51. Why Does God Like Everyone Else More Than Me?

Lecrae walked into the 2015 Grammys hoping the room would finally answer a question he'd been asking his whole life. Am I known? Am I enough? The room never answered. It just moved on to the next name.

If you've ever felt like God likes everyone else more than He likes you, this episode is for you.

Most of us know that room, even if we've never walked a red carpet. It's the refreshed download numbers. The event that eight people showed up to. Somebody else's launch across town with a line out the door. And underneath the ache is a lie most of us would never say out loud: that God is rationing His affection, and He handed the bigger portion to somebody else.

This is the follow-up to "Faith for Everyone but Me," and it goes after the harder question that one left open. Not just that we keep a ledger against ourselves, but why we built it in the first place.

We go to the Jordan River in Mark 1, where the Father calls Jesus beloved and says He is well pleased, before a single sermon, miracle, or healing is on the record. That's the reordering the whole gospel invites you into: approval that comes before performance, not because of it. Then to the two builders in Matthew 7, who face the same storm on the same night, where the only thing that matters is what's underneath the house when the wind hits.

With Esau McCaulley on a belovedness that survives a culture that refuses to affirm you, and Howard Thurman, who knew he was seen by God underneath every system built to say otherwise, this episode is about getting so rooted in what God already said about you that when the room doesn't turn your way, it doesn't move you off center.

You were approved before you produced a single thing. You can stop auditioning for what you already have.

Scripture: Mark 1:11, Ephesians 2:8-9, Matthew 7:24-27.

Share it with someone who's been quietly keeping their own ledger, leave a rating and review, and follow the show so the next episode finds you.

Keywords: why does God like everyone else more than me, why does God love others more than me, feeling overlooked by God, feeling forgotten by God, comparison and faith, identity in Christ, approval before performance, Mark 1 baptism beloved, Matthew 7 two builders wise and foolish, chasing validation and worth, belovedness, Esau McCaulley, Howard Thurman, Christian podcast on identity

