[SERMON] Rewritten: Trusting God When Your Story Doesn't Go as Planned | HOTLWOOD: Solo Mio

Life doesn't always go according to plan — and that's okay. In this message, Pastor Cyle uses the movie Solo Mio as a jumping-off point to explore what happens when life's "altar moments" don't go the way we expected. From being stood up at the wedding to the stories of Joseph, Moses, Naomi, and the disciples, we see a pattern: God specializes in rewriting stories.

Rooted in Romans 8:28 — "All things work together for good for those who love God" — this sermon challenges us to stop mourning the story we wanted and start trusting the story God is writing. Pain is never wasted when we let God transform it.

Whether you're walking through heartbreak, loss, uncertainty, or disappointment, this message is for you.

Transcript

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Today we're talking about Solo Mio. We believe that God's truth is God's truth wherever you can find it in the world, even in movies, even in romance movies. So who has seen the movie Solo Mio? Better than Last Service, okay. Who who wants to see it? Okay, good. It is a great movie. It's a 10 out of 10. Probably really it's a 6 out of 10, but since I love Italy so much, it's a 10 out of 10. Uh, because I get to watch the movie saying I've been there, been there, been there, bought my cheese there, been there. So um I am wearing uh my cologne, which is from the city, one of the cities that's in the movie, right basically next door from the cheese shop. Al Rogers also has the same cologne. We were in Italy together. So are you wearing it today? Are you are you a gladiator today? He's out of gladiator. Wow, he's been using a lot of it. I still have a lot left. Wow, Al, that's been bathing in that. Um, but Italy is my favorite place. I think you guys all know this. I love Italy. It is the place that I'd like to die. That's the kind of my dream. I'd learn to die there. I don't want to die there on the next trip because I'm going soon, hopefully. Um, thanks to you guys uh and my 10-year gift. Uh, we can we're gonna squeeze that into Italy. But uh I don't want to die on that trip, not necessarily. But uh I love Italy, I love Tuscany, and so this is why I love this movie. But it's kind of like my place. If I think about my special place, it's a little town called Pienza, Italy, which is where a lot of the movie was filmed. And so there were 16 of us who went to Italy together, so we've been to Pienza together. It was great. We actually stayed the night in Pienza and it was a great time. So um we we kind of there's a special connection with this movie, but everyone has an Italy. It may not be Italy, but everyone has an Italy. Uh it's your special place. Who has a special place? Anybody? For some of you, it might be here. Uh uh, guy in the last service, uh, Corey. I we've been we've been talking a lot lately. Hey, Corey's special place is Copper Harbor. It is literally. I said, I, you know, I told him how much I love Italy. He says, Oh, mine's Copper Harbor. I love Copper Harbor. So uh, where are some other special places? Nowhere. You you guys need to get out. Mackinac Bridge, just the bridge. That's a that's an interesting one. That's an interesting one. We're gonna live there. Okay. I'm gonna be the troll under the bridge. Okay. All right. No, that's I that's not what I thought someone would pick. Thank you. Okay, that's true. You drive across it twice a day. Uh, any other would have a special, special place, like in Italy? Colorado. Colorado, Jamaica?

unknown 2:28

Grand Mariah.

