Welcome to the cutting room floor, a Southern Christian Church podcast. Each week, we sit down with our teachers to talk through what didn't make it into Sunday's sermon. Thoughts, stories, or questions that got left on the cutting room floor, but still matter. There's no script, just real conversations that allow us to go deeper into last week's sermon. Thanks for being with us. Let's jump in.

Well, hey, everyone, and welcome to the cutting room floor. My name is Neil, and today we've got the King of Detention with us. Scott, Nickle. Scott, welcome. I like that. We got rid of titles, but I would take that one. I was trying to think through, like, how could I intro this with all, like the detention stuff and the stealing of the root beer was that we heard the soda there's a

coke machine right over here. Right here? It was probably Pepsi, actually. But yeah, there was one of those old school snack machines that had like the, you tilt it up and drop it and stuff would fall out. And then there was a Coke machine next to it. And there was a kitchen that that was in, and then this out here was all the lunchroom and all that kind of thing.

So, yeah.

Crazy.

Yeah, those of us who came from broken homes who had to be at school early, as all the kids were single

moms.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, we would all be here way before everybody else, and so we just didn't have anything to do.

So, yeah. way before everybody else. And so we just didn't have anything to do. See, when you have nothing to do, you find trouble. Yeah, we would make our way down here, and we would try to rob this thing. And they had these cookies, these Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, that the cookie dough was frozen in the freezer. We would come down here, and if that was in there, we would just mowl down. That's like my favorite thing to do. Yeah. And so we would, the principal finally picked up on it. And so we would have to always have a lookout that would be right over here. And he got real stealthy. And this is all people don't realize, but it's all a square. Yeah, yeah. He could come from any direction. So you had to have multiple workouts? So we had to be ready. And then what we would do is we would run if we could and get outside into the courtyard and then sprint back down there and then come into the main entrance like we had, like nothing had happened. But we'd have to get our heart rate down. Why are you sweating, Mr. Nichol? Yeah, why are you sprinting around the corner?

That's incredible. Yeah, it was bad news.

Like, again, they should have kicked me out. Like, don't anybody miss that. Like, it was justifiable. That was not them. Yeah, that was justifiable. So we're in, we're kind of in this first week. We've got journals. We've got signage at all of our campuses. we kind of said

this is like a vision weekend

how was thinking through that

you know, John's last week was last week is in his role. And now you kind of step into it. And this is your first sermon. What's your mindset like going into this? Yeah, similar to John, I didn't want to put any extra pressure on myself. I've been here a long time.

You know, it's not like, you know, we were sitting at lunch, me and you and a couple other staff people earlier this week, planning, like talking about the previous weekend, planning for the future. And I said, like, can you imagine, like, if we didn't know each other? Oh. Like, if this was my first week on the job and you guys didn't know me and I didn't know you, like how weird this would be,

but it was just friends sitting around Mexican food, you know. So I just tried not to put any more pressure on myself because like, hey man, you've been here this time around for eight years.

Totally. Also, I was reflecting this morning in my office at every turn in my ministry, the first thing I've done has been to focus

on Jesus. So this is just consistent with that. And to get to walk through the prodigal son and

the other two parables prior to it was really at the core of my heartbeat. And I wanted to make sure that that was a reminder, not only the core of my heartbeat, but that's the core of my heartbeat, you know, and I wanted to make sure that that was a reminder,

not only the core of my heartbeat, but that's the core of the heartbeat of this church. So for me, I mean, like my preacher buddies, it would probably be like, dude, seriously, you picked the prodigals. That's like a fastball down the middle. Like, well, what do you want me to do? Make it hard on myself.

100%.

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