1 hour and 9 minutes summed up in two words. Sorry for running long. Spotify’s preacher filter doesn’t work when I get long winded 🤷🏻‍♂️

There are 100,000 threats we face every day. Far too many to ever list, much less ever manage on our own. By acknowledging and handing all of these threats to God, He is able to free us so we can be of better use to Him. Personally, I think this may be the biggest reason God hates for us to worry. Fear paralyzes us, neutralizing one of the weapons He has to fight evil.

Life is scary, but we come almost pre-programmed to anticipate the worst outcome. But He has promised to be with us always. Speaking for myself only here, my fear of the things I can't control usually leads me to create more frightening circumstances, and in a way, self-fulfilling my own fears.

I'll be honest, sometimes life does feel like a "horror movie". But what I've learned and seen more and more lately is that as scared as I may be, when I turn on the lights, it's usually my face revealed to be behind the mask, wielding the chainsaw all along.

Going to average things back out with a short description this week. Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and don't forget Who to thank.

Apologies for the delayed release, and if you noticed, the delayed description. Here's the truth: making this show was just a disaster. Ever have those days? We were delayed recording by a day, Ben and I were both late and I couldn't get a thought to come out in any discernable combination of words to save my life. I dreaded editing this so bad that I was actually glad I still had work to do first.

But 70 minutes or so of audio was neatly arranged, with all the cool stuff bunched together, separated with nice long meaningless ADD breaks that were easy to spot and eliminate. But there was still one last step, and I wasn't sure how this was going to go. But I had to try.

I'm no better at guitar than Ben is at singing. But thanks to digital enhancements, I've only got to hit a few notes at a time, and then go back and find the one out of fifty that sounds decent, and piece them together. Truth be told, I could play the solo to Free Bird if you give me the weekend and a computer. But matching up rhythms isn't easy, I imagine in any case, and definitely not in this band.

When I finally got it all together, I noticed that my guitar part was still a touch off. I'm not quite good enough to keep up with that last little part, and I really didn't want to re-record it. I decided to just go ahead and overlay Ben's vocals and try to see how close I could get.

Turns out Ben had struggled to find the words at about the same rate that I struggled to keep up, so we stayed in sync, almost so well if I must say so myself, that it sounds like it was on purpose. I assure you it was not.

It's cool what God can do with our imperfections.

We dive into a few commonly misconstrued or sometimes simply made-up scriptures that are often quoted that are not actually in the Bible. Then we ADDerail somewhere into a conversation about faith and trust. Thanks for listening!

There are a lot of areas of God that we get very close to understanding, but still get completely wrong. For example, we read that we were made in God's image, so we think He must be like us. Well, it says we were made like God. But our selfish nature twists it to think He was made like us. This might seem arbitrary, but have you ever turned on the interior light of your car while driving at night? The direction and perspective of the light source is far from arbitrary.

This is probably my favorite title so far. Sometimes we hesitate to go to God because we don't know what it'll cost us, or what He will "make us change". But His guidance isn't a cost, nor is it forced upon His followers. It is one of the many gifts that accompany a relationship with Him.

We appreciate you listening and feel free to submit your political views, opinions and feedback to pastorben@fvbaptist.org.

There are a lot of big, deep questions that we don't get to know all the answers to, and it can be frustrating. But as Ben points out, even as a pastor, he doesn't have all the answers, and he doesn't want to know all the answers. Because as he puts it, "that's the beauty of a God we can't figure all out."

We hope you enjoy listening.

Garrett & Ben discuss facing difficult decisions, Garrett's language at football practice, and offer a different look at one of the most popular verses in the Bible. We appreciate you listening.

Garrett and Ben discuss the ways Christians misrepresent Jesus in our daily lives, how He might interact with our society today, and even pick on Taylor Swift a bit to make a point (that was a personal favorite).

Reach out to Ben at pastorben@fvbaptist.org if there is anything we can ever help with in some way. Have a blessed week.

In this show, we explore the depth and breadth of the reach that pride has in our day to day lives. The simplest and even best of our intentions can be used against us if we are selfishly serving our own interests instead of God's. But how do we learn the difference?

Reach out to Ben at pastorben@fvbaptist.org if there is anything we can ever help with in some way. Have a blessed week.

The title of this episode comes from about the 11:00 minute mark and at the time, it was just funny. But I obviously love analogies, and I think this one fits. Ben points out that if I'm so worried about breaking my phone, maybe I should buy a case? In the same way, God offers us protection and we often decline it because we think we can handle the challenges ourselves. Believe me, no amount of effort or caution is ever going to make me stop dropping my phone. I've accepted it as a part of life. And yes, you can take dropping my phone literally, or figuratively.

Ben and I greatly appreciate you taking the time to listen to us ramble. Feel free to reach out to Ben at pastorben@fvbaptist.org. Also, we'd love any suggestions for topics you'd like us to chat about on the show, and the Q&A feature is great for that. We'd love to hear from you!

Pastor Ben Pearce and Garrett Layell discuss the fears, worries and guilt that build up between us and God in our day to day lives.