Fight for Formation

Hey, if you don't know who I am, my name's Pastor Dylan. I'm one of the staff pastors here. And I'm just going to apologize upfront. Normally, I start with a joke, but I have no joke this morning for you.

So I know I already have one person offended. So it's going to get better, I promise. But this morning, I want to jump right into my message because I have a lot of material I want to cover. Last year, I had a goal.

I wanted to read more. So I tried to read a few books. And one of the books I read last year, I read these three words, and it jumped right off the page. And hopefully, someday, the title of my message will actually become the title of a book that I want to write on this subject.

But those three words, as soon as I read them, made me consider every aspect of life, from how I go to work, how I love my wife, how I even serve my God. And so these three words are the title of my message today. And it's Fight for Formation. And I first read these words in a book called Habits of the Household by Justin Early.

And it's a great book. If you're looking for a book to read as a parent, I highly recommend this book. I love this book. But the concept of this Fight for Formation actually comes from Paul's letter to the Roman Church.

In Romans chapter 12, verse 2, Paul says, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you'll be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. And at the heart of all of our lives, there is a war raging for our formation. Either you'll be conformed formation to the pattern of this world or transformed formation to the image of God by the renewing of your mind.

And this is the Fight for Formation. Justin Early talks about this in his book. And he has a little quote I want to read to you. He says, Paul seems to assume that formation is the default.

We are either being conformed to the world, or being formed, transformed by God. This is an important lesson about what the human heart is. It is never not being shaped by something. And I think that is a good spot to pause for a second.

Your heart is never not being shaped by something. Since the beginning of time, we've seen God has formed man. In Genesis 1, we see there's a creation account. It's called the Cosmic Creation.

And in Genesis 2, there's actually a second creation account. Most people read it as one big account, but it's actually two separate. And that is the account of man, or a creation from man's perspective, often called the priestly creation account. And in Genesis 2, verse 7 says, The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground.

Understand that God created everything. But there's one thing that he formed. He formed mankind, both male and female, in his image. You are formed.

Ever since the existence of humanity, there's been a fight for your formation. Whether you're going to be the image of God, an image bearer of God, or you're going to conform to the pattern of this world. Where it says, The Lord had planted a garden in the east and Eden, and there he had put man who he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.

In the middle of the garden were the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So all the way back to Genesis 2, from the dawn of existence, there has been a fight for your formation. This war is for your imagination, your attention, and your devotion. And so the question I want to help answer today is how do we win this fight for formation?

And I want to give you one word. It's the most important word that I want to share this morning. Focus. Focus.

It is said, what we behold, we become. In other words, our focus equals our formation. And I want to talk about this idea that there's a battle for your attention, or a battle for your focus. John Mark Comer wrote a book called Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

It's a very famous Christian work of literature, and he talks about this whole idea of attention. And I think what he shares is very, very valuable. In fact, I'm going to read a large paragraph from his book, and just know that if I didn't think it was good, I wouldn't read it to you, because I'd rather keep my quotes to about three words, because that's all I can read at one time. So bear with me, all right?

But here's what he says, because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way, the mind is the portal to the soul. And what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.

That bodes well for the apprentices of Jesus who give the bulk of their attention to him, and to all that is good, beautiful, and true in this world. But not for those who give their attention to the 24-7 news cycle of outrage and anxiety, and emotion-charged drama, or the nonstop vid of celebrity gossip, and cultural drivel. As if we give it in the first place, much of it is stolen by a clever algorithm out to monetize our precious attention. But again, we become what we give our attention to for better or worse.

And I think this is very fitting for where we are as a culture. I don't know if you have been on social media in the past month, but everyone has an opinion, and they want you to know it, right? And usually, there's no shortage of hot takes online, no shortage of keyboard warriors, as I call them. The comment section is full, right?

But thanks to social media, our attention isn't just up for grabs, it's actually up for sale. So I don't know if you realize this, but every time you click that little app on your phone, or you launch that little website, somebody makes money off of your attention. And it's usually not you, just in case you were wondering, oh, maybe I can make some money, right? Usually it's some corporation, right?

