 I'm with you today after the two weirdest weeks of my life, which is saying a lot to be 65 years of age and say that to you. About six months ago I got a random DM from a random stranger in America asking me what I'd be interested in auditioning for an acting role. I'm like, what? I've pasted for 32 years the same church in England, 12 years ago handed it over to my daughter and son-in-law who have done a great job there and since then I've been doing what I do all over the world. So to get this random DM, so one of my team went back and said, I think this is a mistake, Paul is not an actor, he is a speaker and blah blah blah and just pushed it away. But the guy came back saying, no, I just found Paul on Instagram, looked at everything he's posted and on YouTube and I would love him to audition for the lead role in a new American TV drama, turns out to be genuine. This guy is a major TV producer in America, found him on Instagram, DM'd me and the journey began so I thought, well, you know what, nothing to lose, it'll come to nothing anyway, I'm not an actor. So they sent me a script, I memorized the part of the script, I was auditioning, went to London, went to a studio, did the audition tape, sent it to America, had nothing for two months. A few months later I got another message saying, would I do another audition now on Zoom with other actors in America and the director and the producer of the show, so I'm like, this is getting weirder and weirder. So I did all of that, then heard nothing for another month, six weeks, then got a message kind of about February nudging into March to tell me I had got the part. I know, I'm up against all these actors in America and I got this part and I'm not an actor. So I've just finished filming the pilot of this new TV show in Atlanta the last two weeks, I play the lead role in a new TV drama, I play a psychologist. I can't tell you the name of the show, I've signed an NDA about the name of the show, but the name of the show is fantastic. The name itself would make me watch it or buy the book or whatever it was titled to. It's a great name and it's a great idea. I play a psychologist, especially to people that are elite and exclusive, who get in trouble. And I tell you this for two reasons, one because it's never too late to try something new, never think you're past it or I can't I teach people all the time, like some of you do, you know, never stop taking chances, stepping out, stay curious, be adventurous, take risks. I teach that all the time. Then when the when the DM came, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, this guy, this isn't right. Anyway, I stepped into that space thinking nothing would come of it. Now I've just finished filming it and it's now going to be submitted to networks. So I'll see you on Netflix or Amazon or something by the end of this year. Seriously, it's a huge production. I tell you for that reason. Secondly, because I play a psychologist, another reason I was interested in the show was because it's speaking into the mental health, emotional health space, which is a huge issue. In fact, May is Mental Health Awareness Month in America. Don't know if you're aware of that, but it's good that we're talking about this, not just for a month, we should be talking about all the time. And it's very much in keeping with what I want to speak to you guys about today. I learned my craft as a communicator, not in the Bible Belt of America, but in the hostile territory of a heathen England. 98% of our population do not attend church, which is true of Europe and a quite anti-church. Most people in our country hate church for one simple reason, they've been. And what they didn't find is they didn't find the church was like this. They found the church like this. Come as you are is very trendy to say until they do come as they are. And that was true of our church. We had all the theology of including everyone, loving everyone, the lyrics of our songs, the language of our sermons, was to reach everyone until people different to us came in. And I began reaching the poor in our city aggressively, going into neighborhoods where no one came to our church from and started busing people in hundreds of them. And the white middle-class people in our church who thought it was their church freaked out. And we had a struggle. For about three years we went through a lot of carnage. Many, many people leave in the church. And all over what I thought we were all here for in the first place, we were supposed to reach people. I didn't know that when we sang about reaching the world, we didn't mean it. And this church will be tested. All churches are. As to whether we mean what we speak about, whether we believe what we preach and shout amen to, we all believe in that until a version of that comes and says next to you or comes and takes your seat. When you come to church one day and somebody sat where you normally sat, and you're like, this isn't right, this is my church. So having gone through all of that journey and past it for decades and now doing what I'm doing around the world, I come to be aware more than ever that we have got pastors and leaders around the world dropping like flies. They love God. They're spiritual people. They're good people. But they have not taken care of their mental health and their emotional health. And I don't want you to repeat that. So I want to speak to you today about looking