142 When Believing Isn’t Blind, but It Doesn’t have Sight Either

During this Easter week, Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw talk about how we walk by faith, and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), but that this isn't just blind faith. They discuss walking by faith, emphasizing that Christian faith is relational trust and attachment rather than merely ideas, and that faith crises often begin with emotional wounds and ruptures in church relationships that later get translated into doctrinal doubt.

They argue resurrection faith is not blind, citing reasons why it is reasonable to believe that Jesus really was raised from the grave. They close by reflecting on trust in everyday relationships, Jesus’ experience of betrayal, Psalm 121, and Aaron's Blessing.

Dive deeper in our new book, Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science and Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection, and learn about our trainings and other resources at embodiedfaith.life.

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Transcript

When Believing Isn’t Blind, but It Doesn’t have Sight Either

Geoff Holsclaw: Welcome back for this season, Cyd and I are looking at the key concepts and practices for attaching to God for becoming more deeply attached to God, so that no matter what landscape you might find yourself in, we can follow the Good Shepherd into the pastures of joy and peace.

Cyd Holsclaw: In our last episode, we talked about exchanging the yo-yo of emotions for the yes of Jesus. And today we. Are talking about walking by faith, and we hope that as you listen today, you will be encouraged and reminded although we do walk by faith and not by sight, it's not a blind faith. And hopefully you're gonna hear some good news today and leave this time feeling just a little bit stronger in your faith.

But before we do that. Two episodes ago we had talked about doom scrolling, and Geoff and I both left with things that we were gonna try to put into practice and just to reveal our humanness to you, we're gonna give you a little update on how those things went. So Geoff, what did you do and how did it go?

Geoff Holsclaw: So I did, I took a a three by five card. I took a picture of it, and then I made that my lock screen so that I look at it and it just had four words on it. Do not do it. That's four words. Right? Do not do it. Don't do it. Do not do it. So every time I picked up my phone and I was about to unlock it that's what I have to read now.

How effective was that? I thought it would be a lot more effective than it was. I think maybe if I got, shh.

Cyd Holsclaw: me a couple times that it was, that you stopped a couple times when you saw it.

Geoff Holsclaw: so I think, I think I need to reflect on it a little bit and evaluate the practice because in one sense, like there are times when I just need to unlock, like I gotta check a text or I gotta look at my calendar and figure out this.

And then other times. Like the times when I really don't wanna do it is like when I'm sitting like at the couch at the end of the day and I'm like reading and then I like also, and then I get distracted, like, oh, I should check that. Like, that's when it was like I really, and I think it was helping at those instances.

Uh, so maybe the reinforcement throughout the day of just like, well I do need to open it, but remember, don't do it. Maybe so. Maybe so. I dunno. So now I'm rethinking how effective it was. Initially I was like, I don't know if it was, if it helped much, but I think it might have helped a little bit. What about you?

Cyd Holsclaw: And that's how practices go, right? We can pick a practice and then we try it out, and maybe it wasn't as effective as we hoped it was, or maybe it didn't actually address the thing that we needed it to address, and that's what it's all about when we run new experiments so

Geoff Holsclaw: just made it into a teaching moment. She was like,

Cyd Holsclaw: well.

Geoff Holsclaw: this is how, you know what? What are the terms? This is like you're supposed to rein, you create a learning plan, and then what are the steps for sustainable change

Cyd Holsclaw: You gotta reflect on it and evaluate whether it was actually producing what you hoped it would, and if not, you can redesign. And so that's what you're, you know, you reflected on it and maybe it wasn't as as effective. I was trying to see, I, my thing was that I wasn't clear enough on what I was gonna do.

I said I was going, this is really bad, bad, like goal setting. I just

Geoff Holsclaw: Coach yourself.

Cyd Holsclaw: less, which is about the most vague

Geoff Holsclaw: not a smart goal.

Cyd Holsclaw: have. And so the idea was that I was gonna put my phone and leave it in a particular place and only look at it at limited hours, but I never decided what that place was gonna be, and I never defined what those hours were gonna be.

So I failed pretty tremendously. And there were several times when I did put my phone in a place and then I couldn't find it later because it wasn't in the place, it wasn't in a

Geoff Holsclaw: then you didn't pick it up and doom scroll so.

