All right, all right, join the Journey family, friends, and guests. You're listening to Join the Journey

podcast with your host, Emma, daughter. Thanks for joining. Today, we are reading the book of Haggai,

and I am in the podcast studio with faithful watermark member, Karis Smith. Hey, Emma, good to be here.

So glad to have you here, Karas. Good to meet again. It's been a while. For those who don't know you, would you share a little bit about what God's done in your life and then what you're up to today? Yeah. So I am originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Missouri. We don't get a lot of Missouri people on this podcast. Every once in a while. Yeah. I will say I moved

when I was about nine years old. So more so a Texan than a Missouran, but still I got to throw that out there.

So I grew up in Weatherford, Texas, with a really sweet family, have a brother and a sister, just like in a strong faith-based family. It's fun to see

grandparents and parents were all believers and just like the generational faithfulness is really

cool. But yeah, so accepted Christ at a young age, was actually five years old. And so I don't

really remember a time without the Lord. Through childhood, the Lord has been super faithful,

even in times when I doubted or did things that I was like,

I know this isn't right. The Lord always showed through. And honestly, just like one I love to highlight is

there was a point in time when I was high school, started consuming inappropriate content. And I just remember

feeling really poorly about it. And I had never told anyone. And one time my dad was in my room with me, I just told him about it. And in that moment, my dad looked at me and he goes, Karras, I am so disappointed, but I love you so much still. And that was kind of a first time. I remember thinking, wow, this is what God looks like and embodied in my earthly father.

So that was really sweet. Fast forward in college, I went to Texas Tech University out in Lubbock.

Reckham. So my brother went. Okay. We got some Raiders and A-Rater in the family.

Two, two, his wife. We'll take it. My younger brother followed me out there too.

Nice.

The out to Tech was really involved at First younger brother followed me out there too. Nice.

But I went out to tech, was really involved at First Baptist Lubbock out there, got to be a small group leader.

Fun. Yeah, and learn a lot there. But coming to Dallas was never really my original plan, but heard about Watermark and loved it.

And so I was like, well, this is where my friends are. And this is where a job is. And so came to Dallas and wanted to go to Watermark and just got plugged into a community group. And what's super cool is I feel like I found what was missing in like Bible study groups. Because there's, you know, we just talk about the Bible. And then there's community groups where it's like, we're getting into it. Like we're here for each other. We're linking arms and we're moving forward, like in life,

chasing the Lord and growing and learning. So in my second community group at Watermark,

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