42. What to Do When Someone Tries to Talk You Out of Your Calling

Not everyone who has an opinion about your vision has earned the right to speak into it. Knowing the difference might be the most important thing you do with what God gave you.

Episode 42 closes the Formation Trilogy -- nine episodes on purpose, calling, and vision -- with the two questions this arc was always building toward. The first: what does God do with the person who is still standing after the vision was buried? The second: who gets access to what God gave you, and how do you guard it without becoming closed, defensive, or unteachable?

In this episode, we walk through John 20, and the moment Jesus commissions the disciples while they are still afraid, still in a locked room, still carrying more questions than answers. The sending does not wait for readiness. It comes through the locked door. And then it goes straight into Nehemiah 2, where Nehemiah inspects the wall in the dark before anyone else gets a chance to speak into the vision -- because he understood that voices enter fast and change what you see.

This episode names three specific voices that should not have access to a God-given vision: the voice of unexamined familiarity, the voice of institutional protection, and the voice of wounded wisdom. It gives you concrete language for how to tell the difference between someone who is refining your vision and someone who is replacing it. And it closes with the commissioning word that has been underneath this entire trilogy: you were not given a vision to hold forever in private. You were given a vision to be sent with.

If you have been carrying something God gave you and you are not sure who to let in, this episode is for you. If you have been through a formation season and you are not sure what comes next, this episode is for you. If you are still standing after something that looked like the end, this episode is for you.

In this episode:

-- What it means to be sent before you feel ready (John 20:19-23)

-- Why Nehemiah inspected the wall in the dark before he told anyone the vision

-- The three voices that should not have access to a God-given vision

-- How to tell the difference between correction and replacement

-- What the word poiema (Ephesians 2:10) says about why your specific history matters

-- The Joseph narrative: what God does with vision that was buried and survived

-- Theological voices: Willie Jennings and N.T. Wright

This episode is for you if you are asking:

-- How do I know who to trust with my vision?

-- What do I do when people mishandle what God gave me?

-- How do I protect a God-given vision without becoming defensive?

-- What does it mean to be sent by God when I don't feel ready?

-- How do I know if I'm hearing from God or just from the loudest voice in the room?

-- What comes after a season of waiting, formation, and loss?

FaithFormed is a biblical discipleship podcast for people who are serious about building a faith that actually holds up. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Connect with us via our Instagram: @faithformed_pod

