God is Writing This Chapter.

The book of your life is being written as we speak, as you listen to my words mine too. I guess God holds the pen. But what I want you to understand is that you're somewhere in some chapter, in some portion of some book that is your life. Metaphorically speaking. But it's an app metaphor, and I love it because it tells me in a way that I want to tell you that you are insight chapter of your life right now, and there are chapters to come, and only the chapter you're in will read the way that this chapter reads. The next chapter will be very different, good, different, bad, different, strange, different but different. Nonetheless, you can look back on your life and you really easily understand how it's been broken up into chapters. Right, You've had a chapter in your life before you even knew you were alive. This chapter gave way to your childhood. What you can look back and understand was tremendously different from birth to toddler. Right. Maybe some terrible things happened or some great things happened in your life that either worked their way into that chapter or created a chapter in and of itself. Meet the person you love, you get married. This is an undeniable new chapter. How that goes, and how that works out, and what it becomes, you know, doesn't necessarily matter. It matters to your life. But the layout of a life chapter to chapter, as I'm explaining, maybe children come along, these are each a new chapter as well. What I've come to realize many chapters into my own book is you'll never know what the next chapter is. You'll never know what's in store for you next. You could never know, you could never predict it. You can't ask artificial intelligence. And because that's the situation, your hand is not writing the words in your book. Years ago, I wrote Darker Trails and illustrated it with charcoal, and I wrote a book called a story in it called all of our Favorite Books or all of our Favorite Stories, I think it's called, and it was about this metaphor. But I wasn't quite in tune with God the way that I am now. Back then, you know, I didn't know who wrote the story, and I didn't know who turned the pages in this book of life that we are are fundamentally are right. It's different now. Wow, So I'm out here walking around the woods. It's one hundred and plus degrees, but I'd be running, believe you me. But I hurt myself pretty bad, and I think that the right thing to do is to relax a bit and let that heal. So but I'm walking down this path. I'm looking for or wild mushrooms largely been pretty successful, not all edible, but I did find the first chantrails of the year, which are They're too small and too beautiful to mess with, so I'm gonna leave them. Little buttons. They're these just little, tiny little buttons. Oh my god, they're just gorgeous. But I'm talking about writing chapters and writing in books. And I turned the corner and there sits, ah, there sits a quill to do the writing. I'm gonna take a picture of it, all right. We'll turn that into the thumbnail for the podcast here, because that's funny. That's funny. But you'll never know what the chapters are, what chapters are coming, what could be written into the pages. The other thing about the book that is wild is we don't get to see it. You never get to see your book. Is it a thick book? Is it a thin book? Am I? Where where are we at in this book? Am I in the middle? I mean I at forty years old. I hope that I'm reading somewhere in the middle, but we don't know. If we look at our beautiful children, we hope that they're at the beginning of their story. But the way life goes, you never know. I spend a lot of my time, a lot of my life, too much of my life, trying to figure out God, trying to overcomplicate it, trying to put a story together in my head that I could explain, is that I could somehow explain my faith to people and maybe not get made fun of, right. And the saddest thing to me has really been that I put so much into another person's view on my relationship with God that I took too long to even develop a relationship. In many ways, it is a blessing, though in and of itself, Like everything is my chapters, they seem to get better all the time. And if I'm honest with you, I get overwhelmed when I think about it. I get overwhelmed when I think about it. I look in the mirror at myself and I think, you've been here forty years. It's, you know, like you've shunned God for many years, shied away from him. At least half of your life was spent nearly mocking him his existence, the whole thing. You know, who would believe such a thing? The arc, who would believe such a thing? The demand could be killed upon a cross and come back to life. And I get wrapped. I got wrapped up in a game that so many people get wrapped up. And that's completely unnecessary and far too complex. Then God doesn't want you stuck in it. What it is is we give up on faith. And I just want you to know that your faith is completely one hundred percent enough. It's not your job to rationalize the Bible with another human being. And I'm telling you this from my perspective from years ago, right, And the importance of that is that you understand no matter what type of evidence you brought me at in that chapter of my life, I wouldn't have believed it. You could have showed me the shroud of Turin and explained it the whole nine yards, modern science, everything, I wouldn't have believed it. So when you're looking around, O, sorry, there's something something's going on under the leaves