Cyd Holsclaw: true. I did less doom

Geoff Holsclaw: So maybe the next iteration of this practice is whenever I see your phone laying around, I just move it to a new place and then you'll have no idea where it is, but then I'll try to call you and then you'll anyways. Okay. One practice that we do, we always do this podcast to help us to help.

All of you listening get into a place of just being a little more peaceful, a little more present is to practice, gratitude. And so we're gonna model that. And then we always leave just a couple seconds for you all in your minds or out loud, wherever you might be to voice a gratitude. So this is very achievement oriented, but I am very grateful 'cause I just got word this morning that I had submitted some poems to a small literary journal and one of them got accepted for the spring

Cyd Holsclaw: Woohoo.

Geoff Holsclaw: So I'm very grateful for that.

Cyd Holsclaw: I am grateful for that too. It was really fun to celebrate that with you this morning.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yes,

Cyd Holsclaw: but that probably can't be my, well, it, I mean, I was feeling pretty grateful for that, so that it could be a gratitude too, but I guess I should choose something else. So I. The thing that I'm actually really grateful for is something that was in the past that actually has shaped our family tremendously, and I was just over this Easter weekend, I had a couple conversations with our younger son about just the ways that he remembered growing up, going to the campfire Easter vigil campfire in the on Sunday mornings in his pajamas.

And then like doing all of the different stories of the rehearsing, the stories of the Old Testament all the way up through this. Stories of redemption and then doing communion and BAB baptism and communion, and then having a big giant breakfast together at our church in Chicagoland. And I was just really remembering all of those rhythms and just remembering how grateful I am for all of those.

And the thing that really prompted it for me this year is that I've been reading the Benedictine. I've been trying to pray the hours with the Benedictines and they had a huge long Easter vigil, and several of those passages in their Easter vigil were passages that we used to read together as a community.

And so it just prompted my gratitude for all the ways that those years shaped me and our family.

Geoff Holsclaw: hmm. Excellent. Excellent. So we're just gonna take a minute. So just voice all of you. What are you grateful for? Alright. And if that wasn't enough time for you, you could just hit the pause button and, uh, finish up your gratitude moment. Or maybe so many came to mind and you just want to voice them all, uh, to the Lord or whoever might be, uh, near you. So today we're gonna be talking about, as Cyd mentioned, how we walk by faith and not by sight, but also the.

Faith is not blind, that we don't have a blind faith in this particularly. This is resurrection week, Easter week. And so we're talking about Jesus the resurrection, uh, how this is a core aspect of our faith, and yet there is a lot of losing faith that I think people kind of need to grapple with. There is this sense that in this cultural moment that people are, having a kind of a loss of trust. So the, I found Syd, you could tell me what you think. I think we've talked about this enough though. Uh, so I think we're on the same page, is that for a lot of people who go through this, a faith crisis or moment of deconstruction a lot of times that presents itself as a questioning of the ideas of Christianity, the ideas of faith, uh, or the authority of scripture or things like that.

But a lot of times I think it starts with some sort of kind of emotional wound or relational kind of situation. The fester maybe is too big of a word, but just something that hadn't been attended to on more of the social, emotional, relational Cyde of life that then creates this it's a loss of trust in the people, uh, the people of God or the leaders of the church that then.

Begins to manifest as a kind of a loss in faith in the kind of the doctrines or something like that. And so I see that quite a bit. Is that somewhat what you 

Cyd Holsclaw: Yeah, I see that quite a bit too. And we talk about it that a little bit in our book, landscapes of the Soul too, about how, a lot of times when we deconstruct our faith. That's because we're actually experiencing the result of the human relationships and the wounds and the scars of our human relationships.

And I think that's, there's been a lot of, you know, there are a lot of people who just don't behave super well in the church and there's also, that intersects with our own baggage that we bring into the church. And yeah, it doesn't take too much imagination to see how all of those. Ruptures in relationships within the church then cause us to translate that onto our entire system of believing.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah, I think that's good use of the word rupture. Rupture without repair. In, in the relationships then become I think, consciously these ruptures in kind of the doctrine. But as we talk about, you know, uh, in Lent, when we started off lent, we went through our three defaults of faith, hope, and love.