Email us any questions or comments to yourpursuitpodcast@gmail.com

Order your copy of my latest book, "The Purpose in the Pause", here

Learn more about me at www.justindbelt.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There is a moment after something ends when you don't know what you are anymore. Not in the dramatic sense. It's just quiet. You wake up and you go through the motions, and somewhere inside you is this unresolved thing. This question that you can't quite shape into words. Like you've built something, or tried to, or you waited a long time to build it and then it didn't go the way that you thought. And now it's over, and you're still here, and you don't know if what happened was failure or formation, or maybe both. I want to talk about what comes next. I'm Justin Belt. This is Faith Formed, a podcast about honest faith for people who don't have it all together. And we're really trying to build a faith that actually holds up. Welcome to episode 42. And before we jump fully into it, would you do me a favor? If you are enjoying the content that we're putting out weekly via Faith Formed and across our socials, would you do me a favor and leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, it would really bless us if you would just take 30 seconds and leave us a rating and review. It's how people discover the work that we're doing as well as by word of mouth. So we thank you and we appreciate you. Now let's get back to the episode. So nine episodes. We started this trilogy asking about purpose, what it is, how you find it, what to do when it feels like it's being withheld from you. And then we moved into calling. What it actually means to be called by God, what the waiting does to you, how do you how how you keep moving when the assignment is not yet clear. And then we landed in vision. What it looks like to carry something God gave you before the conditions arrive for it, and what happens when the vision gets buried, and what to do when you're in the dark, and the dark doesn't seem to be ending. And we've been in some pretty difficult places together across these nine episodes. And I don't take that lightly because you have showed up with me for the hard conversations, and I want you to know that I appreciate that. That matters. But before we go any further, I want to name something about how we got here. Because I think that this formation trilogy, this nine-episode arc, was about more than content. It was about a particular kind of person. The person who was serious about what God called them to. And if that's you, what I want you to hear before we go into this final episode is this the fact that you are still here, still listening, still asking, still holding on, that's formation. That's you doing the work. And this episode is not the moment where everything resolves. I think if you've been listening to the show for any length of time, you know that I don't really do resolutions. But this episode is rather a commissioning. See, there's a difference between a celebration and a commissioning. A celebration looks backward at what was accomplished, but a commissioning looks forward at what you're being sent to do. And so my intent with this episode is that you leave this episode feeling sent. And we're going to do two things today. First, we're going to talk about what God does with the person who is still standing after the burial and what it looks like when he sends them. And second, and this is the part that I didn't want to skip, and I mentioned it at the end of last week's episode. We're going to talk about who gets to speak into a God-given vision. Because part of what the formation season teaches you, if you're paying attention, is not just how to hold a vision, but it's how to guard one. So let's get into it. So we're starting at John chapter 20, the Gospel of John chapter 20, verse 19. The disciples are locked in a room. It's the evening day of the resurrection, but they don't know that, they don't know that, right? Not in the way that we're able to look back on it and read it. We get the other side of the story. But what they know is that Jesus had been crucified three days ago. What they know is that everything they had they had given three years of their lives to had ended in the most public, the most brutal, the most humiliating way imaginable. The man that they believed was the Messiah, this man who was their brother, their friend, their confidant, was dead. And their vision, the restoration of Israel, the kingdom of God breaking in, this thing that they had left their nets and their tax booths and their ordinary lives to follow, it was it was buried. And so now they're hiding, doors locked and afraid. And I think we need to give this the proper weight, right? Because we know that this is the moment that Jesus walks through that wall, but I don't want to get to that part too quickly. Because often we are so eager to get to the resurrection appearance that we don't really sit with what it must have felt like to actually be in that room at that moment. Because these men weren't weak men. I mean, Peter had drawn a sword in the garden and chopped a dude's ear off. James and John had asked to sit at Jesus' right and left hand in the kingdom. And that's not the kind of question that timid people ask. So these men were not cowards by nature, but they were people who had built their lives around a vision that appeared to have collapsed. And now they don't know what they were anymore. And I think that feeling is more common than we're willing to admit in Christian spaces. We've built a culture that moves very quickly from the death to the resurrection, from the Friday to the Sunday, from the loss to the lesson. And there's something true in that movement. The resurrection is real. Sunday