Revival of Hope - Matt Manzari: Finding Hope and Purpose

Matt and I met many, many years ago, right when he had been electrocuted. And my husband and I got to know him, and his wife actually came, and she was my assistant and worked with our ministry for a year or two. And they became like sons and daughters to us. They also were dear friends. And so he flew in from Florida to give his testimony, and like I said, tomorrow he's going to be leading a workshop at 1.30, and you don't want to miss it. But before Matt comes up, I want to show you a video. Some of it, I will warn you, there's going to be some graphic things on there. Because when you're electrocuted, that means you're burned. And he was burned, Matt's going to tell you. I didn't even know there was like fourth and fifth degree burns. I thought it stopped at third. He was near death. They did not expect him to live. But you're going to see what God can do in a person's life. And I believe it's going to give you hope. So as soon as this video is finished, Matt's going to come up and he's going to share his story with you. And then we're going to have the worship team come up in just a little bit, and we're going to have some fiddling. How's that sound? All right, you can cue up the video. All right, let's do it. Time is precious. Time is invaluable. Time is the only thing on this earth that puts us all on the same playing field. It's steady. It's unchanging. 936, that's how many weeks there are in 18 years.

When our boys were young, my wife put that many rocks in a jar, and it represents how many weeks we have with our kids. Turns out, time goes faster than I ever imagined. Another rock gone. Another week gone. I'd get home from back-to-back trips, and it seemed like time had just disappeared. I think that one's over, guys. Yay! I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Goodnight. Goodnight. There's so much I didn't realize how important it was until I almost lost it. After the accident, I had tons of time to think. I was a little kid who was scared of the dark, and like, for me, it wasn't courage that brought me through my accident. It was trust. You know, I'm a person of faith. And, you know, I trust that even if I didn't make it, that maybe the legacy I did leave

could change some people's life. I started looking deeper into the real questions that I was too busy to answer with all the distractions I had going on. There's only one thing more precious than my time, and that's who I spend it with. I believe I'm here for a purpose, created for a purpose, to love others, to be loved by others, to share God's purpose in our lives. I shouldn't be here. Everybody asks me if I could go back, would I change it? I've cried over that question, but the answer is no, I wouldn't be where I am. I wouldn't appreciate the time I have, who I get to spend it with, and how I never take it for granted. Why are you digging a hole? I'm looking for buried treasure. Well, what have you found? I found a few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs. On your first try? Yeah, there's treasure everywhere. Look, there's a tiger with a scarf, he's got a scarf on. What's your story? Like not rhetorically, like if you and I were having a cup of coffee or dinner, and I said, what's your story? How do you answer that question? Because I ask people that all the time, and they'll either say, well, I don't really know, I don't really have a story, or well, I'm from here, and I do this, and that's about it, and they kind of play it down. And I would argue that our story is actually way less about what we do and where we're from, and much more about who we are. It really is. I like that. You know, if my story was that of an athlete or a trauma survivor, well, at one point in

that timeline as an athlete, it's a really cool story. I'm a kid traveling the world, getting to ride a board behind a boat and make a living that way, and it's really cool. But at another point in my timeline, it's all ripped away from me. And if my identity and my story is that, well, who am I? If my story is Matt as a burn survivor, well, what does fully healing ever look like? But if my story is who I am, who has God created me to be uniquely different than each one of you, and you different than me, and that's what I can bring in to me as an athlete, as a burn survivor, as a father, as a husband, as a friend, and in anything else I do. You know, I love that comic at the end. I have it right here. But I love that comic. What are you doing? I'm searching for buried treasure. What have you found? Some weird, rude, disgusting grubs and some rocks? On your first try, yeah, there's treasure everywhere. I love that because this isn't a story about two archaeologists or treasure hunters. Who Calvin and Hobbes are are these quirky, fun individuals that find meaning and purpose and adventure in ordinary things. So it doesn't matter if they're digging a hole in the backyard looking for treasure or walking home from school or playing in the snow. The story isn't the what, it's the who they are. And I think the same is true in our lives. And for a lot of us, if we went and dug a hole in our yard because we thought there was treasure and we found dirt rocks and bugs, and our friend called us and said, what are you up to? We'd probably say nothing. What are you up to? Because it wouldn't even be worth explaining, let alone writing something about.

