"Mary, It's Me"—Finding Jesus in the Middle of Your Grief

The Trouble with Jesus

Easter isn't just a holiday — it's a story about getting up when grief has pinned you down. 

In this episode, Jan and guest Constance Hastings walk through the resurrection accounts in John 20 and Matthew 28, exploring the raw human emotions of that first Sunday morning. 

Why did Mary Magdalene not recognize Jesus at first? 

Why did the disciples go back to fishing? 

And what does it mean that Jesus called her name — Mary — in the middle of her weeping? 

Constance, author of "The Trouble with Jesus," brings warmth, honesty, and deep scriptural insight to these questions, including why it's okay to say "Lord, I believe — help my unbelief." 

A beautiful episode for anyone carrying grief, doubt, or hope this Easter season.

Isaiah 55:8–9 (NLT)

"My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine."

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0:00 Opening Reflection — How Do You Rise in the Morning?

1:05 Welcome & Introduction

1:41 The World We're Living In — Grief, Anxiety & Shaken Ground

2:48 Scripture Reading — John 20:1–18 (Mary at the Tomb)

4:44 Scripture Reading — Matthew 28:1–10 (The Angel & The Women)

6:07 The Women's Grief — Going in Faith Without Answers

8:42 "Why Get Out of Bed?" — The Depth of Their Loss

9:11 They Watched Him Raise Lazarus — Why Couldn't They Grasp It?

10:06 Was It Literal or a Metaphor? The Question Then and Now

11:15 The Empty Tomb Wasn't Enough — They Needed to Encounter Jesus

11:50 Christmas Parallels — Angels to the Outsi

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Transcript

Constance: And our story is,

how do you rise in the morning? How do you overcome,

or if not exactly overcome, but live through this kind of experience of, of loss?

And that's the story of, of the women here. That's the story of Mary Magdalene.

When you read John and she says to whom she thinks is the gardener, you know, where have they laid him? And he calls her name. The way I hear it, it's, it's almost like he goes,

mary,

it's me. It's.

And yet even then,

sometimes because of our grief, we don't hear and we don't understand completely until God reaches out and grabs our attention.

And this, the resurrection, was certainly God's way of getting our attention.

Jan: Welcome everyone, to this episode of just Talking About Jesus.

I am really excited about what we're going to talk about today because this is our Easter episode.

And of course, there are so many layers to that. So, so, so many layers to that.

My guest today is Constance Hastings, who I've had on before quite a while ago. But,

but what she talks about and what her book, the Trouble with Jesus Delves into is just questioning the things about,

about our beliefs and why we believe.

I, I just am struck by,

at this time in our world, things are pretty shaken up and it's just easy to get down,

you know, or anxious or worried about what is going to happen next or, you know, how is this going to affect me in my everyday world?

And just the grief for some, just the war brings and just all of that.

I, I started thinking about how that relates. And it also, you know, the flip side is maybe this is a sign. Maybe Jesus is coming. Maybe you're feeling joyful about this and going and hopeful.

You know, it, it could be all of that and above. But,

but it made me think about how the third day when they went to the tomb and they had the same kind of reactions of things. What were they feeling,

seeing, or sensing and how did that,

how was that for them?

So I want to start out reading,

just reading the scriptures of what happened at the time, just to give us the framework of things. And then we'll go on from there. So I want to start reading with John 20.

Early on Sunday morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance.

She ran and found Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved.

She said, they've taken the Lord's body out of the tomb and we don't know where they have put him.

Peter and the Other disciples started out of the tomb. They were both running. But the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.

He stooped and looked in and saw the linen wrappings lying there. But he didn't go in.

Then Simon Peter arrived and went inside.

He also noticed the linen wrappings lying there, while the clothes that had covered Jesus head was folded up and lying apart from the other wrappings.

Then the disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in and he saw and believed. For until then they still hadn't understood the scriptures that said Jesus must rise from the dead.

Then they went home.

Then. Oh, I guess I should keep reading. Yeah. Mary was standing outside the tomb crying. And as she wept, she stooped and stood in.

She saw two white robed angels. One sitting at the head and the other at the foot of the place where the body of Jesus had been lying.

Dear woman, why are you crying? The angels asked her.

Because they have taken away my Lord, she replied. And I don't know where they have put him. She turned to leave and saw someone standing there. It was Jesus, but she didn't recognize him.