Uh, and so we talked a little bit about how faith really. Isn't about ideas, uh, it is about our relationships. And so just saying, I have faith in God, or I believe in God isn't just the idea of God, but it's really living as if God is available. And so faith is always a little closer to something like trust, loyalty, or allegiance, or of course the language we have of this podcast is an attachment is God being your primary attachment.

And so faith is like in, it's an embodied commitment to somebody. And so it would, and in that sense, we are raising the bar for the church and for church leaders to, to be something like, are you representing well, the faithfulness of God to the people that you're shepherding. And when many people come back with deconstructing their faith, like, I have not been shepherded well, or, and in fact I am repulsed by the shepherds of the church.

That's very understandable.

Cyd Holsclaw: So I think that, but we, when we talk about resurrection, it's like we have good reason to believe what we do. And to have the faith that we have. And so some of the things that we think about, you know this, in this post-Resurrection Week, we think about Jesus. When he rose, he appeared to several different people.

So he appeared to marry in the garden. He appeared to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. He appeared to the disciples when he made breakfast on the beach. He appeared to Thomas in the upper room. And I love what he says to Thomas. When Thomas was like, I won't believe until I see and put my fingers in your hands.

And in the Cyde. And then in John 2029, Jesus told him, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. And Jesus even appeared to Paul Long, after his ascension into heaven. And so af it's, it's in this currency. And Paul writes in First Corinthians 15.

Now brothers and sisters, I wanna remind you of the gospel I preach to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand by this gospel. You're saved if you hold firmly to the word I preach to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain for what I received. I passed on to you as a first importance.

And then he goes into this description, this eyewitness statements that have been made over and over again that Christ died for our sins. According to the scriptures that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, that he appeared to Phis or Peter. And then to the 12.

After that, he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living. Though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all, he appeared to me also as to one abnormally born. So we have this several records, several eyewitness accounts of people who saw Jesus resurrected.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. So we wanna balance, so when it comes to like, faith, resurrection faith in Jesus. As a relationship, that doesn't mean something like, well, what happened historically doesn't matter. In fact, it matters even more in, in my opinion. And so I just want to kind of go through a little bit of the idea that believing in Jesus and believing in the resurrection of Jesus for our sins.

Or for our life is not like blind faith. So we're gonna cover that really quick. This idea that's not blind faith. And then after that, I thought we would talk about how we walk by faith, not by sight. Okay. What were you gonna jump in with?

Cyd Holsclaw: I just wanna pause for a second. 'cause you said something really quickly, but I wanna, I wanna land on it for a minute. You said it, it, what happened in the past is important and I just wanna land on that for a second because part of the whole way that the Nation of Israel. Maintained their faith in God was by remembering, right, remembering that God had given them freedom from Egypt, that he had led them out through the Red Sea, remembering that he had given them the commandments on Mount Sinai.

Remembering what, like all this remembering is all based on the things that God has done. And so this is. The same kind of thing Paul is saying. Hold on to the things that have already happened. Remember, it's the same message that God has been giving the nation of Israel their whole, the whole existence of Israel, which is, don't forget about me, remember what I have done, because it's the evidence of who I am and my faithfulness to you.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. And that's why Paul uses the language of tradition in verse three. You were reading from first Corinthians 15 verse three for what I received. I passed on to you. That is actually a formulaic. Paul uses that several times. And, kind of the school of that he was educated in that word of what I was given, I handed on to you is language for tradition, is we hand these things on and on and on and on through multiple generations.

and that's what Paul was doing for the readers in Corinthians. 'cause all these Greek speaking Corinthians, a long way away from Jerusalem, have no idea, about all this stuff. And yet. Now he's handing on the tradition, uh, to them as, as, as partly as eyewitness reports. And so that's why it's so important as we talk about faith is not blind, but it also is more than sight.

So we're gonna keep getting that. But thank you for that

Cyd Holsclaw: And yet sometimes the traditions we hand on are not always the ones that are the best to hand on, right? So this is where the Pharisees got into trouble of creating all of these extra things

Geoff Holsclaw: now you sound like a good Baptist Protestant. Yes.

