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One way of defining faith is as a willingness to do what makes the most sense. Now, this isn't a typical definition of the word, but it is a very powerful one. And if you'd like to read more about that, I encourage you to read this book I wrote called Through Faith, or reread it if you've read it before. I want to give an example of this from the other day when I was in town. I had to go to town for a list of things. I stack these up so I can stay in my house as long as possible. but I had to go to town and so my wife asked me to stop at the grocery store and top off a few things that we needed so she wouldn't have to go for another couple weeks which is nice. So I did that and because I was there I walked through the aisles and checked the sales. Now we typically buy boneless I'm I'm sorry bone in skin on chicken quarters for about 87 cents per pound. There's only one place in our town that you can get that. We have a whole bunch of grocery stores, but this is a very inexpensive price. You have to go to one place and there's one spot in that store's freezer section where they sell these big 10 lb bags of chicken in in quarters for 87 cents per pound. So, that's how we buy all of our chicken because the boneless, skinless prices are more than double that. So, as I was walking through, I was paying attention to what the sale prices were because if there's something that's not perishable and it's at a deep discount, I'm going to stock up. And I saw that they had boneless, skinless chicken on sale for I think 110 a pound. And I know because I've done the math. I know how much of those chicken quarters are bone and I know how much of the weight is from the skin. Now, we eat the skins when we cook the chicken and we feed the bones to the dogs. Now, I know a million people are going to say you shouldn't give chicken bones to dogs. We have huskys. We have never ever had a problem and they love them and it's good for them. So, they it doesn't hurt them. It's very healthy and it's a good use of the bones. And I don't know if you've checked the price of dog food lately, but it's it's pretty expensive. So, this helps us keep our cost down for for our food and our dogs food. So, I saw that the chicken breast was on sale for about 110 per pound. And I knew that that was way less expensive for the actual meat than we typically pay for these quarters. So, what did I do? Was it on my list? No. Did I just get one pack? No, I got three armfuls. My mom is visiting and she laughed at me. Well, she doesn't do this and that's why she's poor. Plain and simple, right? So, I got three armfuls. Now, I would have gotten more. I would have cleared out that case, but I don't keep the inventory of the freezers. My wife does. I have no idea what our freezer space situation was, but I was confident that what I got would fit. And if not, it's cold outside and we're good for a couple more months. Um, and coolers if that's what it takes. Right now, this is an abnormal way of doing things. But it's faith. It makes complete sense. It makes dollars and cents in this case to do this. Why wouldn't you do this? If you can store the meat before it goes bad and you can get it for 50% off, why wouldn't you stockpile it? So that's faith. And it seems like a little thing, but I'm telling you, principles are transcendent. They apply across domains. They also scale up and down. And so if you're not scaling and you're not applying them across domains, you're not living by principles and you're unprincipled. You're just a lemming marching to the beat of someone else's drum. And I stood there for a second because I'm weird like this and I wanted to people watch. It wasn't 10 minutes. It was just a couple maybe one minute tops, maybe less than that. But I stood there and I watched the case from afar because I was curious if other people were paying attention to the price. More than half of people did not notice it at all. They went in sheep style, robot style. I must buy one pack of chicken. And that's what they did. They put one pack. They didn't even look at the price. They kept going. less than 50% looked at the price and I saw the reaction and they'd get two packs of chicken instead of one pack. This is unbelief. It's what it's called in the scriptures, unbelief. Faith is willingness to do what makes sense. Unbelief is everything else. It doesn't make any sense to buy two packs of chicken if it's at a once a year sale price, right? So you may say, well maybe they don't have the space. And now we get into stacking. This is fun. Good decisions beget good decisions. Light cleaves to light. Good decisions make other good decisions easier. So suppose that you don't have any freezer space. You can go to Costco and spend, I don't know, $250 and get a very nice upright freezer. It's not huge, but it's pretty big. And it's got drawers in it. It's very nice. They sell those there routinely. Depending on your utility rates, which where I live, they're still quite low. It costs almost nothing to run that thing all year round. If you put it in your garage, it's even cheaper because it's cold here most of the year. For the price of that fridge, if you bought enough chicken to fill it, you would pay for the free freezer. Not fridge, freezer. You'd pay for it and then you could keep that freezer for another 10 years. You might have to spend $8 to replace the um oh, what's it? Capacitor on the thing. because sometimes those go out or 20 bucks for a fan, but it's going to last 10 years or more. What's the advertised cost for that? What's the cost benefit for that? Now, you might say, well, so that's stacking because once you have the freezer and it's paid for, you get to save more money every single year. You get to save money. And guess what? If there aren't any good sales, you unplug the freezer and you just leave it be. Crack the door so it doesn't get moldy, but just leave it be. Now, you might say, "But I don't have the space for a freezer." Well, stacking, going back in time or moving forward in time, there's a chain of decisions where eventually you might have the opportunity to buy a house that has space for a freezer. And so, good decisions, they beget good decisions. They make other good decisions easier. What about all the money you save by buying chicken 50% off is right? Well, that frees up money for other things you can spend it on. And maybe there are things that you can spend it on in ways because maybe your food budget's really tight and you don't have I don't know what I bought like 75 pounds of chicken or something. Maybe you don't have an extra $90 to spend on your grocery bill. But if you do stuff like this, you will. You see? So, you start with what you've got. And this is a lesson that extends far beyond anything grocery related or money related. If you start with what you've got and you use it better, you will have more to use for other things that are currently out of your reach. It's true of resources. It's true of our character. If you do the best that you can see right now, you open doors to being even better. There are so many lessons in this and it it you look at it and it's like, well, this is just a dumb little story from the grocery store. And yet and yet, if you live these principles, you will have a fundamentally different life than if you don't. It's amazing. God expects us to be wise to to be intentional to actually think about what we're doing from moment to moment and to orient ourselves to the best that we can understand right now because that is the gateway to everything that's better than that. So think about this and next time you're in the grocery store now you can be someone who who watches the bad decisions of other people instead of making them yourself.