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A Sunday morning sermon, scripture reading, testimony, and song by Mike Zello and ther Beauty For Ashes Ministry Team. In the New Testament, we find another letter to the church in Corinth. These people, filled with the Spirit and passionate about God’s call on their lives, were nevertheless struggling to live out their faith in ways pleasing to the Lord. They were rankled by Paul’s apostleship and his frequent sufferings. They had “a better way” in mind, one in which they could serve the Lord in ways that seemed right to them. Despite all their Spirit-empowerment and commission as a kingdom of priests, they failed to understand how the work of Christ’s kingdom comes through humility and weakness (2 Corinthians 1.9; 4.7; 11.30). While others around them boasted in their strength and lorded over people with violent power (2 Corinthians 1.24; Matthew 20.25-26), God’s kingdom of priests was to follow in the way of King Jesus, who, “though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8.9). These verses reveal how hard it was for the early Church to feel the solid ground of Christ the King’s foundation beneath them. The Corinthians’ struggle helps us better identify with God’s kingdom of priests in the Old Testament, who repeatedly failed to fulfill their high calling to bear God’s blessing to all nations. Seven times—a meaningful number of times—the author of Judges repeats how the Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s eyes (Judges 2.11; 3.7, 12; 4.1; 6.1; 10.6; 13.1). Why did they fail so consistently and so miserably? Because they forgot God was their true king (1 Samuel 8.7). Unlike the neighboring peoples with their Baal worship, viceroys, and minor monarchs, the people of Israel were a kingdom brought into the Promised Land by the Lord God, their eternal King (Numbers 23.21). But like the Corinthians after them, and—too often—like you and me, the people lived their lives as if “there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17.6; 21.25). Choosing to live this way, we not only affect the way we live under the Lord’s blessing for ourselves, but also the lives of those around us who have yet to know the name of King Jesus.

A Sunday morning sermon by a visiting missionary. In the New Testament, we find another letter to the church in Corinth. These people, filled with the Spirit and passionate about God’s call on their lives, were nevertheless struggling to live out their faith in ways pleasing to the Lord. They were rankled by Paul’s apostleship and his frequent sufferings. They had “a better way” in mind, one in which they could serve the Lord in ways that seemed right to them. Despite all their Spirit-empowerment and commission as a kingdom of priests, they failed to understand how the work of Christ’s kingdom comes through humility and weakness (2 Corinthians 1.9; 4.7; 11.30). While others around them boasted in their strength and lorded over people with violent power (2 Corinthians 1.24; Matthew 20.25-26), God’s kingdom of priests was to follow in the way of King Jesus, who, “though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8.9). These verses reveal how hard it was for the early Church to feel the solid ground of Christ the King’s foundation beneath them. The Corinthians’ struggle helps us better identify with God’s kingdom of priests in the Old Testament, who repeatedly failed to fulfill their high calling to bear God’s blessing to all nations. Seven times—a meaningful number of times—the author of Judges repeats how the Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s eyes (Judges 2.11; 3.7, 12; 4.1; 6.1; 10.6; 13.1). Why did they fail so consistently and so miserably? Because they forgot God was their true king (1 Samuel 8.7). Unlike the neighboring peoples with their Baal worship, viceroys, and minor monarchs, the people of Israel were a kingdom brought into the Promised Land by the Lord God, their eternal King (Numbers 23.21). But like the Corinthians after them, and—too often—like you and me, the people lived their lives as if “there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17.6; 21.25). Choosing to live this way, we not only affect the way we live under the Lord’s blessing for ourselves, but also the lives of those around us who have yet to know the name of King Jesus.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. Have you ever felt the ground shift beneath your feet?  