 Today, I'm gonna share with you the story of my greatest failure, or at least what I had considered up until this point to be my greatest failure. But in order to get to that part of the story, I need to begin at the beginning. I was 18 years old, enrolled in university, and I was just like so eager to get out of university. From the time I got in there, I was under this mentality that I was there to expand my horizons to see if, okay, am I gonna do something with this degree? Am I gonna pursue a particular area? I considered becoming a counselor, but at that point, I was still confused about what I wanted to do. But by the end of my first semester, I was convinced that I was going to drop out. So I went to my parents and, because I really respect their opinion on a lot of things and just generally wanted their input on this, I had said, I really wanna drop out. And so my parents, though my dad was very supportive and my mom was supportive too, they were both like, you know, it might be good that you stay one more semester just to make sure that you're set on not going back because the probability is if you drop out now, you're probably not gonna go back ever. And I agree with that. And so I said, okay, you know what? I'll go back for one more. At the end of the second semester, I was committed to dropping out. And I said, okay, hey, look, I'm going to try to make this work, see what happens. If it doesn't, I'll figure something out. I just know that this is not the thing for me. So over those next few months, I began to focus more attention on my YouTube channel, put it on more videos. I would get so excited when they got over like 50 views because I'm like, yeah, people are watching them other than my friends. This is awesome. But we also got some news during that time that was really, they really kind of transformed a few years in my life and the life of my family. My mom was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. And this, it's not understatement to say that this was life altering in a lot of ways because you don't expect this to happen to your mom. You hear about other people, other people's moms, other people's parents getting cancer and you think that would never happen to my mom. And it did. And so my mom was undergoing treatment. And meanwhile I was homeschooled growing up and my siblings, younger siblings were still being homeschooled at the time. And so my mom undergoing treatment, me and my older sister said we'd step in and help homeschool my younger siblings. And during that time, I really sensed the Lord's leading to begin to write a book about father-son relationships. And I know this seems kind of out of pocket, like that seems kind of random. Why would you just want to start writing a book on that? Up until this point, my dad had been such an important influence in my life. He had been so instrumental in my pursuit of what I believe God was calling me to do and just my spiritual development in general and starting daily disciple in a big way and him encouraging me to pursue that. And so it seemed only natural to me that I want to talk about father-son relationships and honestly talk about the things that young men don't tell their dads. You know, for a long time, it was hard for me to bring up certain things to him. But as we grew closer and closer, I just began to understand the benefits of opening up to him in this way and us having this more close relationship. And I wanted that for other sons. I wanted that for other fathers to be able to grow together. So I began to write this book throughout my mom's cancer treatment and homeschooling my younger siblings as well. Thankfully, by God's grace, my mom's healed. Amazing, cancer-free. It's such an amazing, exciting. I could shoot multiple videos on that whole journey as well. I finished my book and I was so excited about it. I run kind of a self-publishing Kickstarter to help raise money so I could actually self-publish the thing. And in October of 2019, I believe it was, I published it. And not too long after that, we all kind of know what happened to our world and things shut down. Before that, I had been to one conference and I sold my book there and it was very fun. And so I sold it, a bunch of people picked it up and that was awesome. But then that world event happened and that kind of shook things up. There was also some discouragement around my book. And I began to kind of just bury it. I was like, you know what? I'm not able to sell this in person to people and I don't know, it's been a long time. So I just kind of let it die. And for a long time, I felt like that was my greatest failure that I had wrote this book that I was so excited about and am so excited about. And I had told so many stories in it that I'd never shared before and pulled so many lessons about just what I had been learning in my faith and my relationship with my dad and equipping fathers and sons to grow together and what that looks like in their relationship. And yet I had just kind of pushed it to the side because why? Well, I think some of those insecurities of old came back up. I began to question, is this book even good? You know, is this even worth getting out there? And so I just sat on a bunch of boxes of books for a long, long time. But then I got a message. I got a few emails from people that said, hey, Isaac, I've read your book and I thought it was really good. And it's helped me in my relationship with my son and I was like, dang, okay, that's cool. And then I went back to that same conference that I first sold my book at and people came up to me and they said, Isaac, hey, this has really been a healing journey in my relationship with my dad. And I was like, wow, okay, that's awesome. And a couple of moms came up to me and they said, Isaac, I read your book and I think I understand my son better and I'm able to connect with him in a deeper way. And so now it's kind of led me to this point where I've really, haven't really promoted it at all just because it was something that I kind of pushed away and I was like, okay, I guess the time has passed. The big world event happened and that kind of crushed my dreams of really getting it out there. But no, I'm actually gonna take this back. And I think this is, I really do believe that this is what God wants me to do with this is, hey, I've written this book, I've spent so much energy and time on this and I really do believe it's gonna help you in your relationship with your son and your relationship with your dad. If you have a husband, if you give this to him, I'm sure this will be a blessing in his life. And so here's what I'm doing. Okay, here's what I'm doing. You can go to the link in my description and you can buy the book and I'm offering free shipping right now for anybody in North America. So all you need to do is just pay the price of the book and I will send it to you personally. I will sign it for you. I might even put a little letter in there for you and you can have the book. And I think this is the step in the right direction. This is getting out what I haven't shared a lot of this stuff, you know. A lot of these stories are really personal and I just don't feel comfortable sharing them on YouTube. But in a book form, I'm like, hey, if you're gonna sit down and you're gonna read this, then you deserve to kind of know these inner workings of my personal life. So there you go. If you wanna pick it up, it'd be an amazing blessing to me and I hope it'll be an amazing blessing to you as well as you read it and just know this, okay? The thing that you think is your greatest failure in this moment, it actually might not be. It actually might not be. You might be building up maybe based on your own expectations or how you thought things were gonna work out. God can completely turn it around. He can totally turn it around. Until next time, God bless.