did come. But if we're not careful, we use the resurrection to skip the Saturday. And some of you are in the Saturday right now. You're in the room with the locked door. And someone keeps telling you that Sunday is coming as if that's supposed to make Saturday feel any less like a Saturday. See, theologian Willie Jennings writes about what he calls the condition of displacement, which is the experience of people who have had their ground taken from them, who find themselves in spaces where they no longer know where they belong, where the structure they depended on has been dismantled. Jennings uses his language to talk about colonialism and race. But I think that he offers a theological insight that reaches further. Because displacement is what happens when the thing that gave you your sense of place and purpose is gone, and you're still standing in the space where it used to be. The disciples in that room were a displaced people because the vision was gone, the teacher was gone, the community that they thought they could depend on had been scattered, and they had locked the doors because they didn't know what was coming next. And they didn't trust what was outside. I mean, guards were probably looking for them. And if you've been in a season that ended before you were ready, you know this feeling. And it's not because you're faithless, it's because you're human, and that's okay. Because vision that dies takes something with it, and grief is not the absence of faith. Grief is what faith looks like when it's been asked to hold more weight than it thought that it can carry. Again, I know that room because I've sat in it and I've locked the door, but here's what happens next, and this is the part that just gets me every time I read it, okay? Jesus comes through the locked door. Crazy. He doesn't come through the open one, he comes through the locked one. And he doesn't wait for the disciples to get themselves together or to process their grief or to establish their theology or to figure out what they believe now that the plan failed. He comes through the very barrier that they put up to protect themselves from what they couldn't process and what they didn't understand. And the first thing he says is not a rebuke or a sermon or a correction about their lack of faith. He doesn't say, you know, how much longer will I have to put up with you? No. The first thing he says is, peace be with you. And then he shows them his hands and his side, the unhealed wounds, not, you know, an unmarked perfected body, the wounds. He shows them the evidence of what he did cost, and then they rejoice. And then he says it again, peace be with you. And after that, the commissioning begins. And I want you to notice the sequence. Peace before purpose, presence before assignment. He doesn't walk into the room and immediately hand them a strategy. He stands in the room and lets them observe him. He lets them feel the weight of the truth that is standing before them before he tells them what to do next. Why? Because the commissioning that comes without the peace is just pressure with a churchy label attached to it. And Jesus is not interested in pressure. He's interested in formation. It is peace and then go. And so in verse 21, he says, As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you. That sentence deserves to stop us completely because it's not just ascending. What Jesus is showing us is a pattern. He says, As the Father has sent me, which means the shape of Jesus' mission also becomes the shape of ours. And if that's true, then we need to understand the shape of his mission before we can understand what we're being asked to do. So what was the shape of Jesus' mission? Okay, here we go. He came into a world that was not ready for him. He operated with the vision, the kingdom of God, the inbreaking of Shalom, the healing of what it of what had been fractured at the root through sin. Long before the conditions confirmed that the vision was even possible. He faced opposition, he faced misunderstanding even from the people closest to him. The people who should have seen it most clearly were the people who resisted it most fiercely. Jesus planted something and then he died. And from the outside, from every observable metric, the vision had failed. And God used the apparent failure as the mechanism of the most significant reversal in human history. And he said, As the Father sent me. M. T. Wright has written extensively about what he calls vocation, or the idea that human beings are not simply saved from something, but saved for something. The idea that Christian life is not an evacuation from the broken places of the world, but a commissioning back into them. So in Wright's framing, we're not waiting to be extracted. We're actually being deployed. But not as people who have everything figured out, rather as people who carry the news that death is not the final word, that the grave doesn't get the last sentence, that the vision God buries is not the same thing as the vision God abandons. And that's the commissioning that is happening in John chapter 20. Jesus breathes on them. The Greek word here is emphaso. It only appears one other time in the entire biblical text that I found, and that's in Genesis chapter 2, when God breathes into the dust, and the first human becomes a living soul. And I John is being very intentional here. He's doing something that is deliberate. He's saying, what is happening in this room with the disciples is a new creation event. The um the disciples who walked in as displaced people, people without a place, people whose vision was buried, are now, after Jesus breathes on them, walking out as people with a purpose. And that purpose is not contingent on the conditions being right, because it never is. The conditions