrity, curse God, and die?

Now I gotta, I'm just gonna say this up front.

I I've got a lot of empathy for Job's wife.

I I don't blame her for feeling this way.

Um, especially at that time, you know, 10 children was was seen as a blessing, 10, you know, a blessing from God.

We got these 10 blessings, and so their whole lives had been about that, her whole, her whole life.

And of course, at that time, a woman's um, you know, a woman's value in that society was around her ability to reproduce.

And so now, you know, in fact, they it was a woman that wasn't able to have a child in that day, at that time, those people would see see it as a curse from God.

That you know, that your your womb has been closed by God, that's how they saw it.

So the fact that she was able to have see uh have ten children, she's feeling tremendously blessed, and like like that, you go from feeling blessed by God to feeling cursed by God.

So she's saying, God's cursed us, God has cursed us.

Why wouldn't we curse him?

And I don't blame her for feeling that feelings are not wrong or right, they're just feelings.

I can't just flip a switch.

Who could blame her for having that feeling?

And I do think it probably would have been appropriate to talk to a counselor, it probably would have been appropriate to talk to a confidant, a trusted friend and say, you know how I feel right now?

I feel confused and I feel extremely angry, and I can't figure out what I did or what makes any sense as to why God would curse me like this, and what I want to do is curse God, and I don't even feel like being alive.

Who could blame her for that feeling?

But what she does in that moment is she dumps that on Job, who's already in the valley of despair.

This guy's already writhing in pain.

And so when when you you gotta be honest, like if you are in a place where you yourself need help, okay, I'm not saying abandon your partner and leave them in the valley by themselves.

At some point, you got to step back and go, we need to bring in some reinforcements.

We need to get some help.

Both of us need help because we're not in a place to be able to support each other.

This is why oftentimes in marriages, these sort of tragedies end up in divorce because you have two people that are both in need of support, trying to support each other and saying and doing things that does more harm than good, and it ends up creating a fracture long term in the relationship.

And so you've got to have the self-awareness.

It's hard when you're in searing pain, but to have the presence of mind in the moment to know I need help, and this is not a time for me to just speak out of my pain.

By the way, if you have somebody in your life who's in the same kind of pain you are saying things, you do need to give grace.

If you're Job, you need to kind of go, that's my wife talking out of her pain right now, and and to be able to be gracious.

And sometimes that is the that is the uh alarm that goes off that says, we gotta, we've gotta humble ourselves, we've got to go get some help, we need to bring some people in because it can't just be the two of us here.

Um you know, uh think about this now.

Support, support isn't um support doesn't mean that you match this other person's energy and spiral together.

That's not support, that that's spiraling together.

It means that you empathize with their pain and you can help them work through their emotions.

This is why we see even in like Galatians 6, I brought this verse up in other messages uh not too long ago, but uh Galatians 6 talks about helping restore someone who's fallen into sin or who's made a bad choice.

And in Galatians 6, Paul says, hey, uh when somebody has gotten out of bounds or somebody's made a bad choice, those of you who are mature and spiritual, go and and help help them out.

But he says, be careful of your own footing.

Because if you're not careful, you'll be you can get drawn in and you yourself could fall into the same thing.

And I think the spirit of that applies in supporting someone.

You got to be honest about uh where you're at and do you have the capacity, or do we need to reach outside and get some more help?

You know, Genesis 35, there's a story of a woman named Rachel who gives birth to her son and she's about to die.

She actually gives birth and she's in so much pain.

She dies a few moments after his birth, and she is in the most pain she's ever been in.

And in that moment, she names him while she's in the worst pain of her life.

She names him Ben Onai, which means son of my sorrow.

And so what she was doing is she was expressing what she was really going through.

But sometimes when you're in that immediate fever pitch type pain, you put a label on somebody or something, you say something.

She was about to put son of my mom's sorrow on her son for the rest of his life.

That boy's about to be 30 years old, he's gonna be 40, 50 years old, walking around carrying the weight of his mother's sorrow and feeling the shame that will come along with that.