I’ve shared before about a time when I was home on the island, sitting with my Dad in the living room, when I felt the earth shake beneath my feet. Not only my feet. I felt it in my core. So did the recliner. So did the house! It was as if the entire island was shaken! And it was. Mount Cameroon, a few miles away across the channel of ocean between us, erupted. The ground shifted. The next day, we went to the church in Ela Nguema, facing Cameroon and we watched the fiery lava flow into the sea, staining the rising steam with reds and oranges. I remember being in awe of what we saw, and also a little unsettled because our island is part of the same volcanic chain. This must have been how God’s people felt as Joshua led them through the Jordan River, into the land promised to them (Joshua 1.2). Like their parents who were left in the wilderness, these men, women, and children passed through on dry ground into a land given to them at the crossroads of the world. Imagine what it must have been like for Joshua when the Lord told him—in the season when the Jordan’s banks were overflowing—to tell the priests to go stand in the river, carrying the Ark of the Covenant, and watch as the waters stopped flowing and “stood up in a heap” (3.13). The rushing river folded up on itself, the crashing waters stacked up as the priests entered and stood on miraculously dry ground (3.17). One by one the people entered God’s promise. One by one, the ground of their personal experience with God shifted. They were stepping into the Promise of God’s Mission, for themselves and for all nations! This Sunday we are stepping into those same waters, believing the Lord is leading us as His kingdom of priests into a deeper understanding of who He is and who we are in Him (Exodus 19.6; 1 Peter 2.9). Friend, I don’t want to be left in the wilderness. I want to enter on dry ground Into the Promise, and I want us to go together.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. When was the last time your life turned upside down? On the rollercoaster of life, it’s only a matter of time before we’re flipped again. Sometimes we can see it coming, but other times… not so much. Sometimes these experiences leave us feeling sick to our stomach, but other times they reorient us in ways we didn’t know we needed. It’s the old adage: things work until they don’t. In life, we learn habits and rhythms and use them, not because they’re right, but because they work. But when the rollercoaster rolls and those old habits or ways of thinking don’t give us the same contentment that they once did, we’re left frustrated and annoyed. So much of childhood is set with old mindset habits. We grow up longing for the validation of others: pleased parents, approving teachers, and happy friends. We learn not to rock the boat, finding our value in these relationships. But then… middle school. We’ve all been there. It isn’t just that our hormones make us go crazy, but that the tried-and-true habits don’t produce the same contentment. Adolescence is where we start searching for new patterns and practices to feed the validation we needed, and this compounds over time.  We don’t want to be discontent, and rightly so! As people, made in the image of God, we are inherently communal. We want to live out what is eternally revealed in the triunity of the Godhead as the Father, Son, and Spirit are in everlasting contentment as our Lord God. We are naturally born with this spiritual longing to be right with God and those around us, and—try though we might—our old mindset can’t get us there. Settling for lesser versions of this, we give in to peer pressure and social norms which either dangerously feed our ego or painfully undermine it.  Through the spinning spirals of life, Paul discovered the way to contentment in every situation. True contentment doesn’t just happen. It is a learned skill and an attitude purposely put into practice. It’s the reverse of what we’ve learned because it’s fostered from the inside out—the opposite of our childhood experience. We experience contentment as we have the mind of Christ, setting our thoughts in discipleship and then living them out in community.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I find it strange when people think Christians are narrow-minded, but even stranger when too many of us prove them right! Reading the grand story of the Bible, we find God’s people as fish out of water, constantly finding new ways to communicate the truth of God’s character through the languages and cultures around them. Joseph went from being a slave and condemned prisoner to the right hand of a global superpower. Moses was raised within the Judaism of his family, the Egyptian learning of Pharaoh’s house, and the wilderness wisdom of his wife’s Bedouin roots, which all prepared him to lead his people. Across Scripture we see God frequently taking the best and most beautiful aspects of all His image-bearers and using those things to draw all peoples to Himself. This was just as true of Paul as it was of his Jewish ancestors. Paul grew up within the Pharisaic tradition, but also as a Roman citizen. This widened his worldview long before Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and called him to be a missionary to the nations. Paul was always paying attention to his surroundings, leveraging the best ideas of his environment to communicate the good news of Jesus. We see this brilliantly on display from the heights of Athens to the depths of a Roman dungeon (Acts 17; Ephesians 6). Among the Greeks, he used the plurality of idols to share the "Unknown God," and as the frequent guest of the