are never right. Rather, it is contingent on the breath that they have just received. And so Jesus says, as the Father sent me, those words are so powerful. And it's not, it's not a sending that waits for clearance, it's a sending that goes because the sender has authorized it. And here's where I want to push on something, because I think a lot of people who have been in formation seasons, who have been through the waiting and the burial and the long dark, have unwittingly developed this theology that sounds like this. Tell me if this is you. Once I get through this, once I can clearly see what the vision is again, once the conditions are in place and the confirmation has come from prophets and everybody else, and the doors are open, then I'll be ready to move. But notice that's not what Jesus says to the people in that room. He says it to people who are still afraid. He says it to people who are still processing, right? He says it to people who still have more questions than answers. Instead, he breathes on them and then he sends them and they go. Because the formation is not the waiting room before the mission. The formation is part of the mission. You're being sent with what the formation has produced in you so far, not with what you wish you had, not with the version of yourself you thought you would be by now, but you're being sent with what you actually have. And whether you believe it or not, that's enough. Why? Because Jesus is the one who breathed. Last episode, we spent an entire episode talking about Joseph's story. I want to come back to it one final time because there's a moment near the end of his narrative that I think fits everything that we're talking about. And I also think that it's the emotional and theological center of the whole thing. And I don't want to close this trilogy without sitting in it. So Genesis 50, Jacob is dead. And I'm not talking about when they first, when his brothers first discovered him in Egypt. This is later, okay? Jacob's dead, and the brothers, these same brothers who threw Joseph into the pit, who sold him to the Midianites, who told their father he was dead and let the old man grieve for years. Now they're terrified. They think that with Joseph gone, that with Jacob gone, sorry, Joseph is finally going to retaliate and get his revenge. And they've been waiting for it. So they come to him and they fall down before him and they say, We are your servants. And Joseph doesn't laugh. He doesn't say, Ha ha ha, finally. But he weeps. Not from anger, not from satisfaction, not from vindication. But he weeps, and then he says the words that I think the entire narrative of Joseph's life has been building toward. Words that really only make sense after everything that came before them. You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. And I want to be careful here because this has been used in motivational speeches. It's become such a common thing that it might as well have been put on a poster because we've lost the weight of what Joseph's saying. He's not performing, you know, something tidy to resolve this whole thing. He's not saying the pit wasn't dark. He's not saying the 13 years in Egypt before his elevation was light work. No. He's not saying the betrayal didn't cost him something deep and leave a scar on his soul. He's saying something much harder than any of that. He's saying, I can see now what I could not see when I was in it. And what I can see now is that God's hand was present and purposeful in the exact places where God seemed most absent. And that's a statement that you can only make from the other side. And even then, it's not a statement that erases grief. It's a statement that holds the grief and the grace at the same time. Because both things can be true, right? The harm is real. The intention behind it was destructive, and yet God moved anyway, not because pain is good, but because God is not stopped by pain. God is not stopped by suffering. And this is what formation produces in a person. It doesn't produce a person who has all the answers. It doesn't produce people who have arrived at some polished version of themselves where the suffering has been cleaned up and the story has been made presentable. But rather, it produces people who have been in the dark long enough to develop a trust in the one who met them in that darkness. People who have had their vision buried and come out the other side, not necessarily with the original vision intact, but with something deeper. A knowledge of God that only grows in the places where you had no option but to hold on to it. Penicillin comes from mushrooms. Mushrooms grow in dark, humid places. And then they become something that is healing to people. It's the same thing here. The people who've been in the dark come out the other side, and God uses them, not despite what they went through, but through what they went through. The suffering becomes the source material, the formation becomes the vocabulary. The very thing that looked like destruction of the vision turns out to have been part of how the vision was being prepared to do what it was always meant to do. Joseph couldn't have governed Egypt the way he did without the pit, without the prison, without the years of learning to be faithful in small things when the big thing was nowhere in sight. The character required for the assignment was forged in the assignment that he didn't ask for. And I need you to understand me here. I need you to sit with this, right? Because we talked about last week that there is a verse in Psalms that says, And the word of the Lord tested him. Some of you, so many of us, right now, the word of God is testing you. The promise that God placed on your life is testing you because there is a person that the vision demands. Stay