And we would miss the treasure that's right there, the treasure that's on the journey that God's trying to tell in our lives. But we miss it. So what is your story? Who are you? What's he doing in your life? You know, I believe God is telling his story of love and redemption in and through all of our lives, even when we don't see it. And it keeps us from experiencing true freedom. And that's what this event is about, is what does freedom look like? What does true freedom look like? And I believe that can only come through Jesus Christ. It really can. How do we look at our wins, our losses, our peaks and valleys, our relationship, our friendships, our work life? How do we look at our story in those lights and do we see Jesus in it? How do we spend our time each day and how do we look at it in the context of our greater story? Why do we do what we do? Because look, when Jesus walks into our story, we should always see him. We should see his provision, his goodness, his faithfulness, his love ultimately. But what are we seeing in our story? You know, I'm somebody that, for lack of a better term, had all my dreams come true. You know, I was a kid and I liked sports and I started getting paid and making a living off of a sport. It was kind of like, what more could you ask for? And I kind of hit like a midlife crisis at 17. because it was like all my dreams came true, and I just felt like that donkey chasing the carrot, like, well, if only I could get this big sponsor,

or this thing, or win this event, or get on the magazine cover, had all these things that if only this could happen, then I would truly be happy and content. And it was just this endless journey. And I sort of hit this point, I was walking away from my career, my friends thought I was throwing my life away, because I'm like, I don't know what I want to do, but I know I got to serve God and others, because this isn't it. And it's funny, because we live in a really unique time right now. With social media and the internet, we can communicate with each other faster than we ever can. Kind of the themes of this generation is like, you do you, and I'm gonna do me, and you find your truth, and you find, she finds her truth, and he finds his, and that can be different, and that's okay, and it's not selfish to look inward, and find what works for us. That's the time we're living in, and you can't open up Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever it is, without seeing somebody's a guru. Everybody's a guru. Here's five steps to being a better mom,

and work-life balance, and this, that, and the other thing, and everybody's got all the answers of how we're supposed to find fulfillment. Yet, studies show we're more unhappy than we've ever been, than any other point in history. I love this Jim Carrey quote, because he's not only an actor, but a comedian, so he's the funny guy. Everyone wants to be around him. He's got money. He's got access. He can do whatever he wants, and he says, I think everybody should get rich and famous, and do everything they ever dreamed of, so they could see that it's not the answer. It's powerful, coming from somebody like that. You know, I think about America. What was this country founded on? We were running away from tyranny, and running away from oppression, and if there was a tagline for America, it would be the pursuit of happiness, the right to pursue happiness, and that's what we're so focused on, yet studies show we're more unhappy than ever before.

There's actually a study called the World Happiness Forum, where they actually measure countries' happiness, and they look at economic groups, and social groups, and religious groups, and work, you know, feedback from your work life, and your relationships, everything in your life, and they rate the countries every single year, and for the last few years, for the first time, America didn't make the top 20, and I'm like, that's crazy, like, if we're about one thing, you wanna be a welder, you can go do that, you got the freedom, go get trained, you wanna be a doctor, whatever you wanna do, you go do what makes you happy, and we're not in the top 20 happiest countries in the world right now, and what is that? That maybe this whole, let me find my truth that's different than your truth, maybe it's a sham.