imperial guard, he adopted their military language to describe his service to Christ. Writing to the multicultural church in Philippi, Paul saw how they were getting lost in translation, creating confusion and conflict among themselves. Instead of narrowing their field of vision, Paul encouraged them to widen it—not to think less, but more! Frank Thielman notes, “Paul asserts the need for believers to cast their intellectual nets widely—to allow all that is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy, wherever it is found, to shape their thinking.” As Christians, we should be known for our love for one another and our curiosity and compassion toward all, because we’ve been saturated by His Word and empowered by His Spirit. May this be said of us.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We live in a world of emojis. Somewhere along the way, we took the simple, yellow smiley face of the 1970s and turned a few well-drawn lines into an entire hieroglyphic language! What can’t that little face do?! One of my favorites is being mind blown. It expresses so much. It depicts shock and surprise. It symbolizes the sheer intensity of a moment. Best of all, it perfectly captures what it feels like to have our minds blown. It’s like a lightbulb moment times ten! It’s the discovery of fire. It’s a completely new way of seeing and understanding. The book of Psalms is . It captures so well the complexity of life. Sometimes we roll through life, and praise pours easily from our lips. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann called the songs we sing in seasons like this psalms of orientation. But then, the rug gets pulled out from under our feet. Try as we might, the direction we thought our life was heading isn't even on the map anymore. In those painful seasons, we sing psalms of disorientation. Our pillows are stained with tears as we struggle to feel God embracing us in the grace of lament. Yet, in ways we never thought possible during the dark night of the soul, we eventually find ourselves singing psalms of new orientation. It’s only when we look back that we truly . The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians is a beautiful symphony, blending notes and chords we’d never expect to hear together. Reading this short letter can be mind-blowing (if we truly listen) because Paul believed it was not only possible but essential that we have the mind of Christ. Speaking from his own imprisoned life, Paul spoke to his beloved brothers and sisters of things only possible when we have the mind of Christ: contentment in suffering, unity in disagreement, eternal freedom and joy while bound in earthly chains.  In this world of emojis and emotions, Paul encourages us to stand firm in Christ. Friend, my prayer today is that we would look back at this reflection on Philippians and marvel at how having the mind of Christ reorients our thinking and our lives. May we rejoice in how Jesus shapes our thoughts and His Spirit empowers us to live.

A Sunday morning presentation by Kings King International Ministry. Intergenerational ministry is a gift, and it is something that comes naturally to us at Eternity Church. Everywhere you look, you see young and old serving side by side, encouraging one another in faith (1 Thessalonians 5.11). But as natural as this is for us, it still takes intentional effort. At times, especially when we are in a hurry, we think it would be easier to do things on our own. Why? Because we already know how. Some things become so routine we can do them in our sleep! When we feel the impulse to rush, a Burkinabè proverb calls us to attention: “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.” When our children are young, it can take everything in us just to get out the door! I remember when our four kids were little—some days it felt like we were herding cats. And it always seemed the hardest when we were in a hurry! I find it useful to pair that well-known West African proverb with another from Kenya. The Luo have a meaningful equivalent: “Alone a youth runs fast, with an elder slow, but together they go far.” I like that because it highlights something that happens all too quickly for us as parents (and grandparents): those little kids…grow up. We used to be the fast ones, but things change. The pace we set matters because before we know it, the babies in our strollers will be slowing down to match pace with us! This is why intergenerational ministry is so important. When we intentionally disciple our sons and daughters, we raise up brothers and sisters in Christ who, even while they are young, can disciple us (Psalm 145:4).  This Sunday, we’ve invited our friends at River City Youth With a Mission (YWAM) as they celebrate 50 years of intergenerational ministry around the world through Kings Kids International. This intentional time of celebration is an important reminder for all of us, young and old, to build one another up in Christ (Hebrews 3.13; Romans 15.2). Come ready this Sunday to be encouraged and to encourage someone else!