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

Copy

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I thought I was done with this, and then I listened to the latest episode of The Deep End with LaCrae. And in this episode, he was talking about his experience at the 2015 Grammys. He'd been nominated that year, I think, for Album of the Year, I think, or Rap Album of the Year, something like that. And he talked about being on the red carpet and how you know he got there like four the events started at six is on the red carpet, surrounded by all these big names. And as he's about to walk out onto the red carpet for all the pictures to be taken, um he gets stopped. The security stops him, and then like you know, Taylor Swift comes through, and then he he sits there and he's waiting for his turn on the red carpet as big name after big name after big name comes through. Um and then when it's finally his turn to finally walk, an hour later, only a couple of photographers stayed to take his picture. Crazy, right? Um crazy, and he he said on the show that he thought the nomination that the the recognition, you know, that that affirmation, that that feeling seen would be good for him, but it wasn't, and he started asking these questions of himself, like, you know, am I enough? Am I known? And but the room never answered, it just kept moving toward the next name being called, the next flash of cameras, the next person who sold more or who or who was known more than him. And I realized as I was listening to that episode that I know that feeling. Like, even though I will probably never sit in the line to have my you know photo taken on the red carpet of the Grammys, um, what I recognize is the part underneath the part that he talked about. The part that has nothing to do with the Grammys or the Emmys or the Oscars or the Tony's. Because what I recognized listening to Lacrae talk about this, and Lacrae holler at your boy if you ever, if you if you hear this, LaCrae, holler at your boy, because you inspired me. But what I realized is that there is a version of me that has convinced myself more than once that the next thing would finally be the thing. What thing you ask? Well, the the thing that would fill the hole in me, the the thing that would uh allow people to know me, that thing that would help people to discover me. So the next the next book, right? The the next podcast episode, that could be the thing that launches me into an entirely new stratosphere of being known, and um it could change the financial future for my family, right? It could be the next milestone that I could point to and say, see, that proves that I was always right about just how special I am. I have chased that feeling harder than I like admitting on a podcast that people actually listen to. A finished manuscript would sit in my Google Drive, or a finished book would sit on my desk, and I would wait for a review to do something in me that the writing itself never quite managed to do on its own. Y'all, I've written three books, and I have probably two to three more books on my Google Drive that are finished, right? And you would think that having written three books that are published that can be purchased, that I would feel you know, some type of pride and satisfaction in it. But if I'm honest with you, I don't. I'm looking at the next book, this next book that I have that I think I'm gonna publish next whenever I whenever it happens, and I'm like, maybe this is the one. Maybe this is the one that takes my name where my name has never been before, in a good way. Um or a podcast episode would go live, and I would refresh the download numbers within the hour like they were about to hand down a verdict on whether I mattered that particular week. Thing is, they never came back with a verdict that was in my favor because numbers don't talk, they just they sat there on a screen, flat and indifferent to my hopes, indifferent to my dreams, refusing to whisper anything true about my worth, no matter how long I stared at them waiting. That the numbers of the books that sold or didn't sold that didn't sell would have something to say about my worth that they never said a word about. I'm Justin Belt, and this is Faith Formed, a podcast for about honest faith for people who don't have it all together, where we're trying to build a faith that lasts in the middle. We're trying to build a faith that actually holds up, and welcome to episode 51. Um, I'm about to be honest with you all about myself and probably about many of you as well. So if you went back and listened to episode 50, you already know the first mile of where this episode is headed, right? I called that episode Faith for Everyone But Me. And in it, I told you something that I had noticed both in my own life and in lots of other believers that I've, you know, pastored or coached across really two decades of doing this. And that is that we can believe God for other people so easily that it barely costs us anything. A friend's marriage is falling apart. I got you. I'm gonna pray with you. Real expectant faith. I'm gonna pray fire down that God will move in your marriage and bring you all back together. Someone that I love receives a diagnosis, and I'll pray with the real expectant faith that, you know, knowing that God is near, right? And and and here's the thing, we mean it when we do it, right? We're not performing some line that we memorized in Sunday school. No, we mean it. But if we were to turn that lens right back around onto our own lives, something inside of us quickly shuts down. Grace stops behaving like a gift the moment it becomes about us specifically. It turns into a ledger. I talked about that last week, the ledger. We go right back to keeping score against ourselves in a way that we would never dream of keeping score against anybody else. We tell everybody else, don't keep a score, because God doesn't keep a score about you until it comes to us. Until we look in our own selves in the mirror and say, oh, wait, wait, but not you. God keeps a ledger. God keeps score against you. And I said in that episode that grace is not a wage you clock in and earn a paycheck for. It's not a transaction where you accumulate enough good days until God finally releases what he owes you, like a debt coming due. Paul doesn't leave much room for ambiguity here. Ephesians 2 says, By grace you have been saved through faith, and that, get this, not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works, so