Welcome to Season 5 of the Excel Stillmore podcast. I'm still your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you in your walk with the Lord, and I'm glad you've joined.

The program continues to be sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John is a good friend, and he's helped me and my family in everything

from stock and mutual fund investing to annuities, life insurance, and retirement planning.

I certainly commend him to you. If you have needs in any of those areas, you can reach him

at 615-895-7773. Thank you again for your ongoing encouragement and support. Let's get started.

So today we're going to turn our attention back to the book Sacred Fire by Ronald Rollheiser.

I did an episode a few weeks ago called The Holy Longing that dealt with

the first part of that book, specifically as it pertains to young adulthood from puberty up

into your early 20s, the different unique challenges that we face at that age, and several

key spiritual things that need to be growing along with everything else. I'll take just a

moment and remind you about the three distinct stages of life laid out in that book. The first one is

called essential discipleship. This is the struggle to get our lives together. And as I just noted,

we used an episode trying to help young people pull their lives together

that is optimistic and joyful in the present, but is also preparing you for the largest

portion of your life, the second stage, which is called mature discipleship. For most of us,

this will represent the largest portion of our life, and these

are the years of our lives where we are supposed to be moving from the struggle to get our lives

together to addressing the struggle to give our lives away. All of that compassion and justice

we were seeding into our young people in the previous episode

is supposed to grow into a charitable, selfless giving life.

We accumulate goods.

We accumulate free time.

...