Cyd Holsclaw: No, tradition is good, but we have to be discerning about the traditions that we keep, and that's why Paul is making it crystal clear. These are the traditions, right? This is what I have received and this is what I'm passing on to you. These are the distinctives, the things that remain crucial and important.

Geoff Holsclaw: Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so let's just, 'cause this is like, now enter, let's take a little shift. It's not always how we approach this podcast, but I just wanna take maybe like an apologetic sort of defense of the faith kind of approach to, well, was the tomb really empty? Um, what kind of evidence, what suggests that, you know, we should hold onto that as not just like a myth or a symbol.

That inspires us to hope or some sort of crisis grief management, uh, lie that people made up. So I just want to kind of go through, and if Cyd, you can interject as as you think. So one of the reasons why historians, you know, who look at this kind of. With an open mind which is an openness to the miraculous.

One would be the reliance on women as witnesses. Women were generally not allowed to be legal witnesses in the courts, and so the fact that all the gospels mentioned that the women saw the empty tomb first and maybe even saw Jesus first resurrected 

Cyd Holsclaw: and that they were the ones who went and told the men.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yes. Yeah. So this indicates that it wasn't made up because any quote, scare quotes, rational kind of storyteller wouldn't add that detail because those are not allowable witnesses.

Women weren't allowable witnesses. So why would you make up something that wouldn't even bolster your case? 'Cause you didn't make it up. It's just what happened, is probably the easiest. Explanation. Uh, the, then moving on is the disciples preached an empty tomb regularly. They pointed to the empty tomb.

They kind of take it, took it for granted. And if it wasn't actually empty, it'd be pretty easy. Like, sorry. Even before the world of Wikipedia and fact checkers, like people could still go, it'd be like, no, we know where we buried him. He's still there. And so that would be a fact that you could easily disprove.

And yet, the early preachers preached the nty tomb. Another one, which I, I just found this out and I hadn't thought about it because we don't live in the culture where you venerate tombs or you venerate ancestors. But if Jesus's tomb, which was. Known, uh, where he was buried. If he was not raised, they probably would've started venerating his tomb.

And they would have, made it a holy site, perhaps a place of pilgrimage. And yet that never happened. There was no sense in which Christians were venerating tombs. Before I move on, any thoughts on some of those or should I just keep rolling?

Cyd Holsclaw: No, I think that's really, that's good to remember. I think the thing that, the question that stands out in people's minds is yeah. Authorities agreed that the tomb was empty, but they also had a story to explain that.

Geoff Holsclaw: Okay. That goes to my next point, so, so well. The authorities then basically said and you get this in Matthew 28, where the authorities had to make up a story about why the tomb was empty. So in that, in that sense, that's an argument for that tomb being empty, which is, well, people had to make up a story about why it's empty.

So what are some of the reasons for why it was empty? So possible explanations would be something like, well, the disciples stole. The body. So this is, uh, the one that you get in scripture is that the guards got paid off to produce this idea. But when you read the gospels and you see how the disciples scattered a fearful band of disciples, like are they really overpowering or tricking Roman soldiers who are professional killers in order to open the grave and steal the body?

Cyd Holsclaw: Highly unlikely, especially because those Roman soldiers would've had such a fear of the consequences from their authorities that why would they take some un unarmed, ordinary. Why would they, why? Why would they do that?

Geoff Holsclaw: And then of course, why would, if that was true that the disciples stole the body or made up the story, like why would they all as tradition tells us why were they all martyred for what they consciously knew was a lie? Another, uh, idea then is like, no one stole the body. Jesus just walked out. He wasn't really.

Dead. Uh, so this is, uh, in some circles kind of popular that, Jesus kind of faked his own death. That really doesn't get us very far because like I said, uh, Roman soldiers were professional killers. They knew when people were dead. They know how to kill people. This is like their job,

Cyd Holsclaw: And they know how to determine and tell if someone is dead or not.

Geoff Holsclaw: You know, and someone being crucified on a cross is really a kind of crowd control. Like it's intimidation. And so they're maximizing all the effects. Right? So if someone's not dead, then you know. Great. Let 'em hang up there longer, you know? So, they're not letting people off the hook because they, you know, someone didn't check a pulse, so that's very unlikely.

