Welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in.

Today's podcast is sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John Cunningham is a friend of mine and a brother in Christ, and he can help you with financial

decisions and future planning.

He's been a big help to me and my family, and I commend him to you.

You can reach him at 205-913-1720.

I am so thankful you're here, so let's get started.

Hey, welcome back. I hope that your day is going well. I'm always thankful to get a chance each week to share some encouragement with you. And today in particular, I'm just

kind of waning nostalgic. We are now in the back half of January, and it was three years ago

this week that I sat down in my closet and recorded an episode called Just Get Better and loaded it

to the internet. It had been a kind of interesting journey leading up

to that day. I have a friend, Kyle Arrington, brother in Christ, and we'd been talking on the phone

and he was like, dude, you need to do a podcast. You need to take the things that you believe

and the practical side of that and just share it with people. And I think my first thought was why. I mean,

I preach every week. Two sermons a week. They're online. I've been preaching for 20 years. There's

lots of content out there. But then he convinced me to think of it a little differently. What if we

put out something a little shorter? Something that's not worship and isn't exactly always scripture-centric?

It's just encouraging and practical and hopefully useful.

And that might hit you wrong as a listener.

You might be like, well, it always needs to be Bible-centric, but I'm thinking more like most of the conversations we have, that always include

the element of God, always, but sometimes just talk about life and how to live it better.

So I was intrigued about the concept, but still couldn't really figure out what that was supposed

to sound like. But it just so happened. At around that same time, I had just finished a book called

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