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During a persecution of Christians under the Emperor Decius, these seven Christian youths hid themselves in a cave outside Ephesus. When they were discovered, their persecutors sealed them in the cave to die; but God instead sent them a miraculous, life-preserving sleep. There they rested for about two hundred years. In the time of the Emperor Theodosius the Younger (408-450), a heresy that denied the bodily Resurrection of the dead began to trouble the people. The Emperor prayed God to reveal the truth to the people. At this time, some shepherds removed the stones blocking the cave in order to build a sheep-pen. They discovered the seven youths, who awoke in full health and told their miraculous story. The miracle was told throughout the empire, and the Emperor himself came to Ephesus and spoke with the youths. A week later, they again fell asleep, this time in death.

Keith is joined by Jim Sheils, a seasoned real estate investor and builder who specializes in new construction and co-living properties.  Together they explore why traditional long-term rentals are struggling to cash flow and how co-living—renting individual rooms in purpose-built homes—can dramatically boost returns.  Jim breaks down how the model works, who the typical tenants are, and why platforms like PadSplit are essential for management, compliance, and steady occupancy.  Their discussion highlights how co-living can simultaneously address the affordable housing shortage and today's "cash flow crisis" for real estate investors. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/617 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866  Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes. To get in the best physical, mental, and professional shape of your life, go to DanielThomasHind.com and apply for Daniel's intensive 1-on-1 coaching for burnt-out entrepreneurs and executives. Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review"  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com  Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Keith Weinhold  0:01   Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. For the first time ever on the show, we're talking about what some call the greatest real estate cash flow strategy today: co-living. Learn about what it is, what it is not, the pitfalls to avoid, and just how terrifically profitable co-living property can be today on Get Rich Education. What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group NMLS 42056. They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Caeli Ridge. While it's on your mind, start at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's ridgelendinggroup.com.    Speaker 1  0:59   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.   Keith Weinhold  1:15   Welcome to GRE from Dover, Idaho, to Dover, Delaware, and across 188 world nations. You're inside Get Rich Education nation. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. For about five years now, it's been harder to make the cash flow numbers work on long-term rentals, and that's because sure rents are up, but not as much as expenses are, and that's why for your regular income properties, builders buy down your mortgage rate for you so that it works. But now enter co-living properties, and your cash flow can be multiples higher. In fact, today we're going to talk about a model that has seven times the cash flow of a regular long-term rental, for example, instead of renting a detached single-family home to one family, if instead you divide it up into six bedrooms and rent each one of the six bedrooms to an individual, you will drive substantially more income. You've got six rent checks instead of one. That's what a co-living property is in general, and you're usually renting it to tenants that are working a lot. They're away from the property. It's often run through pad split. You'll learn more about what that means. And though co-living is lucrative, you still need the right market, the right layout, the management, which is really key here, and the right operating model. Today, we'll talk to a GRE Marketplace operator that provides co-living properties to investors like us with a management solution. And as you'll see, it gets even better than that. Although they serve just one geographic area in the U.S. which happens to be an investor advantaged area, as you'll see, this is conducive to out of state investors. If you want to own there, we're talking about co living income property today. Next week, there's something vital I want to tell you about, and I can't wait to do that. It's about the way that I talk when I meet a 25-year-old, and I learn that their only source of income is as an employee at a job. And no matter what age you are, what I'm going to share with you is going to apply to you too, and it's pretty transformative. That's next week here on the show. As for today, let's learn about co living. Jim Shields is here. Jim, welcome back to the show.   Jim Sheils  3:56   Keith, good to be here. Thanks for having me.   Keith Weinhold  3:58   Well, Jim, we saw each other in person a few months ago at a conference. I wanted to have you back here today to discuss co living since you're involved in it and you help other investors learn about it. And now you even started providing properties for co living specifically for them. And you know, Jim, with co living, I have seen models in the past where, oh, a single-family home it might be retrofitted, renovated to say have six bedrooms and three bathrooms, and that way you, as the owner, you could rent it to six tenants, really who are each only renting a room rather than renting the whole place to one family. In this way, tenants get cheaper rent because they're only renting one bedroom, and then for the owner, this gives them stronger cash flow because they're renting it to six different parties and not just one. So, with affordable housing really being a struggle for so many, you know, co-living is. Really taking off. So tell us more about what co living is and what it isn't, Jim.   Jim Sheils  5:05   Yeah, co living was something that was brought to us by one of the owners of Pad Split. Actually, they had met me and worked with me on other new construction projects, and and kind of my evolution, as you know, Keith was I I went from doing a ton of fixer uppers for many of years to new construction, and both can get you where you want to go. But I like new constructions. But meeting some of the owners of PadSplits, I found that they were starting to have the same struggles that I was when I was rehabbing a lot of homes. You know, it's not easy to take a three bedroom or four bedroom home and turn it into an eight bedroom or a seven bedroom, and so you know, starting from scratch with new construction, we're able to set up for what they're trying to create, and what they're really trying to create with co living is that affordable housing crisis. There's a lot more single individuals out there not looking for you know whole, not needing whole family dwellings to live. They're more at a basic income level that you know keeps them quite a bit below being able to rent. Like here in Jacksonville, the average price of a one-bedroom apartment is just outside of their qualifying range. So they might have a good job and decent credit, but they can't qualify. So what we've seen co-living do, and again, working through our our management partner of Padsplit, is they are bringing in this system of putting people together in one home, still with the screening, still with certain amenities that you know really help the property get seen, wanted, and rented, and then certain managerial things, where you're providing good options for living in areas that need more affordable living, and for landlord investors like ourselves, you're providing now a new opportunity to beat what I've called the cash flow crisis. You know, we have an affordability crisis, but that's also created a cash flow crisis, Keith. As you know, and the numbers that we've been able to see are quite advantageous for both the renter for the amount they pay and for the owner for the amount they're going to cash flow. And that's what I'm seeing this new co-living movement is about. It's really landlords taking a new risk on a certain type of property and tenants getting a type of property that fits their income and their needs.   Keith Weinhold  7:27   You know, Jim, philosophically, I'm thinking about assisted living homes, and when society changed sometime last century, assisted living homes became more of a trend where a lot of times that's where the elderly people went. Now we have co-living, and you kind of wish the world would be a place like where you know someone freshly out of high school or college could be married and have children, and you know just one or two jobs could float and support that family, and they would be able to afford their own home, either to own or rent. But increasingly, that's just not the world that we're living in. It hearkens back to multi-time GRE guest and legendary investor Jim Rogers. To paraphrase Jim Rogers, Jim Rogers said, "I need to invest in the world with the way that it is, not the way that I want the world to be. That's one thought that keeps coming to mind with co-living.   Jim Sheils  8:29   Yeah, for me too. Honestly, Keith, when I first heard about co-living, it was a few years ago. Someone saw me speak at a mutual event similar to one we last saw each other at. I got off stage, and they came up to me and they mentioned to me we're doing these things called co-living.   Keith Weinhold  8:44   Yeah.   Jim Sheils  8:44   And I was kind of blinded. I was looking backwards instead of forwards, and I said, "Oh, that doesn't sound right. That doesn't sound like it could work, you know. And I had a lot of what ifs, and how do you handle this? Well, you know, as the niches really started to solidify and show real wind at its back, all those questions and doubts I had have been answered, and I've kind of become a believer in why it's working and also the results. You know, for us, build right, finance right, manage right. That's always been our model. That's what's going to help us and our investors succeed. Building it right and managing it right. We had to figure out, but figuring that out-that's key. And it's very cool to see investors today breaking the norms of saying, "Well, you know, we can't have cash flow anymore on a nice new construction property in a growth market like Jacksonville, Florida. You can't have good cash flow. Well, that's just not true with co living coming on because again you're answering the call of a forgotten tenant and their needs.   Keith Weinhold  9:46   Yeah, I just think for any thoughtful investor, it's got to give them pause. But this is where society has gone. Well, we're going to talk about how profitable co living is for investors later. But first, tell us more about the nuts and bolts of how co.   