with me. There's a person that the purpose demands. There's a person that the calling demands that you are not yet. When God speaks to you at the beginning, you're not the person that you need to be at the end. And so what happens? That purpose, that promise, that vision, that calling, it tests you not to break you, but to grow you, to grow the kind of person that is needed to inhabit the vision when the vision comes to bear. Joseph wasn't ready when he got those two visions, but he was ready when he had been through the pit and Potiphar's house and the prison. Do you understand me? God is not trying to break you. God is trying to grow you. God is trying to develop you into the person that people will need when the vision comes to bear. And I want to say something to you that I want you to actually hear and not just pass over. You're not disqualified by what you've survived. You're not disqualified by the body. Behind because the vision hasn't materialized on the timeline you expected. You're not some cautionary tale. You're being formed. And the thing being formed in you is exactly the shape of what is needed for the thing that you are being sent to do. And I need you to hold that because it's about to get real. Where we're going with this next. Ephesians 2 10. For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared in advance for us to do. I think I've said this before on the podcast, but the the word translated as handiwork is poema. It's where we get the English word poem. So in effect, we are God's crafted poem. Not mass-produced, not interchangeable, not a generic version of someone else's formation story. But we're a poem. Specific, particular, shaped with intention, with every word chosen for a reason and nothing included by accident. And here is what the text says about that poem. The good works were prepared in advance, which means that before you were born, before the waiting season, before the vision, before the burial, before the seven months or the twelve months or whatever season has marked you most, the works were already designed. And they were designed to fit the person who would do them. Not a fully healed, perfectly prepared version of you, but the actual you, the one who went through what you went through, who carries what you carry, who knows what you know, what you now know because of where you've been. The specificity of that is the point, I believe it is anyway. And it's not a consolation prize, but rather it's a design. Willie Jennings, going back to him, he talks about something that he that he calls the beauty of particular belonging. And it's the idea that God's work in the world is not accomplished by people who have transcended their particular stories or who have risen above their specific histories, but by people who bring these stories and histories into the work. The particularity is not something to be overcome. Rather, it is something to be offered. Your formation story is not a liability that you need to manage or some weakness that we need to compensate for. We often think that it is, but it's not. It's the vocabulary that God is using to say something into the world that only you can say, exactly the way that only you can say it. And I think I've been sitting with this, man, since May of 2025. Um when our church plant closed, that waiting season produced something that lasted for what? Seven, nine months. And for a while I didn't really know what to do with it. Like I had the theology. I could quote verses or find verses about it, you know, verses that I journaled as I was processing. Um, you know, the ones we go to, God means everything for good, right? About his thoughts being higher than our thoughts, about, you know, how suffering of this present time is not worth comparing to the glory that is to come. I could say the words. But there's a real difference between theology that you can recite and theologically that you have metabolized by having to live through the seasons. One lives in your head, the other lives in your chest. And for a while I was still in the reciting phase, kind of just saying the words. Um, and hoping the weight of them would eventually reach somewhere deeper than my vocabulary. But what I've come to, and I want to be honest, that I'm still coming to this, it's not a finished arrival. It's the seven months mattered, right? Uh, the people who came, you know, once or twice before, you know, people just quit coming, they they mattered. The obedience of the planting mattered. And the closing mattered too. I'm thinking through this now. Um, not as a failure, as a next movement in the formation that's still in process. Not because I'm at the end of my story and neither are you. Going back to N.T. Wright, he talks about human beings as image bearers. We've talked about this, Yamago Dei. People designed to reflect God's character and presence in the created world. And the bearing is not contingent on our lives being clean or our outcomes being confirmed or our stories being tidy enough to tell. Rather, this bearing of God's image is contingent on whether we're willing to show up to carry what we have been given into the spaces that need it. So I ask, are you willing? See, the disciples in that room had nothing figured out, but they had the breath of Jesus in them, and so they went. And before I move on to the final movement of this podcast, I want to look back for a moment because I think that this end of the trilogy, but well, because this is the end of the trilogy, it is the end. We're not moving on with this with this trilogy. So because this is the end of the trilogy, I think we owe it to the nine episodes to name what was actually being built. See, purpose, the first arc, was teaching you that the assignment was already in you. That you weren't waiting