around here, something golden. So when when you're gathering together your own faith, I just want you to understand that it's not your job to explain why this why your faith is what it is to people. And not only is it not your job. And I know we're called to evangelize and all that. I mean, that's what the hell I'm doing right now, But I know we're called to evangelize as Christians. But you've got to the lesson I want you to know more than anything is it's nearly impossible to push someone into a religion or to make them believe a thing their health been on not believing. And I think that it would be a waste of your time, just like it was a waste of mine to try to build some subset of explanations so that I could say, yeah, I believe in God and be fully prepared for someone to say, well what about this, this, this, this, this and this and all of this speaks to a complexity in our life right now that is just nothing but a pain in the ess and does it's no good and it's happening on numerous levels, and it's what brought me here today to talk to you just simply about faith, the ability for you to focus on the good things in your life. One of the best ways to do it is to thank God for the good things in your life. You can fill yourself with graciousness. You can fill yourself up with gratitude in a way that and it's the medium for God to enter your being. I think, I think that gratitude is the medium that it's like it just allows him to get in there easier. It feels like to me, this is not biblical. This is me making just remarking on my own experience with God. Right, I find that the more time I spend thinking about how good things have been going, what a life it's been, and even just like the moment to moment gratitude right, Like, I'm just it's a million degrees out right now in Richmond, Virginia. That actually feels great to me. I'm in the woods. The hawks are out if you, I don't know if you can hear them or not. But and I'm just walking around lifting up leaves and looking at mushrooms. But I have so much gratitude for this moment and moments like this, you Like, I get this feeling in my shins. It's the strangest thing to say, I know, but it is what it is. I get this feeling in my shins sometimes and then in my forearms, and it feels like God. I don't know how else to explain. I never felt anything like it before. But it comes at these peak moments of gratitude. And it's not a feeling that comes when things go really well, like Oh I did that thing, I did this thing. Oh I got this money, I made this deal, I finished this book right. This is a different thing. This is It comes during exertion sometimes, but it also just comes throughout the day. It's an amazing feeling. It's a piece of this chapter of my life I never saw coming, never knew would come, never imagine could come. One of the reasons I think, uh, I've been able to let God in so much is because of a simplification of the whole religious thing in my mind, getting away from the trappings, you know, going into churches and just saying I'm into church. You know what I mean. I don't need to know. I don't need to study a manual before I walk in the doors of a church. I can just walk in. I can watch the service. If you want to watch this, just go watch the service. No police are gonna come. I can open the Bible, I can do whatever I want in the Bible. I can read this, I can read that, I can read a whole chapter if i'd like. I don't have to do you know what I mean. And most importantly of all these, I can proclaim faith. And I don't have to be a priest. I don't have to be anything to know that you're surrounded by His presence in that. That's all the permission you need. I don't know. It's huge. It's huge. And in the time of mass media complexity and artificial intelligent complexity and complex issues within the world geopolitical, climate related, whatever, whatever, political, all these complexities, it seems to me the simplest and the best solution to a good life is to simplify. It doesn't mean take the easy way right. Easy and simple are different. But to simplify you can manage your day to day life as follows. And I never knew this. This was a learning thing also, But you can manage your day to day life as follows. Keep your thoughts on the good things as much as possible, right as much as possible. Keep your thoughts on the wood ifs that are good, keep your thoughts on the things that are solid under your feet, what you have achieved, what you have done, what is most certainly coming because of your hard work, and then, of course the realities of your life. Right here, I am in the middle of the woods. It's wonderful, it's beautiful, it's gorgeous, it's alive. There are squirrels jumping in this beautiful bark on this enormous what looks like a giant ash tree, unless there's something wrong with the bark, because it looks like an oak at the bottom, but whatever, irrelevant, Right it isn't oak. It's got a weird bark on it. Yeah, there's enough complexity out here, do you know what I mean? God created a world. It is so immensely complex. We don't have to make it more complicated. We just have to enjoy it as much as possible. You will run into problems. You will have to, you know, pull up the pants and tighten the belt and get to work. And you will run into problems that are earth shattering and earth shaking, and the good job will go away, and the money will run out, and the you know, the relationships will crack and they'll need to be reformed and fixed. It's all part of life when you