You're either clicking a link and buying something directly, or they're selling ads, and you're looking at those ads, and the more you look at them, the longer you stay, the more money they make. Every time you open that app, there's a war for your attention, and it's a profitable one. Our attention isn't just up for grabs, it's up for the highest bidder. And there's an interesting podcast, it's called The Founders Podcast.

And in The Founders Podcast, they take different successful business people or different leaders throughout history, and they do an episode on how they got their start, how they founded their business. And there was an interesting episode on The Founder of Hyundai. His name is Chung Juyung. I hope I said that right.

But he said this on the gift of time. Time is a capital given to everyone in equal amount. A successful man is just one who has made good use of the equal capital given to him, trying always to do his best believing in himself. And when I heard this quote, two things popped into my mind, these two truths that I think are very important to understand.

Number one, the great equalizer in life is time. The great equalizer is time. We all, no matter how young or old, no matter how much money you have in your bank account, no matter how many square feet you have in your house, you all have 24 hours in a day just like I do. It's the great equalizer.

It is equal opportunity for all humans. But the great differential or the great separator is focus. How you spend that time, how you focus your energy and your attention with that time makes the biggest difference in returns between whether you're going to use that time wisely or waste it. And our formation comes either by default, we're conformed to the pattern of this world.

That's gonna happen naturally by existing in this world. Or by divine design through transformation, becoming more and more like the image of Christ. Graham Weaver once said, the truest form of intelligence is designing the life you want to live. But I would actually take that one step further and I would say this, one of the purest forms of worship, and this comes back to Romans 12, the first verse, is purposely living your life mirrored to God's divine design.

In other words, designing a life that you want to live is great, but designing a life that God has purposed for you, that is worship. Pulses were to offer ourselves, our bodies, as living sacrifices, and that is our true and proper worship. When we live our life, mirroring God's divine design, we offer pure worship to him. Think about this, the most precious and rare gift we all possess, all of you possess this gift, is our undivided attention.

Also known as your focus. So you can spend your time doing many things, but you can only focus truly on one thing. Some of us like to think we're multitaskers, science has kind of put a kabosh that, humans don't really have the capacity to focus on more than one thing. What we do is we split our focus, and then we're not really focused on either.

Instead of doing one job really well, we do two jobs, not quite half as well. So our undivided attention, our focus, becomes an extremely rare commodity, because it can only be spent on one thing at a time. And the paradox of focus is that, while it's free of charge, it's also at the same time, extremely priceless. I like what this French philosopher, Simone Wiel said.

She said, attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Sometimes when we think of the word generosity, when we think of giving someone some money, we might even think of donating our time or volunteering, but rarely do we ever think of generosity as giving someone your attention. And yet at the same time, that is the purest, most generous form of generosity. To sit with someone and say, you have all of my attention.

Sometimes my kids, they ask me for stuff, they want toys. Hey, dad, can I get this? And what I found is most of the time, what they really want is not a new toy. What they really want is my attention.

Do you care about me? Do you love me? Will you see me? I can't tell you the amount of times I've been sitting on the couch and say to my daughter, say to my dad, dad, watch me do this.

And it's like, I just watched you jump off the couch like six times in a row. Nothing changed, but dad, I want you to see it again, right? And sometimes I go downstairs, our basement's kind of a mess, but sometimes we go down there. It's kind of like the basement in Home Alone.

It's kind of freaky sometimes, but, and we have this table in chairs. This is our actual table in chairs. Fun fact, my daughter, say to not want me to take her table in chairs. She's like, why am I gonna play with downstairs?

I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. That thing's a death trap full of toys. But I actually had to rent my own table in chairs from my daughter for $5, okay? So just know this illustration cost me something.

So please pay attention, cause I paid the price. But sometimes, and I'm gonna try to sit down without tearing my pants or breaking the chair. So, woo. All right.

Sometimes, I have to sing up a little bit, ooh, I did not like the feeling of that. I felt the chair moving away. It shouldn't have. Sometimes though, Seila and I were playing downstairs and she's got this little coffee cart.

And usually she's like, yeah, what do you want? And I'm like, you know, Breve, please, like, you know, make me a latte, right? So she's making me a coffee. But I'll be honest, sometimes she's off doing her thing or she's taking a while to steam the milk, you know, the pretend milk.