after your emotional health. And the title of this message, if you like titles and I do, is emotional prosperity. The oldest person I've ever known died a few years ago. She was in our church for years and her name was Gertrude Peacock. I know you don't know her. It's like reading names in the Bible and you read the name and think, why is the name there? Well, if it was your name, you'd be glad it was there. So saying her name, when I mention her name occasionally out loud, it reminds me of how much I owed to her. She died a few years ago, age 107. I used to have conversations with her about aging well. And how did she do that? And she told me that beginning of every decade, she sat down and made a list of things she should do more or less of in order to assist her aging well in the upcoming decade. I committed to that in my late 30s, early 40s. I committed to that. One of the things I committed to was aging well across a range of areas in my life. In fact, I'll mention some resources later at the end. One of them is my online video course about aging well. As you can see, I am 65. No false advertising here. Come on. But, you know, we're obsessed in the West with aging well physically. There's no benefit in looking good physically. I am being ill on the inside or be mentally ill or emotionally sick. So my aging well course is about aging well physically and mentally and emotionally and relationally and generationally in five areas. And today I wanna focus with you on aging well emotionally. You will not age well in any way if you don't do it on purpose. No one ages well by default. You have to be intentional about lots of things in life. Not least of which is your internal ecosystem. That does not fix itself. Please don't ever think that because you're born again, you're immune from doing this work. You are not. I've passed it for too many years to believe that that's true. I wish it were true, but it's not. I've helped too many of God's people who were spirit-filled and moved in the power of the spirit and glowed in the dark when they anointing came on them. I had angels rivi dancing on the duvet regularly but did not take care of their mental and emotional health. And ultimately that caught up with them. And it will with us all and it will with us personally and corporately. So I think we're in a good space today to talk about this together, y'all okay? So my communication style is European. It has come from a heathen country. So my whole vocabulary, my whole style and culture of communication is forged in the fires of that country. I come to America, everybody goes to church and I'm like, what? I see people praying in restaurants. I'm like, what? In England you'd be arrested for that. Like this is not socially acceptable. And there's so many things I love about your country and that's one of them. But one of the downsides of that is that when you grow up in a country whose culture is to attend church and be in church, we can assume that by being in church and being around church, a lot of other things are gonna be taken care of and they're not. If it were not so, I would tell you because I would love it to be not so. I wanna share with you six principles, hacks, things you can do that I've discovered that came to me the hard way. They're gonna come to you free and easy today. Don't think the ease with which I share these things with you means that they came to me without a lot of work, a lot of hassle, a lot of sleepless nights and struggle. These six keys and principles to emotional prosperity. I want you to be prosperous emotionally. Not prosperous financially and materially and bankrupt emotionally, which many are in America and all around the world. What does it profit a man, Jesus said? If he gains the whole world and loses himself, loses his soul. So these six things are gonna be getting you moving this week. I'm gonna need to think about these this week. I hope he sparks a conversation amongst you and your family and friends this week. When I mentioned these six things, they're gonna help you do an audit. A little audit today on your emotional health. Firstly, I wanna say to you, emotions are data. They are not directives. Let's come up on screen there. My social media address is at the bottom there, by the way. If you don't follow me on social media, I think at the moment, you probably won't go to heaven. I don't want to exaggerate it, but it's somewhere in the region of that seriousness. The TV producer came to me on a DM. So that's the best versions of social media. When it works, it works well in connecting people around the world. Emotions are data. Emotions are incoming information. They're intelligence. They're the dashboard. It's just information. Just because you feel an emotion does not mean you have to do anything with it. No one tells us that. We don't teach it in school. We don't teach it in college. Many parents don't teach it to their children because parents that are at the mercy of random emotions pass that onto their children. Then they wonder where the kids get it from. And generationally, families live in generational trauma because the adults never did the work I'm encouraging us to do today to keep working on our internal ecosystem. Your internal world is far more important than your external world. In fact, three John verse two, John wrote to the church and said, beloved, he said, I wish above all things. That's a big