Jim Sheils  10:01   Yeah. So the way that it works is, first of all, you start, you know, again going with our model, build right, finance right, manage right, building it right. When you're starting with new construction, you're able to go into the property with all eyes open, without a lot of surprises, and you're able to build it right to the design that a co-living property of success would entail. You know, we're doing seven bedrooms, seven baths. We're doing 14 bedrooms, 14 baths. We're doing 20 bedrooms, 20 baths. These are all things that we worked with the owners of Padsplit as they've worked and researched areas all over the country, starting here in Northeast Florida. But what we're doing, we figured out exactly what type of build you do you need to do that's going to work? Smaller living areas. There's only one utility box. There's not you know multiple utilities. It's not a multi-unit building. So there's one utility box. You build it to that specimen of either we build anywhere from seven bedroom, seven baths, right up to 20 bedroom, 20 baths, and that's the build part. That way, you're getting into it and not having to, you know, kind of. It's really tough, Keith. I don't need to tell you with your experience to turn a smaller house into that bigger house and starting from scratch with new constructions. Great. The second thing we found was finance. Right, as you know, we do our own in-house financing. Well, a lot of the co-living since the banks didn't understand it. Just like you know, it's become a newer niche. They were locking in at 8% You know, with our in-house financing, we were able to get deals down to five and a half percent. So right there, that helps with the rate, the long-term rate, the cash flow, and then management. Again, we've managed 1000s of properties, but we've really teamed up with PadSplit to help us manage these. This is what they specialize in, not only for attracting investors into their organization, but also for managing the properties and screening the tenants, getting them in, and their management system combined with our Build Right Finance Right has been a great combination.   Keith Weinhold  11:57   Pad Split, somewhat of a platform like Airbnb, but it's for co-living type properties. We'll talk more about pad split shortly. But yes, you are making these more efficient for co-living because right from the beginning, you are building them new construction specifically for co-living type of arrangements, rather than that six-bed, three-bath retrofit example I brought up near the beginning of our chat, but tell us more about who actually lives in co-living homes. What's the tenant profile like?   Jim Sheils  12:29   Yeah, let's go to the opposite end. When I first heard about this years ago, Keith, I said, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be really unqualified, seedy people not working, getting into trouble, and that's just not true. Again, a lot of these people are hardworking, but they can't afford the $1395 for a one bedroom apartment, but they can afford an $825 a month room. And a lot of these people might be working at a local warehouse, at a hospital. They're very localized, blue collar, or some in training jobs, you know, extra five $600 a month makes all the difference. Where it's not going out to rent, not even including utilities, it gives them a nice place to live. So it's really entry level replaceable income people, maybe single people that work at a nearby restaurant. But again, they're trying to save more money in their pocket and not spend it on that higher expense, which the competition would be a one-bedroom apartment.   Keith Weinhold  13:31   Now, the tenancy durations here are shorter than what you're going to have in long-term rentals, of course, because one part of what you do, Jim, is for years you have helped GRE followers with build-to-rent long-term rentals. The resident does get more. They're going to get a furnished room with utilities in co-living arrangements, and they're also probably going to have their utilities bundled as well. So tell us about the typical tenancy duration, and then what all the resident gets.   Jim Sheils  14:00   Yeah. So the residency is going to receive all the things that they have to be turnkey. That's the bed, the desk, the dresser, the closet, the bathroom. Everything is set up there for them, and so they just move in. They're not going to have to pay for electric or water or internet. All that stuff's going to be included. There's a washer dryer normally there. Sometimes they're coin operated, other times they're just included, but that way they're not trying to take out a utility in their name or set up internet. Also, for the investor, that's a good thing because you have one master lease. If you start to do a bunch of leases, well, you could get in trouble with the rules of your community, probably of having multiple leases on one property. It's not a multi-unit building, so you can't do that. So one master lease with one utility and all utilities included allows you to do that. This makes it very easy to move in and out. And the average Tennessee might only be six months, but again, the way that it's set up, what we like about PadSplit is they. Have a very good marketing and screening process, so they're constantly marketing and screening to people in the area, and then they have their own private community with investors. So we'll build it and finance it. Our people will move over to their community for management, so the owners can speak together, and then the tenants, though they're coming through pad split system, and so what I like about that is if they try to not treat the property well, well, they're not allowed back into any pad split properties anywhere within the city. So that's really good for co living protection. So we just see that turnkey approach, and you know you've been preaching turnkey real estate for a long time. Yeah, this is a turnkey room where they're able to move in, they're able to move out easily. They can transfer to another co-living property, and by doing that, you can get people in and out very quickly, which keeps the vacancies low, even with shorter tenancy.   Keith Weinhold  15:57   All right, so an average tenancy duration of about six months, and for you, the prospective investor, as you're trying to understand co-living, maybe think of it as like when you check into a hotel. Co-living residents stay longer than you stay in a hotel, but as far as all the utilities are in the room combined, all into one charge with your WiFi, your water, your electricity, your natural gas, and the room is already furnished. Just one all-inclusive payment, making it easier for that co-living tenant. And Jim, you've been talking about pad split, where you're partnering directly with them, and that's the management part of this. Of course, this is more management intensive than a long-term rental. So, tell us more about Pad Split and how it works. Sort of like an Airbnb platform, but yet for longer-term, affordable room rentals that has the property management infrastructure somewhat already built into Pad Split.   Jim Sheils  16:56   Yeah, I think your comparison to Airbnb is very accurate, Keith. But it's more of a community for both tenants and investors. Airbnb, you know, I have short-term rentals and I use Airbnb. But what I've seen with Padsplit, which I think they've done a good job with, it has a community feel sharing for the investors who are a part of the Padsplit community, and so there's extra communication on your management, how properties are going, what areas are doing that. You know, great source of communication on the ongoing management. But for the tenants too, they know right where to go to find these types of properties, and the tenants also have to join this community. So there's a joining where if you want to rent a pad split, they have to join the community. They have to go through all the approvals and such, so that's pretty much how it's set up. It's seen to be very effective. Again, what held me back from this probably for about two years, Keith, was the management piece. You know, we've always managed our properties. I said, well, this is not our niche. Just like we don't manage short-term rentals, we only rent manage long-term rentals, and so I really had to watch and survey a lot of the existing investors and how they were doing, but it's nice to see someone with a good managerial system for both the tenants and the investors to work together in.   Keith Weinhold  18:12   Does PadSplit handle everything like marketing and tenant screening and rent collection?   Jim Sheils  18:19   So what they handle is the way that pad split works, like here in Jacksonville, where's our main market where we've started building co living properties. Is they will work hand in hand like an Airbnb, but underneath them they'll have preferred property managers that they'll work hand in hand. It so they'll handle certain things of the marketing, the tenant screening, and then some more of the mechanical PM pieces, the property management pieces. There'll be an assigned property manager that the client will be working with, the investor will be working with, and the tenant will be working with. So it's kind of a two-tiered approach. Like right now, my I'll use Airbnb, but I have a property manager for my short-term rentals. Same thing here, but we actually have the preferred management list and approvals through Padsplit.   Keith Weinhold  19:06   Okay, so much of this is handled through Pad Split, but not everything. There's a second tier where they partner with local property managers in that area to, for example, help with tenant turns or help with maintenance requests.   Jim Sheils  19:20   Yep, absolutely, absolutely.   Keith Weinhold  19:23   Now, short-term rental hosts are used to Airbnb fees. What are Pad Split fees like?   Jim Sheils  19:29   There's a monthly fee for belonging to PadSplit to keep your property occupied in there, and I don't remember exactly what it is for the tenants, but I know that they keep it affordable. So overall, you're going to be paying a little bit less than an Airbnb property that you would for you know if you use Airbnb and use a short-term property manager, it can be quite expensive. We've seen the pad splits come in below that and still achieve the goals of a good short-term rental. You know we're seeing. I know we're getting into this later, but taking those fees out and doing quite a bit of contingency because of the move and move outs, we were still seeing like a seven bedroom, seven bath based around the same price of one of our single family homes. The cash flow can be about seven times higher. Wow, on that thing, so it it really does answer the call for higher cash flow by bringing that more affordable rental in.   