Dear woman, why are you crying? Jesus asked her. Who are you looking for?

She thought he was the gardener. Sir, she said, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him and I will go and get him.

Mary, Jesus said.

She turned to him and cried out rabboni, which means teacher.

And then, Constance, would you read the other version?

Constance: This is Matthew 28, starting at the first verse.

Early on Sunday morning, as the new day was dawning,

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went out to see the tomb.

Suddenly there was a great earthquake because an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and rolled aside the stone and sat on it.

His face shone like lightning and his clothing was white as snow.

The guards shook with fear when they saw him. And they fell into a dead faint.

Then the angel spoke to the women.

Don't be afraid, he said. I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.

He isn't here.

He has been raised from the dead, just as he said would happen.

Come see where his body was lying.

And now go quickly and tell his disciples he has been raised from the dead and he is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.

Remember I have told you.

The women ran quickly from the tomb. They were very frightened, but also filled with great joy. And they rushed to find the disciples to give them the angel's message.

As they went, Jesus met them.

Greetings, he said. And they ran to him, held his feet and worshiped him.

Then Jesus said to them,

don't be afraid. Go tell my brothers to leave for Galilee and they will see me there.

Jan: Wow.

So we've got,

you know, everyone who has watched the crucifixion,

watched all,

you know, first parading in into Jerusalem and everybody with hosannas and so glad.

So you've got all these mixed emotions, you know, to begin with. Wait, you go from joyful shouting and praise to,

whoa, what's happening here? You know, being pulled away and whatever. Just let's talk about those emotions.

Constance: Yes, obviously,

when the women went to the tomb,

they were going because they didn't have a chance to give to him their last ministrations and servants.

Service of love.

And having spent Friday night would have been their Shabbat through Saturday night.

So early, very early in the morning,

they go to where the tomb was and they bring with them these anointing oils and they hope to finish preparing the body. But they also know there's going to be a great obstacle ahead of them.

First of all, this is a heavy stone in front of the tomb. Most likely it was.

It wasn't something that they might be able to move aside.

And secondly, if it was guarded by the Romans, then how are they going to get past them?

So they literally go in faith, but as they go in faith, they also go with their grief.

And, you know, they have been through a great trauma because the women were the faithful ones who were at the foot of the cross and watched him die.

The only disciple that remained was the disciple John,

and yet he's not with them at this time. So they virtually are alone as they're headed there.

And I. And in a blog that I've written about this, it's the kind of thing like,

you know,

why get out of bed in the morning?

All of us who have been through these moments of loss, we. We. We know that feeling when. When that person who has been so integral to your life has been taken away is lost to you.

It is just such a massive effort to just get up when you seemingly have no reason.

And it was only because of their love and the last drops of their love that they could give and bring to Jesus.

Yeah. So that's where they are as they

Jan: approach that deep, deep grief.

I mean, that just. Just because everything,

it was not just knowing Jesus as a person, as a friend,

it was knowing him as something so much bigger,

you know,

so much bigger and, and seeing miracles and listening to his truths and having a vision of what was to come.

But what did that really mean?

Constance: You know, and. And that vision was their hope.

You know, they're not only an individual hope of their own salvation and knowing God, but, you know, for. For the nation, for the world.

And it seemed like it was all crushed. It wasn't going to happen.

Jan: And. And yet it's like part of them had to know that there was going to be more,

you know, and he had told them that this was not going to be the end. But. But to grasp it's like grappling with your reality of death.

And yet.

And the flip side, they just saw him raise Lazarus.

Constance: Exactly.

Jan: So they knew the resurrection was possible. It. But. But you don't always, because your. Your mind's stuck and freezes and grief.

Constance: Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead,

but can someone raise themselves from the dead?

And when he had said, you know,

told them that he would die and three days later rise,

you know, did he mean that literally?

Jan: Right.

Constance: Or was this more like a metaphor, like, my memory will carry you through and into the world.

And the world today,

I think, looks at it in that respect,

that this wasn't necessarily a physical resurrection, but rather, you know, a spiritual renewal. You know, we can still get up and go on with our lives and have hope, et cetera, et cetera,

but the way the story is told,

it is told as a literal, physical resurrection.

Jan: Yeah.

