What you think about your life? And and and here's the question. Is there anything that you hate so much that you just you avoid it at all costs? There's a commercial on TV over the last few months. You may have seen it, but uh it's for uh one of the major insurance companies. And the way it works is this this woman yells up to her husband, hey honey, have you talked to the insurance company? Have you called the insurance company and he's folding laundry, and you can tell with his face that he doesn't want to call the insurance company, so he intentionally knocks it all over and says, like, no, I gotta fold the laundry, I can't do it, and then it cuts to her, and she's intentionally making a mess in their living room so she can clean it up, and she's saying, I've got to clean the living room, you're gonna have to do it, and then it just gets crazier. It escalates. It ends up with her uprooting their landscaping so she can say she has to do landscaping, and he's like in a tree shaking leaves down. The whole point being, neither of them want to do it, and they don't want to do it with such fervor that they'll do anything to get out of it. We probably all have something like that in our lives. For Megan and I, it's folding laundry. Not doing laundry, folding laundry that's already been done. We just we both we both hate that. I don't know why. We hate folding laundry. We'll do it all day long. We'll wash it, we'll dry it, and then when it's time to dry it, rather than sit there and sort it all out and fold it all up and then take it to where it goes, we just open up this guest bedroom that's right next to our laundry closet and we just like chuck it in there. It's all it's all clean, but it's just a big mess. In fact, as the week goes on, we we start referring to it as Laundry Mountain. Because it becomes this literal mountain of laundry. We have three kids, and so there's a lot of laundry that's going through there every single week. And when it comes time for us to clean the house and to be in that mode, each of us will do anything, anything to not be the one that has to tackle Laundry Mountain. I mean, I'll do the dishes, I'll pay the bills, I'll go grocery shopping, I'll I'll call the insurance company, I'll do anything so that I don't have to do Laundry Mountain because we just we hate it so much. We avoid it at all costs. This last few weeks we've been talking about happiness, how we can have real, lasting happiness, something the Bible describes as the joy of the Lord. In Nehemiah 8.10, the Bible says, Don't be dejected and sad, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. In other words, you are meant by God to have a happiness that is so complete, it is the same as strength for your life. And we've been looking over the last few weeks at how we have to overcome some obstacles in our lives if we want that joy. There are some attitudes, there are some ways of thinking, there are some common behaviors that is just the normal way we live that get in the way of us having the joy of the Lord. And if we want that, we've got to find a way over or around or through those obstacles. Today we're gonna tackle an obstacle that actually doesn't seem like an obstacle at all at first glance. In fact, it seems like a great solution to having more happiness in our lives. But it's not. It's sneaky that way. Today we're gonna talk about the concept of avoiding unhappiness. See, it makes sense that if we avoid unhappiness, we'll be more happy. Right? If you avoid unhappiness, surely you will have more happiness in your life. I mean, it really does make sense. But see, what ends up happening so often is that our pursuit of happiness actually stops being the pursuit of happiness and it just becomes the avoidance of unhappiness. And we start to believe that real happiness is something that we have when unhappiness is absent from our lives, when we avoid it, and what we forget is that real happiness is not the result of unhappiness being avoided, it's actually the result of unhappiness being confronted and defeated. And if we if we live our lives just avoiding whatever it is that makes us unhappy, what we actually do is we create a void of real happiness in our lives. Because real happiness is not the result of avoiding unhappiness, it's the result of conquering unhappiness. But see, we're all really good at avoiding the things that we don't want to deal with. We're so good at that. Some of us in the room, we are we are I'm fine people. Like you know who you are. You're that person that if someone asks you, hey, how are you, you say, I'm fine. I'm fine. In fact, if if you have someone that's really close to you, they might know something isn't fine, they can tell, they they know you really well, and you just tell them over and over again, I'm fine. And eventually the I'm finds become like threats. You're saying I'm fine, but what you're really saying is, please stop asking me that question, stop it, or you're gonna be sorry. So they say, Hey, are you sure are