Well, well, thank you. Thank you so much. It is such an honor to be here and to be back at Southland.

My wife, Lori, and I, we just love this place, and we love the nine years we got to spend here,

the formative years of our life and marriage,

and we had our first child here, and it was just an unbelievable experience. We're so glad to be

able to call Southland a part of our story. We had the privilege of serving under Wayne Smith

and working with Mike Bro and John Weiss and Scott Nickle.

And I can tell you that you're in great hands with Scott moving forward.

And he is amazing and just the best has yet to come here at Southland.

I'm so excited for you guys.

And we're thrilled to be back with you.

Goodness, a lot has happened in the last 23 years.

So we moved to California. We were there for 20 years with a church out there. And then recently

we moved to just outside of Dallas, Texas and have been spending some time there. And

our kids, we had one daughter when we left here and we have two daughters now and, and they're a little bit older now, and they're both married. So I got a picture here of our family here. So, yeah, I got old. So there you go. But you all look the same, and I'm really honored to be here. If you have your Bible opened up to John chapter 3, we're going to get there in just a second as we continue our series

called Grace. And, you know, a lot of people asked me, hey, what was it like moving from Kentucky

out to California? And it was a big, big shift in mentality and life and everything. But Lori and I,

we decided when we moved out there that when we got there, we were going to really dig into

our neighborhood and build relationships with people and really helped kind of guide them to the church.

And our church was really about two years old at the time.

When we got there and they were still meeting in a movie theater, the church was called

Real Life Church, and not a lot of people knew about it.

So when we got there, we thought, we're going to let people know and so

...