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. It’s been said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is painfully true. More than we might care to admit, we approach complicated tasks ill-equipped and—not sure what to do—we start swinging our proverbial hammers. When God blesses us, we nail down His goodness in our lives with the hammer of praise. But when we experience suffering, when we find ourselves in the dark, not sure where we are or how we got here, a hammer is less than helpful. In the dark, we need a flashlight. We may not like what we see, but we need to face it all the same. It’s understandable why we want to hammer away at our problems. It’s heavy, solid, secure. We’ve seen the power of our praise in past trials (Acts 16). But when our lives fall apart and we face suffering and sickness which feel endless, the once vibrant songs of rejoicing become brittle with use. The hammer of exultation strikes painfully on our raw nerves. What once created happiness in our lives now compounds our pain. We need the flashlight of lament. In our times of suffering and sorrow we need to be embraced in the grace of lament which allows us to grieve before God, to express our anger and confusion before the Lord. This type of prayer does not negate our praise. It enriches it. When we are able to follow Jeremiah’s example and give voice to our affliction, we discover a way to the altar of the Lord we didn’t have before. The hammer of praise couldn’t bring us here; only honest, unfiltered prayers of lament could light this way into the presence of the Lord. Beloved, it is in this place before God, where our lament illuminates all our pain before the Father, that we discover Christ who weeps with us. Instead of hiding behind the hammer of praise, we have followed the lit path the Lord promised us, into His loving embrace (Psalm 119.105).

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We’ve been to the moon, amazing 238,855 miles from earth! A few months ago, astronauts circled the moon again, and it was hailed as a great achievement. And it is! But every time we step out into space or live for protracted periods of time on the International Space Station, I can’t help but remember that we’ve yet to reach the bottom of the ocean’s depth in the Mariana Trench. We’ve soared hundreds of thousands of miles into space, but we haven’t been able to get past 7.6 miles deep. It’s as if we’re good at going out, but not that great at going in. This is true of our lives. We’re adept at looking out around us. We find it easy to make external observations about others, but turning that gaze inward…that’s a different story. The tools we have to explore our own inner world are severely lacking. The pressure we feel as we swim down into our motivations is immense. Our best tools melt as we dig into the deepest places of our souls. Eugene Peterson once said that our prayers are tools. They aren’t tools “for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” I think he’s right. We need better tools than the ones we’ve created in order to plum deeper into our inner spaces. When we turn to Scripture, we are given one such tool, one that we’re less inclined to use because of what we think it will cost us. The Bible equips us with the prayer tool of lament (and sadly most of us have to be desperate before we choose to wield it), but when we do, we discover it was the very thing we needed to break through. Embraced in the grace of lament, we find the prayer tool we’ve been searching for. Lament gives us the freedom to speak honestly with God, pointedly asking Him to respond in keeping with His character. Delayed as we are putting on airs, pretending piety before the Lord and others, lament allows us to wrestle with God in the mud of our deepest hurt, anger, and confusion. Friend, God through His word invites to you deeper. Use the prayer tool of lament.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We need to learn from lament. From Leah to Lamentations, from Israel’s ancient patriarchs to the Church’s Apostles, we are embraced by the grace of lament. When we strive to live endlessly happy (unrealistic) lives, we miss the grace of lament which seasons our prayer life. Put it this way: biblically, we have a whole spice rack available, but we only pinch a little salt and black pepper out occasionally and wonder why our spiritual food is bland.  On the way to the cross, Jesus burst the triumphal bubble of the disciples who were busy polishing their résumés, preparing to follow their Messiah into political office. He told them they would weep and mourn and grieve. Jesus embraced His disciples with the grace of lament—something they were hardly looking for! He did this so that in the depth of their unfathomable grief, they would remember despite their troubles, He’d overcome the world (John 16). Jesus was seasoning their prayer with lament. Lament is not a baseless complaining or senseless whining. Lament is purposeful. Lament is prayer. Lament is our raw, unfiltered, and honest laying out the shards and shrapnel of our grief, choosing to place it all into the hands of God. We don’t need to wait to make sense of the senseless before we bring it. Jesus makes room for us before the throne of God our Father to bring our grief and pain as it is right now. As Leslie Allen says, the poet in Lamentations “counsels that his people's deep anger over their wartime and postwar experiences should be brought to Yahweh as the one who has the providential power to bring about justice.” They don’t have to put the puzzle pieces together before they enter God’s presence. They can come, jumbled and hurt and confused. In lament, they can come with their complaint, expecting God to reconcile all things, building their faith on His character and promises. We need to learn from lament, and yet—like “good little Christians”—we hold back. We get stalled out with our irrational need to answer our own questions instead of bringing them fractured and fragmented as they are to God. We drive ourselves crazy trying to play God in our lives. Beloved, we need to learn to lament.