Maybe there is one truth, and one way, and one life. Maybe when we look inward, our problems become our whole world, and they seem inescapable, and we sink into anxiety and depression, and maybe the answer isn't trying to work on me time, maybe it's to serve and love others, and be the hands and feet of Jesus, and we start doing that, and we're like, yeah, we got problems, I'm working on stuff, but man, everybody's got stuff, and we're going through it together, and I find community, and purpose, and meaning in my journey, and we encounter Jesus in our journeys, and we encounter Him in our stories, and He takes that burden, like Christy said, that He says, my yoke is easy, my burden's light. You know, somebody's on the throne in our life. I don't think Jesus wants to be a part of our life, He wants to be the Lord of our life. He doesn't want to be a checkbox, or a piece of it, but He wants to be all of it, and sometimes we sit on that throne,

and we try to carry the weight of our stories, and our world, and our finances, and our relationships, and He's like, man, I'm standing right here, let me sit there, let me take the driver's seat. That's what He's offering, but will we do it? Will we discover our story? Will we discover the story that He's telling in and through our lives? So as I share about my journey, and my wife, and our family, I hope you don't look up here and see me, but I hope that you just see Him in it, and ultimately that you see your story in it, because we're all on this journey together. You know, the video showed you, it showed you this big accident I had, but it didn't show you the story behind the story. Two years before I got electrocuted, like I said, I was moving away from action sports, I was leaving my career, and I didn't know what I was gonna do. I was going to school for theology, studying ministry, and I thought I wanted to go dig wells in Africa,

and it was the weekend before graduation. I had Monday, Tuesday, Friday, were finals week, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were finals week, and then Friday I walked, and it was like this, my life was about to do 180, going from a pro athlete to whatever was next. And the first stop of the pro tour was in Orlando, and I said, man, you know, we're moving back there. I could take a U-Haul home, compete this weekend, kind of have a last hurrah, and hopefully make some extra money for moving expenses. My wife and I, we're a young, broke couple, newly married in college, and then we'll start our life. So I go to Florida, and the competition is on this private lake that I've ridden on a ton of times, and it's a really cool setup because it's a narrow lake, so the crowd can kind of get close. And at the end, it bottlenecks really skinny, and you get right behind the boat, and it goes through that bottleneck and opens up where the boat can turn around. And the reason that's good is when the boat turns around, as you can imagine, it makes big waves, and those waves don't really make it back through, and so it stays really calm. It's good for contests. And I'm coming into the end of that lake, and I know I've got time for one more trick,

and I remember cutting in to jump the wakes, and boom. Next thing I know, there's doctors around me. I'm on this gurney, and they're running me down the hallway. They're telling me not to talk, that my jaw is hanging off, and then I close my eyes, and I wake up a few days later. This is what I kind of woke up to, this picture here. And that shoreline, because it's in Florida, and we don't really have rocks, and the boats were eroding it, they had lined it, have construction companies broken up cinder blocks and old brick to keep the erosion away. And what I'm told happened is, I cut in for that last trick, and as I went to hit the wake, the wave kind of curled, and I backed off, and said, speed up, and kept going, not realizing that that was all the time I had left. So the driver said, he looked back, and he knew I was in the air, and he said, your trajectory, you were gonna land on that rock-covered shoreline, and he did what he could do. He tried to drop the throttle, and I hit those rocks. The boat's going just over 20 miles per hour. You're edging, so you can as much as double the speed of the boat, so my body hits these rocks conservatively 30 miles an hour. I break my skull in 13 places. I get 17 screws and three plates to rebuild my face. My jaw's broken clean on both sides.

