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 a wonderful company, Creation to Revelation. This group of Christians believe it is extremely important that we teach the Word of God to our kids.

They have original graphic illustrations from the beginning of the Bible to the end,

featuring the beautiful and consistent presence of Jesus throughout.

You can explore all of that at creation to revelation.com.

I'm so thankful you're here, so let's get started. Hey, welcome back and thanks for listening in.

If you are catching this on launch day, it is October the 3rd of 2022.

So welcome to October.

I hope that this month and the rest of the year goes really well for you.

As for me, I'm still stuck back in September.

I had a couple of trips to take leading into the end of the month, and I wanted to get a little bit ahead on episodes.

So for me, today is

September the 21st, which probably does not mean anything special to you, nor did it for me

when I woke up today. But then I saw a post this morning from Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle

Morning, someone that I've interviewed on this program before, and actually one of the

great initial inspirations for starting this podcast, he posted that today is World Gratitude

Day. He had a picture of himself and his family, and he expressed how thankful he was for the

good things in his life. So let me just ask you first, did you know that that was a thing?

Because I didn't. I went to Google it and I was hoping for a very compelling story to share

with you today. But it's really kind of straightforward. In 1965, a group of people in Hawaii

were enjoying Thanksgiving Day and said, you know, I think we should do this

more than once a year. They used their connections to spread the word, and in 1966 in September,

...