you okay? And you look at them and you say, I'm fine. I am fine. Okay? I'm fine. I'm not an I'm fine person, I'm a it's not a big deal person. That's what I do when I don't want to handle or deal with something that's upsetting me. I'll just say, it's not a big deal, it's no big deal. Like this happened to me today, it's not a big deal. I'm I'm over it, I'm done with it, no big deal. But it really is a big deal. If it wasn't a big deal, I wouldn't keep saying it's not a big deal. I just try to get out of handling it, dealing with it, thinking about it by trying to excuse it away as no big deal, no biggie. I'll just, you know, whatever. I'm over it, I'm done. We're really good at avoiding having to deal with our unhappiness. And even when we get to the point where we decide to deal with it, so often the approach that we take, the approach, by the way, that this world recommends, is to just numb the feeling of unhappiness that we have. I was online a few weeks ago and was looking at this video. It caught my eye. It's it's a TED talk. You might be familiar with what TED Talks are, maybe not. They're really interesting. And so I'm looking at these TED talks, these little short videos of people from all different walks of life just teaching you lessons, things that they've learned, a lot of really interesting perspectives. And I was really drawn to this one by a woman named Brene Brown. She's a researcher, she's a very good public speaker, and I was drawn to it because the title of her talk was vulnerability. And if if you're kind of new here, we really value vulnerability as a church. Which is sort of strange because very few people value vulnerability at all. Especially not in the church. Like, vulnerability is not highly valued in the church as a whole, but we're passionate about it because just like Nathan said, this is not a concert, this is not a show, this is not a production, because Jesus is not a product. And so we don't put a lot of time and energy into making it flashy and making it perfect. Instead, we want we want to make sure this is real. This has this has to be authentic, if anything. It has to be honest and open. And you can't really be honest and open and real and authentic if you're not vulnerable. And so we really value vulnerability. And so I'm I'm looking online, I see this talk about vulnerability, I'm like, ooh, that's that's right up my alley. I want to watch this. And it was really interesting. She's talking about us as Americans. And how we are so ill-equipped by by our culture to actually handle the things that frustrate us that all we end up doing is numbing ourselves. And there's plenty of ways to do that, right? We can we can buy something shiny and new to take our mind off of whatever it is we don't want to deal with. We can we can take a pill, we can we can really do about anything. We'll buy anything, swallow anything that helps us avoid unhappiness, that helps us numb unhappiness. As I'm listening to this quote, she has a or this this video, a few quotes jump out. They kind of hit me between the eyes. Number one, she said this, and this was this was pretty big. We are the most in-depth, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in US history. I was like, ugh. That's a downer. Can we please, can we please pick it up? And later on, she said this, and I thought this was so good. We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions. In other words, numbing doesn't work. Avoidance doesn't work. Avoidance is never the solution to a problem. I haven't been to the dentist in 12 years. I mean, think about that. 12 years. I got my wisdom teeth taken out right before I got married. 21 years old, like a week before I got married because I was still on my parents' insurance. I just haven't been. It's not that I've I've like made it my goal in life not to go to the dentist. I believe in dentists. I think they're real, I think what they do is valid. If you are a dentist, good for you. Way to go. How you look at people's teeth all day long, I don't know. I don't know how you do it. But I haven't been, and I need to, and I just I know when I go, I know when I go, and I haven't been in 12 years, and I open up my mouth, like that's just gonna be a very humbling moment. It's gonna happen. I'm gonna go sometime in the next one to five years. I know I am. And so, because something's probably gonna hurt. And they're not gonna look at me and go, Well done, sir. By completely avoiding the care of your dental hygiene, you have actually you have the healthiest teeth we've ever seen. No, I I I part of why I don't want to go is because I know, I know that I'm gonna get bad news. I just know that. And maybe if I have enough faith, I won't. We'll see. But but I'm avoiding that conversation. Like, avoidance doesn't work. I cannot go to the dentist for another 12 years, it's not gonna do anything to my teeth, right? Avoidance doesn't work. And so often, the solution that Jesus gives us to life is the exact opposite solution that the world