that no one can boast. And the word that Paul chooses for gift in that passage is Doron, the same word used throughout the Greek Old Testament for temple offerings or things given freely with no expectation of anything given back in return. So, therefore, grace was never structured like a paycheck. Nobody clocks in for grace, nobody clocks in for a gift. You don't submit a timesheet in order to receive something that was already placed in your hands before you ever walked into the room to ask for it. So we named the ledger back in episode 50. We named the lie that grace somehow has to be earned specifically by you, even while you would never in a hundred million years demand that same earning from anyone else that you loved. Yeah? And I thought that I was done. But but something kept nagging at me. Something kept sitting at me after that episode released, and it took me hearing Lecrae's episode to find a real language for it. Naming the ledger does not answer the harder question buried underneath the ledger. And that question is why did we even build the ledger in the first place? Why can we hand out grace freely to everyone in our lives except the one person we actually live inside of every single day? See, listening to Lecrae talk about his experience at the Grammys helped me. And I want to use it as the backdrop to help you if you're dealing with this. So I want to start by naming the lie outright. Somewhere underneath the ledger, underneath the self-disqualification, underneath the reason we can extend grace to everyone but ourselves, sits a belief that God likes other people more than he likes us. Sit with that for a second. Somewhere underneath all of that is the belief that God likes other people more than he likes us. And it's not that God is distant from us in some general sense, no. It's not that God is simply too busy to notice us in a particular season. No. But rather it's preferring, actively, specifically preferring someone else's face, someone else's faith, someone else's story, someone else's obedience, someone else's praise and worship, someone else's prayers over hours. And most of us would never even say that sentence out loud, especially inside of a church building, because it sounds too ugly coming out of our own mouths, like too petty to belong, you know, anywhere near a supposedly mature life of faith. But but watch what we actually do when we watch what we actually do instead of what we're willing to say in front of a microphone. Our spiritual disciplines get quietly measured against somebody else's, and we conclude God must be more pleased with their prayer life, with their praise and worship, with the way they fast than ours. Somebody else receives the calling that we wanted, the platform we prayed for, the marriage or the healing or the breakthrough that never once showed up at our door. No matter how long we waited on the porch for the delivery, and some part of us does not just feel disappointment in that moment. It feels like confirmation. There it is again. Mm-hmm. We tell ourselves, everyone else gets the favor. We get the waiting room, the one with the outdated magazines and the chair that was never quite comfortable, no matter how long we sat in it, no matter how many times I shift, my butt still hurts from sitting in that chair while I'm watching everybody around me come out of the waiting room and into that season. Yeah, God loves them more. In many ways, I think that is one of the wounds underneath my own chase for I'll call it relevance. If I'm gonna be completely honest with you about it right now. I never consciously thought the sentence I want to be known so that God will finally like me. Because really nobody thinks thinks that in language that clean or that damning. But when I trace the thread all the way back to its root, when I ask myself why an unread book or a quiet, underperforming episode used to genuinely wreck an entire week for me, the answer that surfaces is it's uncomfortable. Some part of me had quietly decided that being overlooked by people was proof that I was also overlooked by God. As if his affection and affirmation of me could be measured the exact same way a room measures attention, by whether it had turned toward me in the same way it turned, turned toward somebody else standing a few feet away from me under better lighting. I remember, I remember sitting in my car after releasing uh my last book, The Purpose and the Pause, and I sat there with the engine off, looking, trying, trying to understand why it didn't seem like people were interested. When I knew that God had me to write that book, when I knew I followed his instruction, I was obedient, and I knew that people needed that book, and yet, and yet nobody was buying the book. Yet I had a friend who released a book around the same time, and it went, Amazon bestseller status. And my first thought was not even about the books. It went straight past the comparison and landed somewhere older and quieter. A thought that maybe I had misread something about what God had called me to do. That maybe God had simply handed out the bigger portion to somebody else and left me with what was left over. That's not a theological conclusion. That is a wounded conclusion wearing theological clothes so we can walk around in public without anybody questioning it. Esau Macaulay writes about this from an entirely different angle than the one I'm working from, but it lands, I think, in the exact same place that I keep ending up. His scholarship spends real sustained energy recovering something the Western church is too often buried without ever meaning to. Belovedness was never contingent on being seen or validated by the systems that claim the authority to decide who matters and who does not. His argument, which is running through his work on African American biblical interpretation, is that identity rooted in being chosen by God has to be strong enough to survive a culture that refuses to affirm you. Therein, for the African-American believer, what he's saying is when the church refused to affirm us, when society refused to affirm us, our affirmation from God has to be strong enough to survive that lack of affirmation, that lack of confirmation that comes from culture, that comes from society, that can sometimes even come from the churches that we choose to worship in. And he's saying he's not not survive by simply gritting your teeth and enduring that refusal, no. It's survival because