Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Dream Big podcast. It's a podcast where we talk about life and dreams and ambitions. And today we're going to talk to Chris Brown. He's a good guy. And more than just being a good guy. He's an author. He's got a book out called restored transforming the sting of your past.

Into purpose for today. It's a book that's coming out and it thought it'd be worthwhile listening. So Chris, welcome to the podcast. I'm glad you're with us.

Yeah, I've honored Bob. Great to talk to you again.

So for people that haven't been exposed to you before, like tell us a little bit about you.

Yeah, so always been in ministry. Love the local church and, you know, my why is to, like the book says, I, you know, like everyone else, I've got some serious pain and things that I've been through my life.

And God has just really rescued me from quite a bit. And so my big why in life is to make sure that I kind of sucked a new trance out of my past and give it meaning and allow the Lord to do that.

And so for me, I've been involved in ministry in a variety of different ways through church, through another ministry called Ramsey Solutions. Currently, I lead a church called the Well and Nashville, Tennessee.

Anything I can do to, you know, spread the love of Jesus. So I was the minister guy, I love my family and whatever I can do to spread love in this world.

Everybody got got punched here for the last couple of years. And it wasn't just a virus going around, but it was also a bunch of other stuff going around. It's people sometimes not knowing how to deal with emotions that they're feeling.

It's all of us. And so they reach for the stupid shelf by mistake.

Stupid shelf. I think it's always waist high, always very accessible. And it's always filled with dumb things to say, I think a lot of people have been wounded by things that other people have said they got directed and how do you tell the person that's just stuck in traffic right now.

They think that's exactly how I feel. I feel wounded. How do I take this kind of sting? How do I see that in a more accurate, that kind of artificial or like kind of fake Sunday school kind of way, but how do you really deal with the stings that have come your way in our way, give us some suggestions.

So, you know, I think a lot of times we take offense of things that either a organization, some kind of corporate gathering or it could be just one person what they do to us. And when we say take offense, I take offense to that.

What you're doing is saying, hey, yeah, I'll take that bomb. I'll take that bomb and hold it, which makes absolutely no sense. A lot of times we're taking offense to things because our identity is in the wrong spot identity is and we've got to that person has got to be my source of joy.

And I think you can either choose to be offended or choose offense or you can choose joy, but you can't choose both. And so I think when your identity is not wrapped up in Christ, but it's actually wrapped up in, you know, how what's your neighbor thinks of you or how much your boss thinks of you and you carried too much weight.

You've got them on a pedestal on how what they think about your how successful you are in that particular sphere of influence, then it affects you at too deep of a level where it shouldn't have in the first place.

Sometimes we put our hope in things in this world, anything our hope being in anything in this world, it's false hope is just wishful thinking real hope is a confident expectation of a better tomorrow based on the character and the promises of God.

And so it's got to be rooted in Jesus. They can't be in things of this world. And so therefore you get offended less if your eyes are on eternal things.

Sometimes it'll be a stranger to you that all of a sudden it gets in this real place of intimacy because they're in your grill about something, but if you were to step back to say, this is actually a stranger to me or it might have been an acquaintance that you knew, but they're really not in the inside circle.

They don't really know what's going on in your life. And it's been really helpful for me to just say three things. First of all, what's the most generous view of whatever just happened to say the most generous is this is probably a really neat person living an engaged life in their they think they're being helpful.

That's just like a really generous view, even if though what they said is super lame to say they actually think that this is being helpful.

The second thing is to say what's the most realistic view of this. In other words, what probably happen people don't say lame things by mistake. Usually there's something underneath this. The truth might be that it's true.

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