Constance: And that's even where the first followers, the disciples, the women and so forth, where they even had trouble. Now, if they had trouble,

why be surprised when people today have trouble as well?

Jan: Right, right. However, you know, in the same passage that both of us read, they encounter Jesus.

Constance: They absolutely don't know.

Jan: It's not just the empty tomb, and it's my imagination, like, he's gone and somebody took him, but they were nice enough to fold up the cloths.

Constance: People have talked about that for a long time.

Jan: So it's, you know, all. All of those things to feel and to think about, you know, and yet,

Constance: if you look at the story,

it's not too much different from the Christmas story,

because in the Christmas story,

angels came and spoke to the shepherds and said, this is where he is. Go find him.

And here on the Easter story, again, there are angels speaking this time to the women and saying, he's alive.

Go tell the disciples. You know, he'll meet you. He'll meet you in Galilee.

And so both stories have that similarity. The shepherds were pretty much, you know, at the bottom of the, you know, bottom of the. What do you call, pond, so to speak?

Yeah, they were the ones that did the dirty work in taking care of the sheep. And they did it so that the rest of the people, you know, could,

you know, have their good life and even their perfect sacrifices.

And here are the women.

In their day,

women were so disregarded.

And for them,

for the message to come to women,

not even to the disciples, but to women,

was.

It's just so far out there, especially for the first century readers. And let's remember,

in this period,

women could not even testify in court.

Their. Their words were not of value.

So for them to be given the message to take to the disciples,

it would again, have that layer of, can we really believe this? You're just women.

Jan: The flip side is, though, they walked with them for so long and they knew them too. So you would hope that there would be more.

Constance: You would hope. All right.

Jan: Well, you would hope.

Constance: But even so,

they're.

They're back. They're back where they were,

right? Yeah,

they're literally back where they were. We know later on,

I think it's in John that Peter and James and John and Philip, I believe, and Thomas even go fishing. They go back to where they were. They go back to what they knew.

So at this point, for the disciples not to believe the women, they're going back to where they were as well.

Jan: Right?

I think, I think it's fascinating too, that just going back to the Christmas story, you know, that the angels come to the shepherds, which, you know, Jesus is the Lamb of God and all of that whole aspect of it as well, which is a whole nother topic, but another rabbit hole.

But so they go back,

they tell the disciples who are like, wait, not. Yeah, what? Huh?

You know,

and of course, going to see, you know, Simon coming to see for himself and all of that. It's just a lot of this. I think there's so much,

so much to wrap your mind around. Did this really happen? You know, is this a real thing?

Was this or is this a story?

It.

Constance: Exactly.

You mentioned,

is it. Is this just a story?

And it is.

But I believe everything previous to this very moment is story.

It's our story.

It's, you know,

everybody we know, it's their story. It's the stories that we've learned of our family members for generations. You know, we seek out those stories with, you know, all those ancestry types of programs,

and we look into history and the stories that have been given to us there, and we believe much of it.

Okay? And we very much believe it. So when the Gospels were written,

they were written into the story into this framework of story. And that's how God works.

As it says at the beginning of John, in the beginning was the Word,

and the Word carries the story.

And here we see the story of God and God coming into our world to live among us. You know, as, as the women and Peter and John go to the tomb,

this isn't the first time they've known grief.

You know, you live in this world for any length of time and you're going to know grief. And we try particularly to protect children from early grief, but it happens.

And, you know, there's all kinds of loss that, that we know.

Loss of relationship through divorce,

there's deployment,

you know, when people are in the military and they are being chipped out,

there's loss, deportation that's certainly happening.

Incarceration,

when loved ones that, you know, are sent to prison.

And all these, these kinds of losses, loss of job, loss of health and besides, loss of family,

are all integral to our story.

And our story is how do you rise in the morning? How do you overcome,

or if not exactly overcome, but live through.

Through this kind of experience of, of loss?

And that's the story of, of the women here. That's the story of Mary Magdalene.

When you read John and she says, whom. To whom she thinks is the gardener, you know, where have they laid him? And he. He calls her name. The way I hear it, it's.

It's almost like he goes,

mary,

it's me. It's,

you know. And yet even then,

sometimes because of our grief, we don't hear and we don't understand completely until God reaches out and grabs our attention.

And this, the resurrection was certainly God's way getting our attention.