And so his father Jacob in the moment said, I know you're going through pain, but we're not gonna put that on him.

So we're gonna name him Benjamin, which means son of my right hand.

Right now we are crushed with sorrow, but we don't want sorrow.

We don't want to paint our future with the colors of our present.

So we got to be careful we don't put a label or name what we're going through when we're going through it.

Because we're in the middle of this.

And so, yeah, right now it feels like total rejection.

Right now it feels like failure.

Right now it feels final.

Right now, it's it has all the feelings of despair, but we don't want to name our future what we feel right now.

And so you got to be honest about where you're at and and what you're capable of doing in terms of support.

You might need to, it might need to be somebody else.

Um the second thing we need to be careful of is uh trying to find comfort through answers, trying to find comfort through answers.

Um it's very normal when you you've lost something and it hurts really bad, you your brain's trying to explain it.

And so we're looking for answers.

And like I mentioned earlier, when we're working our way through our emotions, we gotta study them, we gotta come to a greater place of understanding.

But you also have to understand timing.

There'll be a time for that, but is it the right time to do that?

And we have to be careful, especially when you're going into very complex situations and complex um realities that we don't start to try to oversimplify.

And this is where we see uh Job's friends kind of mean well, but kind of do him a disservice.

And in Job 2, 11, uh they starts off really good.

It says Job's friends heard of a tragedy it suffered, and they got together and they traveled from their homes to comfort and console him.

All right, that was a nice thing for them to do.

They wanted to be there for their friend.

Verse 12, it says, When they saw Job from a distance, they scarcely recognized him.

Wailing loudly, they tore their robes and they threw dust over their heads to show their grief.

And then they sat on the ground with them for seven days and nights.

No one said a word to Job, for they saw that his suffering was too great for words.

That's a beautiful thing to do, to actually go there to empathize and to be willing to just be present.

And that's how it started out.

But if you keep reading, at some point they kind of started to get in, trying to make sense of it and trying to bring understanding, which isn't necessarily wrong, but they were trying to do it in the middle of his grief.

They were trying to do it in some way to soothe or to give an answer.

So he's in the middle of um his anger, he's in the middle of his depression, and they start coming up with answers, frankly, they weren't really fit to come up with.

And they were saying things, probably trying to do good, but they were doing harm.

So they were saying, like, well, Job, you know, um God is just, and so all of your kids died.

It must have been in his an act of justice.

Like you, you must have sinned, like you, you must have done something.

Like, what did you do to cause God to do that?

And Job's like, I don't think so.

I I don't think I did anything that bad.

Like, I mean, we're all humans, but I don't think I did anything like that.

Another one's like, well, yeah, you know, that's that's how kind of God is, you know, because uh, you know, maybe you didn't think it was that bad, but God, you know, who's super holy, you know, he knows that this thing you didn't think was a big deal was a huge deal, therefore he took your 10 kids away.

You know, and Job's like, now he doesn't know what to think, right?

He doesn't know he's confused.

Am I supposed to feel guilty?

Is this person telling the truth?

I'm already disoriented in my grief, man, and you're coming up with frankly trite answers to things that are quite deep.

Another one's like, oh, you know, this suffering stuff is this kind of a didactic tool, you know, it's one of the ways God trains us, you know, and he's like, uh that doesn't seem like the this doesn't seem like a good training plan, you know.

I I'm I'm lost my kids.

Like, what are you talking about?

And and so all throughout this, uh, his friends trying to bring answers oversimplified, something that was very complex, and they were giving him conclusive things about the character of God, frankly.

They didn't know what they were talking about.

And so I just want to say, like, I'm sure everyone in this room were here to uh, you know, we mean well.

We want to support.

Be careful that in the midst of this, you don't start, you don't start signing God's name on stuff that he didn't write.

Be careful you don't start, be be careful you don't start speaking for God on stuff that God didn't say or things you don't really know about.

And sometimes we do it because we're trying to give an answer.