gives. He is always counterintuitive. And so, what if we took a completely counterintuitive approach to dealing with unhappiness? What if what if instead of avoiding unhappiness, what if we became people who made it our passion to unavoid unhappiness? And I know that unavoid is not technically a word. If you're a grammar person, I know that unavoidable is, unavoid isn't, but it I like alliteration. Okay, so what if we made it our goal in life to say, look, I will not be a person who avoids unhappiness, I will actually be a person who goes out of my way to unavoid the unhappiness in my life. Because I believe that real happiness is not the result of a lack of unhappiness, it's the result of conquering and overcoming the unhappiness that I have. See, I believe if we lived like that, if that was our attitude, if that was the state of our heart when it came to dealing with those hard things in life that we often don't want to deal with, we would experience a joy that few people on earth ever experience. Give you an example. Last week we talked about David. And David's a very famous person from the Bible. He's he's talked about a lot, he did a lot of big things. One of the things that David did that still echoes throughout history is he wrote the book of Psalms for the most part. Other people contributed parts of it, but David wrote most of the Psalms. If we've ever tried to read the book of Psalms, it's kind of a tough read because it's not meant to be read like a book. It's not really a book, it's a collection of songs. That's actually what the word psalm means. It means song. So it's the book of songs. David was a songwriter, and he was a fantastic songwriter. In fact, so many of the worship songs we sing today have tidbits of the psalms in them because David just had a way of communicating who God is and how life with God looks that we still can't really improve on it today. He's a brilliant songwriter. And like any good songwriter, some of his lyrics, they're happy, some of them are sad. They're not one note. That's I think sometimes while we get kind of tired of forced, cheesy like Christian stuff, right? Whether it's music or or you know, TV, whatever, it's just it's happy, but it's not really happy. It's like children's television happy. It's like that's that's not real. That smile on your face, it's not real. Because you're not, there's no way your emotions are that one level all the time. Right? We we see that, we know it's not not real. David was real. David wrote some, he wrote some depressing stuff that we have recorded in the Bible. For example, this is a lyric from a song that David wrote. Oh Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? David was kind of a whiner, if you if you read much of the Psalms. He just was. Okay, here's here's a totally different lyric. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away when I groan for help? Every day I call to you, my God, but you do not answer. Every day I lift my voice, but I find no relief. If you're like, wow, I woke up on a Sunday morning to come here and think about this. This is this is depressing, right? Let's let's read something a little bit more uplifting. Here's some here's some more lyrics he wrote. This picks it up a little bit. I will sing to the Lord because he's good for me. There we go. That's more like it, right? That's happy, that's joyful, this is good. Here's another one. All who seek the Lord will praise him, their hearts will rejoice with everlasting joy. What's really interesting is if you look at those first two sets of lyrics, you would think that those go together. You could see those first two unhappy lyrics belonging in the same song. You'd believe that. You'd hear those together, you'd go, yeah, that's a sad song. That's a sad, depressing song, but at least it's consistent. The second set of lyrics, the happy lyrics, you would see those in the same song and believe that as well. Hey, this is a happy song. This is a song about praising God. This is good. These belong together. What's really interesting is that those sets of lyrics do belong together. They are from the same songs, but they're not paired in the way we might think. It's not that the first two go together and the second two go together. The first unhappy lyric goes with the first happy one. The second unhappy lyric goes with the second happy one. In fact, we can look at one of them all together, Psalm 13, because it's really short. Here's what Psalm 13. Psalm 13 says, O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Turn and answer me, O Lord my God. Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die. He's like a teenager when he wrote this or something. It's very melodramatic. Don't let my enemies gloat, saying, We have defeated him. Don't let them rejoice at my downfall, but I trust in your unfailing love. I will rejoice because you have rescued me. I will sing to the Lord because he is good to me. Takes an interesting turn. You read the first two-thirds of that, and you're like, man, this is he's really in a bad spot. He's depressed. And he probably was. And then you get to the end, and it's like, whoa, where'd this come from? Where's all this joy? All of a sudden he's saying, I will sing of your praises, and you're amazing, and you're good to me. First, he's saying, You never listen to me. He's basically accusing God, saying, You've failed me, and now he's singing, I will I will sing your praises because you're good to me. Like, what's going on? And here's what's going on David is bringing his junk to God. And he's being honest and open and vulnerable. He's not avoiding his issues, he's not avoiding his unhappiness, he's taking it to God, and he's giving it to God, and God is transforming it into joy. God is conquering David's unhappiness. Jesus said this in Matthew chapter 5, verse 4. God blesses those who mourn, for they will be comforted. See, if you mourn, you'll be comforted by God, but if you don't mourn, how can you be comforted? If you don't take your unhappiness, your anger and your fear and your sorrow and your heartache and your bitterness and your frustration, your tragedy, your confusion. If you don't take that stuff to God, what's God gonna do with it? If you don't give it to God, how can God take it and do what he promises to do? How can he take it and turn ashes into beauty? How can he take it and transform it into something that is good, into something that's beautiful for your life? God asks us to give everything to him. If we avoid our unhappiness, we can never conquer it. Because you can't conquer what you won't engage. You can't cope with what you don't acknowledge. And when we live when we live life just avoiding unhappiness, well, all we do is we create a void of happiness in our lives because real happiness is happiness that is one. It's the way Jesus lived, by the way. It's the beauty of Jesus. We always have to remember that Jesus is God, that's important. But he's God who became man, he's God who lived life as one of us. That's what makes the concept of Jesus so completely different than any other concept of God that's ever existed, because every other concept of God has God on some high mountain, looking down on people saying, Hey, get up to where I am, figure it out, do better, do more. And maybe, just maybe, you can climb the mountaintop and be with me, but but that's not who Jesus is. Jesus left the mountain, came down to the valley, grabbed a hold of us, and carries us to where we belong, to where God wants us. Jesus lived life. And he didn't skip the hard parts. He didn't avoid pain, he didn't avoid sorrow, he didn't avoid tragedy, he didn't avoid the hard parts of life, having to work a job, death. He he handled all of those, avoiding nothing. In fact, we have moments in Jesus' life where we see him experiencing real sorrow, real grief. In situations he could have completely avoided. You ever had a situation in life that you look back on and you realize that the stress and the pain and the frustration was completely avoidable had you made just a few different choices. When I was in college, Megan and I were in a long-distance relationship. She was here in Georgia, she's a southern girl. I was up in Missouri, and for a year, we only got to see each other for like one weekend every three months. It was kind of tough. We had been high school sweethearts down here. I went away to college, and so we kept the relationship going, but I remember at this one point, she was flying to Kansas City to see me, and I hadn't seen her for three months, and I was so excited. This is before Facebook, like we literally had not seen each other's faces in three months. And so I'm pumped, and I remember doing some odd things. Like, I bought a leather jacket, I remember that. I don't know why. I'm like, ooh, I need to I have a cool jacket, you know. She's she hasn't seen me in three months. She's like, ooh, wow. I don't know if I'd been watching Greece or something. I just thought leather jacket, chicks like that. I don't know. So I bought a leather jacket and I got a haircut at Walmart because it was cheap. Sometimes you get what you pay for. And I had this really weird-looking haircut, we're super self-conscious about it. I was just hoping that the leather jacket would like take the attention away. I was so excited to see Megan. I remember going to pick her up from the airport, and I had cleaned out my car, which, if you know me, I cleaned my car. That's like a that's a minor miracle, okay? I cleaned it out, I vacuumed the car, I got all the trash out of it. I go to pick her up. I'm in the parking lot of my dorm, which is about a hundred yards away from where I lived. I had to walk to this parking lot, get my car. Car's perfect, except for this one bottle of IBC root beer that was in my car. Now, some of you are thinking, sure, it was a bottle of IBC root beer. It really was, okay? Don't judge. So it was a bottle of IBC root beer, and it was just, it was like the one piece of trash in my car. So I looked at it