I think today we live in a very anxious society and people need to be shown firstly that they're worth something.

The first point I'm making to someone isn't you're a sin, the first point I'm making to someone is you have no idea how much you matter.

The god of the universe thought you up and he had a good day when he did.

I love that.

Welcome everybody.

This is Simon Gilbo with Inspired. It's great to be back with you again. Oh, in a week when there's been plenty of bad news. There's always, we've bombarded with bad news, aren't we? And the whole

idea for those of you and you to inspire is that I get different mates from across the years

that I've overlapped with who tell they're often just well they're so different the beautiful

variety of faith journeys of how God's been at work in their lives and I love it this week

it's it's funny literally an hour ago I dropped a line to an old friend. 25 years ago, we were at

Bible school together. We did the Corn Hill training course just south of London Bridge on Borough

High Street. And who could possibly have dreamt Sam that we'd end up with our respective journeys?

It has been amazing. Everybody here's introducing to Sam Albury. Welcome, Sam. Simon, it's so good to be with you. Thank you for having me on. It's brilliant. So I just Facebook to you under an hour ago, and you are currently, although you're based in Nashville, you're preaching, teaching in Brisbane. And I said, well, do you want to do it now? And you said, you're up for it. So, so here we are, just a few minutes later. And it's, it's wonderful to have you. We've overlapped it, not that much, but you did work at St. Mary's Maidenhead for, I'm guessing about a decade, which is where my mom was formerly church warden. And so we cross paths there a bit and speaking at a few conferences.

And now it's the chance to hear your whole backstory, which will be wonderful.

So, you know, where did it start?

Give us a bit of context in terms of your childhood.

Yeah, so I grew up in Kent in Southeast England, for those who don't know England very well.

Didn't grow up going to church or really thinking about Christian things at all.

As a teenager, I went back and forth about whether or not I believed in God.

But I got to know a couple of Christians in my last two years of secondary school.

I had a weekend job working at a local coffee shop, and the coffee shop was run by a Christian company,

and some of the staff were from one of the nearby churches.

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