Friend, listen, comfort doesn't come through answers, comfort comes through relationship.

Answers are are are are helpful, but they're a small part of comfort.

Think about this.

If you took your child into surgery, they would need some answers.

Why are we here?

At some point, you would explain, you know what, there's something going on in your body at a cellular level, and this is kind of what it is, and you try to explain it, and then you would introduce them to the doctor, and you say, here's her name, here's his name, and here they're they're good, they're a good person, they're gonna help you out.

And then they you this, you know, we're in foreign territory here.

I this machine is beeping.

This is what this machine does, and this is what this sharp object does.

And you try to explain, but that wouldn't bring comfort.

Comfort comes in your hand, it comes in your eyes, it comes in your presence.

All of those answers and bullet points don't do anything, it's the fact that you are there when they go to sleep, and you're there when they wake up.

And so when we think about comfort, be careful that you don't just try to come up with answers because you feel like you need to.

Even if somebody's asking the questions doesn't necessarily mean you need to plunge into the answer.

Sometimes you just need to be present.

By the way, this is what Jesus asked of his disciples.

He didn't ask them for answers in Matthew 26, 38.

My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

What does he say?

Stay here and keep watch with me.

Just stay awake with me, just be here with me.

Um, which leads me to the third thing to be careful of.

Be careful of allowing greater hurt to form from people who are unable or unwilling to support you the way you need it.

Sometimes humans will let you down.

Some of you are here and you go, you know what, Pastor, I know people can't read my mind.

I know sometimes people say too much or say too little.

And I didn't expect them to read my mind.

I told them exactly what I needed, and they still didn't do it.

Jesus tells his disciples, keep watch with me, stay awake with me.

Look at this, Matthew 26, 39.

Said he went a little further, he bowed his face to the ground, he prayed, My Father, if it's possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me.

Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.

Verse 40.

Then he returned to the disciples and found them.

Look, I didn't ask you guys to go to the cross, I didn't ask you to solve the cross.

I didn't ask you to give me reason.

I just asked you to stay awake and you couldn't stay awake.

And you see a little bit of Jesus' humanity in this because he kind of snaps.

He's like, I just asked you to stay awake.

You couldn't keep watch with me one hour?

And they get up and he goes back to pray, comes back, they fall asleep again.

Verse 45, it said he went to pray a third time, saying the same things again.

Verse 45, look at this.

Then he came to the disciples and he said, Go ahead and sleep, have your rest.

At some point, Jesus came to peace with the fact that, yeah, I wish that my disciples and my best friends would stay awake.

I wish they would.

And I asked them to, and for whatever reason, they were so fatigued, they were so tired.

Either physically or emotionally or whatever, they couldn't give me what I asked for.

And I want to encourage you, some of you, if you're not careful, you'll take the struggle that you're already in and you'll keep compounding wounds.

Because not only did I have my struggle, not only did I have the tragedy, and not only do I have the battle that I've got to fight through, but then I have my mom or dad or my brother or sister or my husband or wife or my son or my daughter or my best friend from childhood or the person that we had, you know, promised to one another not be there for me.

And I told them what I need, and they still couldn't do it.

And so now I've got the struggle and then I've got this disappointment, and it just keeps compounding.

And at some point you've got to choose to give grace.

I can tell you from personal experience, I have let people down, and I've had people let me down in this space.

And I know for a fact I've had people reach out to me, I've had friends reach out to me that were going through hard times and to express later on, man, it hurt my feelings because you weren't more supportive, because you weren't there more.

And the reality is what they didn't know is some of the time they were going through what they were going through.

I was going through something too.

I was barely holding myself together.

I was trying to hold my stuff together.

Or I was coming to my capacity as a human being.

It wasn't that I was apathetic, it wasn't that I was disinterested in their problem.

It wasn't that I didn't care.

I wasn't trying to blow them off.

It was the reality is I was hitting my capacity.

And I've had other people as well.

I wanted, I was hoping they would support me better.

I was hoping they would know what to do.