and I said, Oh man, I gotta get rid of this. What do I do? It was cold, it's in Kansas City. I got my leather jacket on, right? That's why it's cold. So I'm going, oh, I don't want to walk all the way back to my dorm and throw it away at the trash can there, and I don't want this in my car. And I just had a moment where I was like, you know what? The parking lot's already kind of trashed. And I just I just grabbed it and I dropped it out my window. And then I backed my car up. And I guess what must have happened, I guess that the bottle hit and then rolled behind my car. I'm trying to put this in, you know, figure out how this happened. And I back over it in such a way that it breaks the bottle, but it breaks the bottle so that the the top of the bottle shoves into my back tire and gives me a flat tire. And so I'm sitting in this parking lot having to go pick up Megan in just a few minutes, and I have a flat tire, and the flat tire was caused by the bottle that I just dropped out of the window. Like I I just gave I could have walked up to my car and slashed my own tires, and it would have been no different. Like, no different. And I had to quickly change and put a spare on, but I didn't think the spare would get to the airport, so I had to drive to the closest place that would patch my tire, which just so happened to be the same Walmart that gave me the bad hair. Just how God works things out. And I went there, I was a little late to the airport, but this whole mess, this whole mess, completely avoidable. When we see Jesus in the Bible dealing with pain, dealing with sadness, dealing with heartache, we need to understand that all of it for him was completely avoidable. Because he is God and he can do whatever he wants. When I was a kid, I remember being very, very fascinated by this one verse in John chapter 11. It's the shortest verse we have in English in the New Testament, and it just simply says this. I don't even know why I'm looking it up. Jesus wept. Just wanted to make sure. Jesus wept. I love how little of the screen that fills up. That is awesome. In other words, God cried. Really crazy concept, by the way, to the people that this was written to. When John wrote his letter, it was written to the Greeks. And the Greeks did not believe that God could express emotion. Because in their eyes, emotion was a sign of human weakness. And so if you could move God to tears or to anger or even to joy, that would show that you have some kind of power over God. And in their concept of God, there's no way God could express emotion. God is unmovable. Here we have Jesus, God Himself, and He's crying. He's not faking it. He's not mustering tears because it's it's appropriate for the situation. You may have found yourself in a situation where people are crying and you're not, and you feel like something's wrong with you because you're not having the same emotion as everyone else, you just have to like act sadder than you are. That's not what's Happening here. Jesus is overwhelmed with grief. And it wasn't the only time he cried. In fact, in Isaiah chapter 53, the Bible is prophesying about who Jesus will be. And it says this He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. Other translations say that he was well acquainted with grief. Jesus never avoided the hard stuff. This particular story where we get the Jesus wept verse from it, it happened because his friend Lazarus died. Jesus was very close with Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary. And the specific situation is really simple. Lazarus got really sick, and they sent word to Jesus. They had faith in Jesus. They knew Jesus could heal. They had seen him done it. They were close with Jesus. So they they sent word to Jesus, who was far away. Hey, Lazarus is sick. You need to come. Except Jesus didn't come. He didn't drop everything and go to where Lazarus was. In fact, he kind of delayed. Like he really took his time. And he shows up, and Lazarus has been dead. Not for a few hours, but for four days. He is dead and buried. And everyone's kind of mad at Jesus. And you can understand why. In fact, Martha says this to Jesus in verse 21. I said that, and then I totally lost my place. It's not a show. Martha said to Jesus, Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died. In John 11, 37, but some said, this man healed a blind man, couldn't he have kept Lazarus from dying? And they're right, he absolutely could have. In fact, Jesus didn't even have to be there to heal Lazarus. We have a story in the Bible of Jesus healing someone long distance. Someone who was miles and miles away. All Jesus would have had to do to keep Lazarus alive was in that moment that he heard that Lazarus was sick, some 20, 30 miles away, he could have just gone, ah, Lazarus is better. And Lazarus would have sat up in bed and said, Man, I feel great. I feel wonderful. Crisis averted. That's not what he does. He doesn't do that. He doesn't even go directly to Lazarus, just to be intimate and personal, just so