Never despise the day of small beginnings. I absolutely love that verse. Everything that grows starts small in comparison to what it becomes. When I was growing up, I was actually pretty small. I was born early and placed in an incubator for weeks. Many people underestimated me because of my size and because of that I was picked on. In high school that came to an end when I learned an expression - little frame - big pain. I stopped allowing my size to be a liability and used it to my advantage. Short folks have a different perspective and great leverage. Satan loves us to focus on the small things to keep us small. Life keeps us limited because we quite before things even have the opportunity to form. Faith sees the small things and expects them to grow. That becomes the advantage. While most people in life are limited, people of faith trust God through the process of growth and development. They refuse to quit and live life with expectation instead of disappointment.

Sometimes in life things do not go as planned. It is guaranteed that at some point or another, things will come to an end, the best laid plans will fail, people let us down. relationships will drift and heartbreak will happen. It is important how we handle those times. We all know people that we love and respect who have had unspeakable and unexplainable things happen. This podcast looks at these difficult times with humor, honesty and hopefully a great deal of clarity.

The older I get the more I appreciate the idea of finishing well and finishing strong. We give a great deal of emphasis on how to start things, and that is important. Yet, what we are seeing is many people who are having a difficult time completing this race of life well. Both the start and the finish matter. I would say however that finishing well is more important than starting well. No one starts as a champion; they are only a champion after they have completed whatever it was that they started. As Christians we are not concerned with the placement of our ending we are concerned with crossing into heaven having won the race. In this podcast we will discuss what that entail and what that looks like.

I like to keep things Simple. I believe in the simple life. We all like our technology but it seems that the more sophisticated things have gotten the more complicated things have become. Even the things meant to keep life simple and make it easier. I have found that even in Christian and in church circles we have complicated things that Jesus meant to be simple. Have you ever noticed how even the Apostle Paul could take complex spiritual concepts and present them in ways that were easy to understand? In relationships, I absolutely despise pretense. Just be open and honest about things. Listen, I can hang with anyone and their sophisticated, high society shenanigans but I prefer straight, simple and to the point. Direct but not mean. Short, Sweet, meaningful and with clarity. This podcast is about keeping things, everything simple. It is not about a lack of class and decorum it is about keeping it real.

All of us have issues. The truth is I have yet to meet an issue-less person. The Book of Proverbs tells us that we are to guard our heart with all diligence for out of it flow all the issues of life. This means that everything in our life is a heart issue or an issue of the heart. I think of the desperate lady who reached out to Jesus and grabbed hold of the hem of His garment. She had an issue of blood that doctors could not heal. She had spent all of her money trying to solve it, and Nothing. Jesus did. He didn't even touch her. She reached out to Him. Listen, I have issues. What are yours? In this podcast we are going to discuss the issue of our issues.

As Christians we should be setting the bar high in the way we speak, care and have compassion for people. The world has lost their collective mind. People are just not kind, patient and understanding with one another. Unfortunately, many Christians are being pulled into the vortex that seems to be causing people to no longer know how to be civil with one another. I would contend in the strongest terms that Jesus is calling us to live at a much higher level of maturity. There is a term that many are throwing around today - empathy. Empathy is a great word. With great meaning. What our culture calls empathy I call "toxic" empathy". It is good to feel for people; to care for people, but we can do that without agreeing with them when they are wrong or behaving badly. However, it is vital that we look with understanding and caring at why people act and say what they do. On the cross Jesus said - "Father forgive them for they know not what they do". Can you imagine? He was still showing concern for people who were killing Him. That is powerful empathy, civility and compassion. This podcast is a discussion about how we can better respond as Christians in world with growing civil unrest.

There are some people that the world can just not stamp down. People hit by the trials of life the heights of achievement and the people who forget their impact. Leonard Ravenhill was one of those people. This is a little different type of podcast. I want to read something powerful that I ran across and then discuss it. I hope that this podcast is meaningful, impactful and inspiring.