And it's easy to get bored or distracted. And sometimes I can zone out. And, you know, sometimes things distract me. Like, you know, my phone might ring or something.

And I think they're supposed to play a sound effect. My sound effect, I think has to do pro-possing or so, see if it plays. No. All right, Lucian, why don't you just bring out my phone?

Just pretend that my phone rang, please, for me. Enlighten me. Humor me. Thank you, Lucian.

Sometimes, you know, your phone rings, and we live in a weird society where we're reachable 24-7. I just want you to know that is common, but not normal. Up until about, I don't know, the last 50 years, I'll be generous. We haven't been reachable 24-7.

You had to like, you know, dial a real phone. You had to walk across the street, hop on a party line, like, you had to take a ferry, right? If you wanted to go talk to someone. Now we're accessible 24-7.

So sometimes my phone rings, sometimes I'm like, oh no. So and so sent me a message, and I forgot to correspond. You know, so I got to send them back a message. You know, we call them texts.

And so I will just take out my little typewriter. Oh, my jam the keys. That's, you guys remember typewriters? Don't pretend.

I know some of you guys never have typed on with these. Okay, and then I send my message back, you know, but I'm not gonna lie. Sometimes my mind wanders, and I just wonder things. Like I should Google, last night we walked a bug's life.

I was like, who's the voice of the grasshopper? So I got to, you know, Google, who's the voice of Hopper? Oh, great. I don't even remember who it was.

Oh, he's, guys, he's still bringing out the computer. I'm still googling, it's working. Okay, crunch the number. How many of you guys remember Dialov internet, right?

E-R-E-D-E-D right? Just a horrible sound, and then Dad would come there. I needed to make a phone call. I just loaded the first page, and you got to disconnect.

Oh man, what a day to live. And then back in the mid 90s, we had one of these. Thank you, Lucian. Really try not to drop it.

This is ancient technology. How many of you guys had one of these? The Space Maker by GE. We had one of these, it might have been this exact one, because there can't be that many in existence.

But we had this mounted under our kitchen cabinet. And every once in a while, you know, you just want to listen to a little Spotify, well, we didn't have Spotify. So we listened to the radio, right? FM, AM, good stuff.

Let me see if I can find a spot for this. Here we go, we're making it. All right, and then sometimes though music's just not enough, right? You can't just listen to the audio.

You know, you're like, say, I know we're playing right now, but I just really need to look up this YouTube video of the cats doing the keyboard thing, right? Duh, duh, duh, duh, or whatever. Like I gotta figure out what I need to do later, right? I need to figure out what I'm gonna buy later, whatever.

But they call it YouTube. You guys know anyone from Gen Z know why they call it YouTube? Here's why, it's a Tube, TV. Anyways, some people just now figured out that the reason you pick up a phone is because you used to pick up of any ways.

Here's my point. I hope you're starting to see the point a little bit. Someone in the room's like, done, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, right? I would never, ever pull out all those devices while I'm playing with my kid.

But I understand this, just because they made technology more compact and more convenient, doesn't mean it's any less divisive, destructive, distracting, or disrespectful, right? We used to have a conversation with people face to face. And I think sometimes I was talking to my friend, Andy, about this. Sometimes you're having a conversation, and if someone comes up to you, you don't just be like, oh, hey, how's it going?

You've finished your conversation and you're like, hey, what's up, right? But sometimes we're with someone in person, our phone rings are like, oh, hold on, I gotta take this. Like let me tell you, you're not nearly as important to me as this. And I think it is a little ridiculous.

I would never pull out all these devices, yet at the same time, how ridiculous is it to pull out an inanimate object when my daughters they're going, da, da, da, watch this. And I'm willing to give my undivided attention to this little screen. And what is that communicating to my four-year-old? You're not as important as this little thing.

Like that's quite the statement to make. I was recently at a barbershop. I had gotten trouble first-service. I said it was great clips.

And I said they should call it sometimes great clips. And I think one of the hairdresser ladies who works there was here. Apologies, always great clips. I was there.

