Some quick pre workout thoughts. I was, uh, standing in my house looking out the window. I just got to orient myself here at these birch trees. Oh, there's some pretty horses with bells on. That's that noise. Not sure if the bells are so the bears don't eat them or if they just want to locate where they
are not the bears the owners. So these birch trees are turning yellow here in the cold weather. And, uh, I was looking out the window thinking, oh, there's, there are my birch trees that people told me wouldn't grow here and yet here they are. And then behind me, I don't know if you can see there, but
I've got, I think I'm up to 75 apple trees that planted in that orchard. And a bunch of people told me apple trees wouldn't grow here. And, uh, here's my house that, um, was listed at a price that we absolutely could not afford when we bought it. And, uh, what this reminds me of, I stayed in a hotel
once in Manhattan and, um, I was up there for work. The room was so small that, um, it was funny because it's like the furniture was all miniaturized almost and nothing was the normal size, but they still made it the appearance of the normal thing. So it, it was really weird but it felt like no matter
where you stood in the room, you could reach all four walls because that's how small it was. And in the lives of the faithful, it's like that you can reach out and touch what other people would consider impossible all the time, no matter where you stand. And that gets weird when you start thinking about
it figuratively because how do you stand in someone's life so much of who we are and what we do is hidden. Um And you'd have to be around someone 24 7 to even start to get a clue. Although saying that I have to say that for the benefit of the viewers, I, I understand that that's probably hard to think
about for, for some of you. But the truth is that um we are called to be like God and God is the deepest being. And so as a person becomes more like him, that person will also become a very deep person, a person that can't be known in an instant, a person that maybe even needs more than a lifetime to
know fully. And so that's, that's an interesting thought. Anyway, so in the lives of the faithful, if you could step into their life, you'd find that you could touch the impossible. Um, no matter where you stand. And so physically that ends up being true in people's lives. But those things are always
a subset of the full measure because it's not all about, uh, planting trees and things. But, um, this is important because, um, what humans regard as impossible, usually it's just really hard and you don't really know if it's impossible until you try and not just try a little many things do not yield
to just a little. You have to go all in. And that is another thing that I want to end this with is that even though the signs of faith will fill the lives of the faithful, um What you might not see are the failures. And there's an important distinction to make between the failures of the world and the
failures in the Lord's way because there aren't really any failures in the Lord's way. Um His outcomes are inevitable. They can't be frustrated. That's an interesting thing worth digging more into. Uh But we won't do that right here. And now the point is is that every step in the Lord's path yields improvement
, even if it's not in the way that was imagined beforehand. And so I mentioned that something like 75 fruit trees here, I've planted probably double that and the other ones didn't make it. There's a lot of experimentation to find what would work here. So, um things that don't work out the way that we
thought they would, those aren't necessarily anything negative. In fact, they can be just the right thing because uh what we're moving to almost always requires steps that we didn't expect. And when we fail to obtain what we expected, it gives us many blessings. There's greater understanding and wisdom
, there's more accurate valuation. Usually there's greater desire to do what's actually required to obtain what you seek and so on. So those are all important things to think about against the backdrop of the clamor of these gorgeous horses that are not mine. I don't know if you'll be able to see them