Lazarus can know, hey, I care about you. I want to put my hand on you and heal you. He doesn't even do that. And everyone's in tears, everyone's crying, and Jesus shows up and he starts crying. He's moved with compassion. And he's deeply saddened by the fact that his friend has died. And everyone looks at him and everyone says, Why didn't you, why didn't you change it? It's because God doesn't avoid the hard stuff. And it's a good lesson to all of us to remember that sometimes our prayers can be dominated by prayers of God getting us out of hard situations that we're in instead of getting us through them. Don't get me wrong, he will remove difficulties from our path, absolutely, but but he never promises us an easy life. He didn't live an easy life. See, if the story kind of ended there, if it was like, hey, you know what, life's hard, sorry guys. It wouldn't be a very good ending. Maybe a good lesson. Maybe we realize, hey, yeah, life's tough and we all have to go through hard things. You know, even Lazarus had to, but but thankfully the story does not end there. Because here's what happens next. Jesus goes out into the graveyard, and he goes up to the tomb that they have Lazarus in, and he he says, Lazarus, arise. I heard a pastor say one time that Jesus had to be specific. He had to say, Lazarus arise, because the power of Jesus was so intense that if he had just said arise, like every dead person would have gotten out, and that would have been just pandemonium, right? Pandemonium. But he says specifically, Lazarus and only Lazarus, get up. And after the man has been dead for four days, Lazarus gets up. And he's wrapped in all these linen cloths. That's how they did things back then. They would wrap you with spices, and so you know, he can't even see. He's got all this stuff on him. The smell had to be so intense, all the spices they had put on his body. I mean, he's like just like alive, but like, what is going on? And Jesus says, get the grave clothes off of him, get him cleaned up, like get him okay, and now he's alive. And what I want us to realize in that moment, how much joy did Martha and Mary feel when Lazarus got back up? The Bible doesn't tell us exactly how they celebrated, but I'm gonna guess there was a party in that town that night, like there has never been. That the level of joy and just exuberance that every single person, Lazarus himself, felt, must have been so unbelievably incredible. Because here's the thing had Jesus intervened and allowed them to avoid death, there would have been joy. Right? I mean, there would have been great celebration had Jesus done something that allowed death to be avoided. But that day, death was not avoided, death was defeated. And the joy that comes from our unhappiness, from our sadness, from our pain being defeated by God is so much greater than the joy that comes from simply avoiding it. And we have to remember that because God, He loves us, He loves you, He knows your pain, He has compassion on you, He knows, He knows everything that you deal with, and He's looking at you. And if you may have that same question that they had, hey God, why did you let this happen? Hey, hey God, why has this happened to me? Why didn't you step in and keep this from happening? You could have helped me avoid this. All of us have questions like that. And we may never know the answer to those questions, but but it's kind of irrelevant when we have a God that can defeat whatever it is that's hurt us. And if we would be people who would who would take our garbage to God, who would take our unhappiness and our pain and our misery, and we would just go to God and go there with God and expose ourselves to God and say, hey, God, this is me, this is my stuff, you've got to fix it. We would experience the joy that comes from our sadness being defeated. We would experience what it's like to look at life and be able to say to everything that's ever affected us, hey, greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. Seriously, we we could you cannot be defeated when you live with Jesus. Because he is a conqueror. And the Bible says that with him we are conquerors. In fact, it says we are more than conquerors. The Greek is actually the word hypo with conqueror, so we're hyper-conquerors. Picture like that kid that's super hyperactive in the hallway, just running everywhere. And that's how God says you are when it comes to conquering the challenges you have in life. When you live with him, you are a hyper-conqueror. I can't promise you that God is going to keep you out of painful situations. You could be the most faithful person to God, the most kind, the most loving person, and still deal with tragic situations. He never promises us that he will keep us from all pain. But he does promise us that he will deliver us from all pain. That he will turn our morning into dancing, that he will turn our sadness into joy, that he will exchange beauty for ashes. We just have to go there with God. And look, to do that, it takes