Jan: Absolutely, absolutely.

So in your book,

you've done a lot of exploring the devil's advocate, basically,

the reasons why, the questions, the reasoning of why a person would not believe.

What are some of the things that you address in there?

Constance: It.

For someone,

let's put it this way, who hasn't grown up in the story?

It is something that just maybe doesn't seem quite possible.

And I know there have been marvelous things written to prove,

you know, the gospel story that Jesus lived, that he was crucified and that he rose again,

the gold standard being the case for Christ.

And, you know, we struggle and so forth, you know,

but what I find is that the people who really embrace that kind of evidence or proof are people who probably believe at least a little bit anyway, and it kind of gets them over the hump.

But what happens when you're Talking to someone who has put up major obstacles to this.

People call it myth building and, and that kind of thing.

And yet I believe that God in the Holy Spirit,

if we're willing to take a good look, an honest look at the life of Christ,

it is story,

but is story that we can begin to see ourselves in and come to understand where we are.

And at this point, I often lean back onto Mark 9,

where the father, who has a son described as demonic, likely epileptic,

comes to Jesus.

He'd ask the disciples to heal his son. It didn't work.

And he comes to him and he says,

you know,

lord, have mercy,

do something about this if you can. He had known that Jesus I'd done these miracles. And Jesus says to him, if I can,

yeah. And it's like, you can't believe what you heard,

okay? And he says,

anything is possible for someone who believes,

okay? But the man then gives the most candid answer. I believe in the whole Bible. He says, lord, I believe.

Help my unbelief.

You know, if we look at this, to enter into this story,

we can see parts of it that we can accept that we can believe,

okay? So we can relate to the women and where they are in their grief.

We, you know, we all have hope that the world will get better.

And we can see that throughout, you know, the gospel message, that it is a message of hope,

but it's that,

that space, that gap, that unbelief part.

And, you know,

Jesus then moves and he, of course the boy is. Boy is healed. But I think it's not because of,

of where the man had problems, but because of what little points of belief that he could have, which was ultimately, as I said, based in hope.

Now, the opposite of that is fear.

And when people enter into a place of fear, I think it's sort of like,

okay,

if I agree to this,

will God let me down again?

You know, is there going to be another time when I come to this and I get squashed, that my life doesn't work out like it should,

that, you know, horrible things will happen?

And that fear then is where we tend to want to walk away.

And the subtitle of the book, the trouble with Jesus considerations before you walk away,

and God will allow us to walk away,

but in God's grace, God's grace also follows us wherever we walk.

So that sometimes brings us into that place.

But how,

how does it get to that point of seeming real?

And again,

that's part of what the book is to take.

Maybe a.

Not a hard look, but a,

a look at Jesus story and see it from a perspective that we can understand.

And that's why I begin with something simple. Like, the trouble with Jesus was he chose losers.

We know if you're going to start a movement today, you got to have people behind you. You've got to have the influencers, the, you know, the movers and shakers, the people with the money who are going to help promote your cause.

Jesus chose people that didn't have any of that,

you know,

largely uneducated.

You know, they, they didn't get along.

You know, as, as we, we know from other things. You know, there was a tax collector who worked for the Romans, and then there was the zealot who was going

Jan: to hail everybody and you're going to

Constance: put them in the same,

same seat.

And yet that's how God in Jesus Christ brings us together. Even though we're so very different in Him. We have our unity and can use

Jan: all of us, even though we're all different.

Constance: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Jan: I think I want to go back to one of the things you said was that,

is God gonna let us down again? But I think that has to do with a misunderstanding of who God is initially.

And so when you think that bad things happen because God makes them happen,

and that's your perception of things.

Yeah. You're gonna think that, like, okay, well, I can't really trust him.

Constance: Or if it's not that God made it happen, God let it happen.

And, you know, the big question there,

why?

Why did this happen?

And that's a statement which really stretches faith. You know, it's hard to trust when you, you can't see beyond what the horror in front of you is.

Or if it's not the horror, maybe it's the emptiness of what's before you that you don't have purpose in, in that regard. So there's a, there's a, you know, a large realm in which,

in which that works. But the other side of it is. And again, I write about this in the book, the trouble with Jesus is he refuses to be the divine fixer.

You know, yes, Jesus healed many people, but if you read carefully,

he didn't heal everyone.

