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.

Hey, welcome back and thanks again for listening. I really do appreciate your kindness and your patience,

especially if you are a weekend and week out listener. I know you can't see

what's happening behind this microphone, but I come into this little room and shut the door

at least once every week. I've never done a transcript and I rarely even bring notes. So I'm just

sitting here, sharing with you things that I'm excited about, things that I'm learning,

and things that I believe can work. In some ways for me, over the last four and a half years,

this is just incredibly therapeutic. I get to pitch things out loud because I'm recording.

If I say something that's totally messed up, I get to delete it and start over.

And when I finally open the door and walk out of this room,

I feel like I've put down ideas that matter.

And then I take that bold and perhaps foolish step of sending out those ideas,

submitting them to everyone to be used and weighed and even judged.

So for the incredible ESM family, which constitutes around 4,000 listeners,

I just want to say thanks for giving me this opportunity. Sometimes it's not just the chance

to line things out in my own mind, but it's the chance to practice things before I present them

in sermons. I suspect you probably know that podcasting is not

my day job. For the last 22 years, I've preached an average of two sermons every single week.

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