vulnerability, right? It does, because we have to we have to open ourselves up. Like men, just to speak to the men in the room, we love doing that, right? We love to be open. It's so fun as a man. I see like a lot of dudes with their arms crossed right now. I'm just maybe your arms are always crossed, I'm just noticing it right now. Guys are like, mm-mm. Nope. Megan and I started going to counseling together probably five or six years ago. After two sessions, the counselor said, Justin, I want to see you every week separately. And I've been doing that for five years with no end in sight. So, whatever. But when when we started to meet, my counselor started to make me deal with stuff I didn't want to deal with. I wanted to do that whole not a big deal, I'm fine. I wanted to avoid my unhappiness. It was a lot of it was in the past, and I just wanted to leave it there. I had never dealt with it, I had never really dug into it, I had just kind of avoided it, pretending like it wasn't there, and that actually gave it power over me in my present life. And so he started making me deal with stuff, and he started making me like think about emotions. And I don't I didn't like that. I didn't like I don't really feel a lot of emotions, at least that's what I thought. He would ask me, How did that make you feel? And I would say, angry. And he would go, Nope. Can't you can't say angry. And I'm like, what? That's like my only emotion other than happiness. I'm either, I'm like, this is it. He said, no, no, anger is like a surface level thing. You've got to get deeper. What does it really make you feel? And I was just at a loss. And so he handed me this sheet, like a typed out sheet of emotions, like a menu of emotions. And I had to look at the sheet and go, that one. And it was so embarrassing. And so all of a sudden, for the first time in my adult life, I'm having to say things like, I feel insecure. I feel rejected. I feel underappreciated. And that's such a like, that's not things that men are supposed to say. Like men, like just picture a man being like, I feel insecure, rejected, and underappreciated right now. Man up, right? That's what you say. Deal with it, get over it. That's how I felt. And all of a sudden, I'm having to say these things. And it was so, it was so hard. It required this whole new level of vulnerability for me. In fact, the worst was, oh my gosh, it's funny now, but it wasn't then. I'm in a I'm in a session with Megan, and he's doing his counseling thing, and uh, and we're doing this thing about love languages. You may have you may have learned about love languages. Different ways that we express love, that other people feel it more. And sometimes in in a marriage or in a relationship, you have a disconnect because you're trying to show your love a certain way, but it's not the way the other person receives love. If they don't feel loved, and you're like, well, I do all this stuff, and you're like, I don't care about that. And so he's helping us identify what our love languages are. And so he gives us another menu of love languages, there's only like five or six of them, and he asks me to pick them, and I go, okay, my two are words of affirmation and physical touch. And then he says, Justin, with Megan right next to me, what can Megan do to help you feel more loved then? Knowing that it's physical touch and words of affirmation. And I've just kind of awkward, and I was like, well. She could uh like, and he's like, No, you have to say it. I'm like, well, I don't want to. I said, Fine. She could sleep with me and tell me I'm good at it. That's what she could do. That's exactly what she can do. Those two things. I would feel so loved. If you're new, you may never have experienced vulnerability in church. This is what it looks like. I'm so sorry. But you know, it it is it is funny now, but it really wasn't. It really wasn't in that moment. And Megan was not like, read you loud and clear. I'm gonna make that my top priority. That's not how it, like we were dealing with some serious pain. And so I was like raw and emotional, and I was, you know, almost like almost cried. Okay? So men, I didn't cry. Almost cried. And say I hated it, but here's the deal. I I never, I never would have started to make up ground emotionally if I never dealt with those emotions. I lived most of my life avoiding all the things that caused me any type of pain, believing that I was a stronger person for avoiding it. I actually used to believe that people were weak when they would like talk about their stuff and deal with their stuff. I'm like, just get over it. Move on. I had a class in college where that's what we were supposed to do, and I just remember sitting there being like, you bunch of babies. Wham wham. Like, come on. Everyone's lived life. And then God had to change my heart. Because avoiding your issues is not strength, it's cowardice. And I live my life as a coward for years and years. Like, we all want to be happy, right? Like we can agree with that. The world would be