Hey everyone, this is Mary Demuth and this is Pray Every Day, where I have the joy and privilege of praying you through the Bible verse by verse.

Super grateful to have you here.

And I do pray that the Lord just feels near and present to you.

I know a lot of us are walking through the dark night of the soul where God feels distant.

But the truth is he is near and he is for you,

he is with you, and he will never leave you. He will never forsake you. Maybe someone just needed

to hear that today. All right, I'm going to be reading Jeremiah, the whole chapter of Jeremiah

24 in the World English Bible, and this is what it says.

Yahweh showed me, and behold, two baskets of figs were set before Yahweh's temple after Nebuchadnezzar,

king of Babylon, had carried away captive Jechaniah, the son of Joachim, king of Judah,

and the princes of Judah with the craftsmen and smiths from Jerusalem and had brought them to Babylon. One basket had very good figs, like the figs that are first ripe, and the other

basket had very bad figs, which could not be eaten. They were so bad. Then Yahweh said to me,

what do you see, Jeremiah? I said, figs.

The good figs are very good and the bad are very bad, so bad that they cannot be eaten.

Yahweh's word came to me saying,

Yahweh, the God of Israel, says, like these good figs, so I will regard the captives of Judah,

whom I have sent out of this place and into the land of the

Chaldeans as good, for I will set my eyes on them for good and I will bring them again to this land.

I will build them and not pull them down. I will plant them and not pluck them up. I will give them a heart to know me that I am Yahweh. They will be my people

and I will be their God for they will return to me with their whole heart. As the bad figs,

which can't be eaten, they are so bad. Surely Yahweh says, so I will give up Zedekiah, the king of

Judah and his princes and the remnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land,

...