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. We surprise ourselves with pain when we ignore the grace of lament. We close our ears to the voice of grief and suffering in a naïve hope that what’s out of sight will remain out of mind. We read the Bible like a bouncing ball, alighting on the passages we find encouraging and rush past the others we find discouraging. We love to find ourselves with the Lord our Shepherd in green fields and beside still waters, saying, “I shall not want”; but what about when we find ourselves in the third of the psalms which cry out in lament? For every Psalm 23 there is a Psalm 88. Our optimism bias blinds us to reality in this life and leaves us confused when we suffer. It may seem a strange comfort, but I was greatly encouraged to read Walter C. Kaiser, one of the leading American theologians of our time, call out this trend in the Western church. He says that by avoiding the grace of lament “our own ability to find direction in the midst of calamity, pain, and suffering have been seriously truncated and rendered partially or totally ineffective.” It’s time to change that. We need to abandon the optimism bias we’ve built as a façade to hide an unformed faith, ill-equipped to withstand hard times. Closing our ears to suffering hasn’t made it go away, in our lives or in our world. It’s time to open our ears to the voice of lament found throughout the Bible, found on the lips of Leah and David, Rachel and Jeremiah. To help us Listen to Lament, we will turn our attention to the book of Lamentations, where the Prophet Jeremiah grieved the fall of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem. His ears and heart were open to the suffering all around him, but instead of turning blindly away from them, He turned toward them and brought them, through the grace of lament, to God. What we find are raw, honest prayers that give us a model of a deeper faith we’ve left untested in our own lives.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I never tire of seeing God at work in our lives. Too often (like most), I only want to see the ends, but the means are where the details shine. Leah’s life is a testimony to this. She grew up in a dysfunctional family, the daughter of father who never saw her worth, treating her as a commodity for his financial future. She spent the early years of her marriage frustrated and alone, praying God would make her husband care and heal the wound of her loveless pain. Leah’s life shows us wounds are where the light shines through. As Leah lamented the injustice of her life, the radiance of God’s presence shone through her, revealing His loving character to her and a thousand generations (Deuteronomy 7.9). From the very beginning, God gave Leah a voice. We see this in the name of her children. It’s through this naming that we see the first ray of light shining through the darkness at Judah’s birth. Praising, Leah found her worth rooted in God’s love above and beyond all other relationships. What had been withheld in human deficiency was amply offered in the Lord (Issachar), and to whatever end, God honored her (Zebulun) where others failed. It should come as no surprise that the God who uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong would choose Leah, the marginalized matriarch, to bring about His redemptive plan for all humanity (1 Corinthians 1.27)! Through her the Lord gave the Law (through Moses of Levi). Through her descendants Tola (of Issachar) and Elon (of Zebulun) His people lived at peace 33 years during the time of Judges. And through David (of Judah) God built an everlasting throne for His Messiah. And in the fullness of time, in the lands of Zebulun, Jesus would first proclaim the Good News—fulfilling the prophesy of Isaiah—and people who walked in darkness would see a great light! (Isaiah 9.1-2). But back up for a second? That’s the ends. Leah never saw any of that. She never saw beyond her days. Her children, the great men and women who shook and shaped the world, came later. All she knew (all we know) was the love of God here and now. And that was enough.