the affirmation you were searching for was never actually coming from that room to begin with. It was never that room's affirmation to even give in the first place. No matter how much power the room seemed to hold. Do you hear what I'm saying to you? The room that you're waiting on to affirm you doesn't even have the power that you've ascribed to it, that I've ascribed to it to affirm you in the first place. And I think this is the piece that Lecrae was circling in his own way that night, whether he would have framed it in these exact words or not. The Grammys, winning or losing, was never going to be able to answer the question that he brought into it with him. It was not built for that kind of answering. There's no room, no, no room ever is, no person ever is, no matter how important the room looks, no matter how important uh the outcome looks, no matter how important the person, the boss, the supervisor, the agent looks from the outside, no matter how many cameras are pointed, it doesn't have the power. But we give it to but we give it. Israel Houghton, love Israel. He has a song on uh I can't think of the name of the album, but it's called Accepted. And on the bridge, the bridge says, and you won't make me earn for your love. It's already mine. You said that I'm accepted, and you won't make me earn this grace. No, it's already mine. You said that I'm accepted. I probably butchered those words, but you get the gist. Right? The whole posture of this song is reaching for the exact thing that I want to land for you and for me right now. We are not tolerated by God. We are not merely permitted to stand in the room as long as we've behaved ourselves and stayed quiet, but rather we are accepted fully before we've done a single thing to earn the label. That's the frequency of this episode. That's the frequency I want you to tune your heart and to tune your mind and to tune your soul and spirit to as you listen to the rest of what I have to say in this episode. You were accepted. So go with me to Mark chapter 1. Jesus comes up out of the water at his baptism, he's dripping. The crowd is still watching, wondering what is going on. They probably can feel the weight of something, but they can't name it. They don't know what it is. But Jesus comes up and the crowd is still watching, and then the voice from heaven speaks directly over him. He says, This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Now, I need you, let's just, let's just not run through this quickly, okay? Because this matters more than we usually let it matter. So let's sit with here. Listen, the declaration comes before the first sermon is even preached, before the first miracle, before a single person has been healed and a single demon has been cast out, before the entire ministry even begins to unfold, the Father's pleasure gets spoken over Jesus while there is not one single item of ministry on the record. No books written, no songs written. See, for years I would read that passage and assume that it only applied to Jesus, which fine, obviously it applies to Jesus first and foremost, yes. But I believe that it is also the pattern the entire gospel invites us into, whether we notice the invitation or not. Approval precedes performance. Not approval that eventually responds to performance once enough of it has been accumulated on the record. Rather, it precedes performance entirely from the very beginning before there is anything to evaluate at all. And that should undo something in you that has been tangled up in not your whole life. Because many of us are living the reverse order without ever pausing long enough to examine why that order is what it is. We assume that if we can just get enough right, produce enough, obey enough, serve enough, become noticed enough for what looks like right and holy reasons, we will eventually qualify. The kind of pleasure the Father spoke over Jesus at the Jordan that day. But the entire point of the gospel is that nobody backs into belovedness through output. You start there at the beginning, fully approved, fully loved. Everything that follows after that is a response to a gift already given, not a qualification for a gift still pending somewhere down the road. I think about my life. There are so many things that are clear for me right now. How I would try, you know, to be in good with the pastors of the church, churches that I went to. I wanted them to see me. I wanted them to affirm me. And when it didn't happen, I would feel like less than. I would feel cast aside. But if I look at this through the lens of the gospel, it wasn't on them. It wasn't on them to affirm me. It wasn't on them to do or to undo what God has already done. Howard Thurman understood something here that I reading this helped me to understand this about myself. See, Thurman lived inside of a country that built entire systems, like legal, social, and even religious. These systems were designed to tell him he was not fully seen and not fully human in the eyes of the room he happened to be standing in. He didn't locate his own sense of being beloved by eventually convincing the room to change its verdict about him. No. That relationship with God he lived inside of never required the room's permission in the first place. He never once needed the room to sign off. Thurman wrote about walking along the ocean and knowing, independent of anything the surrounding culture would grant him or withhold from him, that he was a beloved and significant part of what God had made. Nobody voted on the fact to make it to make it true. Nobody nominated him for the beloved or handed him an award confirming that he was beloved. It was simply something he knew was true underneath every system that was built specifically to insist that he wasn't. This is the same reordering that Jesus is showing us at the Jordan River that day. God's voice doesn't wait for the room to confirm or affirm his thoughts on us. God's voice speaks into the room before the room even exists to have an opinion. Now, here's where I want to be careful because I don't want to leave this too soft. Because I think the gospel is not soft on this either. So, yes, God approves of you before you have done anything worth mentioning. That much is the gift. And it's not up for negotiation. I don't care who you are, okay? I don't care how unworthy you happen to feel on a given Monday morning or a Tuesday afternoon. But there's a second half to this that I think we skip past also, mostly