And I've been trying to be off my phone more. And I sat down as an exercise of boredom. I decided not to take my phone out and just observe. You should try.

It's wild, what you notice. But I'm sitting there, and I'm observing. And I see these two 65-year-old guys sit down. And they are the biggest screenagers I've ever seen.

And that's when it hit me. I'm like, it's not just my generation. It's definitely not Gen Z, OK? They learned it somewhere, right?

They learned it from us. And we learned it from you guys, right? Up in, you know, we just keep going. But it's affected all areas of our society.

Recently someone asked me, what is an iPhone cost these days? And without really thinking, I said, I don't know, like, $1,200. And the more I thought about the answer, the more I would argue it, for a lot of us cost a lot more than that. See, we know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

We've made distractions so convenient. Yeah, it's not convenient to pull out a computer and connect to the internet and pull a radio and a phone and a typewriter and a TV. It's very convenient to pull out your phone. And just because convenient doesn't mean it's any less dangerous.

And so we do this. And what is costing us is $1,200. It's costing us meaning and purpose and valuable connection with people we love. It's costing us our attention.

We have forgotten how to be bored. We feel every moment with distraction. If there's silence, let's put music. If there's music on, let's put a video on.

Let's multitask, right? We have forgotten how to get bored. And I'm telling you, some of your best ideas in life are going to be on the other side of boredom, not on the other side of distraction. And I think it's really important we learn how to get bored again.

Sailor the other day came in the house. We didn't have the TV on, which on some days is a rarity, just full honesty. She comes in and goes, dad, I'm bored. And I don't think she was expecting my reaction.

Because I did a fist pump, like when you make a 20-foot putt, you know, at a golf bar? So I was like, yes, Tiger Woods. And she looked at me funny. And I said, Sailor, I just want you to know I'm doing my job.

Like, as a dad, I hope you get bored. And I hope we all rediscover how to get bored. Maybe observe some things. Look up at the sky once.

It's really cool. So how do we combat the constant distraction that we're faced with on a daily basis? I'm going to give you three of my future 10 focuses or habits to focus. How do we combat this constant distraction and win the fight for formation?

Focus number one is this. It's not butter. It's margin. And all of my chapter titles are going to have a weird name, just one in the upfront.

But growing up, we used to have a saying in my house. And we still do. It's sage advice. We still follow.

But butter makes everything better. First there's amen right there. That was a great point, guys. But butter makes everything better.

But I'm going to give you something even better than butter. It's called margin. Not to be confused with margarine. I think some of you are mis-understanding what I'm saying.

Margarine is the spreadable plastic. I wouldn't give that to my worst enemy. If you have margarine in your house, I love you still. But just go ahead and throw that right in the trash and skip the middle man.

That is plastic, if you ask me. Butter is where it's at. Butter makes everything better. But even better than butter.

I feel like I'm wrapping up here. Even better than butter is margin. And what is margin? Margarine is simply this.

It's the space between your load and your limit. And a lot of us are not good at margin. We rush to the next thing. We got sports we got to get to.

We got activities we got to get to. I got to get the kids out of the house in the morning. I got to get to work. And we rush, rush, rush.

And what is happening is, instead of living full, meaningful, purpose lives, when we live without margin, what we get instead is hurried lives. And we're constantly hurrying and speeding up to the next thing. And what happens in our mind is something called task lagging, where your mind can't fully process the task you're on, and you jump to a new one. So your brain is actually splitting focus.

It's going, hey, I'm supposed to be doing that thing, right? And now you're rigidly on one task, but you're already working on the next task. And what happens is we become functional zombies. Some of us are higher functioning zombies than other people.

But you're still a zombie nonetheless, because you're moving from task to task to task, more and more and more next next. And we have no time, no energy left, to give people, analyze, to spend processing life's emotions and all the things that go with it. And the cure for a lack of margin is really simple. And this might be kind of novel to some of you, but it's doing less.

I know I just rock somebody's world. Like, what? I have more time by doing less. Yeah, it's amazing.

You should try it sometime. Very freeing. When you do less, you can focus more. I like to call this state of life being present.