thing to say to a church. Above all things, I wish that you would prosper and be in health even as your soul prospers. So what he's saying is all true prosperity in life and I'm all for that and all its variations. All prosperity is saying really is rooted in internal prosperity. That if you have a prosperous soul, it is a solid foundation for a prosperous external life. But when we pursue external prosperity and internally we are in famine and in deficit and we are bankrupt and dry, something's going to have to give eventually and it does. And we need no more examples of that to see that we don't want to increase the gap between our external persona, our external image and really we're running away inside from the reality of how small we are internally. So emotions are data. If you can get this down today, it would have been worth you coming today just for this. Because some of you, many of us as humans, we assume that just because we're feeling the emotion, it's then our job to respond to it even if it's coming in on phone, get involved in its energy, say something about it, make a comment, get into an argument, return the emotion that's coming to us to someone that's bringing towards us. So if we understand that all emotion, all emotion is optional. No emotion is obligatory and a command. All emotion is data. You get to decide what you do with that data. No one tells us that. And so if you'll see emotion as data and information, not as a directive that you must respond to it, you'll already start this week far more in command of your emotional life than if I hadn't told you that. Our emotions become our mood. And our moods become our temperament. And our temperaments become our personality. And you can be as Christian and as walking with God as you like, but that doesn't fix temperaments that you have had all of your life that no one's spoken to you about. Or if they did because your temperament perhaps is to be offended when someone tries to help you. And your temperament isn't openness and teachability and someone tries to help you. You do the same thing you always do. You get defensive. You remove that person from your life. You don't spend time with them because they're telling you perhaps some hard truths. And I don't mean that everybody does that well. Sometimes people say hard things to us but they don't say them well. And that makes us resistant to what's been said even though what's been said is good for us. So I'm not advocating that. But these things that we don't take care of when we don't realize that emotions are data and we internalize them or take them all on board, it becomes a mood and a temperament and a personality. And it doesn't matter how much you try to do to concrete over that with spiritual activity or a great prayer life or been in church. Because in the church we've not been good on this whole area about speaking about the soul. I grew up in the church and every time I had something in my life that didn't seem to be aligning with God, it was called solish. I'd never heard that word before. It's not a Bible word. That's solish. That's solish. And in my generation, solish was listening to Elvis or wearing denim or having tattoos or a man bun. Now we put those people on stage. How times have changed. So we gave up all of that stuff because it was solish and have an attitude that wasn't good was solish. And to ask a question that was an awkward question was to be solish and so on and so on. Millions of young people are leaving the church in America. I don't know if you're aware of this. You need to be real about this. It's well researched. Millions of young people leaving the church in America, late teens, early twenties because they feel they can't be themselves in the church. They feel that if they express doubt that the leadership try to fix them. What is doubt is a genuine authentic part of a human's journey. We've called Thomas doubting Thomas but the Bible never ever called him that. We've been unkind to Thomas. We've been unkind to Martha as well. She's the one that chose the worst part. She was in the kitchen using a different oil that's just as important as the oil on Jesus' feet. Martha was here before you all showed up today. She was getting this place ready, putting the lights on, putting out the chairs. You've got to have Martha in the house as well as Mary. I've been to Mary churches where they're just at the feet worshiping. They're the ones that forget to pick you up at the airport. I've been to Martha churches where it's hard to find Jesus because it's so organized. So we've got to have both in the house. So I want you to stop right now with taking everything in as a directive because it's shaping your personality and the people that love you are aware of it but the struggling to stay around you, the struggling to continue to like you, the struggling to keep including you. And you wonder why maybe it's to do with this and in this mental health awareness month, emotional health awareness month, I want you as you leave today to think where have I taken every emotion and not seen it as data? What do I do with this? I'm going to stand off and watch it a minute. I don't think so. No, thank you. If I was up here today and threw a ball out into the audience and it came to your direction and it was aiming for you, you would instinctively catch it. That's what we do with emotions. You don't need to catch it. Even if people