Hello, welcome back for season two of the Excel Stillmore podcast.

I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies

to help you deepen your faith, build stronger relationships, and do the most with your life in Christ.

Thank you for joining. Let's get started.

Thanks for being here today.

I'm excited to talk to you about minimizing the damage.

That's our episode title.

And it recognizes a reality for us all. Sometimes things get messy. Sometimes things go wrong. Maybe it's other people's bad

behavior. Maybe it's mistakes you and I have made or just the way that life has gone. Sometimes there is

damage. And what you and I need to do is be sure that we minimize that damage. We don't want a

bad thing to get worse. We don't want something awful to happen, but because of the way we react to it, something else,

even more awful happens. That's what our episode is ultimately about. I have a story to tell you

from this week. It includes my 16-year-old son. He will probably not enjoy that this story got told, but it does show some things about

his growth, and it has a decent ending. Maybe not the one he wanted, but a good one, I think. Before I get

into that, let me talk about something else for a moment, because living a Christian life is not just about

minimizing all the damage. It is also about

avoiding a lot of damage. Yes, you need to know how to maintain control in a moment when you could

make things go from bad to worse. But what if you could live a life where there weren't so many bad things? Now, I know

there are a lot of things out of our control, but I wanted to speak to this for at least a couple of

minutes. Listen, being a Christian is the elimination of a lot of problems from your life. Your decision

to serve God, to believe on the name of Jesus and follow

these spirits characteristics, love and joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness,

...