Welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in.

Today's podcast is sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John Cunningham is a friend of mine and a brother in Christ, and he can help you with financial

decisions and future planning.

He's been a big help to me and my family, and I commend him to you.

You can reach him at 205-913-1720.

I am so thankful you're here, so let's get started.

Hey, welcome back, and thanks for bearing with me last week. I really felt compelled to share that information on the one baptism, and I hope that you found it helpful.

And as we turn our attention to planning today, I hope that it makes you more confident in engaging

in more gospel sharing opportunities. To get back to what we talked about a couple of weeks ago,

planning is our focus throughout the end of the year, and today we will give attention to that.

I want you to use these last several weeks assessing the value of 2022, preparing and testing

and considering what would make next year great, entering in with a sense of expectation

that is not burdensome or overwhelming. And those are the things we will address today,

and I feel like we've been needing to talk about this for a while now. There needs to be a sense

of balance in the pursuit of excelling. If you listen to this program at all, you know that I am all

in on the I-N-G life. I want to use the rest of the time that God provides

growing, learning, changing, building, and excelling in areas that please God and help the people

that I love. But sometimes, even terrific things like that can be pursued in an imbalanced and unproductive way.

So then negative things start to happen while you're trying to become a better person.

Maybe it just all feels very burdensome and totally unpleasant.

You're trying to become something more, but you end up just stretched too thin.

You want it to become more productive for yourself and others, but all you've done is become crazy busy. So then you start wondering,

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