Hi friend, this is Mary Demuth and this is Pray Every Day where I pray through the Bible verse by verse on this 10th day of December.

I'm really happy and grateful to have you here. I just want to say a shout out to William who does all the engineering here.

Be praying for him. He continues to struggle with health issues and a huge shout out and hello to Kristen, my assistant, who I

couldn't do my life without her. So Kristen, I'm so grateful for you. And I'm also grateful to all

of you, the listeners who have been faithful to listen and apply and be prayed for. And those of you

have contacted me and prayed for me, I'm so grateful for that and I want to live on this 10th

day of December as someone with amazing amounts of gratitude. And I want to reorient my heart

from naysaying to gratitude. And so hopefully that's happening today. Today I'm reading from a

very famous passage. You'll recognize it. I'm reading from the

book of Jeremiah chapter 29 verses 1 through 16. And I want you to take note of the context. You know the

context. You are in the context. This is about people being sent off to Babylon, exiled, and this is where this prophecy is.

We often rip Jeremiah 29-11 out of its context to mean something for us today.

It can mean that, but I want you to think about what it means in the context.

Okay, here we go.

Now, these are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophets sent from Jerusalem to the residue of the elders of the captivity and to the priests,

to the prophets, and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive from Jerusalem

to Babylon. After Jechoniah, the king, the queen mother, the eunuchs, the princes of Judah, and

Jerusalem, the craftsmen and the smiths, had departed from Jerusalem by the hand of Elasa, the son

of Shaffin, and Gemariah, the son of Hilkiah, whom Zetekiah King of Judah sent to Babylon,

to Nebuchadnezzarar king of Babylon. It said,

Yahweh of armies, the God of Israel, says to all the captives whom I have caused to be carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and dwell in them. Plant

gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and father, sons and daughters. Take wives for

...