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.

Hey, welcome back this week to more Bob Goff. I love this guy. He's such an encourager. His stories

just hit right in the heart. They seem really easy to kind of identify with,

and when you can identify with someone's experiences, and they're trying to get you to lean into Jesus,

it's just a really nice mix. As always, we can't recommend everything everybody says, but overall,

it leaves the right kind of marks on me, and I thought you might enjoy it too. So I put a couple of links in last week's show notes that get you to the book Love Does and also his second book, Everybody, Always.

I'm already about halfway through the second one, and Kate, Luke's girlfriend, has already let me borrow the third book, Dream Big, so there may be another episode or two upcoming. As it is, this will

be the third episode of ESM devoted to some portion of Bob's life. I did a little archive digging,

and back in May of 2022, I did an episode called Be Secretly Incredible. It was based on a YouTube

video from Bob talking about the work that gets done

in other countries. A friend of mine, Kenzie Fountain, had suggested it to me. As I recall, there was a

little bit more information about him and his humanitarian work, so I'll link that in today's show

notes if you'd like to go back and check it out. But for today, I have to share with you what is far and

away my favorite stories of all of the life events that he talks about. It is his first story

that he tells. It is chapter one of the book Love Does from 2012. I meant to share it with you

last week, but I had some things I needed to get off my chest. So thank you for that, for listening and for following along and being so kind and supportive.

But now, let me tell you about a story he titles, I'm with you.

So Bob recalls a time when he was a high school student in California.

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