Hey everybody and welcome back to I Just Want to Talk about the Bible.

If this is your first time, then welcome.

I am genuinely glad that you're here.

My name is Christian Keeter and I live in the southeast of the United States with my amazing beautiful godly wife

Lacey and our two wonderful daughters, Felicity and Serenity. So let me begin by sharing with you

guys a personal testimony that will serve as a springboard into the content for the lesson today. Because I believe that

a lot of you guys are going to be able to relate to what I am saying. And for even those who don't

relate directly to what I'm going to start off by sharing, what I'm going to say implies to every single one of us.

So personal testimony, a little bit about me. Throughout the course of my life, I found myself

wrestling with various recurring emotions. Emotions like anxiety, worry, fear, fear of conflict,

fear of rejection specifically, or a little bit more specific at least,

at times feeling kind of hopeless like there wasn't anything to look forward to,

battling with sadness and things like that, just all throughout the course of my life at different

points. And it's really manifested itself in different ways at different stages. And so,

for example, with middle school, so seventh, eighth, and part of ninth grade,

I would say probably actually, probably middle school and halfway through high school,

I very much occupied the noble and highly respected role of the class clown at my school. And that got me in pretty much,

you know, recurring trouble. I would, uh, I wasn't a believer at the time. Even though I, I think,

at least for a part of that time, uh, I thought I was a believer, but that's another conversation that we've already had in earlier episodes.

And, you know, spent quite a bit of time in detention and things like that just because, I mean, I was just a class clown.

And so what, of course, drove this was, I think, in retrospect, fear of rejection from my peers,

you know, desire to be accepted and not be abandoned, rejected, ostracized, mocked.

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