say, even if people say, this is for you, says who? Even if it's got your name on it and they throw it at you because if it's got your name on it, you feel more obliged to catch it because you feel, oh, well, they love me of my best interest as heart, maybe not. Maybe they have another agenda that's more controlling and manipulative. That's why your name's on it. So don't feel obliged to catch it because it came in your direction. Just keep your hands folded. It's interesting. I don't think I'll respond to that. Tell the devil not to do it. I'm not gonna accept. So it's that. So emotions are data. This took me years to figure that out. They are not directives. Secondly, secondly, emotions are not feelings. It took me years to figure that difference out between emotions and feelings. We use those two words interchangeably. And as if they're the same thing and they're not. Emotions and feelings are not the same thing. An emotion becomes a feeling when you give it a meaning. Until an emotion has a meaning, it can't become a resident feeling that comes and makes its home inside you. Once it has, once an emotion has a meaning, when you give it a reason and you give articulation and language to it, it becomes a feeling. So feelings are emotions that have graduated college. Feelings are emotions on steroids. Feelings are emotions with a degree. So you must be careful. With any emotion going on in your life right now, whoa, slow down. I tell people all the time, whoa, I've got eight grandchildren. I tell them all the time, whoa, slow down. This may not be what you think it is. This may not merit the reaction and the drama you are producing right now. This may be something else altogether. Can we talk about it? As they get older, my oldest grandchild is 19. So with all of them, I have been from the day they came into our world trying to do better for them than my parents did for me, trying to do better for my kids than my parents did. So what meaning are you giving to what she said to you? What meaning are you giving to what I am saying to you? Because the truth is, and I speak about this, I'll mention it later, in my communication masterclass that I do around the world, that I learned this as a communicator years ago. I figured this out again the hard way. Sitting where you sit, I figured this out. There are two voices always speaking when someone's speaking. There's two voices in this room right now. There's what I am saying to you. That's one voice. I'm on the microphone, you can hear me. There's what I am saying to you, but, but, but. That is what you are saying to you about what I'm saying to you. That is the most powerful voice in your life. What you say to you about what someone says to you that in a conversation you have is born out of all the meanings you've given feelings to over the years. So somebody can say something quite innocent and you suddenly get offended or uncomfortable or feel got that or judged. And no one's maybe doing that. And so what happens is that when those feelings are given a name and a meaning, they become part of our life's narrative. And once it becomes a narrative, you can't find it anymore. It's just so embedded in your life, in your psychology, in your mental health that this narrative now is going on. So we live suspicious or if threatened or live insecure or live angry or variations of those energies that we live in all the time, live hyper-vigilant, live guarded, live untrusting because our narrative led us to believe that's the way to survive in life. And being an loving God and serving God doesn't eradicate that. If you don't think that's true, you need to pay attention to the people who spent 24, 7 for three years with Jesus. And he didn't make a dent, a dent on some things in their lives. Judas was still Judas, Peter was still Peter. You know, Peter walked with Jesus three years, 24, 7, and he was part of the inner core of three. And he still hated Gentiles. Go figure. How can he be with Jesus 24, 7 for years and not get the idea he loves everybody? When Jesus reaches the Samaritan woman, he sends the disciples on an errand knowing that they couldn't stomach being around those people because Jews and Samaritans had historical, tribalistic standoff divisions, races and prejudice. And so they're with him 24, 7 and Peter still years after Pentecost, years after all of that, still needs a sheet to come down three times from heaven and say to him, Peter, nothing is unclean that God accepts. It wasn't about animals, it was about people. Peter was prejudiced against. So don't think being in church and being full of the spirit means you don't need to hear this stuff because that's what happens to leaders. We're up here churning it out and we're preaching and we're not taking care of ourselves. They say never trust a skinny chef because they're not eating what they're serving you. And if we don't eat what we're serving you, we get skinny inside. We get emaciated and we get sick. And we're not happy and we're not fulfilled but we're churning it out every week. And you're a year old. This is a good time to talk about this. So that 10 years from now, we're not up here performing, churning it out but internally I'm burnt out, I'm exhausted, I'm not happy, my home's not happy because we're not paying attention to our mental health, our emotional health. All of you, all of us must be doing this together. I can't do this for you nor