run into these thoughts, when when you are rotating through your thoughts on the good things and your praise for God and the thankfulness you have that God could give you such a life, right, that you could be gifted with such a life, and what a blessing it is to be you. Because listen, for the most part, particularly if you're in the United States, you're living a blessed life. You have to recognize it. Do you have to study the horrors to know that you live in a blessed life? I don't know. I did. I did for a while, but when life becomes too much, you go to God with the problem. First. God, this is a lot, This is a problem like this is going to really be hard to deal with, and I need your help and I trust that you'll help me. I know that you'll help me. You've never left me. You've never left me. I was a mocking child for two decades of my life and you never left. You know, you were handed still handing me things, still handing me opportunity, despite me being a mocking child for for two decades of my life. And because of that, I know and I want you to know that if you find yourself in a situation where we all do Oh man, this is bad. This is bad. I can't pay this bill, I can't do this thing. Something just happened with the cards not working, the child got sick, whatever, citua, I got hurt. Whatever it is, right, you know, you go to God first, Keep it simple, give him the problem first. God, this is a lot. We can we work on this together, like I need your help with this, and then you can build your battle plan. You can build your battle plan after, but first you go there to the source of all power, and let God know. I'm scared. I don't know how this is gonna work out. I'm gonna look real bad if this doesn't work out the way I want it to work out. Whatever the situation is, right, That is the whole of a day to day operation, right there, that's the whole operation. You can guide yourself through almost everything life's gonna throw at you with that little set of principles right there. If you're meandering through the woods on a hot day and you see a beautiful chantrelle mushroom, thank God for it. If you're healthy enough to meander through the woods on a hot day like today, thank God for those woods. Thank God for the diversity of crushed leaves underfoot that kind of make your travel a little easier, right, And the insane mix of trees and shrubberies and bushes and vinery that grow throughout the woods that make literally make it what it is, make it such a pleasure to be here. And these same plants that are just billowing out oxygen, you know what I mean. It's so densely green in here that I can barely see very far, and every one of these plants is just pumping oxygen out. Man, if you can't see God in that, that's you have no choice. It doesn't matter if you can't see God in that. So you thank Him. As the days go by and the chapters are written and all the blessings are bestowed, you tell him you know, and you return to those memories, all that great day with the kids, and that great day in the woods, and that great day and that amazing show we all did together, and that wonderful whatever the situation is, God is in the gratitude. I've read the Bible, I've gone to church. I'm telling you right now, guys, I've done that stuff in search. But where I connect with him. The most is in gratitude. It's in seeing this world for what it is and getting all your shit out of the way. Unfortunately, in order to get all of it out of the way, you have to be brutally honest. You have to be brutally honest with yourself. You have to be able to say to yourself, this is where I'm really good. You know, I'm really good with these things. And then of course you have to be able to do the opposite. You have to say, you know, I'm not really good at this. You know, I really struggle with a lot of things. I'm failing at some things in a way that is negatively affecting my children, my wife, my family, my extended family, my business. Like, there's some things that are really wrong and I need to work on them. It's not easy for people to do that. It's not easy for anybody to do that, to admit where they are weakest, because we're trained early on that you hide those weaknesses. But you don't have to with God. You can talk about them with God. You can say God, I'm struggling here, man, I need your help with this because it's negatively affecting all kinds of things in my life and I'm not happy about it. I don't want it to keep on this way. I can't serve you if I'm like this, you bring that problem to God. So, if you're feeling overwhelmed by life, by faith, if you want to walk closer to God or something along those lines, you understand that you're living in a world that is hyper complex. You're not supposed to live in fear and anxiety. If you're living in fear and anxiety, then you're living the devil, the life the devil wants for you. Right, it doesn't matter where you do your research. You can do it in texts about demons and the devil in the Bible itself. One thing that you know for sure, fear, anxiety, anger, this is these are the foods. This is the food, the food, the feed of demons. This is what they love. They love the feast on these feelings. That's what the sins are all about. Right, you're feeding that side of the equation. I don't know how many times it's said, but it's said, there's so many times in the Bible that no, fear, don't fear, don't be afraid. It's not because you know you read something like that. If you're not in tune and you start to think like, oh, I'm