My hip's dislocated, my tailbone is broken, my hand's broken in five places. And I had made it through what I would consider a fairly long action sports career. I mean, an eight-year career in action sports was long with no injuries. I'd never had stitches. I had never broken a bone. I was a pretty conservative, safe rider. And now I have this huge accident, and I could spend the rest of this time telling you how my life was flipped upside down. I had never went through a major challenge like that in my life up to that point. I'm 22, two years into marriage. I'm young, it's me against the world, me and my wife. And I wake up in this hospital bed, and most of the time when you break your jaw, you have the luxury of at least drinking through a straw for a few months. But I broke so many bones in my nasal passage, I spent the next few months pouring liquid through my teeth to eat, using a walker to learn to walk again, and eventually a cane. And it was, to say I was at a really low bottom point was an understatement. Our apartment lease was up that Friday. I just lost a semester of school. I didn't know where we were gonna live,

how we were gonna move, what we were gonna do. And it was just like sitting in a bed, Lord, where are you in this? I was walking out of my action sports career to come serve you, and this is when this happens. And man, what I really saw was it wasn't in the way I would have done it, but I just saw God step in in every area and be like, I'm right here. My parents opened up their home for us to live in, and our other friend helped my wife get a job while I recovered. And I just watched everywhere. It was like, well, Lord, what about this? He's like, I'm right here, I got you, I'm right here. And I remember getting to the end of that journey thinking, this is my testimony that I will never forget, that I know I'll never face anything this big again, but I'll tell these stories to my kids and grandkids one day about whatever you face, you gotta trust. And little did I know, it was really preparing me for this huge storm that would forever change my life. You know, often when we talk about challenges, we talk about the negative ones like that, the hardships, but what about the fun ones? There are really fun challenges. I mean, every kid in here, I see a few kids in here, school's hard, but it's good, you're learning. Work's hard, but we build things, it's good. For me, I was a pro athlete, like I said,

and I'd love to sit here and tell you I was a talented athlete and just had gifts from God, but I didn't. I was a regular kid that loved baseball and then got a skateboard and started loving action sports, and I wasn't particularly good at any of them. I kind of was just middle. road average kid and when I was 14 my dad told me this story he said Matt did you know for as long as we've been using a mile as a unit of measurement we've been measuring how long it takes people to run it and it was a known fact that it was impossible to run a sub four minute mile for hundreds of years and then in May of 1954 Roger Bannister runs this sub four minute mile by 1960 by the end of that decade hun you know 30 runners had done it since then hundreds have done it we've had high school runners do it and I remember thinking I'm not much of a runner but I don't think there's anything more raw and physical than run that way I'll time you and I realized that maybe even that is more mental than physical maybe we're teaching sports wrong and so I started going on my wakeskate and I said we need to break through the barriers I need to pretend there's tricks that kids are doing that nobody's doing I need to pretend that hundreds of kids are doing it when nobody's done it and just get the muscle memory and the expectation that we're gonna land these things and before I knew it I had a handful tricks that were my own and I got a call from a small company in Oregon called Nike and they said hey can you can you be our first wake athlete we're building this action sports brand of Nike and and before I knew it I was in magazine covers like this shot here I was traveling the world I had my name on a board a boat sponsor and man I would love to sit here and tell you oh yeah I was special I was talented I wasn't I was a regular kid that changed my thinking and it changed my life I chose to believe that God had created me to do and be more than I could imagine and that my biggest competitor wasn't this guy next to me but it was the guy

looking back in the mirror and that's what's setting our limitations that God has so much planned for us but we were scared we don't experience that freedom because we don't believe do we believe what he says is true I realized that battles aren't won on the battlefield they're not we look at war movies and we think the battles happen on the battlefield they don't take a hundred random civilians and give them tanks and planes and equipment and say get in there knock yourself out work together like they'll get obliterated the planes won't get off the ground battles aren't won on battlefields they're won in the training beforehand when our emotions get involved and our adrenaline goes up we go into autopilot we go into what we know battles are won on the front end I know that for me if I have one vice it's food if I say I'm gonna try to eat healthy that lasts until I open that cabinet and see those Oreos staring back at me and I'm like I'm gonna eat healthy tomorrow I've got to make decisions about my diet on the front end I said oh sweets are on the weekend and that's it so when I open that cabinet on a Wednesday and there's always I'm like get away from me Satan you're a Friday you're a Friday choice I got to make decisions on the front end and manage them on the back end and that's how I've been able to get through my whole life and that's why man when I got electrocuted it really it really set the precedent for that because to bring you into that time of my life I woke up to doctors telling me the gift you're getting is the time to say goodbye I woke up and the doctor cleared the room dr. Howard Smith in Orlando and he said Matt we've never had a fourth and fifth degree burn survivor come through our trauma ward and he said what that means is third degree burns through the layers of skin fourth burns the muscle tissue fifth starts burning bone and when you burn to the bone you destroy the muscle and when your blood flows through that muscle it poisons your own blood it acts like a toxic filter and your kidneys and heart are getting filled with poison and we pump it out and we try to replace your blood but you're right on the verge of what's called septic and the gift you're getting that nobody gets as you get to say goodbye and I planned my funeral so Bobby Jean wouldn't have to