you for me but if I do this for me, it will make me better for you. My greatest gift to you is a healthy me. Seriously, your greatest gift to me is a healthy you. Don't do it for me, do it for you but I benefit from that too as does everyone around you when we lift our game, when we get better and healthier and stronger. So emotions are not feelings. The moment you give an emotion a meaning, it goes underground and says, thank you. I will now direct your life for you. Your ego gets a hold of that meaning and says, let's protect this meaning all of our lives. This is who we are. Be suspicious of those people. Don't trust those people. Don't do this, don't do that. Don't be generous, don't involve, don't volunteer because we have meanings that we attach to things that happen to us. Meaning, meaning is far more powerful than destiny. That's huge. I've got a destiny on my life, it doesn't matter. You can have a destiny on your life but if you give something a false meaning, it will derail your destiny. If you say it means this and it doesn't mean that at all, you will perceive that as your life narrative and you will separate from your destiny. It's like Joseph in Egypt. Joseph decided to make the brutality of life he experienced. He's been wrongly accused. He decided to make that mean something different to what he could have done. When he meets his brothers later on, he said it's okay, it's okay. What you meant for evil, God meant for good. So somehow in that loneliness of that prison cell, falsely accused, many of you understand what it is to be falsely accused, the council culture, in that prison cell on his own, he figured out, my brother's intended evil, this means something bigger, something bigger's going on. And he decided to make his suffering mean that God was getting him ready to be a deliverer of the people of God, rather than he could have gone to a victim mentality. God's desert of me. I don't believe in God anymore. God let me down, God did. So his meaning would have determined what came next. So does yours. So does yours. So does ours corporately. So be careful before you assign emotions a meaning because that meaning can derail your destiny if it's so far off the reality. I met too many people that have gone walk about, disappeared, walked away from God because they assigned something a wrong meaning and that wrong meaning became their narrative and unknowingly they drifted until they were so far from their destiny, it was hard to get back. Okay, you all okay? All right, number three, emotions need border control. Border control. It's no good having strong border control in our countries when we have non-internally. You all of us have a point in our humanity that should act like a border. When I came into America this time, your immigration, some of your immigration people are scary. Some of them are like smiley and nice, anything. Hope I get that guy. Then you get the one that's looking like, I said to me, what are you doing here? What do you do for a living? Who do you know here? Where are you staying? How long are you staying for? Have you got a return ticket? What do you, how do you make your money? It's all of those questions. And what's he doing? He's controlling the borders of your country. But we don't do that internally. So something just comes into your world today. There's no Q and A. You should be interrogating the hell out of stuff. You should be saying, whoa, whoa, hang on, whoa. You should be going, whoa, what is this? Who is this? What's this energy? What's this drama? What's this anger? What's this language? What's, whoa. And you got to interrogate it, like the immigration officer. So this week, internally, take a moment and think, okay, I'm just gonna do a border control thing here with my own thoughts. Or with what happened the other day and start to ask, what are you doing here? Where did you come from? How long are you planning to stay? Do you have family here? Are that negative thoughts gonna say, oh yeah, I've got plenty of family in you. I'm coming to join them. Because you let things in a year ago that I'm connected to that train. So you've got to interrogate them. And you've got to stay with it until you see a crack in the facade and you realize, gotcha. A key question that reveals that it's not yours or all, it doesn't belong here, don't let it in. So your emotions and our emotional mental health needs border control. Everybody say border control. Border control. Can you be a border control immigration officer on your own internal country this week? Is there what I'm encouraging you to do? Be your own immigration officer. Interrogate the data. Interrogate the feelings before they are attributed meanings. All right, number four, emotions need boundaries. Everybody say boundaries? This is such a brilliant word when it comes to mental and emotional and relational health. Boundaries, we have not been good with boundaries in the church. I passed it for decades, as I said. And so I'm aware that I should have had far more boundaries because I was exhausted with all the drama in the church. Dealing with all the conflict and the disputes and sitting down, you know, counseling and judging and making decisions and dealing with, it's like, I got exhausted, no boundaries. And then the idea was we should all be open and vulnerable and accountable and transparent. Whoa, whoa, with who? You should be asking, with who? You should