Keith Weinhold  20:25   We're going to talk more about just how profitable it is for investors, and more about co living somewhat nascent model, a model that's actually been around for quite a while, but it's really gaining traction in making things more affordable for tenants and making things more profitable for investors, we're back with more shortly. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. This is Get Rich Education. Flock Homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio, through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture, it's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now, mom and pop landlords can 721 the residential real estate request your initial valuation. See if your properties qualify at flockhomes.com/gre. That's flockehomes.com/gre. Let me ask you something: If you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom Family Investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation. And full disclosure, I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed. But with a track record of consistent, on-time investor payouts, they built real credibility.   Keith Weinhold  22:11   Go to freedomfamilyinvestments.com to book a clarity call, or text family to 66866. That's family to 66866. Hey, it's corporate direct Ted Sutton. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your daydream. Welcome back to Get Research Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. We're talking about co-living, specifically how smart it is to get this right from the beginning and build a new construction single-family home, or something that could be larger than a single-family home with seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, or 14 and 14, or 20 and 20, and when we think about this gym physically, the footprint. What is parking like at a seven-bedroom home or larger? And did this entail any zoning hurdles?   Jim Sheils  23:15   A couple of things. It can entail zoning hurdles, so I would make sure, especially if you're doing new construction, you have someone who is a builder in the area that knows how to work with the county department or city department of how to get these approved. That's a very important things for how you submit them and how you make sure you're staying compliant. I think compliance is very important, obviously, for a rental and and parking. What we've seen right now is we look for about 50% So when I say 50% of bedrooms, so a seven-bedroom house, we're going to have three or four parking sites. There's a large majority of people that don't have a car, and that's why a lot of these are built near public transportation. But we still try to always serve, you know, based off of what we saw, the needs to stay in compliance, also working with Pad Split on lots of their designs. 50% of parking spots is usually good for the amount of bedrooms that you have.   Keith Weinhold  24:08   What about zoning hurdles? What had to be met there?   Jim Sheils  24:12   It's going to be a trial and error for a new builder or a person who's rehabbing a property. You know, we were not the first to come in and do this, we had watched Pad Split do it for two years and more with rehab properties, but just starting new construction, we knew Northeast Florida and what needs to be done very well, and so it's all in how you present it. Again, if you go in there with multiple utility boxes and such, you're going to be in quite an issue. So we found that we didn't have any issue with that. Also, we own some of these in some of our quad communities, so these were for larger. You know, you've worked with our quads before; they're yeah, you know, larger buildings. Well, we've been able to turn those into, for example, 20 bedroom, 20 baths, and so they operate like a small. Building, but they're in our quad communities where we wrote the HOA, and so they're allowed. And there's a plethora of parking there, so that keeps us in compliance. So really, compliance is knowing what your local city or county is going to require and knowing how to get that approved. That's very important.   Keith Weinhold  25:18   Okay, so these can thrive in sort of duplex and fourplex type neighborhoods. That's where they're being built, and you have a good bit of control over that with you having your own de facto HOA there as well. And Jim, I looked at several of the co-living properties and the footprints and the floor plans, and you know I was really encouraged to learn that really the cost for one of these brand new build seven bath seven bed co living properties really isn't that much more than a regular single family home designed for one family. So talk to us about the pricing.   Jim Sheils  25:57   Yeah, in Jacksonville, for example, seven bedroom seven baths, going between 325 and 345, which is very similar to single-family homes. And then our pricing for our quads, like a 2020, would be in the low nine hundreds, and that's the same as a quad as well. So we've been able to match our pricing to, and we have duplex ones. The 1414 would be mid five hundreds, which would be about the same as a Jacksonville duplex. So you know, I'm going off Jacksonville pricing right now, just as a sample. Sure. Okay.   Keith Weinhold  26:30   The model I looked at was seven bed, seven bath. It had two stories. The price was 325k, and it had 1800 66 square feet. Talk to us about just how profitable that it is for an investor on a pro forma income and expenses basis, Jim.   Jim Sheils  26:49   From what I've seen is if the average single family home was bringing in about $3,500, and that's a net on the year. So we're saying net, you know, cash flow on the year. Let's say it was about $3,500 on the year of a single family home that you bought. Well, your pad split property would be more closer to about 25,000 for the year. Wow! So that's a big jump. Now, with that comes a lot more rent collected, Keith. But also, and again, we can't do it here, but on the performa, there's more expenses because you have pad split. You have just very similar again. I think your analogy of a short-term rental for anyone who owns those very similar. There's more components. There's more pieces to it. There's more management. But what I did like about the performas that were first brought to us, large amount of rent collected, but also a large amount of contingency and expenses calculated in to get that number. So those are what I liked again seeing these is there's a lot of expense taken out to still reach that you know higher cash flow, but you know it's something that you will want to account for as well. You know what keeps people safe? Do your numbers. Do your numbers real. You know talk to people who have owned co-living properties, make sure that you're accounting for the extra expenses of tenants turning over more and and just more management involvement.   Keith Weinhold  28:10   Okay, so on that comparison where you likened it to a long-term rental versus this model, it's about $25,000 of annual cash flow, which is about $2,000 of monthly cash flow, and was that for the seven bed, seven bath model?   Jim Sheils  28:26   Yeah, and it would go up from there for the larger models.   Keith Weinhold  28:29   Yeah. Now, are tenants paying in advance by the week or by the month, or how does that work?   Jim Sheils  28:34   That's a key thing. They pay by the week, which I didn't realize how important that was for affordability and staying current on your rents, but from the things that I've been shown on working with Padsplit, they showed that when they charge people by the week, it's much more affordable. A lot of these people are paid weekly, so it really keeps them in good rhythm, and so they go on a weekly process.   Keith Weinhold  28:57   And is this just as conducive to out of area investors like long term turnkey rentals are?   Jim Sheils  29:03   Yeah. Well, that's why you always want to build right, finance right, manage right. You have lots of great connections. You can find a great builder that's willing to build them. You get good financing and then good management. So you don't have to live in the area, but you want to make sure someone is taking care of that for you. Again, I am going to say I know some people like to manage their own properties from afar. That can work with long-term rentals. I've done it with a few of mine when I left California and came here. From what I've seen, though, for co-living, the involvement-if you are from out of area-I would highly, highly recommend that you follow a manager process and work with a manager.   Keith Weinhold  29:43   Meaning that you would use one of PadSplits recommended managers.   Jim Sheils  29:47   I would use PadSplit with one of the preferred managers that we know well, and actually one of the managers that they highly recommend worked for our company for five years, and she's great. And for what we're. Doing, I can put a stamp of approval on it, and again, I think just seeing the involvement, these can work really well. But you want to have just like any time, but even more importantly, on these ones, you want to have management in place, especially if you're afar.   Keith Weinhold  30:14   Sure. So, what could the involvement realistically look like, Jim, if that out-of-state investor is using Pad Split and using Pad Split's recommended manager. What might that investor have to do remotely? And maybe that's just on an email basis.   Jim Sheils  30:32   You know, a lot can be done by email. Again, Keith, our goal-I don't think you should be spending more than two hours a month on managing your property manager. So again, just because there's more involvement, what I like is it doesn't mean there's more involvement for you. You're paying someone to set that up to handle it. You'll have to be involved somewhat. You are a property owner, but again, I don't see that you have to get involved with every little thing. In fact, I like to step back and not get too involved in my properties. I find like I just kind of go and stir things up. Let my manager do their thing. I'll manage certain big picture managerial things and in communication and overall just directionals. But you should not be getting overly involved. That's what their job is. You should not be doing that.   Keith Weinhold  31:18   Now I'm a turnkey real estate investor myself, as you know, with multiple properties in various states and places, and I'm used to getting monthly emails from my manager in those markets, and that is what my owner statement looks like: income and expenses and anything that's going on with the property. But that's just on a monthly basis. Are there weekly statements for co-living managers and owners?   Jim Sheils  31:42   Still rents are collected weekly, but statements still come out monthly.   Keith Weinhold  31:46   Because—   Jim Sheils  31:47   You want to, what you do is you collect all of the rents, but then again, it's easier to reconcile with all expenses and such that come out on a monthly basis. So it's done monthly.   