and I prepared my living will and I registered it with the state of Florida and they gave me a few days or a few hours and I said look I I don't care what they say my wife was pregnant with our first and I said we're two weeks from the gender reveal I'm gonna make it that was my goal I'm gonna make it to find out if we're having a boy or girl but even I didn't know living was on the table at the time and and I was gonna make it two weeks that was my finish line and I waited to die and I never did man to bring you into that I got some photos I can show you but this is when things were really bad and I was in the coma everything is really puffy just one it was this next photo you see that kind of shiny looking stuff on my chest all around from my ribcage up to my neck that's a lab-made product called Integra you can't put skin grafts on top of just muscle and bone so before that went on you could just see my whole left rib cage you can actually see there there's a circle the Ironman looking thing in my chest It's not a superpower, that's burnt sternum bone that we hadn't cut out yet. There you can see some clavicle bone coming through too. But this last picture is probably one of my favorite pictures from the hospital. Because you can see my wife smiling. You can see her smile. And a time that should have been all about her, because she's pregnant with our first, was all about me. And she'd come into the hospital room and she'd pray with me and cheer me up and be strong for me and encourage me. And later I'd find out sometimes, walk into the hall and just collapse. And wonder, is that the last time I'm gonna speak to him? Am I about to have this baby and be a single mom?

Am I gonna see him tomorrow? And I think about 28 times, 29 times, I just had another surgery, I forgot. 29 times in the last 11 years, she's held my hand while I went under anesthesia and had 80 surgeries, I just had my 80th. When she said, for better, for worse, the worse was so much worse. It was so much worse. And I realized that in our stories, you know, we don't always get to choose our stories, but we have choices within them. Bobby Jean has this thing that she had hanging in our house forever and she always had it in my hospital room and it said, even if, dot, dot, dot, God is still God. And she said. She said, whatever those dots are for you, because they could be huge. She said, for her at that time, it was even if Matt doesn't wake up, even if he wakes up with no brain activity, like they told me, even if God is still God and he's still working and he's still good. You know, when I got electrocuted, I was holding the controls of like a high reach bucket and that electricity flowed in through my hands and that's when my blood pressure went up. And I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna have a heart attack. Electricity flowed in through my hands

and that's when my burns run on the inside of my arms like this through my chest. And I had my phone right here where I keep it today and it actually went down my headphone wire. It melted my iPhone here. I have a little Apple symbol burned. I get free phones now. No. I don't. But I do have a big circle scar there. My phone, it melted to my leg and then it went up those headphone wires and it melted the earbuds in my ears and it burned this plate, my jaw and my eye. That's what you see there. And you probably can't see, but I have a bald spot here and one in the back where it exited through the top of my brain. So they told my wife, they said, even if he wakes up, he had 12 to 21,000 volts blow through the top of his brain. The amperage on that line, it's the second highest amp line in the state. When they worked to tell a documentary on it, they were looking for a survivor rate and the engineers called us back and they said, we can't find one. What we can tell you is the amperage on that line would be the equivalent of hooking him up to six to 10 electric chairs.