because it's more comfortable to sit inside the affirmation and stop there without going any further. So, God does not only want you to receive that you are approved, He wants you to actually believe it as the primary definition, the primary operating system that is governing your entire life. Not as a nice, you know, sentiment like, oh, hallelujah, amen. Thank you, Jesus. God knows me. I'm blessed, I'm sealed, hallelujah. I'm loved, I'm adopted, hallelujah. This is so great. And then when you get out of service on Sunday morning or when you cut this podcast off when it's done, you go right back into the same patterns of behavior that have not served you up till now. See, the belief is the part that's gonna cost you something real, something with actual weight in it. Writing the books has nothing to do with it. The platform has nothing to do with it. The likes and comments on a video has nothing to do with it. All the things that we collectively agreed to treat as sacred, even while insisting out loud that we know better than that, have nothing to do with it. What this actually comes down to is being so rooted, so anchored, so thoroughly grounded in your identity in Christ that when the room does not turn your way, when the chairs don't turn around for you, when the pastor doesn't see you, when the boss looks over you, when the person looks at you, looks right through you, it doesn't move you off of center. People will try to hand you a different definition of who you are, and it will not stick to you the way it used to, when you believe that you are beloved. Your own thoughts and emotions will want to crown you on the best day of your life and crucify you on the worst day of your life, but neither one gets to have the final word anymore because the final word was already spoken before you even had a good day or a bad day. Jesus tells a short parable at the end of the Sermon of the Mount. And I think it gives us the actual picture for all of this, okay? Two builders, same storm, arriving on the same night for both of them. This is Matthew 7, okay? Matthew tells us that the rain came down, the streams rose, the winds blew and beat upon both houses without any discrimination between them. Both houses got battered. Both houses got bruised. The difference was entirely about what sat underneath the house when the storm finally did arrive. Get me. The house built on rock stood, and it didn't stand because the wind took it easy on the house. It stood not because the wind showed favoritism, no. It stood because the foundation underneath it could actually bear the weight of what was coming for it. Saints, hear me. Justin, I'm gonna do a Pastor Mike. Justin, hear me. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Life is still gonna hit you hard. Life is not gonna show favoritism at you, no matter how much you think life will, because life itself is not alive. Life lives through you. So life is gonna hit you. Storms are going to come, and the storms don't show favoritism. Storms just do what storms do. But what's in your foundation? And see, I keep returning to that one detail, right? Both houses absorbed the same exact storm on the same night with the same wind, with the same rain, with the same thunder and the same lightning. The wise builder was not spared the storm. He was only standing because he had built on something that was able to hold when the wind finally arrived anyway. The wind wasn't invited. The wind wasn't different. The wind was just doing what it was gonna do. But the wise builder wasn't spared. I don't care how much you speak in tongues. I don't care how much you give in tithes and offerings. I don't care how much you serve in church, the wind is gonna come. The wind is gonna come. What foundation are you built on? But also notice something else in that parable, too, that is easy to miss. Jesus never says the wild, the wise builder had a better view of the coming weather. He doesn't say the wise builder somehow avoided the storm through spiritual discernment or receiving a word from a prophet or superior planning. No. Both men heard the exact same teaching. Both men had access to the same exact instruction. The only variable in the entire story is what each one did with what they had available to them. Whether he built on it or simply admired it and moved on. And the distinction matters because a lot of us have heard this same truth from various pulpits across the United States about we've heard the truth about being beloved. We've heard it preached to us a hundred times over without actually building anything on top of it. We sit and we admire it. Oh, Pastor, that sounds so good. Oh, that that made me jump up and run during service. That made me jump around, that made me fall out in service. But as soon as you leave service and the wind comes, hmm. Hmm? Huh? We nod along in the pews and we highlight the verse in the journal. A verse that we may never come back to again. And then we go right back to allowing the room to decide if we were beloved when the sermon from God just said that we were. So by the time we are leaving church and we're stuck in traffic getting out of the parking lot, we've forgotten that we're beloved. Now we're zoned into what the room thinks about us. Beth Moore has a line that that I think fits here. She says, God will put you in a position to wrestle with your identity and choose whom you believe. Him or you. Now that I can end the episode with that. Listen to this again. God will put you in a position to wrestle with your identity and choose whom you believe, him or you. See, there will be a moment, likely more than one moment. I've had more than one, scattered across the years ahead of you where you will have to make a deliberate choice, an on-purpose choice. Either believe what your circumstances are currently telling you about your worth in this season, or believe what God already said about you long before those circumstances ever showed up without an invitation at your doorstep. This is not a decision that you get to make and file it away. It is a muscle that must continue to be worked so that every time the storm hits and you're forced to choose again, you're able to choose because you have something that is anchoring your feet to the ground. So, what does any of this actually mean practically when you are the one sitting inside your own version of that room watching somebody else receive the nomination or the calling or the healing or the breakthrough or