Welcome back to the ESM podcast. I'm so thankful that you've joined. Today's episode is sponsored by Tyler Kane with statewide mortgage. He's a senior loan officer with 20 years of experience in helping people with their home mortgage needs, whether you're a first-time buyer,

looking to refinance, or just want to discuss future home ownership goals, give Tyler a call

813-380-8487, or you can set up an appointment at his website, which is provided in the show notes.

It just does not get any better than Christians helping Christians.

Speaking of which, thank you again for being here with me.

Let's get started.

Welcome to the podcast today.

It's a special day for me.

It's December the 15th.

That's Monday launch day, and that's my birthday.

Today I turn 47. I'm very grateful and thankful. That's kind of a weird number. It's prime number, I think. It's still mid-40s, maybe, technically.

And I'm just prayerful that this next year is as great as the one that just passed. I know that you hope and pray the same for me and for yourself.

One thing it reminds me of, 2019 is when I started this podcast, January of that year, and I recorded an

episode in December called, Hey, I'm 40, based on some rant by a college football coach that we

turned into an episode. So that had me thinking kind of nostalgically today about how

all of my 40s have been spent here on this little simple, cheap microphone that I bought off of

Amazon when I was only 39. Okay, enough about that. Actually, not yet enough about that. I just think

this is pretty cool. Today is Saturday, I told you, tomorrow for me is Sunday morning, December

the 14th,

and there are five of us at Lindale who share the same birthday. Ed Tacker, Glenn Hyde, Josh Self,

Vicki Isaacson, and me. So we get a cool picture every year, and Vicki's the only girl, so she gets

to theme it, and she's chosen dark dark green and it's just really a neat occasion

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