One of the great cinematography works of art in our time, Kung Fu Panda. Great movie if you've never seen it. It's quite a movie. But there's a quote from Kung Fu Panda from Master Ughwe.

And I love this. It's one of my life models, if you will. It says this. Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That is why they call it the present. And I think those are wise words to live by.

Today's a gift. The only moment you ever get to live in is the present moment. Don't waste it being somewhere else. One of my favorite characters who's often overlooked in the Bible is Jesus's earthly father, Joseph.

And we really don't know that much about Joseph. We don't hear any record or read any record of him having special talents or abilities. He didn't do any miracles. He didn't drive a faster donkey than anyone else.

He's just kind of a normal dude. And we don't know that much about him. But we do know one thing. He was at the birth of Jesus.

And it's the Christmas story, right? Luke chapter 2, verses 4 through 7 says, So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea to Bethlehem to the town of David, because he belonged to the house in line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him. That's nice.

He's got a fiance. And was expecting a child. That's pretty Stearns County. Verse 6, while they were there, the time came for the baby to be born.

She gave birth to her first born son. She wrapped him in cloths, placed him in a manger. That's very Stearns County, because there's no guest room available for them. So why am I bringing this up?

Because here's the deal. Mary will be wherever Jesus is born, right? Mary's pregnant with Jesus. Wherever she goes, he goes, right?

It's not really much choice in it, right? Mary's still willingly accepted. But there's not much choice. Like where I am, Jesus is also.

But for Joseph to be at one of the biggest moments in all of human history, the birth of the Messiah required a choice. And the choice was, do I want to be present? See, the wise man brought gold, frank, and sense, and murder. But Joseph, I believe, brought the most valuable gift.

He brought his presence. And he easily could have missed the greatest moment in history to that point. But he stayed present. Focus number two.

This one's called Hungry Hungry Hippos. How do you guys remember the game, Hungry Hungry Hippos? OK, for I just happened to have it right here. Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Fun game, used to play it as a kid. And the goal is pretty simple, right? Eat as much as almost a humanly pot. And hippo will be possible.

Eat as many of these little marbles as you can. And there's multiple colored marbles. I don't even know how many marbles are supposed to be. But the goal is really simple.

Eat as much as you can. And I was thinking, how do you win at Hungry Hippos? And then I thought about it. And it really doesn't matter how many marbles you eat.

It doesn't matter which marbles you eat. All that matters is that you eat more than the other guy. And I think this is very much so how you live as a culture. I don't really care what it is.

And I just want more of it than you have. And we want more and more and more. We're addicted to more. Jesus taught us a valuable lesson about appetite in his sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 5, 6. Jesus said, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I think it's important because, yes, it's important to hunger and thirst for righteousness. But I think it's a spiritual principle that applies to all life.

Whatever you hunger for, you feast on. So be careful what you hunger for. Proverbs 27, 7 says, one who is full, lo is honey from the comb. But to the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet.

So in life, if you don't know what you're hungry for, understand you're going to get hungry. And when you get hungry, anything and everything becomes appetizing. And that's when it's really easy in life to start chasing after things that don't really matter. We're hungry for the wrong things because we're not sure what we're really hungry for.

We're just the hungry, hungry hippo. As long as I eat more than you, I'm fine. In other words, be careful what you chase in life because you just might catch it. It's like a blessing and a curse, catching what you chase in life.

And I think of another great movie, The Dark Knight. The Joker says, I'm like a dog chasing a tiger. I don't know what I would do if I caught it. I think that's many times how we live our life.

I don't really know what I want. I just know I want that. And we chase after it. And then what happens when they get it?

And it's not what we really wanted at all. See, part of this problem, part of this constant desire for more is not your fault. Our brains are actually wired for specific reasons to want more. And there's multiple chemicals in your brain.

I'm not a scientist, so I'm not going to go into all that. But there's one really important one. There's four major ones. One really important one called dopamine.

And there's a book about the subject of dopamine and dopamine addiction. And it's by Daniel Lieberman, it's called The Molecule of More. Scientists call it the Molecule of More. And this is a really good summarization of what dopamine does in our life.

This is from the book Molecule, More by Daniel Lieberman. He says, from dopamine's viewpoint, having things is uninteresting. It's only getting things that matters. If you live under a bridge, dopamine makes you want a tent.