So we don't know why he's here. You know, we don't always get to choose our stories. Jesus didn't even want his story at one point. In Luke 22, 42, it says, Father, if you're willing, take this cup from me. But then he submits and he says, yet not my will, but yours be done. And sometimes we have to ask different questions to get different answers. We will face pain and struggle. We are promised that in this life. John 16, 33 says, I have told you these things so that in me, you have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. You not might, maybe will. You will have trouble. But the end of that promise is, but take heart, I've overcome the world. And if he's in us and we're in him, then through him, we have overcome this world. Everything it could throw at us all the way to the grave because that's what he did. That's who he is. That's a story he's telling in our lives. God didn't promise to take away all our temporary struggles. He promised us eternity. But even better, he promised that in those temporary struggles, that he's right here, that he's working. It says, a wise man builds his house on a rock

and a foolish on sand. So when the storm comes, the storm's coming. But Chrissy's husband, Tim, he builds homes and he can tell you the importance of building on a strong foundation. That when you tie that foundation in and the way you build your house, you ever go in an old house and doors don't line up and things are crooked and things are leaking. The way we build the foundation of our faith matters. The foundation of our beliefs matter. Where is our foundation? Who's sitting on the throne? Because when the storm comes, because it will, and maybe it is for you right now, what are we built on? You know, I hear people all the time, they use pain and suffering interchangeably. Like, oh, they've lost somebody, they're going through pain and suffering. You know, but they're different. They're really different words. I think pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Pain is the thing that happens in our life to us that's gonna happen. But suffering is when we allow those things to break us and we can go through large amounts of pain, but we don't have to suffer. And what does it look like? to do that, to face that pain and pursue joy and peace and contentment through the pain.

The pain that, the, the joy that transcends understanding is sometimes when someone looks at our situation and says, how could they have joy in that? And it's not fake, but we truly do. How do we face it emotionally? You know, the world will so, show courage so different than the way Jesus did. The world will show it as almost, you numb yourself. You act like it doesn't bother you. And inmates watch it, we've seen this. You want to talk about it? No, I'm good. I'm fine. Doesn't bother me. That's easy. That's not strength. It's not strong to act like it doesn't bother us. That's a self protection coping mechanism. It's actually hard to say, man, I'm struggling. Can we talk about it? Jesus, the ultimate man of courage who comes to earth, who if anybody's all in, it's him. He goes to the grave to have a relationship with us and shows he's overcome and resurrects. On 1135, the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. He's able to walk into a situation to see the pain of the people suffering around him and say, man, this hurts. And I could be real in that. Courage isn't numbing or acting like it's not there. It's being able to experience it, but then staying the course. Jesus didn't experience it and say, am I really the son of God? Can I bring him back from the dead? No, but he was able to sit in it and say, man, this hurts. And then he was able to go and say, but watch what I could do.

Lazarus come out of the tomb. I'm going to go to the cross. I'm going to save the world. That's what he's able to do. How do we look at our pain and say, man, it's here. I need to acknowledge it. I need to recognize it. There's this animated movie called Inside Out. I love this one scene. It's about this little girl, Riley, and you're in her head of her emotions or the character sadness, joy, anger. And there's a moment where she's in a really heavy, dark place and joy instinctively goes to move towards the controls to try to cheer her up. And she hesitates and she stops and allows sadness to come in and knows that there's a role sadness needs to play in order for Riley to get back to joy, to experience the mountaintop. We go through the valley. And when we hit that point, we're like, Lord, if you never do another thing for me, I owe you the rest of my life. You know, the most common question that you'll ever see in trauma is why? Why did this happen? You know, people will try to justify everything happens for a reason, like, really? I have studied this book in the Greek, in the Hebrew, in the Aramaic, in and out. Show me the verse that says everything happens for a reason. It doesn't. Sometimes the reason is not very good. Sometimes the reason is that we live in a broken world. There's an enemy looking to seek and kill and destroy every relationship, everything you ever do to drag you down with him. That's what he's doing.

