Hello, my friends and welcome back to another Friday Pray Together episode.

I want to start out by thanking all of you who have been praying for my aging parents for many months now.

Yesterday, morning, February 4th, my father passed from this life.

And we trust is now with the Lord. Thank you so much for your prayers.

The long and drawn out decline of his health and dementia was a big part of that.

Really made it possible for all of us to grieve kind of ahead of time.

And we grieved the loss of such competence, capability that we saw in him through his whole life.

And yesterday wasn't so hard. I'm sure there's likely grief still to come.

But we all honestly felt a sense of relief for him and for my mother.

And we're so inspired by her faith. She was just a rock and still is and is really just trusting in the Lord.

And we're so thankful for that. So thank you for your prayers.

And we have quite a few prayer requests here that we have to get through today.

And I want to encourage you to do what you can to set aside the time that you need to really pray with me in this Friday episode when it comes out.

We've got the opportunity to lift very real and pertinent needs to the Lord for his consideration and for his action.

Our God tells us to come to him with our concerns. We're to unload our grief and our burden and our need to him and let him carry it and walk in faith here on planet earth.

So join with me right now as we lift the prayer requests of our brothers and sisters in Christ to the king of kings, the sovereign over all the universe, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Lord, we just take a deep breath for a moment and exhale just to get all the stress we may be feeling in our bodies out.

We want to come to you calm and assured because you are the God of the universe who holds galaxies in your hand.

You spend everything in time and in creation and in history according to the purpose of your will and that brings us great peace.

Sometimes, Lord, it will bring us great concern and great conflict because we don't understand why the difficulties in our life are first coming through your loving hand.

And that means you've allowed it or you've even brought it about in some cases which we don't understand.

But God, the comfort that comes is in knowing that in your wisdom and in your sovereign power and in your majesty and your might,

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