Okay?

And that's hard to take.

You know,

if, if someone has a gift of healing, why aren't they running through cancer wards and, you know, and healing people and so forth? And it's. It all comes down to a certain plan that God has.

And not being that divine fixer,

he is not one in which we can pull strings and get the world to work as. As we want it to, not above it. Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Which is so, so very hard.

But it is, again,

entering into a place of trust where you can. You don't see it in the moment,

but beyond it are things that you have not seen.

Maybe something's happening right now that of which you're not aware, or maybe something is going to happen that'll have come to you. I. I went through this period when a couple of things were happening.

My father was dying,

and at the same time,

the church was falling apart,

and all of this grief and ugliness were just converging.

And I just,

you know, I just looked up and said, what are you going to do about this?

And,

you know, I didn't exactly know.

And it took,

gosh, I don't know,

a while,

Not. Not all that long, but a while, a while before I realized that God was saying, yes,

your father's dying and I will take care of him.

And I truly believe that happened.

And yes, this church is not where you belong because they're not willing to follow the Christ. You know,

And God moved me out of that church and moved me to a place where, with inspiration and time,

I got to write the book. The Trouble with Jesus.

Jan: I think that's just so true.

If you can come to the point where you can truly believe that God has a bigger picture in mind all the way. You know, I mean, he's got. He's got his reason.

His ways are higher than our ways.

We don't know it all. And even with Job, you know, when he's looking up and going,

come on, what's going on? And God says, did you create the universe? I mean, it's like,

I know what I'm doing.

You know, you think you know me, but you know this much, this tiny little bit of who I am, right?

Constance: And we. We have this. We want so much of our life to have the quality of autonomy. We want to be the ones in control.

And it's a hard stretch. And even for those who are strong believers and have been believers for a long time, these things are going to happen.

And it might not be anything catastrophic or out, you know, that nobody else goes through, but when it happens to you,

it is major.

And to learn to take those steps.

And following Jesus in that place of trust,

not, I emphasize this is not an easy sell.

You know,

if. If,

you know, we were going to design a way for everybody to come to Christ,

I think we'd have a bigger we. Everything would go good.

It's not. It's not going to happen now.

Jan: But, you know,

God gave us free will.

Absolutely kind of messed up the world.

A lot of the things that happen is because of free will. And so, you know,

some things are natural.

Constance: Yeah.

Jan: Everybody's going to die and somebody's going to grieve because that person dies.

Right.

And feeling that loss and that, you know, people are going to get ill and you're going to have to go through things and they might make it and you might.

Or you might be changed. But even with your church situation,

I, you know, did God maybe wanted to pull you out of that so that you. He. You could experience something different in the midst. And you think, oh, but this is my family, this is my people, these are my whatever.

But, you know, true.

Constance: That's exactly where I was. You know, I.

I thought that's where I was meant to be and good things were happening there, but it was very clear that from then on out,

things would be much different, and I just couldn't be a part of it. Mm.

Jan: Yeah.

And I wrote a Bible study called discovering your journey. And basically it's just figuring out your path of your life, of your major points, whatever, like that, but with the rubric of because of this.

This happened, resulting in. And then taking the same ideas with Ruth, Joseph, Jonah and David, but going through their lives because of this has happened, resulting. And you look at especially.

Well, all of them, but especially with Joseph. My goodness sakes. You know, all the things. All of the things that all lined up, whatever. But the point being that if you take time to look at all of those moments in your life,

you can go back and see where God was and what he taught you and whatever. So that whatever you're in right now, in that anxiety you're in or that grief or that whatever situation you're in right now,

is to just look, based on what God has done over time with me,

he's still. He's saying, God, he's still gonna do those other things, you know, and we should change our mindset to being, oh, this is happening.

Okay, well, I should be excited because I'm. I can't wait to see what you're gonna do with me.

Yeah.

Constance: Be excited. Right? But, you know, getting back to the resurrection,

someone said to me, if we can help people move the needles, so to speak, towards Christ is where the Holy Spirit can step in.

And I've. I've become convinced that if someone believes in the resurrection,

then they can carry that hope.

Yes. Through all the trials of their life as well as, you know, look at the rest of the. Of the Word and see that same God power in all of it.

You know, whether it goes back to the creation and learning to come to terms with God as creator.