to be given something, you were learning how to recognize what had already been placed there. Because purpose is not a destination, it's an identity. Calling, the second arc, was teaching you that the waiting season was not filler. It was the most intentional formation work God does. That the fog was not a stop sign, that obedience before clarity produces something that clarity before obedience could never even hope to, that calling is not an event, it's an ongoing work of becoming the person that the assignment requires. And then vision, this arc, has been teaching you that what God gives you to carry exists before the conditions arrive to support it, that the burial is not the end, that the dark has a purpose. And now, in this final episode, the last thing vision teaches you is this. You were not given a vision to hold forever in private. You were given a vision to be sent with. And that's the full arc, right? Purpose forms you, calling moves you, vision sends you. And you're the one being sent now. Not when you're finished, not when the story makes sense, but now with what you have, because the breath is in you and the works were prepared, and the world needs what you carry. And they can't, they can't wait for you to be ready. They need it now. The hurting people need it now. The people asking what and why, they need it how. And the vision God gave you is not compatible with who you used to be. That's why he puts you through the formation. So when someone who knew you before tells you that this vision doesn't sound like you, they might be exactly right. It doesn't sound like the old you, and that's the point. The second is the voice of institutional protection. These are the people who are sometimes leaders, sometimes organizations, sometimes whole systems, whose primary concern is whether your vision fits within the existing structure of the culture or the society, whether it threatens anything they've already built, whether it requires them to scoot over and make room. And I'm not saying that all institutional voices are corrupt because they're not, but what I am saying is that an institution's job is to protect the institution. And your vision's job is to do what God said to do. And those two things are often like oil and water. You have to know the difference between a correction that is coming from God through a leader and a correction that is coming from a system that is trying to protect itself. And then the third voice is the voice of wounded wisdom. This one is the hardest to navigate, I think. These are the people who tried something similar and it didn't work, who had a vision and watched it die and have never fully recovered from that. And now they speak to your vision from the wound. They're not wrong that the vision is hard, right? They're not wrong that it might not work out the way you expect, but but they're speaking from the scar tissue, not from your assignment. And scar tissue, as much as it needs to be honored, it is not a reliable guide to speak into someone's calling. Now, I need to be careful here, because I know that I am one of those people now in some of those contexts. I planted a church and it closed, and I carry that. But I have to be disciplined about the difference between wisdom I have genuinely earned through the experience and the wound that might still be open. Not everyone who has lived through the fire has turned it into wisdom. Some people have just been burned and they have not taken the chance to heal yet. So, how do you know who should speak into a vision? Here's what I've learned. Um, yeah, here's what I've learned. The people who get to speak into your vision are the ones who have proven they can hold it without needing to control it. They can be trusted with what you are carrying because they're they're not trying to capture it or redirect it towards something that serves them. They are genuinely for you, and they are genuinely for the thing God gave you. Those people are rare. When you find those people, hold on to them. Please hold on to them. They're not cheerleaders, they're they they will give you the hard messages that they need to give you, but they will tell you the hard thing because they're trying to protect the vision, not undermine it. The people who do not get to speak into the vision are the ones who have not paid the price to understand it. They're the ones who haven't been in the room, who have not prayed over it, who have not sat with you in the dark seasons and asked the right questions. Allowed opinion from a distant place is not the same as earned authority. And you don't owe everyone access to what God gave you just because they asked for it or demanded it or implied that their wisdom should apply. Nehemiah knew this. When Sanbalat and Tobiah came against the vision, and these brothers, they were major haters. They came from it from every angle. They used mockery, they used discouragement, accusation, threats. Nehemiah's response was not some long theological discourse. It was short and it was clear, and it was a sentence in chapter 2, verse 20. He said, The God of heaven will give us success. You have no share in Jerusalem, no claim and no historic right. And then he just went back to building. And so this is the posture. It's not defensive, it's not anxious, it's not constantly trying to justify the vision to people who were never going to see it. It's just clear. You don't have access here. And then back to the work. And I need to close this with something that I think is the heart of it. Guarding a vision is not the same thing as being closed or defensible or unteachable. Guarding a vision means knowing what you saw, knowing who showed it to you, and being discerning enough to tell the difference between a voice that is helping you carry