be asking, is this a safe place? Well, the church is a safe place to be vulnerable. No, it's not. No, it's not. You need to be careful. Don't forget, you're a human before you're a Christian. So use some common sense, you know, I said this morning, I want to say again to our kinds of churches, we've made it on inspiration and we've minded on wisdom. Inspiration will leave you before you hit the car park. Inspiration is famously unreliable. Wisdom will be with you Thursday this week because something was said in the service that stuck with you, you'll be in a situation Thursday this week and something will come to you. That guy said border control and boundaries. I think this is the moment you'll be thinking Thursday morning when something comes on your phone, you'll be thinking, this is a moment for me to create a boundary and leave the family WhatsApp channel. I dare you. Because a lot of your stuff comes in right there. You've taken care of it in your physical relationships but it still finds you on the phone or on social media. So boundaries, boundaries is such an important thing for mental and emotional and relational health. A boundary is a place where I can love you and me simultaneously. That's what a boundary is. A boundary is a place where I can love you and me simultaneously, where I can be safe inside my boundary to love you as much as I can and able to without betraying myself and letting your life and your energy and your agenda overrun my boundaries. A boundary protects you. It's not about controlling them though they will feel your boundary is about controlling them. Never adjust your boundaries because of someone's emotional reaction to your saying no. And listen to me now, listen to me. Some of your boundaries aren't working because it's really not a boundary, it's a hint. Example, example. So here's what sounds like a boundary but it's not to the person who really needs to get it clear. So here's a typical hinted at boundary that doesn't work. Please don't shout at me when I talk to you. I don't like it. That's not a boundary. A boundary is if you shout at me when we talk I am leaving the room. That's a boundary. So you're gonna make sure that your boundary is clear because if it's not, it wasn't one. And I know this is difficult by the way, let me just say this to you. If you're a people pleasing person and lots of us will raise that way, it's really hard to set boundaries. The first word a child learns is no. Not yes, it's no. But sociologists tell us, and I think it's true, the older you get, no is harder to say because the more you say no as an adult, the more you're worried about the social implications. Do people think I'm not kind? Do they think I'm not supportive? Do they think I'm not loving? So we say yes, but we mean no. Every time you say yes, but you mean no, I'm gonna tell you now, it accumulates. And you're involved in something next week that you said yesterday, here at church, someone got you in a corner, could you help me out next week? And you thought, you know what, I can't, I don't want to, but to be nice and to be open and to be Christian, you said, yeah, I'll be there. The moment you said that something inside, you said, you caught that ball. Wasn't yours? You should have said, you know what, but I can't, my schedule doesn't allow. That sounds more like a boundary. They're probably gonna leave you alone. But the more you say yes, here's what I found about yes people. The more you say yes, the more news travels that you're the person to go to. Yeah! People say, oh, you know what, go and ask Sue, go ask Phil, nobody would help me, but I asked Phil. Phil always says yes, you get a reputation. Then all the people who had a no line up for you because you always say yes, good old Phil. And Phil's exhausted, burned out, emotional health is bad, mental health is bad, because you gotta learn to say, nn, nn, nn, nn, nn. Specific to your mother, or your husband, or your wife, or your friends, or your kids, or the church family. Sometimes you have to say no to the church. Seriously, I taught this to our church. Don't think you gotta say yes, cause it's the church. Sometimes it's not your turn to say yes in the church. And you know what, it's someone else who's gonna step up. There are times in your church life, and you're in your walk that you just, I'd love to be there, but I can't. And then you feel bad about it. No, no, it's okay, we get it. Someone else is just in a place of readiness to step up though. So if it's a no from you today for something we need help with, it'll be someone's yes today, and it'll all balance itself out. The church is a volunteer culture, so it's strange for me to say that to a volunteer culture. But we can't take advantage of you in a volunteer culture and call it spiritual, a Christian, because the church becomes responsible too for burning people out. So we gotta manage all of that too. You have and we have too. You're a year old, we need to talk about this stuff. All right, I'm moving on quickly. You all okay? Listen, a boundary is about self-respect. Not their respect for you. Respect yourself. Never put your emotional home in another human being. Don't do that. I have done it, I have done it. I've done it with pastors and leaders, spiritual fathers, close friends. I put my emotional home in them. Listen to me, if you put your emotional home in another human, you give them the power to make