Keith Weinhold  31:58   Are they writing common mistakes to avoid that are developing in the space, like an investor that gets in and buys their first co living property, and then they think, "Oh gosh, I wish I would have known about this thing sooner that I didn't think about because I'm only used to long term rentals. Any common mistakes to avoid pitfalls like that with co living, Jim?   Jim Sheils  32:17   Yeah, a couple of things. First, again, I can't stress enough that co living, from what I've seen and experienced, they do make money. But on the build it right, you know, going back to our build right, finance right, manage right. Just know if you're going to try one your on your own and you want to convert a home that's three bedrooms into a seven bedrooms, it is a much more tedious, involved process. Where again. Keith, like you said, are you getting things approved with the county or city? Just know that you really want to be in the know, and that's going to take some involvement. So that's my warning on if you're going to use co living and rehab your own property, financing wise. The thing that the mistakes I've seen made is people didn't see that they had higher interest rates, so you want to do that in your numbers. You know, working like with us, we're we have our own in-house financing. We're able to get it down to five and a half percent, but some of these co living banks are looking at it differently, and you might be more around 8% So you want to just do that in your numbers, and then the third pitfall, which we've you know hit on, and this is one of your real foundational rules: is management is key. And on these, where I see the biggest harm, once you get it built right and financed right, it could all fall apart if you don't have management in place. So I would just be you know some of you do it yourselfers. I have some things that I like to do it myself too, but on a more technical type of property like this, I highly encourage you get management in place to do their thing.   Keith Weinhold  33:47   For sure, it is easy to make the case that the management is even more important than the property itself. One of the things that I like about what you do there, Jim, is you're so forward-thinking and you are so into making the experience as turnkey for that investor as it can possibly be, and one of those things is as you rolled this out, you had a lot of the financing hurdles rolled out right with it. Tell us more about those in-house financing options you have that you touched on specifically for co-living, and especially I'm thinking through the lens of like that seven bed, seven bath, 325k co-living property that I saw.   Jim Sheils  34:28   Yeah, I mean it's nice with getting to be a builder of our size with a really good balance sheet. We're able to work with banks and buy large tranches of money or slate large tranches of money at cheaper rates than available to the public. You know, for our normal long-term rentals, we can get down to 3.75. That's for normal houses. You can't get that low because of risk factor. Banks still they like working with us, but we have gotten it down to five and a half percent. So right now, our most popular program is a 30-year fixed five and a half percent for co. You know, and again, a lot of people that have come to have said, "Holy moly, we were locked in at 8.15. We are getting it not as low as our lowest rate, but at a really good rate now. You know, below what's normally offered out there. So that's normal qualifying that you would have to do with any bank loan through us. And our counselors are happy to talk more about that. That's our most popular program for the co living for the seven seven. You're looking at a five and a half percent interest rate, 20 to 25% down. That is a super attractive rate. Is that something that the home builder helps participate in buying down discount points, or that the buyer is asked to do in order to get down to that rate? Working with us, well, it could go either way out in the marketplace, Keith. When working with us, we pay all of those required fees and points to get the lower rate. That's on us, not on the buyer.   Keith Weinhold  35:50   All right, we're talking about co-living properties today-a way to supercharge your cash flow. This is one of the greatest cash flow strategies in all of residential real estate today, Jim. Is there any last thing you have to tell us about co-living? Perhaps something that I did not think about asking you that I should have.   Jim Sheils  36:09   I think that's probably just what you and I talked about, like what Jim Rogers said. It's how not how I want things, but how things are. Yeah. And so for me, I held back for a few years, even when some of the founders right here in my own backyard have pad split to team up with, but I think that I couldn't picture Keith 10 years ago having a short term rental and like wait a minute I'm going to have them stay there every week and I'm going to have to furnish it you know is from the old guy doing long term rentals so I think for people just read up on it it's becoming a very interesting trend there's some very interesting statistics of why this is working, how management can be handled effectively, how to stay in compliance with your city. There's a lot of good information. This is a great starting point to our conversation today, but I don't think this niche should be ignored because the track record is already there and it is answering a need of both investors and tenants, which is pretty cool.   Keith Weinhold  37:04   It has been super intriguing to learn more about this. Jim represents one of our GRE Marketplace providers. It's been great having you back on the show.   Jim Sheils  37:13   Now, thanks for having me, Keith.   Keith Weinhold  37:20   Yeah, a really informative episode today. If you want to learn more about co-living properties, you can do so at gremarketplace.com/co-living. That's where you'll get the investment report, floor plans, financial projections, see the exact pricing, and learn more about pad split there. I've been around this space for a while, and I know investors that own co-living properties. Some other best practices that I've learned about are that you want to have limited visitation or a zero visitation policy for your co-living tenants. As we touched on, these properties can really make money, but don't try to manage them remotely. Make the house rules unusually specific. Address guests, quiet hours, smoking, drugs, pets, parking, food storage, shared bathrooms, thermostat settings, and cleaning and abandoned belongings, and enforce the rules consistently and quickly. Because one disruptive resident can cause several good residents to leave, and in co-living, retaining household harmony that is often more valuable than retaining one problem tenant. Provide professional common area cleaning. Don't expect seven or 14 unrelated adults to collectively develop some passion for wiping down the stove. That is not going to happen. Shared areas should be cleaned at least weekly. Install bedroom locks and then smart exterior locks. Give each resident private space, eliminate shared keys, and immediately revoke keys after move out. Cameras they should generally be limited to lawful exterior and entry locations, not in private spaces. Provide excellent internet in co-living, unreliable WiFi. That is practically a habitability crisis. Use business-grade equipment, strong coverage, and have a backup plan for internet. And as an investor, it's wise for you to maintain a larger repair and turnover reserve than you would for a normal long-term rental. Keep these things in mind, and it can keep seven times the cash flow from becoming seven times the headache. Again, you can get the investment report, floor plans for the very properties we discussed today, financial projections, pricing, and get more information about pad split all at. gremarketplace.com/co-living. That's gremarketplace.com/coliving. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 1  40:15   Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.   Keith Weinhold  40:43   The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building getricheduceducation.com

If you’re feeling restless or weighed down tonight, you’re not alone. This biblical sleep meditation, narrated by James Seawood, is designed to help your body relax and your mind rest in the peace of God’s Word. Be transported to a peaceful evening in New York City where the beauty of harmony unfolds through music, fellowship, and the vibrant rhythm of life. As a jazz quartet comes together in unity, let their melodies and the message of Psalm 133 guide you into deep rest, reminding you of the goodness found when God’s people dwell in love and peace. Abide is a Christian meditation app offering biblically grounded meditations and sleep stories to help you experience the peace of Christ and find rest for your soul. Try Abide free for 30 days and explore our premium, ad-free sleep content here: https://abide.com/peaceDiscover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us

She was the mother of the Apostles James and John, the wife of Zebedee, and the daughter of Joseph the Betrothed, who was a widower when he became betrothed to the Mother of God. She was a disciple of the Lord and one of the Myrrh-bearing women who first brought tidings of the Resurrection to the world.

What do you do when God asks you to leave the very thing that makes you feel secure? In Part 8 of the Holy Girl Summer series, Joy is joined by Darneisha Beeler, who shares her incredible journey of walking away from a successful six-figure career in banking after the Holy Spirit began stirring her heart for something more. Leaving comfort and financial security wasn't easy—but Darneisha knew that God's calling was greater than her fear. In this powerful conversation, she shares what it looked like to trust God's timing, surrender her plans, and step boldly into the purpose He had prepared for her. If you've ever felt the Holy Spirit nudging you toward something that feels bigger than you—a new opportunity, ministry, business, career change, or simply using your God-given gifts in a new way—this episode will encourage you to take your next faithful step. God rarely reveals the entire roadmap. Instead, He invites us to trust Him one step at a time. In this episode, you'll learn: How to discern when God is calling you into something new Why obedience often requires leaving your comfort zone How to overcome fear when taking a leap of faith Why your spiritual gifts are meant to glorify God, not yourself How trusting God's timing leads to greater purpose and impact The encouragement you need to finally say "yes" to what God has been asking of you This conversation is a beautiful reminder that God doesn't call the equipped—He equips those He calls. When you surrender your plans to Him, He can do immeasurably more than you could ever imagine.