it well and a voice that is trying to take it from you or talk you out of it, or reshape it into something that is more manageable and less threatening to them. The vision that God gave you is not designed to be comfortable for everybody. Okay? It was designed to do something in the world that needs doing in the world. And I can't encourage you enough that if you're carrying that, and you are, guard it accordingly. Guarded with your life, but also guarded with an open hand toward God. And here's what I want you to carry out of this vision as I get ready to close. Here's what I want you to carry out of this trilogy. Purpose is not a destination you arrive at, it's an identity you inhabit. Calling is not an event that you wait for, it's the ongoing work that God is doing in your life even now. And vision is not the plan you execute when everything is in place. It's the thing that God holds and trusts while he forms the person who can carry it faithfully. And when enough of that work has been done that you can be useful in the carrying, he'll breathe on you and he will send you. Not when you're finished, not when the grief is processed, not when the conditions are ideal. He sends you with the breath in you and the wounds visible that the work was prepared for the actual you. So guard what God gave you, not with fear but with clarity. Know what you saw, know who showed it to you, know who has earned the right to speak into it, and who has not earned that right. Don't let the loudest room in the voice voice in the room be the one that reshapes what God gave you. Let the vision be shaped by the one who gave it, and then go. Not with false confidence, not with a polished, culturally, you know, plastic version of yourself that has hidden everything at cost. But I want you to go with the wounds visible, like Jesus did. Because the wounds were proof that the resurrection is real and the formation was real, and none of it was wasted. So go into your family, go into your work, go into your neighborhood, go into your community, be the person who stayed, who held on, who was formed in the dark and came out carrying something that easy seasons could have never produced. Because you are God's poem. You were written for this moment, for these people with this history. Go because you're sent. Father God, I thank you for the work that you have done over these last nine episodes, for the people who've listened, who have had your word spoken over them, your vision confirmed in them, your calling confirmed, your purpose respoken. God, I thank you for the work that you've done in our lives and the work that you continue to do, how you continue to form us, God, how you continue to lovingly reshape us, God, how you continue to lovingly correct us and redirect us when we get off path. And God, I'm praying right now for the person who has made it all the way through these nine episodes who still doesn't feel like they have clarity. For the one who's been in the waiting for so long that the waiting has become their identity. And they can't imagine what movement would even look like for them. I pray for the one who planted something and watched it close, for the one who's holding a vision and the conditions aren't right for it yet. And so some days they wonder if they made the whole thing up. For the one who has let the wrong voices in, for who gave access to the wrong voices, to the loudest, most insistent voices, and they've let them speak so much that they've forgotten what the actual vision looked like. God, let them find their way back to what they originally saw. God, I'm praying for the ones who were sitting in the locked room right now. Not because they don't have faith, but because they're afraid and they're scared and they're tired and they don't know what comes next, and they, because they've been hurt in the gap between what they believed and what happened. Lord, come through the locked door. Come through the failure. Come through the tears. Come through the sadness, the frustration, the disappointment, God, because you've done it before, God. Do it again. Let them feel the weight of your presence before they feel the clarity of the direction, God. Show them your hands. Let the wounds be proof that you were in it with them. In the burial, in the dark, in every season that looked like the end but wasn't. And then, God, breathe upon them and send them. Send them with the same breath that you breathed into Adam at creation. Send them with the same breath that you commissioned the disciples in John chapter 20. Send them with what the forna formation produced. Send them not when they feel ready, but when you are ready to use them, because you are the one who determines readiness, not what we see, not what we feel. God let them go knowing that they are your poem written for this exact moment with this exact history for these exact people and for this exact moment. In Jesus' name. Amen. So, yo, we've finished nine episodes, and I think we built something together that was just really awesome. Like I didn't know if I could do this when uh the idea first came, but God has been faithful, and I'm I'm I'm grateful that you've walked through this with me. If this formation trilogy has landed with you, would you please leave us the rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? And do me one more favor share any episode in this trilogy, maybe especially this one, with someone who needs this encouragement, who needs this challenge. Yeah? It would mean a lot to expand the reach of this message, to expand the mission of this message. Y'all, thank you for hanging with us for episode 42 of Faith Formed. I'm your host, Justin, but I'm in this with you. Thank you for being here. Now go. You're being sent, and I'll see you next week. Be blessed.