a much simpler place if everyone would just give up on the whole happiness thing. If everyone would throw in the towel and say, you know what, let's all stop trying to be so happy. Let's just settle for mediocrity. Much simpler life. But we can't do it because God created us to be happy. We want it, we need it because we were created to have it. Real happiness, real happiness, it's the result of pain, it's the result of sadness, it's the result of unhappiness being conquered, being dealt with, not avoided. You cannot conquer what you won't engage. And so to wrap it up, are you willing to unavoid unhappiness in your life? Seriously, are you willing to make it your goal? Not to steer around it, but to go right at it. To be able to say, look, this happened to me, this is happening to me, and I'm mad about it, I'm upset about it, and to go to God and say, God, what are you doing? To be like David and say, God, you gotta help me because if you will do that, guys, you will experience real joy. Because God's gonna show up. That's what he does. That's why he's the real God and all the other gods aren't, because they don't show up. It's not politically correct to say, but they're absent gods. They're silent, they don't do anything. It's because they're made of rocks and imagination. And our God's real. He shows up. If you will go there with God, he will go there with you. In closing, I want to read another song that David wrote as we go into worship. And this song is so perfect because it's another one of those songs that just describes this journey that we're talking about unavoiding, unhappiness, going there with God. David wrote, The Lord is my shepherd. I have all that I need. He lets me rest in green meadows, he leads me beside peaceful streams, he renews my strength, he guides me along right paths, bringing honor to his name. Even when I walk through the darkest valley, not around the darkest valley, not above the darkest valley, but when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me. You prepare a feast for me in the presence of my enemies, you honor me by anointing my head with oil, my cup overflows with blessings. Surely your goodness and your unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the house of the Lord forever. This is a song about God going through it with you. And so if you're here today and you have unhappiness, you have sadness, you have fear, you have insecurity, you have anxiety, you have depression, you have whatever it is, whatever label you want to put on it. Whatever is keeping you from the joy of the Lord, don't ignore it. Don't pretend like it doesn't exist because it does. And don't be afraid of it. Just give it to God. Just walk through that valley with Jesus. Yep. Just walk through it with Jesus. Because here's here's the beauty of it all. He's already been there. Like what are you gonna go through that Jesus hasn't already been through? Nothing. So not only do you have this God who is so powerful that he can just he can just do whatever he wants, he can defeat anything he wants with just a word, with just a thought, but you have a God that's been in the dark valley before. Like you can walk through it and say, Jesus, this is how I feel. And he says, I know I've felt that. I get that. And he can just put his arm around you and just hold you. Because he loves you. He loves you. If people aren't willing to go through your junk with you, they don't love you. Right? We all know that when we go through dark times, we learn who our friends are, because there's people who are like, you know, Jesus wants to go through it with you. Don't keep him away. Let's be people who unavoid unhappiness on our way to the joy of the Lord. Please pray, please pray with me. Jesus, thank you so much for this day. And thank you for this church. God, thank you for this moment. It is so clear right now. I can just sense your spirit that you are you are doing things in this room right now. There's a heaviness, God, but it's not a bad heaviness. It's because your your love and your truth is heavy. It is overwhelming. And Lord, sometimes we just need to be overwhelmed. So overwhelm us, Lord, with your passion. Overwhelm us, Lord, with your with your grace and your mercy and your understanding. God, remind us that you are not afraid of anything. You're not afraid of the pain that we feel. And you love us so much that you actually ask us to give you our mess so that you can take it and you can shape it and you can make it into something beautiful, something glorious, Lord. We we do not want to be people who fake it. We are tired of being people who have to put on a smile and pretend like our pain isn't there. Lord, we want to be people who can who can simply bring it to you and watch what you do. So meet us where we are right now. And remind us as we walk out of this room, Lord, that we don't we don't leave our pain here. That's not how it works, but we take you with us everywhere we go. We love you, Jesus. We pray all this in your name. Amen.