Robert Brill, CEO of Brill Media, explains how businesses can implant a complete growth engine that attracts ideal customers, converts more leads, and scales sustainable growth through a proven marketing framework. Under his leadership, Brill Media has been recognized 11 times by the Inc. 5000 and the Financial Times 500 for helping businesses grow through precision advertising, strategic messaging, and performance marketing. In this conversation, Robert introduces The Growth Engine Framework—Setup, Awareness, Conversion, Closing, and KPIs. He explains why businesses must first define their Super Consumer, build a compelling proprietary system, and deliver messaging that differentiates them in crowded markets. Robert also shares how overcoming the “81% Gap” through nurture marketing, leveraging AI-powered tools, and documenting repeatable systems enable organizations to scale more efficiently while helping founders transition from operator to owner. — Implant a Complete Growth Engine with Robert Brill  Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest is Robert Brill, the CEO of Brill Media, a leading media buying agency specializing in precision advertising for business growth. Under his leadership, Brill Media has been recognized 11 times by the Inc. 5000 and the Financial Times 500. Robert, welcome back to the show.  Steve, thanks for having me. It’s great to be back. Good to see you again.  Yeah, good to see you after two and a half years. Lots of things happened. So we’re going to dive into all of those things, but let’s start with your personal ‘Why’ and how you’re manifesting it in your business, Brill Media?  I mean, my personal 'Why' is I'm focusing on becoming an owner, not an operator. Spend more time with family, less stress, more happiness.Share on X Because if I think about the last five years, the most cherished times that I think about are the times that I’ve spent on vacation, going to Disneyland, or going to baseball games with my family—all the fun stuff. And it’s not about the fun stuff necessarily. It’s about the fun stuff with family. So, more of that.  Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Those times with the kids don’t come back. The business is going to be around for a while longer, much, much longer. So prioritizing this is a really good idea. So tell me what happened over the last two and a half years since we talked together. What has changed in your business?  You know, we’ve really focused on evolving our solutions. For many years, we’ve been focused on agencies, and we continue to be focused on agencies. If you search for white-label media buying on Google, we’re one of the top one or two results. That’s because we’ve carved out a really strong position helping agencies do media buying, earn revenue, create stickier client relationships as a result of the work we do, and complement their work.  What we've learned over the years is that no amount of good media buying can overcome the wrong messaging.Share on X Even if you look at search engine optimization or social media, at the end of the day, it’s just an amplification of an existing message. If you’re spending lots of time, energy, and, notably, money delivering the wrong message, worst-case scenario, you’re confusing the marketplace. Best-case scenario, you’re only losing money. But obviously, neither of those is the desired outcome.  So before we help clients buy advertising space, post on social media, do SEO, or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), we really want to dial in the types of messages that are most interesting to them. The next part is this: even if you have the right message and you have the best media buying in the world through Brill Media, none of that matters if you have a leaky bucket. The leaky bucket is when you pay a lot of money to run a Google Search ad, someone clicks, and then they never hear from you again.  At the end of the day, it takes more than one touch—or even a few touches—to get someone to buy from you. So our responsibility has evolved into building this growth engine of understanding the motivation behind why people buy from your company, then delivering the message, then getting people to convert, overcoming what we’re calling the 81% Gap—we can talk about that—and then getting people to see you everywhere so that you become the inevitable choice. The fifth step is understanding the KPIs—the success metrics—for every step of the process. So it’s not just media buying anymore.  Yeah. No, I definitely noticed that it’s not just media buying. It’s not just precision advertising. It sounds like you help them strategize what the right message should be and then convert those leads into customers. So essentially, it’s the whole growth engine that you’re building for companies. Is that right? That is exactly right. It’s the growth engine.  So what is the framework? Because, remember, this is a framework podcast. So describe to me. You actually mentioned step four and step five. I don’t know what the first three steps are. So can you go through the five steps and share with the listeners what that looks like?  So, step one: Setup. Who are you talking to? What’s unique about your audience? What’s unique about your business, and how do you help them achieve transformation? When we talk about setup, there are a few subsections. There’s the Super Consumer. We talk about the Super Consumer as someone who will evangelize for your company. They will pay you what you’re asking, and, in my opinion, most importantly, you like working with them.  So basically, you want to find the Super Consumer, you want to articulate who the Super Consumer is, and then target your growth engine to the Super Consumer?  The first step of the Growth Engine is simply defining who your Super Consumer actually is. So step one is Setup. Inside Setup, there is your Super Consumer, your Unique Advantage Point, and your Proprietary System. The reason we talk about the Super Consumer is that a lot of companies, especially big corporations, talk about the Total Addressable Market—everyone who can possibly buy from you. It’s too broad.  They also talk about small and mid-sized businesses, and commonly people talk about the Ideal Customer Profile, which is anyone who can extract value from your company. In our opinion, that’s too broad as well because if you dial in to the Super Consumer—if you understand the people you want to work with, who will evangelize for you, and who will pay you what you’re asking—you have a subset of people.  When you define them, there's a clear, describable transformation that you can provide that helps you become the inevitable solution for that group of people.Share on X When you know what those people want, what their desires are, what keeps them up at night, what they’re experiencing on a day-to-day basis, what they’re saying to themselves, what they’re saying to other people, and what they’re searching for—when you understand the psychology behind the person—you can actually carve out a position that is highly valuable.  The key part for us is that this is about commoditization and decommoditization. When you talk about lawyers, doctors, dentists, accounting firms, or any retail location, most of these businesses are commoditized. What commoditization means for us is that if you’re an accountant or CPA, your website says something that every other CPA in the area says. If you’re a dentist doing Invisalign, you’re saying something that every other dentist in the area says. That means you can swap out the logo and swap out the photos of the people, and it’s exactly the same.  The consumer can’t tell the difference between one dentist and another, or one accountant and another, because they’re all saying the same things. So the way you decommoditize is by talking about your Super Consumer—who you actually want to serve—and then carving out a unique position for those people.Share on X An example would be an accounting firm we spoke with that really focuses on the trucking industry because they happen to have a large degree of experience in that space. So don’t say you’re a generic accountant who does bookkeeping, taxes, and everything else. Say, “We’re the number one accounting firm for truckers in America.”  Love it.  That’s unique.  Yeah. Love it. Okay, so step one is Setup. Who you’re serving, who your Super Consumer is, what your Unique Advantage is, your Proprietary System, and decommoditization. What’s step two?  Step two is Awareness—driving awareness with your message. Our idea is that now you know exactly who you’re talking to and how they can achieve transformation with you. When you have the ability to really define how they’ll engage with you and what they’ll get from you that’s different from anyone else in the area or the country, that’s when you deliver the message. That’s when you run ads, post on social media, and say things that are going to attract people.  There’s a whole subset of activity behind that related to levels of awareness. The number one mistake businesses make on social media is posting content that’s irrelevant to the audience. That irrelevance comes from how aware the audience is. When people are unaware they have a problem, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a problem. It just means they don’t realize they have one. Your responsibility, when speaking to people who are unaware, is simply to help them understand that they have a problem.  You’re not trying to get them to start now, book a call, or get your free diagnostic. You want to trigger something in their head so they say, “Oh, I’m dealing with this type of experience. I’m a trucking company, and I really don’t have good accounting. I didn’t realize I had a problem.” The success of your marketing is simply when that person says, “Oh, I actually have a problem now.” You’re not going to see that in HubSpot.  You’re not going to see that in any meaningful metric. But when you consistently post content on social media that highlights the problem you solve, three, four, or six months from now, you’ll start to see that wave of marketing activity result in activity inside your HubSpot or CRM. So step two is Awareness—simply delivering the message. Okay.  Step three is Conversion. Conversion is simply, “Hey, click on this ad or see my post and download the guide, take the diagnostic, take the interactive quiz, watch a video,” whatever it is, in exchange for an email address, name, phone number—that type of thing. Now, here’s a key insight. People are not ready to buy after they submit their contact information. That’s another meaningful point that businesses overlook.  