I might have even asked and they couldn't say yes, or they couldn't follow through.

I can either start to add that to my compounding list of offenses and pain, or I can say, look, like Jesus, I asked my disciples to do this thing, they couldn't do it.

Go ahead and have your rest.

I'm not gonna hold it against you.

I understand we're all kind of out here trying to do our best for the most part, and I've got to be able to not keep adding to my pain.

And so we see him kind of give that permission.

Um, okay, how do we support?

How do we support a friend?

Oh, let me say this last thing on that.

For some of you who have had somebody who had the nature of the relationship that they have in terms of their close to you, means that they should have showed up for you and they didn't, in some way, they let you down.

They either didn't say enough or they said too much or something.

One of the things to keep in mind is even though somebody is in relational proximity to you, sometimes people don't know what to do in those situations, or they might even lack the emotional depth.

We talked about this last week.

People that avoid their feelings altogether and won't go into them, one of the consequences of not going in and experiencing and studying and understanding and getting to a better place is not only are you in personally in internal conflict, but you lack the resources and the fortitude and the depth to be able to support the people around you so they go unsupported.

Okay, so how do we support people in their struggle?

I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you real quick the training that we train uh our care leaders here at the church, and and I'm just gonna give it to you real quick because here's what I'm gonna say I'm I'm gonna share in a moment some of the ministries we have that I can't wait to tell you about because it's really gonna help you.

But this isn't when it comes to like care and support in a church community, it's not just about the official ministries, it's a culture.

So people may maybe they're not gonna go to the class, they're not gonna go to the thing, but but over coffee, God can use you.

Through a phone call, God can use you.

On a sidebar, God can use you.

So, so let me give you here's here's here's the training.

ESPN.

Some of the men just woke up, they're like, wait, ESPN?

You're you now you're back.

I got you back.

All right, ESPN.

Starts with empathy, right?

Empathetic listening, fellowship of suffering.

Not that we spiral together, but I recognize that look, I know, I've been there.

And the more you walk through your emotions, you build your reservoir, you build your depth to be able to go, I know.

I've been there.

And by the way, this is so beautiful in the community.

It is part of even your healing process that you see God using even your hardest things to be a blessing to somebody else.

So you have an empathetic ear and you listen well.

It's what Job's friends should have done.

They shouldn't have piped in with a bunch of answers.

Listen, let the man talk.

Let him talk, listen empathetically.

The second is scripture, right?

We're going through a tough time.

We anchor ourselves in God's word.

We build our lives on a rock, we build our lives on something solid.

How many of you, by a show of hands, will say, You've been through a hard time and you had a scripture that you referred to over and over again that helped propel you through that hard time?

How many of you would say, You, you, you can witness to that?

Yeah.

Sometimes often you'll have a scripture that'll be like a life verse, even for that season.

This thing I keep coming back to, I keep coming back to.

I'm thinking about it in the morning, I'm thinking about it before bed, and you anchor yourself to that scripture to keep you moving through your struggle.

The next is prayer.

Prayer.

I can't tell you how many times I've been with somebody.

I didn't exactly know what to help, how to help them.

I didn't know what to say.

I didn't want to say too much, I didn't want to say too little.

And in that moment, say, you know what?

Let's just go to the Lord right now.

We can come boldly before his throne of grace.

We can be anxious.

Instead of being anxious for this, we can be anxious for nothing but pray about everything, tell God what we need, thank him for what he's done, and the peace that passes all understanding will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Let's go to him right now and we pray together right there.

Don't listen, people often go, you know, I'm sorry I don't know how to help, but I'll be praying for you.

It's like prayer's the least you can do, you know.

Sorry, I wish I could help, you know.

I guess I'll pray.

Friend, prayer is not the least we can do.

Prayer is the most we can do.

That's the most we can do.

And so so don't underestimate the power of prayer.

Join together and pray.

And then the last thing is next step.

And this is where it all comes together the last couple weeks.

About we're talking about moving through our pain, moving through our struggle, moving through our emotions.