supposed to be brave, right, you know, it's a warning, it's a warrants letting you know. If you're living in fear. First of all, you don't have faith in God. Your faith in God's not strong enough. If you're living in fear and anxiety, you're also feeding the enemy. You're living the life of the devil wants for you. He wants that. He wants you to sit there and go, oh, the bills are coming. I don't know what I'm gonna do. And I made a mistake, and I don't want to own up to it, and I all these things are going wrong, and I just sit here in this feel and you can almost feel it. If you get in tune with your body, if you get in tune with yourself, you can almost feel it. You get really down, you get really depressed. You can feel there's an aura around you. Right, there's a feeling around your body. It's a disgusting muck. It's an atmosphere of depression. It's holding you down. I ask you, what do you really think that is? I'm talking about? You get in that deep, miserable depression because you don't have money for what you need, you don't have time. You know, you just lost your job, whatever the sit you're divorce, you know, all that stuff that happens death, and you get down and you get deep down into depression and you feel it and it's an aching and it's a it's like you're walking in a bubble. Something has encased you and tuned you. I think you're being fed on. I really do believe that. I think you're being fed on by the entities of the demon realm. I think you're being fed off of. For years, I've felt that. You know, you get in everybody gets in those states. You get in one of those states, you're what is this feeling? It's just like and it's inescapable. It's like there's nothing. You know, my best friend could come in, I could eat, my favorite meal could show up before me right now. You know, my favorite show could come on, whatever, My kids could come downstairs and say, Dad, we love you, let's play. And nothing, nothing can get you out of there easily. Sometimes fitness can get you out of there. Now that's a whole other show for another day. But there's something about that there is something true to that. Sometimes, yeah, self imposed suffering fasting can pull you out of that. And that's in the Bible too. It's nothing new. I'm not telling you anything new. Starve the demon, but you get you get entombed in that, and it feels inescapable. Your rational mind gets completely entombed in that, and you say, there's no way I can get out of this feeling right now. It doesn't matter what happens, you know, it just doesn't matter what happens right now. I can't get out of this feeling. I feel terrible. I'm no good. I'm terrible. I'm always making these mistakes. I'm always doing these things. I'm always doing the same bullshit I've been doing my whole life. Always. If I would have just done it this way, it would have been better. If I would have went back and done it that way. I should have always. You know, Mom told me to do this, Dad told me to do that, my buddy said to do it this way. Everybody was right except me, because I'm never right. I'm always wrong. We've all been in that snowball, that avalanche, right that's burying us alive. And that's what earns you into food. All that just radiates, all it emanates off you. It's your spirit, there's something emanating off you. And you're just surrounded by these creatures, these little demons, and they're just slurping that feeling up, man, just eating it up. Which is why it's so important. It's so important for you to first go to him. You go to him first. You get that piece of mail, you get that email, you get that phone, call you, whatever it is, and you go first to him. He's like, Dad, you know what I mean. He's like, you go first to him. Oh, man, I got a problem. You're not even gonna believe it, you know, And you start there, I'm gonna need some help here, you know what I mean. Like, I'm gonna need some help to get out of this one. And you pray, and you pray to God and I can't tell you how to try us in him. I can't tell you how to have that kind of faith in him or you know that he's gonna help, you know, and you're gonna get through it. I can't. I don't know how to tell you that. I don't think anyone can tell you that. You can't tell a person be faithful, right, you can't do it. So I'm telling you the steps to get there. Because when you stand before God and pray to him and ask him for help, things happen. Think you've got to get resourceful, you've got to get to work. And sometimes sometimes I think the only thing that happens, you know, it's not like you pray to God and say, God, I need your help here. Man, this is too much. This is too much. I can't bear it. Sometimes I think all God does is fight the spiritual side of the battle for you in that moment, because you know, when you're in that state where you're getting eaten alive by the demonic, when you're in that deep level of depression, you know you can't help nobody. There ain't no problem you're gonna fix. You can't help nobody. You can't make nothing better. There's nothing's getting better. You know that you've been in that state. Sometimes I think when we ask God for help, first, he goes to battle against that presence that's gonna entombe you like I just talked about, and he gets out of your way and you find yourself in this situation. I've the guys, I just the reason I've been here so many times. I've been here, so many times where I've on both sides of the ball. You're completely you're completely rendered incapable of