They think, “Whoa, a lead just came into HubSpot. Well, clearly they’re ready to spend $50,000 with me.” But think about the experience. Maybe I spend two and a half seconds on an ad. I spend 20 seconds on a landing page. No one’s going to spend any meaningful amount of money after 22 and a half seconds of engagement.  Yeah.  All they’re saying is, “Hey, for a moment in time, what you said to me was relevant.” And that’s it. This is where a lot of companies stop. They say, “Well, I’m getting bad leads. They’re not converting into business.” Or they say, “I got a click, and they visited my website.” It’s not turning into business because you’re not warming people up. And then the solution to that is you’ve got to overcome this 81% Gap, right?  So after someone converts—and for e-commerce it’s slightly different. People maybe visit your site, or they add something to the cart and they don’t purchase yet. But going back to B2B and professional services, you’ve got to overcome this 81% Gap. There’s a study by 6sense, the account-based marketing firm, that says 81% of buyers will only talk to a vendor after they’ve decided to work with the vendor. The implication of that is staggering. The number is going to increase by 2030 to, like, 95% or 98%.  What that means is companies are not going to get a chance to sell people anything. There’s no sales conversation. There’s no credibility. There’s no case studies. There’s no testimonials. There’s no, “Hey, here’s why you should work with us.” Which means all the information that would’ve been supplied by the salesperson now needs to be supplied by marketing. All the case studies, the testimonials, the credibility markers, you’re a member of the Chamber of Commerce—all of that needs to be delivered in marketing. It’s no longer going to be delivered in a sales conversation.  Interesting. Yeah.  So step four is Close.  After conversion, don’t we have a nurture step?  Well, we’re calling Close the nurture. Close is effectively the nurture step.  Okay. Got it.  So it’s the activity to achieve the close, which is the nurture. What we’re saying is: retargeting ads. Again, here’s another common mistake businesses make. Many businesses will pummel people with the same ads that got them into the funnel. That’s worthless because you’ve already delivered that message.  The user’s beyond that. What the user needs to see are the case studies, the testimonials, the credibility markers—all the reasons why your company should be the company they choose. The user needs to see the email marketing—up to 45 emails over the course of 100 days, somewhere around there.  Forty-five emails?  Yeah. Twenty-five to 45, but we recommend 45. The reason is, first of all, the user’s not going to read all of them. Secondly, the user’s only going to pay attention to the things they’re actually interested in. So: retargeting ads, email marketing, and professional services. The last component is LinkedIn Social Preheating. LinkedIn Social Preheating is the simplest thing that anyone listening to this can take action on this today.  Go to Sales Navigator. Create a list of all the people who are in your CRM. Find them on LinkedIn. When they post something, like their post. That’s it. Spend 20 minutes a day in the morning liking posts from people who’ve expressed interest in your business. Or, alternatively, do the same thing for people you want to work with who don’t know you yet. The reason that’s valuable is because, number one, they get notifications and sometimes emails saying, “Steve Preda liked your post.” Steve Preda. Steve Preda. Steve Preda. Over the course of two weeks: “I’ve got to pay attention to Steve Preda. That name sounds familiar.”  Yeah.  Oh, and here’s the ad from Steve Preda, and here’s the email about the transformation he provides. So by the time you or your people call them: “Steve Preda… I’ve been meaning to talk to you.” Or they call you and say, “Steve, I see you everywhere.” The LinkedIn activity, combined with the email marketing and the retargeting ads, makes you the inevitable choice. To a small group of people.  Because you’re not trying to get millions of customers unless you’re in retail or e-commerce. You’re trying to get 20 customers who are going to pay you $10,000 to $50,000. To those 20 people—and the hundred people who maybe don’t convert—you’re everywhere. You’re the inevitable choice. The fifth step in this process is setting KPIs at the beginning. How many sales-qualified calls do you need? How much revenue per month do you need? There are clients who are members of ProVisors.  I’m a member of ProVisors. How does your marketing impact your ProVisors relationships? The core idea is that we see a lot of companies going into the marketplace with point solutions. “Hey, I’m going to try Facebook ads.” “Ah, it didn’t work.” “I’m going to try Google Ads.” “Ah.” “I’m posting on LinkedIn.” “Ah.” They try all these different things and wonder, “They should work. Why don’t they work for my business?” The answer is because you don’t have a unifying strategy. They all serve different roles in the marketing process.  When you know the difference between an unaware consumer and what they need to hear versus a solution-aware consumer who’s on Google, you know you need different metrics and KPIs. We want to prevent companies from going from one point solution to another for years, spending lots of money and getting very frustrated. Instead, have one unifying strategy and then deploy activities that are actually going to benefit the growth…Share on X  Love it. So the five-step framework is: Setup—Super Consumer, Unique Advantage, Proprietary System. Number two, Awareness—ads and social. Then Conversion, which is basically email capture, a diagnostic, a video, a white paper, whatever. Then Close, which is the nurture: retargeting, email sequence, LinkedIn Social Preheating. Interesting. And then KPIs. How do you measure? What are your targets? And how do you get there? That’s  Yeah. That’s the Growth Engine.  So one thing that you mentioned: Proprietary System. What do you mean by that?  The only truly unique things that exist in the world are technological innovations. The iPhone—when Apple created the iPhone—that was unique. When Ozempic came out, that was unique. I’m not talking about that. What I’m talking about is this. I’ll give you an example. If you’re a lawyer, a dentist, or an accountant— If you’re a lawyer, you cannot deviate. You’re literally dealing with the law.  What you have to do as a lawyer has been dictated in legal documents for a long time, depending on the field of law that you study. You cannot deviate from that. You have a process that you have to follow. But what is unique is the way you think about it, the processes inside your organization that ensure you’re successful, and the way you steward clients. Look at marketing. We’re a highly commoditized industry. There are a million people on Upwork who do some sort of marketing work.  There are 40,000 or 50,000 agencies in the United States that all do some type of marketing work. If I go to the marketplace and say, “Hey, I do Facebook ads,” guess what? There are 10,000 people who also do Facebook ads. That’s not unique. What is unique is the systems and processes we’ve developed around how we do Facebook ads and how we think about marketing. The first step we take with our clients is developing a Proprietary System—the thing that's unique about the way they approach the world.Share on X  I was just doing some thinking about roofing. I have some notes here. The Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System. What is that? I don’t know. But you know what? A roofing company needs to have something called the Seven-Point Storm Shield Inspection or the Precision Roof Blueprint. The idea is that you have something no one else has, such as this Precision Roof Blueprint, that you can point to and say, “Look, you can get roofing from anyone, but only we have the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System.”  Yeah. Yeah, got it. So it’s not a marketing system. It’s more about productizing and branding your services.  Exactly. You need a three-, five-, or seven-step system that you can point to. When we have sales conversations, we have a visual for the Growth Engine. The reason that’s important is because you need to be able to hook into the buyer’s mind. One of the ways you hook into the buyer’s mind is by the buyer saying, “Look, they have this thing called the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System. I don’t know—that sounds real.  Here are the seven things you get when you get the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System.” It’s a way for people to not just get excited about your business, because that lasts a very short period of time. They need to go to their husband or wife, or they need to remember a very pithy, short summary of what the conversation was about. “Oh yeah, they have the Roof Guard Lifetime Protection System. Here’s what it is. Here’s a visual of it.”  Okay. That makes sense. So, switching gears here a little bit. Things are changing very fast in this business, and you want to make sure you put your family first. What is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in this business going forward?  I mean, the most fascinating and exciting thing I’m doing right now is something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the skills for—and now I suddenly do—which is building actual software that’s valuable for us and our clients. For example, we have a framework for LinkedIn. In very simple terms, you like the posts of the people you want to sell to. From the perspective of the LinkedIn algorithm, that’s very low value.  It’s good from a sales perspective, but from the algorithm’s perspective, it’s not that interesting. You post content on LinkedIn that has to have a unique perspective—an opinion. A lot of people can write with AI. You don’t write with AI. You say something that’s unique to your perspective. Maybe AI helps you write it more eloquently in little bits and pieces. But even that by itself, it’s hard to get traction. The way you get traction on LinkedIn right now is through comments. I’ll get 80 to 100 views on a post.  