So then others kind of move into this idea of like, well, maybe people had like collective hallucinations, that sounds like you put those words together and that sounds fine, but like medical doctors, psychologists, there is no such thing as a collective hallucination. Hallucinations are so personal based off of your current physiology, your memories that your brain pulls from, and then just random firings of your neurons, like there's no way you can have collective hallucinations of things

Cyd Holsclaw: funny that you said That sounds okay. Like a collective hallucination. I'm like, wow. I would never like collective hallucination. Doesn't sound reasonable.

Geoff Holsclaw: just you put those words together and you're like, oh, it means multiple people are having an hallucination of the same thing. Yeah, that's fine. But that's not a real thing. Some other people say isn't it nice? But Jesus only appeared these appearance stories.

Jesus only appeared to people who were expecting him or believed in him. That's not actually true. Thomas, know, he was pretty non convinced. He wasn't sure if he was believing, and certainly Paul was confronted by Jesus. Paul was not believing in Jesus at all. And so, he was confronted and so, so if you wanna read more about that, a great book would be, uh, surprised by Hope by Auntie Wright.

He goes through all the arguments about why the most plausible ex explanation of the historical evidence is that the tomb was empty. That Jesus was raised from the dead and that he thinks that's actually the most open-minded view and takes the least amount of faith actually in kind of making up alternatives.

It also explains the rapid growth of the church and all these other things. But I just wanted to bring those up and there's a lot more there's a lot of other arguments we could bring up, but I just wanted to bring up those things to be like believing in God, believing in Jesus, believing that Jesus is our good shepherd, our savior, believing that Jesus rose from the dead.

Takes faith, but it's not a blind faith. There are good reasons for understanding these things and that there's a, a proper confidence as miss Theologist, Leslie New Begin would say we have a proper confidence in God because of a lot of things, uh, that we've seen and experience so that we can put our confidence in God.

Cyd Holsclaw: Yeah. And the realization and NT Wright talks about this and surprised by hope too, is that it takes faith to believe any of these other explanations as well. And it takes faith to believe that Jesus didn't ever actually die or that he walked outta the tomb. It takes faith. It means you're still not seeing, and it still takes an act.

It still takes faith to believe that's what happened.

Geoff Holsclaw: So that leads us to the, uh, the next part that we wanna cover here is in second Corinthians five, seven. It's, Paul says, we walk by faith, not by sight. Hebrews 11, verse one says, faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen. So how do we square these two things that.

Belief in God. Belief in Jesus. Belief in the resurrection is not blind faith, and yet we don't walk by sight, but we walk by faith over to you. S answer it,

Cyd Holsclaw: Yeah. I think, just leave me with this big, huge question, but I think, if we think about, again, you said at the beginning that the way we talk about faith is that it's about relationship. And so a more, a more fitting word can sometimes be the word trust. And so we walk by trust. so if you think about that, walking by trust is not just particular to our religion or to the God that we believe in, but it's also significant in all of our relationships. Like we trust our friends, we trust our relatives, we trust our spouses. We trust our. Doctors, we we're not, I mean, some of us do live in skepticism, so I'm not gonna say that that doesn't happen.

But most of the time, in order not to lose your mind in this world, you do actually have to trust and have some faith in the people in your life. Because if you're constantly checking the motives and actions of every single person and constantly scrutinizing every word or action, and constantly assu, like making people have to prove themselves to you over and over again.

I mean, that is a well of anxiety. That just can be such a deep trap. And so there is some amount of trust, some amount of faith that all of us exercise in our daily ordinary lives. We trust that, our boss is still gonna be our boss. We trust that the people that we show up to work with are still gonna be there.

We trust that, you know, there's all kinds of things that we trust as far as the relationships with people. I trust that you're still gonna be. My husband tomorrow. Um, I trust that my kids are still my kids. There's this, you know, and I know that a lot of people have experienced disruption of relationship, especially in today's cancel culture, where, you know, there's a rupture in the relationship.