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Grandmaria, I don't even know where that is, but yeah, that's awesome. UP. Oh, UP. Okay, yeah. UP. All right, any others? Grandpa Studio, Texas, Texas, Manistee. Anybody is it here? I've had people, I've had people here uh just tell me, like, Devil's Lake is my place. I've had people at our church like they're here because they've moved from somewhere else to be here because this is their special place. Clark Lake, Lake Columbia, this is their special place. And I get that. That's why we love living here. That's why we've stayed here for 10 years and wanted to stay here because there's something special about the Irish Hills. It's just not Tuscany for me. But uh it's it's it's it's close. It's close second. Um, but in this movie, you saw the trailer. Uh, so I'm not gonna explain a lot of it through. Where it's it's this movie's still out, so I'm not gonna do spoilers on it for you. So the trailer's what you get. We're gonna talk about because there's one pivotal moment in the movie that I think is is something we can talk about in our whole lives. Because Matt, the main character in the movie, Matt had planned the perfect wedding with the perfect woman. He had the perfect honeymoon set up, and he had the perfect future all planned. That was that was the thing. He fell in love with the teacher, they planned their life together, they planned their future together, and they planned this beautiful wedding in Italy. Now, the place in that wedding scene would have probably cost hundreds of thousands to book because it is a it's at the top of the Spanish steps, so not realistic for any of us, probably, to get aim for that, but he had this perfect future line. And then one moment changed everything. He showed up and he was at the altar, and she didn't come. Now, I have done a lot of weddings over the 28 years of ministry I've been doing. I have never pastored a wedding where someone hasn't showed up. That's not been a thing. It is a thing in the world, but Cody and I've talked about it. We're like, what would we do if this ever happened? I don't know what I would do. It would be so awkward for me as the pastor, because I would also be standing up there, be like, is she coming? I don't know, is he coming? And so I don't actually know. I don't want you to test this for me. Like, this is not a goal. Don't like plan a wedding and not show up for me. Uh, I don't ever really want to have that happen because it'd be awkward. But it that moment in his life in the movie, it changed everything. It devastated him. And the same thing happens in our own lives. Maybe you haven't been stood up at the altar. I don't want you to put your raise your hands up. I don't want to call you out. Or um, but like ultimately we have these moments in life where life happens that changes everything. It could be a diagnosis, it could be a divorce, could be a job loss, it could be a betrayal, it could be an unanswered prayer. Like we have that moment where we think we have everything set up for our future, everything set up for our life, and then boom, something happens. For Matt, it was he got stood up at the altar. And the question isn't whether life will disappoint you. Life will disappoint you. I promise you, there's been a lot of times of life I've been disappointed by life. So it's gonna happen. The real thing is what will you do next? That's the that's the real thing. Life is gonna disappoint you. What are you gonna do next? I always try to be a really uh eternal optimist. I love to be optimistic. It is annoying for people, it can be annoying for my family. I know it, it can be annoying for my friends because I'm always like when something happens, you tell me bad news, my mind instantly starts clicking to all the ways that I'm gonna fix it. And it's gonna get the way my mind is wired up. And so I'm always thinking about what's next, how are we gonna fix it? How are we gonna get through it? Some people, though, they like to wallow in the mud, right? Whoa is me, right? My life is over, it's ruined. And the problem is some of us are stuck there. So I think the question we need to say is when life disappoints us, is what are we gonna do next? How are you gonna get through? Because God often meets us in broken places. That's the reality. Look at the ministry of Jesus. Jesus didn't go find people who are just happy, healthy all the time. The stories we read in Scripture is broken, blind, frustrated, poor, paralyzed. Those are the people he came into life, and those are the stories that we talk about and we relish because he totally transformed their lives. I want to go to Romans 8.28 here. I'm gonna read this together because I think this is such a profound Bible verse that it's good for us to remember. It says this, and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. All things work together for good. It doesn't say all things are good, because not all things are good. It says all things work together for good. There's an important distinction there. And see, Matt in the movie, he's the groom, and he expected a wedding, but instead he got heartbreak. We see a lot of stories in the Old Testament. I love