I’ll get 400 to 800 views on a comment. The comment is the engine behind more visibility on LinkedIn. This goes back to the question you asked. The key point on LinkedIn is you’re not just saying, “Hey, great job.” “I like that.” “I totally agree with you.” Or posting the raised-hands emoji and saying, “This is amazing.” That’s not the kind of comment I’m talking about because that’s low value. It’s also not AI-written content because that’s low value. It’ll deprioritize your content.  When you comment on LinkedIn, you have three sections: Compliment. Expand. Ask. Compliment: “You’re right. Marketing is highly commoditized. I fully agree with you there.” Expand: “When we work with clients, especially highly commoditized businesses like doctors, lawyers, and accountants, the first thing we do is help them decommoditize their business.” That’s the second section. That’s Expand. The third section is Ask. “What’s the first step you choose when you come across a highly commoditized business?” Compliment. Expand. Ask. Now guess what? We built an app that I’m using. All you need is five to eight posts a day. It’s AI-powered. I put in a link for Opus 4.8. It gives me a perspective on what I could say. I get three options. I copy one, write my own commentary around it so it’s not fully AI-written—because I want it customized to me—and then I post it. After that, I go back to the app and put the content I wrote back into the app.  A few things are happening. Number one, any of our clients can now use this app to write highly engaging commentary on LinkedIn. It starts to learn your voice and how you write so that the AI becomes better at writing in your style. I don’t know what it’s called—a micro app, a business app. This isn’t something I’m going to take to the marketplace and say, “Here, spend $10 a month to buy this service.” It’s simply an added value for our clients.  Love it.  Those types of apps are super powerful. I get on sales conversations. I understand the business problems that businesses have.Share on X I build apps. Like right now, I’m in the process of building a media planning app that actually becomes a replacement for how we develop proposals. One component of that app is going to have a diagnostic section, which means you give me some information, and it’ll spit out information about what you should do for your marketing that, number one, follows our framework, the Growth Engine, and, number two, is based on the historical knowledge we have across all of our clients—but generalized by industry, not specific client names.  It takes the best of what we do and makes it so easy that someone who doesn’t have a great deal of knowledge in digital advertising can get a highly pertinent proposal and diagnostic ready for them with the click of a button after talking to someone for 15 minutes.  Very impressive. So you’re building these apps, and essentially you’re empowering your business with these apps so some of the things you’ve done in the past can be automated. So, Robert, if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?  I mean, look, just to be completely honest, I understand the difference between an owner and an operator. The short answer to that question is I want to be an owner, not an operator. I’m looking at an operator as someone who’s in the day-to-day. They’re the practitioner. I mean, I’m 23 years into the advertising business. I’m 13 years into my business. I love this business. You’re not going to see me become a real estate agent, and I’m not going to be hawking…  I think I probably said this last time. I’m not going to be hawking crypto or whatever the case is. This is my life, and this is my passion. For so many years of my life, I’ve dedicated my interests, my hobbies, and my professional time to becoming a better practitioner. My goal now is to become an owner, which means the business operates without me. I get to focus on the projects that I want to focus on, which I’m already doing to a degree.  I have a phenomenal Director of Accounts. Her name is Linda Flores. She is k*ller. She scares me sometimes. We’re on calls, and I’m like, “Holy cow, if I was not the owner of the business, I’d be scared. In fact, you’re scaring me, Linda.” You’re getting things going. People should be scared of you. That’s what a good Director of Accounts—an operations person—does. She’s phenomenal. But at the end of the day, if I choose to be on an island for six months out of the year, the business operates fine. We’re not there yet. That’s what I’m focusing on.  So what’s missing? You said you’re already spending some of your time developing these apps—the stuff you love. What would you have to let go of in the next 12 months to get there?  I recently read the book The E-Myth about a year, year and a half ago. One of the most insightful perspectives I got from The E-Myth is this—and people are going to hate this. People who are not entrepreneurs will look at me like I’m the devil. Okay? But this is not my idea. This is from The E-Myth. The idea is that processes, systems, and standard operating procedures are effectively the safety net for the success of a company.  Which means instead of hiring incredibly expensive people inside your business, you can hire, for many roles, people with the minimum level of qualification. The standard operating procedure becomes the safety net that helps them succeed. I was like, “Holy cow, that’s fascinating.” Because as a business owner, I’m looking at myself. I’m hiring highly qualified, very expensive people to do the work. The sign of a good business, in my opinion—or at least from what I understand—is a business that has such phenomenal standard operating procedures that it can hire people with the minimum level of qualification, and they can still be effective.  Frankly, I think we have good standard operating procedures, but we need better ones. And frankly, the AI tools that I'm building help us get there.Share on X The media planning tool that I’m building means I could hire someone with two, three, or five years of experience in marketing and advertising. Through the AI system, they get the benefit of all of our clients’ knowledge and insights that we’ve talked about over the years. They get the benefit of what I know about marketing.  They get the benefit of all the data that’s flowed through the pipelines of our business. All of that information becomes the baseline from which someone with two, three, or four years of experience in marketing develops a phenomenal strategy. Because they’re not relying on two, three, four, or five years of experience. They’re relying on my 23 years of experience delivered through an AI pipeline.  So essentially, what you’ve accumulated over the years—institutional knowledge—maybe it’s in your head, but you can download it. You’ve written things. You’ve produced a bunch of videos. You can put that into an AI database or knowledge base, and that can power some of the systems you’re developing. Other people can come in, run it, and follow your process.  Yeah. And it’s not just ours. I mean, look, it’s any system that I believe is valuable that should be piped into that AI knowledge base. But the value there is me as the curator. That’s when you get to the point where the business is still an authentic reflection or extension of the owner. One of the most important things, especially for professional services businesses, is that the business will be successful if it’s an authentic representation—or extension—of the owner, and you like the people you’re working with.  Love that.  Which goes back to the Super Consumer. The most important part of our whole process is: Who are the people you love working with? Just as an aside, what’s funny is there are two paths. There’s the path of people you love working with who don’t pay you as much, but it really fills your soul. You like them. You’re helping them. They’re very grateful for it.  Then there are the people you like working with less, and they pay you a ton of money. You need both. I think every professional services client we have who starts paying attention to this discovers that same dichotomy of clients.  Well, if you can have them be the same people, that’s the ultimate, isn’t it? That’s the ultimate.  Yeah. By the way, I really love this E-Myth reference. I had Michael Gerber on this podcast about 10 months ago, and he might actually like to hear how you’re refining his system in The E-Myth. So it’s pretty cool. Robert, if people are hearing this and they want this Growth Engine to be developed in their business, and they want access to the other software components you’re developing that could amplify their business—maybe the LinkedIn warm-up system and things like that—where should they go, and how can they learn more and connect with you?  Yeah. So the site that’s most relevant right now is: strategy.brillmedia.co. Again, that’s strategy.brillmedia.co. That breaks down what we do for businesses and what we do for agencies. You have pricing on there. To get a blueprint for your business—the diagnostic and strategy—we spend an hour on the phone interviewing the business owner. What are the economics? What’s been working? Why is now the time?  Tell me about your best clients and your worst clients. Just tell me stories about your business. It’s $497, and you get a complete blueprint—a complete marketing strategy synthesized through our systems and processes—so you can get off the marketing treadmill. You’re not spending months, years, and lots of money grasping at straws: Facebook. Google. LinkedIn. “Why doesn’t any of it work?” We’ll solve  All right. Definitely check out strategy.brillmedia.co. See for yourself what you can get there and how you can get started with Robert and his team. Definitely connect with Robert on LinkedIn. And if you enjoyed this episode, st81% ay tuned because every week we bring you one or two exciting entrepreneurs who share their frameworks with you. Thanks for coming, Robert, and sharing your experience. And thanks for listening. Important Links: Robert's LinkedIn Robert's  website

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Isaiah 6:1-101 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;    the whole earth is full of his glory.”4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”9 He said, “Go and tell this people:“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;    be ever seeing, but never perceiving.'10 Make the heart of this people calloused;    make their ears dull    and close their eyes.Otherwise they might see with their eyes,    hear with their ears,    understand with their hearts,and turn and be healed.”