you homeless. Because the moment they exclude you, say something kind about you, don't involve you, don't speak well of you, aren't kind to you, you go through some version internally, instantaneously, I've been thrown onto streets. And now what you finish up doing, now you start fighting to get back into that emotional home that you felt safe in. You are the CEO of your life. You are the love of your life. You are who you've been waiting for, you are. You don't want to say that, want to say that I see some of your eyes, isn't that Jesus? Let me tell you something, Jesus is not insecure. He doesn't think, ooh, don't be telling him that, I won't get enough attention. That's human, that's like thinking about, God is a human, God is omnipotent and omnipresent. He's really cool with you loving you. In fact, the second greatest commandment is, you can't love people if you don't love you. You all okay? All right, my time's going, I'm gonna wind this up and get you out of here. All right, all right, we're on number five. Emotions need literacy, literacy, emotional literacy is an art. Emotional literacy is the ability to identify two emotions that seem the same, but they're different. Like empathy and sympathy, like guilt and shame, shame and humiliation, loneliness and solitude. They can both appear the same when you look into someone's life or look into your life, but if you wrongly name an emotion, you will suffer under the false identity of the emotion you think you have, but you don't. And people accuse you or use language towards you, who you love and respect, who say, I don't like how angry you are lately. And you think, I don't think I'm angry. I think I'm frustrated. I think I'm passionate about this, but I don't think it's angry. And if you accept it as anger, you'll dial it down when you should be dialing it up. It doesn't always come out perfectly. And sometimes frustration and passion can come out strong. And people that always see strong people as angry will say, you're angry, people just send me all the time in my church and around the world sometimes. I find you very intimidating. I'm like, who, me? Me? Moi? I just feel really bad about that because I don't want to intimidate people. I love people. Then I realize, hang on a minute, am I intimidating or are you intimidated? Because if it's that, if it's that boundary, this has nothing to do with me. You're all on your own in your intimidation. You know, when you work, I've worked really hard, and you have to, I've worked really hard to bring myself to this version of me that is secure and stable and happy and confident and all of that stuff. So when somebody says to you, that's intimidating, that's a lot of work I've put in for you to call it that. If you to call it that and really, is it that? Then I think, no, it's not that at all. It's that I know sometimes people find that kind of personality intimidating. So if I can say to you, no, I'm not intimidating, but I think you're intimidated around people like me or certain kind of people, all your life versions of me will have been in your world that probably you felt intimidated by. So the good news is, it's not that I'm intimidating you because if I disappear, someone else will crop up in your life that makes you feel intimidated. What do we do? Do we move all those people from the world? So you never meet intimidating person? No. So emotional literacy is hugely important. Identify what is it that you're feeling, give it a right name and have less confusion with emotional illiteracy in your life. Number six, practical hygiene. Mental hygiene. It's no good having a sanitized body. We're doing lots of that, haven't we, in COVID? You sanitize your body but you don't have emotional hygiene. You have unforgiveness. You have anger and bitterness and rage. And so you don't have internal emotional hygiene. Be as emotionally hygienic internally as you would be externally. It took me years to learn these things. I offer them to you today, free of charge, calmly and conversationally. But believe me, this stuff came to me with a fight and I don't want you to have one. If I can share something with you from my age and stage of life, that means I lessen your wrestling with this thing that it was worth us all being here today. Let me pray to the wonderful people here. I'm gonna hand it over and get out of your way. Father, I wanna thank you for this wonderful old church, for all the beautiful humans that make this church up. All the stories, all the hurt, the pain, the trauma, the joy, all the strengths, all the weaknesses, all the mistakes, all the high days and low days accumulated here in this family. We thank you for it all. We pray you'll help us as we move into a second year to use all of it to become more human, to become more authentic in our faith, that we might shout to our community all our welcome here, because I found a welcome here and I never found that in any of the church, but I did hear. I pray the reputation of this church in this community becomes whosoever will may come to that church. I pray the word on the street will be about this church. You would not believe who goes to that church, that that would be a badge of honor and merit because our circle of love is so non-judgmental and so inclusive. I pray above all that the mental and emotional health of this leadership and this house will continue to prosper and flourish in the years ahead.