the Old Testament. If you ask me what are my favorite of the two, Old Testament, New Testament, it's always Old Testament, because I think the Old Testament stories are fascinating. And there's so much truth in the experiences of people in those stories with our daily experiences of life. Yeah, New Testament's great, but there's just something special about the history of the world and how God worked in it in the Old Testament. And so we see stories like Joseph, who expected freedom, but then he got prison. So he was, he's sold into slavery, he ends up getting free, and he's living and working and serving in a house. And then the woman, Potiphar's wife, turns on him, and he ends up going to prison. So he had this good life after all this stuff he went through. Now he's in prison. That's unexpected. We have Moses who was rescued. His mom put him in the river in a basket. It went down. He got adopted by the Pharaoh's family, royalty. He's gonna be a royal the rest of his life, but then something happens. He gets angry about Hebrew treatment, he ends up killing a guard, and now he's banished to a life in the desert. That's unexpected. Then you've got Naomi. She expected a family, but then she got lost. And then you have the disciples. They expected a king and they got a cross. All the disciples are waiting for the Messiah to come. The Messiah was going to be this warrior king, and he was going to rescue them. But instead, he got killed and put on the cross. That was unexpected for them. See, God specializes in rewriting stories. That's the truth of who God is. And so for us, when we're when we're on in the story, we're on a journey. So don't waste your the journey. Don't waste your journey. Life is a series of ups and downs, peaks and valleys, highs and lows. You're never gonna just have a life that's just all high moments. You're also never gonna have one that's all low moments. It goes up and down and up and down. My last week has been awful. It's been up and down and up and down. Um I had a horrible day Monday, and then suddenly Monday night, I got to go to my dinner with friends, my last one. It's very disappointing for me. Um my dinner with friends group's been amazing. I'm no longer gonna share any of their names with you because I want to keep them because they make ribs and custom cookies and all kinds of amazing food. But dinner with friends is just we Sace and Amy got together and they just got everybody's names wanted to participate. And you just go and have meals with people from church. That's it. That's like it. There's nothing else. You don't have to like do anything else. You just make food, get together, talk, do life together. But Monday night, it was great to just get together with people who are becoming friends and just laugh. Spend two hours eating and just being together. Like that's it. Even on Monday, I had ups and downs. And then Tuesday, another great bad day. And then so that's what I did. I literally called Carver and said, I'm coming and I I need this. So uh so I got there, I got I got a massage for 45 minutes, and you know, one of the chair massages. They like put hot stones in my legs, and now I have sparkle toast. And here's the thing I didn't understand. Um, I got a royal shellac. So if you're a woman, you know what that means. Um you're like, and you know what that means. Yeah, good on you. So uh, but when I was a boy growing up, I was not so good, so I got a royal shellacan. That's different than a royal shellac, I found out. So I thought that your nail stuff would go away soon. But someone told me yesterday royal shellac lasts like months. So uh yeah, I have some pink sparkly toes. So and they're sparkling. So uh we're gonna figure that out. So but life's a journey, it really is a journey. And in this movie, Matt, when when when his fiancee left him with daughter, that's devastating. And he could have just gone home and said, you know, I don't want to go on my honeymoon because he already prepaid for his honeymoon. You can see that in the trailer. But he didn't. The Maitre D convinced him to go and just go on your honeymoon. It's already paid for you, might as well. You're in it, you're in Italy, you might as well experience Italy. And so he stayed. He could have stayed angry, he could have quit, but he didn't. He moved on in his story. Instead, he stayed and experienced Italy differently than he'd ever imagined. And Italy is an experience it's life-changing, I think. That's what happened. He experienced a different story than he could ever imagine at all in his life. So and sometimes I think the problem is for us, we spend so much time mourning what we lost that we miss out on what God is giving us. Matt could have just mourned and mourned and mourned and mourned, or he could go experience Italy, and a whole new journey, a whole new adventure will be before him, which changes his story. And in the trailer, you can see that after his wife left or to be wife left him at the altar, he he made met made some friends. And God sends people on the way. That's that's the reality of our journey as well. We are never meant to do this life alone. We were always meant to live it in community, be in fellowship with each other, and have have community. That's why dinner of friends is good. That's why we push Bible studies, that's why we push life groups, that's why we we want people to get into groups. We do so many events and activities because you are meant to do life alone. I mean, not within groups, not alone. Don't do it alone. If someone's gonna take that clip it, like he said, do it alone. So you are meant to do life together in community, not alone. Not alone. You need people. 