If you live in a tent, dopamine makes you want a house. If you live in the most expensive mansion in the world, dopamine makes you want a castle on the moon. Dopamine has no standard for good and seeks no finish line. The dopamine circuits in the brain can be stimulated only by the possibility of whatever is shiny and new.

Never mind how perfect things are at the moment. The dopamine motto is more. And our brains are wired for this dopamine drip. Going back to our phones for a second.

This is why sometimes when you pick up your phone and you launch an app, you're like, wait a minute, how did I just launch Facebook or whatever it is, right? It's because your brain is going, I want more dopamine. And we get dopamine every time we check it. But pretty soon, we have to linger longer and check it more frequently.

And all of a sudden, our dopamine drip is just on a forever cycle. I heard this the other day. It really made me sad. Said, man wakes up.

First thing he does is pull out a 5.7 inch screen. Gets up, gets ready, goes to work where he sits for eight hours at his desk in front of a 15 inch screen. Just to go home and stare all night at a 65 inch screen. Only to lay back in bed and stare once more at his 5.7 inch screen.

Why? Why are we in this cycle? Because we've given over to this idea of I need more and more and more and more. Contentment.

Contentment will free you from the desire of constantly needing more. The key to freedom is not the accumulation of more, rather the appetite for less. Contentment. G.K.

Chesterton. So there are two ways to have enough. Accumulating more and more or desiring less. That's why Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6.6.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. See, we're after the great game, but we don't understand how to get it. The way to get great gain is not by going and getting more stuff. It's by becoming more content and desiring less.

So watch, which you hunger for. Focus number three and the band is going to come out. We're going to try to land this plane quickly. A tree is 90% air until it isn't.

And I learned this life lesson on the golf course. My friend Nate Davis and I, we like to go golfing. And I would consider myself in aspiring golfer, which means I'm terrible at golf. But I wish I wasn't.

And sometimes as an aspiring golfer, you, well, you can't find a fairway. And so you hit it and it ends up behind a tree. And we call it tree trouble. And I'm in tree trouble a lot as a golfer.

And so usually I veer to the left, and I got to go over there, and I find my ball, and I'm right behind a tree. And at this moment in life, you have one or two options. You can be the smart guy and just hit it back in the fairway. You're not going to get very far, but at least you're straight in line with the pin again.

Or you can try to be the hero, you know, channel your inner tiger woods, and bend it around the tree, or hit it through that little acorn hole of the tree. This is it. So I was asking Nate, Nate, you're a good golfer. What should I do?

And Nate would always tell me the worst advice ever. He'd say, a tree is 90% air. And I'd say, all right, I'm going for it, you know, it's hero time. And then I get behind the oak tree and I swing, and I find the 10% every time.

The pesky 10%, right? But that lesson on the golf course has taught me a valuable lesson in life. And it's really simple. It's this, life can be going all your way until it isn't.

And when it isn't, it has a wave coming back at you fast. Tree's 90% air until it's not. And when it's not, boy, does that ball come back at you quick? And that's kind of how my life has been last month to the day.

One month ago was actually a Sunday because February is the perfect month, 28 days. And last month, on Sunday, me and my wife, it was Willie weekend. We'd been having a lot of fun. We both got to meet Willie.

It was a man. It was a cool event. I know a lot of people were here that weekend. And that was doing some cool things.

And for me, I've been a Duck Dynasty fan since 2012, back at the Haiti. I've actually been down to Duck Commander at Interview Jase. And Si, one time, told me a story about skipping school and going fishing. Me and Derek got a shout out on the podcast one time for being horribly dressed.

And then Willie, Saturday night, made sure to let people know because I was dressed like him. That's what he would look like if nothing would have worked out. So it was fun being roasted by your hero in front of all my friends. It was great.

But where I'm from, if you get made fun of that, it means you're real friends. So anyway, it was a great weekend. Sunday morning, we're here, Kenzie, my wife. She was kind of a big component of putting some of those details together.

Friday was a really busy day. She was exhausted, and she just kind of shut down. And then Saturday, just tried to rest. Obviously, we still had stuff going on.

