Hello, welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast.

I am your host, Chris Emerson, and we are here to talk about tips and strategies that you can employ to deepen your faith, improve your relationships, and just get the most out of your life.

Thank you for joining. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome back to the program today. For me, it has been a little while on the recording

end of things. I know on the listening in, everything kind of plugs along at a regular pace,

new episodes on Mondays and Thursdays, but on the recording side, sometimes we have to get a little

bit ahead when we know there'll be a gap in recording, and that's what happened over the last,

I think, 12 days. I had the opportunity to travel a little bit, doing some preaching and teaching,

and was able to do that in a couple of Texas towns, west and southwest of Dallas, and it

feels really good to be home. One thing that's super great about going out of town is meeting

new people and having tons of conversations. I feel like I learned all kinds of stuff

just sitting and listening to people's stories, their background, their experience, their

understanding of the word. It's just all really rich and important. And in fact, it is out of one of

those conversations that this episode idea was born.

Give me a few minutes to tell you about that, and hopefully the title will make sense,

and also you will have three very specific things to think about when this episode is finished.

So I was staying several days with this older couple

from the church there, and one day we're sitting there in the living room, and the lady says,

I want to tell you a story about my former boss. She begins by saying, my former boss was a very

successful business woman. She had made a lot of money,

and at one point she owned, I think she said, four restaurants in the area or something like that.

The lady I was staying with was her accountant, and they were pretty close friends.

...