20 uh 21 years ago, when my daughter died, uh, I went home and I was mad. And uh, we had been told that we were gonna Patty's gonna deliver the baby um or deliver, it's gonna be like 16 hours, and so I'm sitting at home and I'm mad. I didn't want to be around anybody, I want to talk to anybody, I didn't want to hear from anybody, I didn't want to take any phone calls, I don't want any text, I don't want nothing. And then all of a sudden, I'd been home for a couple hours and uh we, you know, after the hospital, but somebody has my friends, two pastors that I did summer camp ministry with years ago, they found out from like three and a half hours away. They got together, one of them got his church van, and he was from Toledo, and I was like three and a half hours away. And so he got he drove, picked up the other guy, and then they drove immediately as soon as they found out to me, and they found me. They came to my house. So I'm sitting in my office looking down the road, and here comes Timberline church van and these two guys, pastors in it, my two friends. In my time of desperation, disappointment, they showed up, and it was so healing. It was so healing. We need people. God sends people in this story. Matt found people, those were strangers he didn't know. There's just other couples on an Italian honeymoon. He didn't know those people, but they became part of a story. They helped him heal, they helped him move forward, they helped him grow. See, God placed people around, you know, not in this story, but Matt had people placed around him, but we have people placed around us in our life too. We see this in other stories in the Bible. The Bible says uh the same about Ruth. Ruth is had Naomi, her supporter, right? We have David. David had Jonathan, his best friend. David was the king, but he had a best friend. He had Jonathan who went through life together. We had Paul, who took the gospel to the known world at the time, but he also had a partner, Barnabas. And then we had Jesus. Jesus didn't walk through life alone. He had the disciples. He had he had friends he went through life together with. He had community. And healing almost always happens in community. We need each other. You need each other. That's why church matters. It's a community of people that come together to glorify God and to do life together. And in the highs and lows of life, we got to be there for each other. What the enemy wants, the enemy wants to isolate us. He wants you to be miserable, he wants you to be alone, he wants you to wallow in your self-pity, and he wants you to do it all by yourself. Because then you don't have people. What God wants for us to do is connect. Connect. And this movie gets it right. Matt does connect with these strange people, and they're strange people in the movie, but it helps them in a process of healing. See, the end you wanted for your story may not be the end you actually needed for your story. What you dreamed of, what you hoped of, what your Italy is, may not be what God actually has for you, and may not be actually what you need for you, your story. We've all probably had lives that we've dreamed of and they haven't always gone the way that we want them to go. You have the life that God has you on your story. And ultimately, all things work together for good according to his purposes, so that we move forward in the story. And sometimes we have to look at the Bible and we have to see, like Abraham in the Old Testament, he waited. He waited. He wanted to have a child, but he waited and waited and waited and waited and waited years. Years in the 80s. Sarah, his wife, she was told as old as she was, she was gonna have a baby, and she laughed because there's no way that's gonna be the end of the story. Well, we should have had children years ago, decades ago. We see Joseph, we know that he was sold to slavery, and then he he ended up making a name for himself, and then he gets put in prison. Joseph suffered on his journey. Wasn't his plan? David maybe he may be became the king, he defeated Goliath, but in the middle there, Saul, who was the king, wanted to kill David, and so David had to hide in caves to survive. That's not an enjoyable part of the story. And then we have Jesus for the disciples. Jesus died. The Messiah that they they believed in, he died. He went to the cross and died. That was unexpected. So in these stories, they have these unexpected moments they have to navigate to get through. See, none of those endings were the actual ending in those stories. There were better, amazing endings to the story. Jesus rose from the dead. He is God Himself. That was the true ending of the story, and then he goes to prepare a place for us. But for the for the disciples, they were devastated for a few days. See, God's story is bigger than your chapter. We aren't the whole story. I don't even think we're a chapter. We are little tiny footnotes in a story. God is writing a big story, and we are just a small part of it. But we have a limited perspective, so we think our story is a story. This is all that matters. And so every high is wonderful, and every low is devastating us, and our life is over. Woe is me. Who's ever said the phrase, my life is over now? Or thought it. Many of us have thought it. Well, that's it. I lost that job. My life is over. Alright, he doesn't love me anymore. She doesn't love me anymore. All right, my life is over. We do it. We wallow in self-pity. But we have to go back to Romans 8.28. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those according to his purpose. All those things, all those bad things, all those good things, they work together for good, according to his purposes. So your bad week, it's a bad week. Your bad month, it's a bad month. But the ups and downs of life, they're always working together for good. And we ultimately have the final good, the ultimate good is the eternal good. The one thing about being Christians is our at the end, we always have a happily ever after. Solo mio, I may ruin it for you, but it doesn't have a happily ever after. It's a cheesy, like Hallmark romance. But if you love it, it's great. And if I'm Italian like Mary, it's great. So, right? But all things in our life, they work together for ultimately our eternal good to spend eternity with Jesus, where we can hear, Well done, my good and faithful servant. You've arrived. Your ups and downs, your story, now it ends with the happily ever after. See, everything isn't good. I think I mistyped on my slide here. Everything isn't good. God works everything for good. There is a difference. There is a difference. Everything in life is not always good. There's bad stuff that happens. That's the reality of life. But everything does work together for good if you're following Jesus. You can navigate the hills and valleys, you can navigate the bad things that happen because God is working you always towards something good. Jesus himself understood rejection. Jesus had bad moments. People didn't like him. They put him on the cross. They literally killed him. They set a murderer free just so they could kill him. How unfair is that? A guy who healed people, who loved people, who taught them good things, who never did anything bad or sinful. They freed a murderer just so they could kill him. That's rejection. None of us have been rejected like that ever. That's never been a thing that we've been rejected to that level. Jesus understood stress. We see in Isaiah Isaiah 53, 3, this is a verse from the Old Testament that predicts the Messiah to come, which is Jesus. It says this about Jesus. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Jesus knew sorrow. So much so that in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prayed so much he bled from his pores. I don't know about you, never bled from my pores praying. And I bet none of you have either. And I don't want to. That's not something I want to, I don't want to achieve that in life. That's not a goal of mine. Jesus understood stress. He understood burden. He understood sorrow. He understood grief. He lost people who he loved. See, he he had his life interrupted. He had his story interrupted. And so we gotta stop doing is we gotta stop asking, why me? Why me? Woe is me. I'm so bad. It's just me. I'm the it always happens to me. We gotta stop doing that. We said we gotta start asking these questions. These are the questions we should ask. God, what are you trying to teach me through this moment? This pain that I'm going through, this un unexpected thing? What are you trying to teach me through it? How are you trying to change me? What door are you opening? Maybe that unexpected thing in your life, it's a closed door. God's gonna open a door in your life for something else, but you have to be able to respond to it. Or ask the question who are you making me become? Who are you changing me into? And then how can this pain I'm suffering, how can this pain glorify you? How can I turn this pain into something that brings praise to my God and brings glory to your name? See, there's there's something I really believe in here in this next one. Pain is either wasted or it's transformed. You either waste the pain, you either just wallow in the mud and all the muck and the mire, and you just are miserable. And some people are just miserable wretches. You know them. You have them in your life, you've tried to cut them out of your life. They're just miserable people. Every time you see them, they're just miserable, they're nasty, they complain, they're frustrated, and you're like, I don't just want to walk the other way when that person walks in the room. I don't want to see them. See, they waste pain. But pain either is wasted or it's transformed. If you allow pain to motivate you to be better, to do better, to move it on your story, that's transformation. There's no gain without what? Pain. You tell yourself when