the miracle or whatever the specific shape of it happens to be for you personally right now? Okay? What does it mean when the books aren't selling and the podcast isn't being listened to and the business is not taking off and the products and services are being ignored? What does that mean in your actual life right now? First, let me say that the ache you feel is real. And I need to, I need to affirm that. Okay? I'm not gonna sit here and tell you to pray that away because it's real right now. But the ache itself is not evidence. It feels convincing, but it's not evidence. It feels like proof that God somehow forgot to write your name down on an important list. But that feeling is not proof of anything of the sort. No matter how loudly it argues, okay? The voice at the Jordan was never conditional on Jesus producing a good outcome on that particular day, at that particular ceremony. Your belovedness was never conditional on your outcome either. No matter what today specifically handed you or withheld from you, it's not dependent on that. But it also means something harder to say plainly. You and I have got to stop auditioning. And I don't know of an easier way to say that. So much of what gets called ambition or drive or vision is actually an audition that we're quietly running for an approval that we already possess in full. Building things is still allowed. Pursuing callings is allowed. Do it, write the books, record the episodes, that's allowed. None of that is inherently wrong or suspect because you enjoy it, right? But but there is a real difference between building from belovedness and building for belovedness. One of these postures is worship. The other is a slow, exhausting attempt to earn something that was genuinely never for sale in the first place. No matter how hard you work the register, it just is not for sale. I'm not all the way there myself. And I want to say that plainly before I close this out with you. There, there, listen, I'm recording this episode right now, and it comes to my mind that I say in jest when my wife is praying. Sometimes I'll say to her, uh, why don't you pray? God listens to you. That is me, that is me, Justin, telling myself that God prefers my wife over me. Which is so not true. Do you see how easy this is? Right? Do you know how easy it is to catch myself catching numbers on a screen like they're about to whisper, Justin, you you did the thing this week. Huh? It's it's old habits that are have been built over years of chasing this, and they don't dissolve simply because you finally understand the theology underneath them. But what we can do, what I am doing, is learning to recognize the sequence, learning to recognize the pattern faster than I used to, catching it and then revamping the sequence and asking whose voice am I listening to? Whose affirmation am I listening to? Am I listening to gods who affirm me first before the room was even created? Or am I listening to the room? Am I auditioning for approval? Am I living from belovedness or am I living toward it? The room's voice, it's still loud, it's still insistent. But we have to sp we have to listen to the voice that spoke first, long before the room ever had anything to say about you and me at all. So if you walk away from this episode carrying anything, let it be this. You were approved before you produced a single thing worth mentioning to anyone. And that approval was never once in competition with anyone else's approval. God can approve you and everybody else and not take anything away from you. God is not rationing his affection across some crowded room, handing out more to some people and less to you. The voice that spoke over Jesus at the Jordan holds the exact same posture toward you right now, in this moment. Not because you have earned a seat at the table through years of effort, but because he built the table himself and put your name on it before you even walked through the door. Yes, the storms are still gonna come. They came for the wise builder too. And no amount of faith made the wind skip his house out of respect. It just didn't. But you get to choose every single time the wind picks up what you are standing on when it finally arrives at your door. Let's pray. God, for the ones listening right now who have spent years trying to prove something to a room that was never going to answer them, we ask you to speak over them what you once spoke to your own son at the river. That they are beloved and that you're pleased with them, not because of anything they have built or produced or finally managed to get right after all this time, but because you chose them long before any of that ever existed to evaluate them. For the ones who compare their lives to somebody else's and quietly walk away convinced you like that other person more than you like them. Lord, expose that lie for exactly what it is and replace it with what has always been true underneath it. You're not stingy with your affection, and you've never once been, not for a single second. There is enough of you to go around for every person listening to this episode right now, with no exceptions and no rationing. God, root us so deeply in who you say that we are that the next storm does not move us off of our foundation, even though it will not spare us from the wind and the rain. In your holy name. Amen. So this is the kind of episode that I would rather you sit with for a few days rather than just rushing through once and then moving on to the I think that this is just that important. I do. So let it sit on you as you drive to work or as you are listening over breakfast or what let it sit with you. And and if this episode found something in you, don't just sit on it and let it fade by tomorrow. Send it to someone else who needs it. Someone else who's been quietly keeping a ledger, someone who needs to hear that the ledger was never the real map to begin with. And if you've not subscribed to the show yet, go ahead and do that now so that the next episode shows up on your feed without you having to go looking for it yourself. A rating on Apple Podcast takes less than a minute of your time, and it genuinely helps someone else find this show at the exact moment that they need to find it. Alright? Alright. So go believe what he's already said about you long before you ever gave him a single reason to say it. Don't just know that he approves of you, but believe it. Believe that you're beloved. Y'all be blessed. I'll see you next week. Peace.