A Sunday morning sermon by Peter DuMont. What does it look like to be rewarded by God? So far in our “Leah Beloved” series, Brett has shown the ways in which Leah’s story demonstrated to the Exodus Generation that God sees, hears, and responds to his people according to “ways and means” different from our own! This week we will look at the birth of a fifth son to Leah. She celebrates him as God’s reward for having given her servant to her husband as a child bearing surrogate, a cultural practice of the time. But the Genesis text simply states that God listened to her prayer and gave her a son. God answers our prayers with good gifts that we cannot provide ourselves—safety, peace, new life. Yet when those rewards come, we can make ourselves the center of the equation, thinking that extraordinary things we did prompted God to act more than who he is as a loving father. What God rewards—more than our works—is our simple dependance on Him. Attaching ourselves more securely to God’s unchanging heart will free us to receive our greatest reward: living from the love of a faithful Heavenly Father.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. An amazing thing happened between the birth of Levi and the birth of Judah. It’s as if something finally clicked into place for Leah. For at least the first three to six years of her marriage to Jacob, Leah exhausted herself. She was the tradwife par excellence with nothing to show for it. We can hear the desperation in her prayers. Everything in her world revolved around her husband. Lonely in a patriarchal society, she did everything in her limited power to get him to see her, hear her, love her. If we slow down long enough, we can hear Moses' subtle critique against Jacob his forefather for his neglectful treatment of his foremother. After three attempts to get Jacob’s love and attachment, Leah appears to be at the lowest point of her life. Every time she prays it’s a variation on, “now my husband will love me, now he’ll care, now he’ll hold me in love.” That may not be our exact story, but how many of us have bent ourselves out of shape desperate to be appreciated, cared for, loved. But something happens in her prayer life after the birth of Levi when Jacob fails to change (again). Her focus shifts. Her eyes are opened to the One who’s seen her all along, heard her every cry, and held her through every sorrow. I believe while she was carrying her fourth child in her womb she realized she was more than a womb. She was more than a second-class citizen. She wasn’t an ignored daughter in the house of her father or a neglected wife in the tents of her husband. She was loved. She was beloved. No longer breaking her life, wrecking her soul, chasing after the impossible affections of others, she experienced the rich fullness of the Lord who loved her all along. We see this shift, this joyous relief, as she named Judah, praying: “This time I will praise the Lord” (Genesis 29.35). Friend, if your story feels like a mirror image of Leah’s, I pray you would find the same reason to praise today. Allow God to shift your perspective. Trust Him to show you how His grace is sufficient for you, even if your circumstances don’t change (2 Corinthians 12.9). Leah was beloved by God and so are you.

A Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Brett Deal. I think the deeper we step into the story of Leah, the more we find a mirror image of ourselves. We all long to be seen, especially by those closest to us, and we all want to be heard. It can be deeply frustrating when we feel our words are falling flat all around us, unheard. We all want to be held, not just physically, but emotionally. We understandably want secure attachment. Our earliest disconnections happen in childhood. Although the Bible does not give us a full biography of Leah and Rachel’s upbringing, it does give us a clear image of their father Laban. He’s a trickster just as much as his son-in-law, grifting his way through life. You see this first glimmer of gold-fixed eyes when Abraham’s servant came looking to find a wife for Isaac. The sight of silver and gold and a caravan of camels had Laban off his feet and running toward this finance-securing opportunity (Genesis 24). When we find Laban again years later, it doesn’t seem to appear that He has grown past his desire to build up his wealth or bend others to his own financial advantage. When Jacob expressed interest in marrying Rachel, Laban leapt at the chance to get more than what was culturally expected. He saw the desire in the young man’s eyes, and although the bride price at the time (remember this was a heavily patriarchal society) was equivalent to two or three years of labor, Laban locked Jacob in at twice the price! Then, when the wedding night finally came, switching Rachel with Leah, he doubled his already exorbitant fee. He wrote checks for himself in the lives of those who should have been the most precious to him. Beloved, it is understandable why Leah would have deeply longed to be seen, heard, and lovingly held by her husband, knowing the kind of childhood and youth she’d experienced in the house of her father. But, Jacob didn’t have the love to give that Leah longed for. All the same, Leah kept trying, praying for a secure attachment with her husband, even naming her third son, Levi, which means attached. Leah was on a long journey of discovery each of us will walk. In the end, Jacob doesn’t change, but Leah does. In her sustained place of prayer, God was showing his beloved daughter, He always saw her, heard her, and held her close.