Welcome to Season 5 of the Excel Stillmore podcast. I'm still your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you in your walk with the Lord, and I'm glad you've joined.

The program continues to be sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John is a good friend, and he's helped me and my family in everything

from stock and mutual fund investing to annuities, life insurance, and retirement planning.

I certainly commend him to you. If you have needs in any of those areas, you can reach him

at 615-895-7773. Thank you again for your ongoing encouragement and support. Let's get started.

Hey, welcome and thanks for listening. I hope you're having a wonderful morning, if it is morning for you.

It is for me, and I'm having a great one. It's actually quite rare for me

to be recording episodes before lunch. The normal cadence or rhythm of my workday week is home

until lunch and then office until dinner, and I record up here at the office. But this morning at

8.30 a.m., I had jury duty in downtown Tyler, which probably should mean that the

morning is not going super awesome, and there's no way I'm up here at the building before lunch

speaking to you, but things worked out a little differently than I expected. Short story alert,

I got there a little bit late. I walked in the courthouse 10 minutes after I should have.

Like 200 people had already gotten there before me, but there was still a line, so it's not like they were waiting on me.

There were about 10 of us who came in late and got at the end of the line.

And just before we got checked in, while we were literally standing right in front of all of those people who had been sitting there for 30 minutes,

the clerk announces that the room is full and she's going to let the last 10 people go home.

You can probably imagine the groan that went over the room and the glares that they passed towards us while we walked out.

The clerk did say to us rather loudly to keep the mob at bay that we will

most likely have to get rescheduled. And then the room kind of snickered like we slackers were

getting what we deserved. But as soon as we got outside in the hall, she shut the door and said,

actually you guys aren't going to get rescheduled. You can just go. So we were the ones who got

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