Hey everybody, this is Heidi St. John. Welcome to Off the Bench with Heidi St. John.

Today is Monday, the 14th of March and today is mailbox Monday. It also happens to be the birthday

of one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, my daughter Summer, Summer Happy Birthday.

Spence or Mist, the shout out on the podcast because his birthday was yesterday. We've got a 13, 14

going on in any event. We're going to have a great day here at the podcast and I'm going to answer

your questions. Stick around. I think you're going to be encouraged.

All right. So welcome to the show for those of you who are new. Mondays are the day when I try

to tackle audience questions. I've been doing this for about eight years and it really is one of my

favorite things to be able to read through your Off the Bench stories to read about what God is doing

in your life. And we're going to do that today for about the next 15 minutes or so. I wanted to

start by just reading it to you a little bit from first Peter chapter three. So Peter knew

a thing or two about what it meant to suffer for righteousness. And there are a lot of people in

the world right now and this is happening in every sphere of influence that I'm aware of,

where people are trying to do good things and they're suffering for it. Let's see what the

apostle Peter had to say about this in first Peter chapter three starting in verse 13. He said,

now who will want to harm you if you are eager to do good? So I think he's asking at this point a

rhetorical question. So he knows that if they step up and they say I want to step off of the

sidelines and onto the front lines off of the bench and onto the battlefield, there's a very

high possibility that they're going to be suffering for it. So he asks them a question, who would

want to harm you if you'd want to do good? But even if you suffer for doing what is right,

God will reward you for it. So he starts off by saying, really, people are going to harm you

and then he kind of like, he goes, yeah, that's exactly right. And then he reminds them even if you

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