Welcome to Season 6 of the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I am here to encourage you in your walk with the Lord, and I'm glad you've joined.

Our program continues to be sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John is a good friend and he's helped me and my family in everything

from stock and mutual fund investing to annuities, life insurance, and retirement planning.

I certainly commend him to you if you have needs in any of those areas. You can reach him at

205-326736-3-64. Thank you again for your ongoing encouragement and support. Let's get started.

Okay, let me tell you first thing today that there is some bait and switch built into today's

episode where I lean you intentionally in one direction and then come in out of nowhere and

completely flip it on its head. I'm telling you right here at the top so you can be listening

for it, and if you catch it before the reveal, let me know. To give you some idea, it relates to

natural perceptions and images that we build in our minds that might not be accurate to what's really going

on. And I'll even give you a random example of this, a riddle that I remember hearing when I was

young. And it goes like this. There's a father and son who are in a car accident. The father is

killed instantly and the son is rushed to the hospital for surgery. The surgeon comes in to begin the

procedure and then announces to everyone, I cannot complete this surgery, this boy is my son. And the

riddle question is, how is that possible? Now, you're probably like, Chris, come on, that's easy. Who would

ever get that wrong? Obviously, the surgeon is his mother. And if that's what you said, that's correct. But when that riddle was originally created back in the 70s or 80s, it was so inconceivable for many males to even envision a woman surgeon that a whole bunch of men could not come up with the right answer.

So sometimes our perception of the way things are and the way it's built out in our mind

can't see it going another way. And so here in a minute we'll take another run at that

through something that's more recent and see how it goes. But first, a little setup. I love

when ideas come out of left field. I mean,

never saw them coming, would have never been an episode, and then something happens or someone

reaches out, and I get super intrigued and share it with you. My original intent this week was

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