And rather than, than seeking repair, one or the other person just says, forget it, I'm done. I don't wanna be in relationship with you anymore. Um, and that is an incredibly painful. And difficult place. And so I'm not making light of that. But I think the good news that we need to keep in front of us, which allows us to exercise that trust and that faith in Jesus, is that Jesus himself was betrayed.

He was denied, he was abandoned, and yet he never gave up on his father. And so he has experienced deeper pain than we will ever know, and he is with us in those experiences of losing faith in humans, in the people in our lives. He gets it like he gets it like nobody else ever will. And so in his presence and his companionship together with him borrowing his capacity, we can do the work to tease out the separation or to differentiate between when it's the people who have let us down and.

When the God who has suffered the betrayals and the disappointments right along with us is still stubbornly refusing to let us go. And that's where again, we come back to this sort of remembering what God has done. And I don't know that's how I would answer that question. How would you answer the question?

Geoff Holsclaw: everything you said was great. I when I teach theology, we talk about how you could list all the physical attributes of me, right? Six. Three. I weigh

Cyd Holsclaw: Oh, you grew an inch. I thought you were six two

Geoff Holsclaw: all this time. You thought I was

Cyd Holsclaw: today. You're six three.

Geoff Holsclaw: I've been six three the whole time. I've, we've, I've always been six three. How much do I weigh? Where was I born? How old am I? My social security number. We could list all these facts, but would you say that, Geoff right. The most important things about me our relationships together, relationship with my children, the goals and values I have.

The fact that I'm incredibly funny. Yeah, see Cyd was laughing. The, like, so all these different things like to kind of capture the essence of a person goes way, way, way beyond facts that you could list. And so that's kind of what I think of that difference between walking by faith and not by sight is well, sight is like the things you can list.

And so as I was kind of reflecting on, on that. That verse, we walk by faith, not by sight. That doesn't mean you don't walk without seeing things. It just means that it's faith, that it's our attachment to God. By which we see all those things. So it's like a deeper seeing. We're seeing through the world to receive the gifts that come from the father.

We see God behind the movement of things that might otherwise be random, but that doesn't mean we just close our eyes and now there's nothing. In front of us, but it's this like deeper kind of seeing. And I've actually been reading some work by Michael Palani and he was a, a scientist as well as a philosopher, and he was basically making the argument, even scientists live by faith, they live by the hunch of a reality that they haven't quite discovered yet, but they see signs and hints of.

Patterns of things that they don't know quite what they mean. And so they're grasping after this new discovery, but they have to believe that it's out there, otherwise they'll never put in the work to finding it, to discovering it. I really think that this is like the essence of, uh, you know, when Jesus says, whenever you know, you seek, you will find or your knock and the door will be open to you.

And so there's, we always live by faith in some fashion, and so sometimes you get that word. Seeing is believing. But really when you, when you unpack how we functionally live, it's actually believing is seeing, it's the things we believe and take for granted are the things that most likely kind of see and appear.

So are we looking to God in order to see the rest of the world would be kind of my main question.

Cyd Holsclaw: I think that's such a great reframe that it's when it's by believing that we see.

Geoff Holsclaw: Well, can I end with Psalm 1 21?

Cyd Holsclaw: Please do.

Geoff Holsclaw: So I was reading this, I think it was yesterday morning. It just really struck me. And so I'm just gonna read it. This is from the new revised standard version for those of you who read in different versions, but it's a very familiar Psalm, I would think. And it really is this question of, who are we looking to?

Which is that question of faith. So verse one, I lift my eyes up to the hills. From where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper.

The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day or the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. The Lord will keep you, will keep your goings and your comings in from this time on and forevermore.

Cyd Holsclaw: Wow. I just noticed as you were reading that the number of times that the word keep shows up, that he keeps you, he will keep this, he'll keep that. And then also that he will not let your foot slip. That he is your A really, that's all about God's availability. That he never lets go. He keeps us.

And so that's a perfect transition into our closing benediction today. And I would just encourage you if you have time to just reread Psalm 1 21 and think about all the ways that God keeps us and that we have faith in the maker of heaven and earth to keep our feet from stumbling when we walk by faith and not by sight. And so as we close today, we just leave you with the blessing. May the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. And also we just, I just always wanna remind you and the God is always with you and today remembering that he keeps you.

So thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.