And you don't even necessarily have to prescribe the next step for them.

You can ask them, hey, what is the next step?

We don't want to stay stuck where we are.

And now we have a vocabulary for where we are.

We know we're walking through anger right now, we're walking through depression right now, we're fighting through bargaining right now.

What is what's next for you?

And then what's my role in that?

What do you want me to do?

Maybe you need me to help you think through a next step or what some next steps might be.

Maybe you need some accountability because this next step's gonna be really hard.

And so I need you, would you be with me when we do this?

Would you can I be a phone call away?

You know, can you check on me in a couple weeks and ask me if I've taken the step or not?

You know, and so what you're doing is helping them to not stay stuck where they are and to offer yourself as a support.

Here's the last thing I want to let you know.

You know, as a you know, one church is 13 years old, and I feel like for the most of our church life, our infrastructure was trying to catch up to our church.

So we had church was growing like crazy, and we just couldn't keep up in terms of support.

And so we've worked extremely hard in leadership development, developing our ministries to be able to get to where I'm glad to tell you today we have more infrastructure than we've ever had.

We have room to support people.

Sometimes people think, well, I'm you know, I go to this big church, you know, we come into service in and out, the parking lot's full, got people in the lobby.

They probably don't have the uh infrastructure to support me when I'm going through.

Well, contrary, we do.

We actually have a squad of leaders ready.

In fact, I want to tell you about the best kept secret in our church I'm trying to blab about so everybody knows.

We have a thing called Celebrate Recovery.

Celebrate Recovery, it's in 33,000 churches across the country.

It's a bona fide program to help people through various types of hurts, habits, and hangups.

Now, when I when you hear recovery, people automatically think addiction, which by the way, uh it does help with that.

We have people with all varying types of addiction that are a part of the of that program, but but don't limit that to that.

It helps with um all kinds, any kinds of hurt habit or hang up.

In fact, it it helps people from the impact of abuse and really every type of negative emotional response under the sun.

I ask them to send a list of things that that they've that they are designed to help people through.

Um, help people through things like control issues.

Don't nudge your neighbor, but people if you have an issue with control, anger issues, isolation, perfectionism, avoidance, okay?

You you you thought recovery was just uh addiction?

No, trust issues, procrastination, in Jesus' name.

I need help with that.

Critical nature, people who are overly critical, worry, I just can't stop worrying, anxiety, fear, bitterness, can't let go of this bitterness.

I've been trying to, I need support, greed, fear of abandonment, codependency, shame, guilt, low self-worth, rage, impatience, enabling, denial, food for comfort, and more.

We have 16 leaders who went through 10 months of intensive training to be prepared to help walk people through this.

They have a whole process for helping you zero in on the heart of your issues and to support people as they walk through.

Here's how it works it goes year round, all year.

Every Wednesday night over in Building C.

We have uh at six o'clock.

Six o'clock every Wednesday.

Guess how much it costs?

Zero.

But don't think it's don't cheapen it because we did it for free.

It's incredibly valuable.

Guess how long the registration form is?

Drop in.

You can just drop in.

You show up, show up Wednesday night at 6 p.m.

Don't walk alone.

I end with this, and then we're gonna baptize some folks.

I end with this.

Some of you have allowed yourself to stop in your struggle because people who should have been there for you weren't and aren't.

So it's going, well, but they're my family member.

Oh, but they they said they love me.

Oh, but they're okay.

The fact that they're not there for you doesn't mean that nobody's there for you.

The struggle is real, but support is real.

And so just because they let you down doesn't mean nobody's there to so don't get into this while everybody let me down.

You're gonna have to give them grace and forgive them for not being there when when they they could have been or should have been.

But the bottom line is there is support there for you.

So take it.

Take that step, take that step.

Support each other.

But if you need help, step into celebrate recovery.

You need help, get in a group.

Don't let the fact that somebody you care about let you down, keep you from taking the hand of somebody else who cares who might be actually better equipped to help you walk it out.

Amen.