Hello this is Erwin Raphael McManus. I'm the lead pastor of Mosaic. Welcome to our podcast. Thank you for joining us today.

I hope this talk inspires you, encourages you, and transforms you, and that this is just

the beginning of a conversation between you and Jesus.

Enjoy the message.

I think is when I was in junior high, it was the first time we ever visited the mountains of North Carolina.

I'm not sure why, but I've always had this romantic magnetism toward the mountains and that whole

region of the United States and where the Cherokee Indians used to Rome.

And my brother and I and our family were there, but one time we went out into the woods and

one of the most terrifying things in the world when you're a city kid is to get lost in the woods during sunset when you realize you're running out of light and you have no idea where you're going.

Everything looks the same.

I've lived in cities all my life.

I am used to signs. I'm used to street signs and directions carefully written out so I can know exactly

where I'm going and how to get where I want to go.

But in the woods it was different.

And as it got darker and darker and

you hear a lot of very sounds by the way. You hear a lot of things walking that you

cannot see and and I found that it was so difficult not only to not be able to navigate where I'm going

but but even to find someone through sound when someone would say I'm over here I'm over

here it was as if the if the sound was coming 360 degrees when someone was trying to guide me by their voice.

I couldn't figure out if it was coming from the right, from the left, from north, from south, from west.

And I look now and I think about how we have all these GPS systems and we have ways and all these

different ways of traveling our way through cities. it kind of drives me crazy sometimes

...