And then Sunday, we knew something was off. And what a lot of people didn't know is that we were planning. After that Sunday, after second service, we had pictures already. We had an announcement.

We were expecting our third child. And Kenzie, 15 weeks pregnant at time, we were just kind of laying making the announcement after the busyness of the weekend. And after first service, we had a little chat in my office. I could tell if something wasn't right.

And I said, we better go to the ER. And so we drove to the ER and St. Cloud. Same day, Kenzie's dad got taken by ambulance to ER.

One of my heartland students got taken by ambulance to the ER. It was a fun, really fun day, if you know what I'm saying. Nothing fun about it. And it was snowing like crazy, slow drive.

We get there. And I'll make a long story short. Kenzie gets wheeled back into the room. And the words, I'm so sorry, but your baby has no heartbeat.

And at that moment, you have way more questions than you have answers. And Kenzie was supposed to be 15 weeks pregnant. Our baby was measuring 12 weeks. And what had happened was her body was trying to process the miscarriage that had just taken place.

And for those of you familiar with our story, you might know that that's actually our fourth pregnancy. Our first pregnancy was ectopic. We lost that baby at seven weeks. And then God gave us two wonderful, beautiful, healthy gifts, Sailor and Maverick.

And then we were excited to hopefully have a third here on Earth. But it's amazing how fast you can go from feeling like you're on top of the world to having the world be on top of you. And you go from planning a pregnancy announcement to Googling funeral arrangements for miscarriage. And it reminds you just how temporary this whole thing we call life is.

It reminds you what's really important. There's none of that. It reminds you, in a very loud way, shouting in your face, cherish it while you still can. And we made it home Sunday night at midnight, we got home.

Monday morning, our kids were with an awesome family just hanging out there, really unaware of what was going on. And we were just kind of grieving. I was sitting crying, which is fun, as a grown adult male, just crying by yourself. And I felt the Lord just put something on my heart.

He said, I want you to grieve out loud. And I was like, God, how on earth do I do that? So I took out my phone. And I made a note on my phone.

And I called it getting stronger every week. And week is crossed out like as in week of the year, but week as in weakness. And I wrote it down. And I didn't know when.

But I knew at some point, God would ask me a shirt. And so it's why I'm going to share what I wrote, part of what I wrote in this note. So here's why I wrote, I felt today God's gentle nudge to grieve out loud. Hopefully it will bring healing to not just my soul, but yours as well.

Second Corinthians 1210 says, that is why for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. I am getting stronger every week. Be worthy of the suffering you face.

For when you suffer well, you hope greatly. Praise God for hardship. Because hardship produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. Romans 5, 3, 3, 4, not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings.

Because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character hope. Then I went on to write, grief is strange. One minute you're crying on your bed, perhaps at the thought of your loss, or perhaps at the amazement of support you've been shown. The next minute you feel normal, almost as if none of the pain existed.

So normal, you actually for a moment, however brief, however transient, feel guilty for not hurting more. The pain of grief is difficult, and yet simultaneously the guilt of normalcy weighs just a bit more. Breathing the lostness of past is hard, but I'm not sure the neverness of the future is any easier. God holds us in our pain as we hold him in our hope.

I shake at the thought, literally my hands are shaking, even as I type this, of having to tell my four-year-old what death is. How will a child handle such an adult subject? Will she understand it all? Will her little heart break?

The thought is too much for me to comprehend. All I know is God will give me the strength to do the right thing, if I provide the courage to act rightly. Some truths are hard to accept at any age, but they remain true regardless. I plan to tell her she has two brothers or sisters in heaven already.

And when we arrive, we will have a big hug as a family and enjoy each other's laughter for the first time. What a joy this pain will bring. After telling her, she said, Dad, I don't understand. I simply replied, I don't either.

Sometimes the truest answer is not having a right answer. It is said fear cuts the channel through the mind that all their thoughts must trickle through, and I think the same is true for grief. Jesus wept, and so did I. We are not told to forget our problems, rather, to remember our God.

And then last Thursday, I wrote down a prayer that I simply called, the smallest coffins are the heaviest. O little coffin, you weigh heavy on my heart today. What tragedy? To miss someone you've never met.

