Hey fam, if we're honest, reading the Bible consistently can be a challenge. But it's never too

late to start and we're in this together. Thanks for journeying with us and here's your host, Emma Daughter.

Thanks for joining. We are back with Ben in the studio. How's it going? Ben, it's a Sunday.

It is. It is a specific Sunday. It's Palm Sunday. Oh, yeah. So here's the thing. This is our first time doing this, an episode where we don't have a reading assignment, but we wanted to talk about Palm Sunday. Yeah. And to start, what I don't want to do is drift from part of really the mission of join the journey, which is to help make a big place feel small. And we're going to talk about Palm Sunday. But Ben, this is what? Your

fourth time on the podcast? I think so. Yeah. Fourth time, you're in the room for all the recordings.

And I just thought it'd be fun for everybody to get to know you a little bit. If you shared

your testimony, three to five minutes, what's God done in your life? Absolutely. Well, as is probably

mentioned before, I'm a resident this year in Watermarket Institute, and it's kind of been sweet

given my story of what I'm learning this year and getting to work with, join the journey.

Growing up, I grew up in the church and with two parents who loved me a lot. And a lot of these stories

that we would go through that were gone through in the New Testament are stories that I was

super familiar with. And for a lot of it, it became kind of a legalistic thing of, okay, well,

the knowledge that I gain is something that is an identifier for me. It's what gave me identity.

And it became, oh, how much can, like, to my

friends and to my parents that I can show, hey, you know, I know what I'm talking about. My knowledge

makes me better than other people. And I don't think I would have said that at the time, but it was

definitely a driving factor in, hey, how I relate to people and how I gain my value, not only from my

parents, but from my social circles and my friends. And so that was an interesting part of my

childhood of growing up, knowing all these stories. And if anyone would have looked at me saying,

oh, well, that's what we would call like a really good Christian or that, you know, A-plus Christian, but on the

inside, being a slave descent. And so growing up through high school and in college for me, it became

at this, okay, well, from the outside, I get to present myself in a way that people look at me and say,

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