As you look through the Old Testament and the things that, you know shouldn't have happened, that didn't you. You referenced Joseph. You know, we look at Moses parting the Red Sea.

We look at, you know, look through the stories, say, like, Jonah being swallowed by a whale.

And, you know, people today say that's. That's not possible.

Okay,

all right. You know, we. We might not always see, you know, a great sea being parted so that an army can run through it,

but at the same time,

when ways are open to us,

it's probably no different in the real working of the power of God,

that opportunities come that we didn't see coming, that we didn't know would happen.

And that, yes, sometimes we feel like we are in a very dark place from which we can never escape. But just as Jonah was delivered from the belly of the whale, in the same way,

we can be delivered from the darkness in which we think our lives will end.

And that's. That's the pattern of God.

And if you, like you say, if you look for those points where God has entered, if you look for those patterns, you can then develop that kind of confidence in your faith, your trust, your belief that God will continue to move.

And all of that happens by this resurrection.

If Jesus hadn't risen from the dead, this story would have died long time ago.

We could put it up with,

like, the Greek gods, you know, and Homer writing, the Iliad and the Odyssey and those kinds of things, and they become dusty books on a shelf that sometimes people pull out and make a movie.

And yet we don't think of that as being real.

But the gospel story has become real in so many lives,

and it does not die,

right? It's living.

It does not die. It continues on and on.

You know, the world will look at us and say, okay, you know, you don't have as many people in your churches anymore or whatever.

Oh, baloney.

That's. That's not the point.

The point is,

and. And let me just say, Jan,

this ability to speak about this on a podcast,

this word is going so many places, more so than you and I will ever be.

And yet that is exactly what happens with the word of God. It enters into places that we never will know, but God will live and the story will continue.

Jan: I love that. Yeah, I do love that about That I do want to say,

it's not to say that sometimes horrible things happen. I mean, horrible things in war happen, horrible things happen to people and they don't have a happy ending.

But our hope is in the risen Jesus. And our hope is that because we have faith in him, we will be with him in eternity, which is going to be way better than we could ever imagine in our earthly life.

Constance: Yeah, yeah, I, I saw that. My family saw that with my father in law. Uh, he was actually a methodist pastor and 40 years old and very successful and very well liked.

And he was stricken with Parkinson's disease.

And this was in 1953,

before they had the medications and treatments and even the understanding of the disease that we have today.

And he very quickly succumbed to it and had to retire from the ministry.

And so there was my mother in law and she had her husband to take care of a 12 year old boy and a baby girl.

Fortunately, the family had a small bungalow on a small town at the time, had dirt roads and they moved there,

but God took care of them and he lived for 38 years.

Jan: Oh my.

Constance: Yeah, by the time I, I came to the family, he was, you know, very rigid, catatonic.

And yet the churches that he had served all that time at Christmas would send money.

I'm talking to the tune of thousands of dollars.

And I said to my mother in law, I said, the, the people that are sending this money from these churches didn't know him, but they were everything that the church should be.

And they were faithful for those 38 years in supporting them in the care that he got.

Yes, he, he died and you know, it was so sad that this happened to him as it did.

But the faith and the witness that came from that is,

is, you know, as great as any story that we have.

And we, we have that confidence that he, he has been restored with heaven, that he is. Well,

my mother in law is now with him and I sometimes say he never was able to say my name. He wasn't speaking by the time I came to the family.

And when I get to heaven, after I meet Jesus,

I want to meet him and I want to hear him say my name.

Jan: Yes, yes, yes. We had just a couple minutes left. What final words do you want to tell our audience?

Constance: We, we know that the resurrection is the pivotal point of actually all of history.

That everything began to turn with the belief that Jesus did rise from the dead.

And in the same way our lives can also turn as we accept his resurrection, as we accept indeed that he loves us,

whatever we've done, he can forgive. But in the grace of God,

we can be one with Him.

And in. In that we. We can have our hope.

It doesn't mean that the world is going to run like we wish it would.

It doesn't mean that everything's going to suddenly get better in our own personal lives. But we are going to have the strength and the power that went with the resurrection for ourselves until that time when we do meet Jesus.

Jan: Hallelujah. Thank you, Constance. I really enjoyed this episode. I'm so glad you joined me.

Constance: Thank you, Jan. It was good talking to you today.