you're working out and you hate. Every second of it. Well, there's no gain without pain. There's no gain without pain. That's actually what that phrase means that you're transformed through the pain. Your body is actually physically being transformed from the pain. But our lives can be transformed by the pain. If we allow it, if we allow God to move us in the story. So, what does this mean for you? Why are we talking about it? I think we've got to stop living in yesterday. I think we got to do that. Some of us we live in yesterday. We look back and say, oh, yesterday was so bad. I don't care about yesterday. If something bad happens, you move on. I don't have power. I haven't had it since Friday. It's been a week. It's been a weekend. It's been a number of things. And you just keep moving forward. I know for some people that's absolutely devastating. I don't really care. I spent the night on the couch at the Hodle House last night with my dog. It was great. Carver slept in the basement because I didn't know how I was going to get to church without any kind of power to power my cell phone for an alarm. So then this morning I had to run home to change, to change get outfit. I didn't bring an outfit. Carver found me sleeping in my chair upright at 1220 in the hotel house, working with my computer in my lap. Because not only did I have a computer, didn't have power, I don't have a computer. I do my slides every Saturday night. That's really hard to do with no power, no access to my computer, no access to the programs. So this has been a this has been a week. And so this morning I ran home and I changed, got ready for church. This is not my outfit that I put on. This is the second outfit. Because the first outfit, my house was starting to flood because my downspouts were backing up. So at 7:30 this morning, when I'm supposed to be on my way here, I'm on a ladder in the rainstorm cleaning my downspouts, getting absolutely drenched to the bone. Then I had, I couldn't do it, then I got my my blower, my leaf blower, put it up there, and now I have, if in my hair I just have grime because I put it up there, it was just shooting up everywhere. So I got drenched in filth and water. So this is my second outfit. But before that, I had to run to the gas station to get gas because my generator that Mike Warner just helped me get started yesterday after a day and a half not working, it ran out of gas, literally on the way to the gas station. So I got back, did that. I'm getting soaked to the bone. So literally, Patty laid out some clothes for me, and she's like, hey, there's some clothes for you in the bed. And I changed real quick and came to church. That's been the day. But God is still good. Like I think it's funny. It's just that's good preaching material. Like it's that's literally what I think every time. It's like this is gonna preach. So uh it's gonna be good. So we have to stop thinking about all these things. We just gotta move forward because don't let your disappointment define your future. There's a lot of disappointments. But we move forward. Move forward. See, you gotta trust God when the script changes. Your script is gonna change. I'm someone that's very involved in the writing world, in the movie world, and it's been great. I know a lot of people involved in that. Here's the thing I know about scripts: never is the script that was written the script that is produced. There are always change after change after change after change. Sometimes they hire another writer to take over, then they hire another writer, then they get a team of writers, and so it just continues to change until there's a final story is put out. Your life, your script, it's always changing. And the great thing is, God is changing your script. So that movie, that life, that journey you thought you were on, God's gonna change it. It's gonna be the best version of it. And it's gonna work out for his good if you let it. But any good story has moments of highs and lows. Because if you buy a book without highs and lows, it's boring. Especially in Act 2, there's always three moments when it's so bad that the character wants to turn away and has to overcome to move forward in this journey, no matter the story, no matter what kind of story it is. And those are what make you buy in because now the character is being transformed by the pain they're experiencing. Our lives are the same thing. We're moving forward in the journey. So stay on the journey and then believe God is still working in your life. God is always working in your life. And I think God's greatest blessings often arrive disguised as life's greatest disappointments. The problem is you don't realize it unless you trust Him. But sometimes that thing that's the greatest disappointment of your life is going to end up leading you to the greatest blessing that God has for you. If you let God lead your story. And sometimes the altar you never reached is what leads you to the life God always intended for you. Matt never reached the altar in the movie. But his life ended up being good. I want to ruin the ending for you, but it ends up happily ever after, as you can imagine from the trailer. It led him to