That's his job. Sometimes we do stupid stuff. Sometimes people do mean stuff. The gospel isn't that God is electrocuting or hurting his kids for bigger reason. The gospel is that God is saying, look, you're in this broken world and this just happened. If you trust me, watch what I could do with it. Instead of asking why, I don't know why I got electrocuted. I was a big metal bucket and I got a certain distance away from power line. That might happen a hundred times out of a hundred times with the gospels as Jesus walked into my life and said, hey, do you trust me? You want to see what I could do with this? And I said, okay, Lord, what's next? Are we actively seeking goodness in our stories? Are we asking what's next? What narratives are forming our beliefs? You know, as I close, the question I get more than any other is, Matt, if you could go back and change it, would you? And that's a really hard question to really be honest about, that if I could go back and have a conversation with little Matt just a week before my accident, in one sentence I could change it. One sentence, hey, Matt, don't help the church with this project. I could take away 80 surgeries. I could take away pain on a level I didn't know existed. I could take away everything I put my family and my friends through in one sentence. Man, there's a temptation to say, yeah, I'd take it away, and I'd let the Lord use me in other ways. But I wouldn't. If I could go talk to little Matt, I'd say, Matt, remember when we were kids and we were scared of the dark, and we'd sit in bed at night in elementary school, and we would swear we heard a monster, and we'd jump out of bed, and we'd look under the bed and out the window

and in the closet, and we'd see the truth is that we're okay. And we'd go turn the light back off, and we'd get back in bed, and pretty quickly as we sat in the darkness, we forgot the truth we learned in the light. I'd say, Matt, these next few years you're going to experience pain on a depth that you didn't know existed. existed. But in those dark, hard times, I want you to remember the truth you learned in the light, that you are bought at a price, that you have a God that is crazy about you, that's working in your story, that's going to do things in this, but you got to trust Him. I don't know what you brought into this room tonight, for those watching, for those here in person, I don't know what your scars are. Some of yours are like mine, and I could take my shirt off and the whole world sees them, but some of the scars that you brought in are unseen, and those can go even deeper. But what I know is that we have a God that deeply loves us, that the King of King and the Lord of Lords is standing at the door of our life, saying, I'm right here, I love you so much, just let me walk through this with you, and that He's lived and died, lived the perfect life and died and was resurrected, so we could spend forever with Him, so He could spend every moment on this earth with us, He could be there in our darkest moments where we don't forget the truth we learned in the light. You know, there's this passage in Mark chapter 8, Jesus is walking with His disciples, says He's walking to Caesarea Philippi, and on the way, He asks them, He says, who do people say that I am? And they say, some people say you're John the Baptist, others say Elijah, others say one of the prophets, and He says, what about you? Who do you say that I am? And I believe us answering that question is the most important thing we could ever do. Who do you say that He is? And I believe when we want to experience true freedom, it's in the answer to that question. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank You for Your presence here tonight.

I thank You for the promises in Your Word to never leave or forsake us. I promise that You're with us in our stories, and Lord, I just pray that each one of us, that You would turn Your face upon us, that You would show us where You are in our story, show us who we are, what is the name You call each of us, who have You made us uniquely to be different than anyone else? That if You woke us up in the middle of the night, that's the name You'd call us. Let all of us discover that, discover our story, discover who we truly are and who You truly are. And we thank You for Your presence here tonight, in Jesus' name, amen. Thank you for watching our broadcast. Are you an incarcerated brother or sister who needs encouragement? Write to us at Victorious Living Correspondents, P.O. Box 2751 Greenville, North Carolina, 27836. Or email us at hope at vlmag.org. To view Victorious Living magazine in its entirety, please have your chaplain contact us at 352-478-2098, or email us through our website at vlmag.org. We are happy to provide our Victorious Living magazine free of charge, in bulk, with or without staples.