I'm so excited about what's about to happen in this room. I'm excited because for the very first time

in our over six year history as a church, my wife is going to be speaking a full message from

our stage, and I could not be more excited about this. Before you fully welcome her into this moment, just want to give you the

backstory on what's happened leading up to this moment, because this is not something that

Courtney has, like, wanted to strive for, like give me a microphone and let me do all of these

things publicly. Honestly, she has embraced the role of being a pastor's wife from the very beginning of our relationship.

It's one of the reasons why we got married.

But for six years, as I've grown and matured and learned how to be the lead pastor of a church, I would say equally as much,

she's been growing and learning how to be a pastor's wife.

And in that journey, a couple of years ago, as ACC was growing, she was having our first child and she was like, it's just tough

because we're growing and there's so many females, like young women and older women who are a part

of our church that I want to know and I want them to know my story and I want to pour into

them but I can't and so in light of that she actually started a blog called pastor wife life

and she started writing and sharing her life with other people and going hey this is me being authentic

I can't get to know all of you but here I am and here's what I'm doing and that was awesome but that

was only intended just for people in

our church to be able to get to know her better and then all of a sudden a little over a year ago

we got a call and an email from a publisher in California and they're like hey we wanted to know

if you're interested in writing a book and they're calling Courtney and going, would you want to

take what God has placed on the inside of you and put it on paper? And we want to make that happen.

And so, of course, right away, we're like, okay, is this a legit publisher? Is this a middle

school kid in his parents' basement who are like reaching out, you know, what is happening?

...