Well, I miss you. And I never even got to meet you, both of you. I feel torn today between two worlds, and feel guilty for being absent from the one, and not totally present in the other. Please forgive your father, as the Father has forgiven me.

One day, our reunion will be sweet. Even if for the present moment, it doesn't feel swift. It brings me comfort to know you're enjoying his presence now, even as I feel the weight of your absence. The last thing I wrote was this.

Remember when life lets you down, God holds you up. The reason I share that is not because I want your sympathy, to be honest, I don't even know how to handle that. But I want you to know, there's realness to my life, and there's realness to yours, and I'm not the only one going through suffering. See, we all suffer at times, but not all suffering has to be bad.

We are called to suffer well. And I want to be worthy of the suffering I'm now going through, just as Christ was considered worthy to suffer on my behalf. Who am I to accept blessing from God with an open hand, and not accept the world's suffering in the same way? Problem is in America, we tend to avoid pain and suffering at all costs.

In fact, last year in the United States, collectively, we spent anywhere from $3.5 to $7.7 billion on one thing, painkillers. We will do anything to ease or avoid the presence of pain or suffering. But this is a reminder, when suffering comes, and it comes to us all, suffer well. Simone Wheel, I quoted her earlier on the subject of attention, also wrote about suffering.

She said this, we should neither seek to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering. I think especially as Americans, we need to have a renewed theology of suffering. Don't avoid it, repurpose it. Allow it to form you.

In the fight for formation, if you can learn to suffer well, it will change you. The bad things the enemy has meant, God will repurpose for his good. So this morning with every head bowed, every eye closed, I just want to close with a couple of short questions. When we're in the hospital, one of the cool moments of the whole thing, say after the doctor told us the news, me and my wife obviously are crying, we're grieving.

But he came back in short while later and said, you must be people of faith. And the fact that he saw us grieving with hope made him take notice. He must be people of faith and we had to change the tone, about our faith. And it reminded me of a simple truth, life is hard.

This moment where life is very hard, but it's a lot harder without God. And to do this without hope, I couldn't do it. But I have hope and his name is Jesus. In Phoenix, we're in this morning saying, hey, honestly done, I'm going through something, whether it's grief, whether it's loss, whether it's suffering, whether it's pain, whether it was caused to you or caused by you.

I just want to let you know there's hope. And if you're in this room, you say, Dylan, that's what I need. I need hope. I need to put my faith in Jesus Christ.

He's the only hope we have. And if that's you, I just want you to slip up a hand so I can be praying for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, a lot of hands.

Thank you, Jesus. One other question I want to ask. I'm just going to make this real quick. If I spoke anything, maybe it's, man, I'm just addicted to my devices.

Maybe you leave no margin for the people you love. You just run into the next thing, you're just hurried. Maybe you're constantly chasing after more and more and more. Or maybe you're in this room, you're saying, I'm suffering, whatever that is.

It might be a different problem than I'm facing, but you're saying that to me. If something I said spoke to you and you want prayer in the fight for formation, that you will be transformed, not conformed. If that's you, would you slip up a hand? I just want to pray for you this one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Lord, I just come before you. Lord, I'm just truly thankful for your hope.

Lord, there's so much brokenness in our world. And God, you didn't cause any of it. Lord, the brokenness that's in our world, we introduced when we sinned. Lord, the greatest suffering we all face is life apart from you.

Walking in a sinful way, but Lord, you sent your son to give us hope. So Lord, be humbly coming, we accept you. Lord, for every hand that was raised, it's as simple as confessing that he is Lord, repenting of our sin and walking in relationship with you. Lord, I pray for every other hand that was raised.

Lord, help us to win the fight for formation. God, help us to not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but God, would you renew our minds? Help us to walk in transformation, to walk in your Holy Spirit's power. Lord, I pray you be with every single person this morning as we walk through and navigate this thing called life.

We praise you, we thank you, even for the hardship. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Amen. Thanks so much for being here this morning.

Hope you guys have a great week and make sure to grab a cleanex on your way out. God bless you guys, we'll see you next week.