feeling, of doing, of progressing. You're rendered just completely incapable by the circumstances, right, and you find yourself in that kind of a nightmare hell, and you know there's nothing I can do together. I can't even think straight. You know, I've got in like car accidents because I've been in this level of depression where it's just like I don't even know where I'm at, you know what I mean, Like I'm barely here, and and I've been on the other side, you know, I've been on the other side where it's like, oh, all of a sudden, all these ideas pop in your head. All of a sudden, everything's out of your way, and you're like Neo. You see the problem, you see the solution, and this is what I gotta do. I gotta do X, Y and Z, And if I do these things, I'm gonna get out of here. I'm gonna get out of this problem. I'm gonna fix this problem, you know, whatever it is. But you got to go to him first. You go to him first. It's not like you're going to get a package at the front door. Oh look, this package has marked all my problems. I open it up and it's empty. They're all gone, right, Or there's a million dollars in they're great, it's all over. No, it never works like that, you know what I mean. Sometimes some things happen. Sometimes some impossible to explain things will happen. You go to God for help, You get a phone call and you go, why I didn't talk to you in a while, or you know one of the things. Yeah, I mean, sometimes those miracles happen. Sometimes God reaches out in interesting ways. But I think for me, what I see most is clarity. God goes to war on whatever it is, the ruinous powers that are converging on your head, on your mind, on your soul at that moment, because they see an inn, they see a way in right. Oh, his faith's cracking a bit. Oh he's angry. There's sin there. We can feast on that. We can feed into that anger too, you know. And as long as we keep him away from God, we can really press him down, we can juice him. So go to God first, pray God. I can't do it is too much. And then of course when you're on the other side of the spectrum, we don't forget about him. You know, you find yourself in this situation where I'm at right now. I'm coated, just in this thin layer of sweat from the heat, and I'm walking back home and my family's there. My home, my house, you know what I mean, my house I've lived in for fifteen sixteen years, whatever it's been. Now this beautiful place in Richmond, Virginia. I met a woman in a whole nother state and took these great risks and all the wild cursing God, and I don't know, I don't know if I believe it, eh, And He's still It gave me so much, man. And you you gotta just exist on that gratitude. You gotta just float on that river of gratitude at all times and dip your hand in that cool water and know that this is your story being written, you know, And I have to imagine that if you live a grateful life, it gives you the ability to look back on that story, to look back on those chapters and say, well, that was pretty that was pretty damn good. As opposed to living without gratitude where you find yourself in a situation where you're always saying, well is me, man, it's been a rough life. I can't believe that happened. Remember when when mom passed away? Remember when this happened, and that happened, Like all these horrible things are always happening to me, and that's just how how it's perception. So live in gratitude, PBN family. Understand the new chapters are coming, right and that's that's a warning for both sides. A new chapter will be written. So if you're living in a phenomenal chapter here and now, oh my god, I think a year is playing with my neighbors dog, if you're living in a in a new chapter, or you're if sorry, if you're living in a chapter where life is great and wonderful, and understand, man, that's temporary too, you know, and you better enjoy that. You better enjoy that chapter of your life. And also understand that, like if you're living in hell right now, if you're in a chapter that's just a nightmare, it will end. That chapter will end and a new one will be written. And if you think you know what's coming, you have no idea, right If you think you have any idea what could be coming. You have no clue what the next chapter will hold. And the worst thing you can do is sit there and belly ache about it and say, oh, you know, it's never gonna be good for me. Just is never gonna be good. It's always gonna be trouble and pain and suffering. No, it's just might just be this chapter, and it might be a long chapter. Thank you guys for listening. It's weird to be at this point in my life where I feel compelled to share these experiences with you and share my walk with God with you, and I hope I can free you up a little bit, you know, from some suffering where I hope I can hope I can free you up into you and let you into your faith a little more. You know, there will come a time when you have to stand before I mean, you will be waiting at the end, and the worst thing you want to do is say, you know, I really did want to get to know you God, but I was afraid other people would make fun of me. I was afraid that I would sound stupid if I said I just have faith in God and I don't know why, and It's not my job to explain to you which pages of the Bible to read so that you can understand my faith. And once you get over those hurdles, man, it's all gravy at least between you and him. Talk to you soon, Folks, enjoy the rest of your day here. It is a beautiful day, even with the heat of consist the same tran