actually where he needed to go to be truly fulfilled. And there's a moment in the movie where he hears from the woman that left him, and she basically said, We could have had a life, but it wasn't gonna be the best life. And he ended up trusting the journey and had the best life. We need to trust God in the journey so that we can have the best life that works out for good. Some of you today, you walked in here carrying a broken dream, a broken relationship, a broken future, a broken life. I'm just gonna tell you that Jesus invites you to stop mourning the story you wanted and trust him with the story he's writing and your life. Just trust him. You you don't, nothing promises in the Bible you get the life that you want. It promises that your life will work out for the good, for his purposes. My life is nowhere what I thought it would be 25 years ago. I've told you guys this throughout the series. I thought I'd be in the mission field, I thought I'd be an Olympic wrestler, all these different things. It's not my life. But my life is so much better and different and good. You just have to trust him. Jeremiah 29, 11. Now we're gonna read this because this fits, but I'm just gonna tell you this. But no, this is a lot of your life verses. This is often taken out of context. This is a promise written in a time and place for a certain people. It is not necessarily a promise for you directly from Scripture. Now, I know it may ruin your Bible verse for you, but I want to make this clear before I read it to you. So, Jeremiah 29, 11, for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for evil to give you a future and a hope. But because this is in the Bible, even though this is not something that God gave to you as your promise, we can understand that the God is gives this promise to people is still our same God. So, like the people that this promise was given to, we can believe that God does have a plan and a future and a hope to give to us in life. Make sense. So we know as God's writing our story, he's working it out. We also know in the New Testament that God gives us a hope for the future, a hope for eternity, and he has a plan for our life. See, you've got to trust his plan. It'll work out. There's gonna be peaks, there's gonna be valleys, but just trust him. Too many people judge God's faithfulness from one painful chapter in their life, and that's the reality. I have a sit with so many people that they tell me that the moment they hated God or were done with God when someone died that they loved. That's a painful chapter. Or a breakup they experienced. And like, God, I really I just don't I don't trust I don't believe in God because this happened. Well, I'm just gonna promise you, you're gonna continue to lose people. You're gonna continue to have happiness, you're gonna continue to have sorrow. That's the reality of human existence. But God is still good in all of that if you trust him, if you follow him, and if you believe in him. See, the great thing we can see in scripture is God is still writing your story because we're still living and we're still breathing. Are you trusting him with your story? Are you trusting him with your journey? I think the one thing we can do today is just trust him more. Understand that he has a plan for you and all things work together for good according to his purposes, even in your own life. This is a romance movie. If you like a romance movie, it can work out. But some of you are in here with heartbreak. Trust him with your heartbreak, trust him with your sickness, trust him with your diagnoses, trust him with your career, trust him with your life. And trust that eventually those highs and lows will all work out for good according to his purposes. That's the great thing about God. So I want to do today, I just want to pray. I'm gonna pray that we just put our story in his hands and let him write it and we join him in the journey. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, we just thank you. We thank you for Jesus. Lord, we thank you for your word. Lord, we praise you for being a God who created us to not only experience love and romance and heartbreak, but to live in this world, just experiencing the day-to-day, the mundane, the jobs, the careers, the life, the sickness and disease, the health, joy and happiness, all those things, Lord. We pray that we understand and acknowledge that life is a story. It's a journey. We're on it. We pray that we understand that in our journey, Lord, you're writing our story. We just have to trust you. We have to follow your lead. We have to believe that what Romans 8 says, that all things, Lord, work out for the good according to your purposes. That we have to trust in what your good is, not our own desires, not our own wants, but your plans for our life. And give our story over into your hands. But we pray a church be Lord, we just pray we could be a church of people who through our lives together, our community. We we walk through life together, we walk through each other's stories, we pour into each other's lives and continue to point each other back to you and the stories that you have for us. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.