Thank you. The Good morning, church. How are you?

Good. Hey, this is crazy. Could you guys, if there's seats open next to you, could just scoot in, there's still some people in the back, kind of standing room only. So if you all could just, if it's convenient, scoot over a little bit, give that end seat. Some of you skinny chicks go two to one seat. That'd be good. uh here we go all right if we hadn't met i'm i'm pastor jovi i'm the lead pastor here the church

of 1122 uh merry christmas and happy new year i'm not sure which one we're supposed to do right now

we're in that kind of weird transition right um how many of you have taken your christmas lights

down how many all right good 11 that's good we are we're one of those gretchen puts ours up the day after Labor Day, something around in there. She started singing jingle bells. And then we're not even quite finished unwrapping the last present and we're taking stuff down. Okay, so that's kind of where we are. This is a special Sunday for me. It's so glad to see so many people. Usually this is like one of the lowest attended weekends,

right? And so, good to see all y'all. And the reason is because I might be the only lead pastor

in the country preaching right now. Most senior pastors take this week off and they let the youth pastor

preach. And so I got to do that for years and years and years when I was a youth pastor. And I would have people say things to me

early on. I love when the youth pastor preaches. I don't get the point. I don't get the jokes. I don't get

the haircut. But man, we get out in 23 minutes. So that's great. So that is not how we're rolling

today. But we are in this transition between, you know, between Christmas and New Year's, and I hope you do get your lights down.

When I was growing up, that meant this was the week that we took the Christmas tree and put it in

the closet and then just shut the door. We didn't take those ornaments off or anything.

We just, as is, we just put it in the closet. And this is the week that my family from Dillon,

South Carolina, they are unplugging their lights, not taking them down. Why in the world would you do that, right?

Just leave them there just in case. You don't know. The spirit might move. You might need to

plug them in in July and rock the big, the big colorful lights on the chain link fence.

You don't know. So that's how my people are. And so I'm glad that you're here. It's also an interesting time of year because we just celebrated the birth of Jesus, the coming of the Messiah.

And we all know, we've been to the Christmas page.

It didn't go as planned, right?

I mean, it was kind of chaos.

At least it looked like chaos from our perspective.

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