Kristina Brenkova je zbrala pravljice z vsega sveta. Izbrala sem japonsko pravljico Deklica s čebričkom, ki govori o skromnosti, previdnosti in izpolnjeni ljubezni. Prisluhni.Vir: Zbirka Zlata ptica, Pravljice, Kristina Brenkova, Mladinska knjiga Založba d.d., Ljubljana, 2011, bere Nataša Holy

Holy crap, it's a LOADED SHOW in between both nights of WWE Summerslam with my reaction to Night One, including Brock Lesnar and Oba Femi inside Hell in a Cell, and Triple H's comments after the show about the need for talents to GET THEMSELVES OVER if they want to be in a top spot.  I've got a LOT to say about that, as well as his absurd comments from Thursday on Busted Open Radio about wishing the fans would just BELIEVE more (yes, it is OUR fault, you see!).  Plus, the latest installment of LOLTNA with Lebron James, thoughts on the Grayson Waller "pipebomb" from NXT this week and a DARK SIDE OF THE RING REVIEW on the life and death of the Big Boss Man, including insights into his close friendship with Chris Benoit NOT included in the episode!Support my sponsors this week by using the links below!Download ERAS OF WRESTLING below and GM the promotion you always dreamed of!APP STORE ▶ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/eras-of-wrestling/id6569255567GOOGLE PLAY ▶ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cc.eras&hl=en_USEXPRESSVPN ▶ Get an extra FOUR MONTHS FREE of the #1 trusted VPN at http://www.expressvpn.com/solomonsterFACTOR MEALS ▶ Use code "solomonster50off" at http://www.factormeals.com/solomonster50off to get 50 PERCENT OFF your first box plus FREE daily greens!***Follow Solomonster on X (formerly Twitter) for news and opinion:http://x.com/solomonsterSubscribe to the Solomonster Sounds Off on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/user/TheSolomonster?sub_confirmation=1Become a Solomonster Sounds Off Channel Member:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jcg7mk93fGNqWPMfl_Aig/join

August 2, 2026 | Brew City Church | Randy Knie & Shelly Schmor

At Jesus' Crucifixion and Death, the “Temple Veil” Was Torn; After Jesus Easter Resurrection, You Now Pray Directly with God MESSAGE SUMMARY:  Think about the magnitude of your direct and personal access to God that your prayers give you, through Jesus, if you will only pray. Before Jesus, ordinary people did not have direct access to God, through the Throne Room of God, with a direct personal relationship with God. In Old Testament times, people would come to the priests; and the priest would offer up a sacrifice on behalf of the people. The priests, and not the people, were communing directly with God. On Good Friday and at Jesus death on the cross, the “Temple Veil” was torn from top to bottom (i.e. “Temple Vail” was a large, very thick, and very heavy barrier that divided that portion of the Temple accessible by those wishing to sacrifice for prayer and the “Holy of Holies” where the only the High Priest could meet with God and pray on behalf of the people of God.). At Jesus Resurrection, no longer was an intermediary (e.g., a Priest) required for direct prayer with God by the people in Christ (i.e. Jesus Followers).  Because Jesus created a New Covenant relationship with His followers, now your prayers are in direct communion with God, the Creator of the Universe. Everyone, who is in Christ, may have access to the Throne Room of God in the name of Jesus. What a privilege this direct access to God is for those who are in Christ. The author of Hebrews, in Hebrews 4:16, tells Jesus Followers that, because of the Gospel, you have direct access to God's “throne of Grace” for your needs: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.".   TODAY'S PRAYER: Keeping the Sabbath, Lord, will require a lot of changes in the way I am living life. Teach me, Lord, how to take the next step with this in a way that fits my unique personality and situation. Help me to trust you with all that will remain unfinished and to enjoy my humble place in your very large world. In Jesus' name, amen. Scazzero, Peter. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Day by Day (p. 129). Zondervan. Kindle Edition. TODAY'S AFFIRMATION: Today, I affirm that because of what God has done for me in His Son, Jesus, I AM FILLED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT. If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! Luke 11:13 SCRIPTURE REFERENCE (ESV): Philippians 4:1-13; John 15:9-10; Revelation 4:1-2; Psalms 69c:25-36. A WORD FROM THE LORD WEBSITE: www.AWFTL.org. THIS SUNDAY'S AUDIO SERMON: You can listen to Archbishop Beach's Current Sunday Sermon: “Christians in the Church Must Become Christians in the Marketplace of Unbelievers” , at our Website: https://awordfromthelord.org/listen/    DONATE TO AWFTL: https://mygiving.secure.force.com/GXDonateNow?id=a0Ui000000DglsqEAB

August 2, 2026 Sunday morning sermon by Pastor Jeff Colón Website: www.lighthouseontherockky.org Facebook: https://facebook.com/lotrchurch

Spiritual Eyes of Faith (1) (audio) David Eells, 8/2/26  V. W. - 6/4/19 (David's notes in red) I had this dream where some of us of local UBM were in the living room of a house. Some of us were talking casually, sitting at a picnic table that was in the living room. My husband and I were sitting next to each other; Debbie Fenske was to the right, a little farther away. She was talking to us about the book we are reading in our Wednesday Bible studies, The Real Good News. (This book is about what the Gospel provides for those who overcome through faith.) She said something about the chapter we are in, and she had read a few chapters ahead. She was also very excited about the deliverance the Lord is doing now, and something about spiritual warfare. I remember seeing Joe D. (who has come here to visit) sitting in a chair diagonally across from her, smiling. As she was talking about the book, I knew we were now receiving “grants”. (For those who take part in the cleaning up process, the heavenly “grants” will come to those who have faith in the promises.) Then, when I woke up I thought of (Php.1:29) …to you it hath been granted in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer in his behalf. (Those who suffer with Jesus in our death to self will also reign with him through the grants. (2Ti.2:11) Faithful is the saying: For if we died with him, we shall also live with him: 12 if we endure, we shall also reign with him: if we shall deny him, he also will deny us. (Rev.2:26) And he that overcometh, and he that keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give authority over the nations. All the promises we've been given from the Lord are past tense, so we see them as being “granted” already.) I thought about how a grant is a gift to be used for a specific purpose. And I searched the New Testament for the word ‘granted' and found these verses. (I added the Old Testament grants to overcomers.) It is amazing to see all the things the Lord is granting us now. Thank You, Father, for Your grace and for granting us to be delivered out of the hands of our enemies! Thank You for all the things You are giving us. May we use all You grant us for Your Kingdom and glory in Jesus name, Amen! (Luk.1:73-75) The oath which he sware unto Abraham our father, 74 To grant unto us that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies Should serve him without fear, 75 In holiness and righteousness before him all our days. (Act.4:29) And now, Lord, look upon their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants to speak thy word with all boldness. 30 while thy stretchest forth thy hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done through the name of thy holy Servant Jesus. 31 And when they had prayed, the place was shaken wherein they were gathered together; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spake the word of God with boldness. (Act.14:2) But the Jews that were disobedient stirred up the souls of the Gentiles, and made them evil affected against the brethren. 3 Long time therefore they tarried there speaking boldly in the Lord, who bare witness unto the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands. (Act. 27:23-25) For there stood by me this night an angel of the God whose I am, whom also I serve, 24 saying, Fear not, Paul; thou must stand before Caesar: and lo, God hath granted thee all them that sail with thee. 25 Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer: for I believe God, that it shall be even so as it hath been spoken unto me. (Rom.5:5) Now the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be of the same mind one with another according to Christ Jesus: 6 that with one accord ye may with one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Gal.3:16) Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. (And He grants to those who abide in Christ who are sons of Abraham by faith.) 17 Now this I say: A covenant confirmed beforehand by God, the law, which came four hundred and thirty years after, doth not disannul, so as to make the promise of none effect. 18 For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no more of promise: but God hath granted it to Abraham by promise. (Eph.3:16-19) that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man; 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God. (2Pe.1:3-4) Seeing that his divine power hath granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that called us by his own glory and virtue; whereby he hath granted unto us his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust. (1Ch.4:10) And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my border, and that thy hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it be not to my sorrow! And God granted him that which he requested. And He will grant us this too. (2Ch.1:11) And God said to Solomon, Because this was in thy heart, and thou hast not asked riches, wealth, or honor, nor the life of them that hate thee, neither yet hast asked long life; but hast asked wisdom and knowledge for thyself, that thou mayest judge my people, over whom I have made thee king: 12 wisdom and knowledge is granted unto thee; and I will give thee riches, and wealth, and honor, such as none of the kings have had that have been before thee; neither shall there any after thee have the like. (Ezr.3:6) From the first day of the seventh month began they to offer burnt-offerings unto Jehovah: but the foundation of the temple of Jehovah was not yet laid. 7 They gave money also unto the masons, and to the carpenters; and food, and drink, and oil, unto them of Sidon, and to them of Tyre, to bring cedar-trees from Lebanon to the sea, unto Joppa, according to the grant that they had of Cyrus king of Persia. (Trump as Cyrus is conquering D.S. Babylon and freeing the Christians and granting them expenses to build the true Temple. Its happening!) (Ezr.7:6) this Ezra went up from Babylon. And he was a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which Jehovah, the God of Israel, had given; and the king granted him all his request, according to the hand of Jehovah his God upon him. 7 And there went up some of the children of Israel, and of the priests, and the Levites, and the singers, and the porters, and the Nethinim, unto Jerusalem, in the seventh year of Artaxerxes the king. 8 And he came to Jerusalem in the fifth month, which was in the seventh year of the king. … 13 I make a decree, that all they of the people of Israel, and their priests and the Levites, in my realm, that are minded of their own free will to go to Jerusalem, go with thee. … 15 and to carry the silver and gold, which the king and his counsellors have freely offered unto the God of Israel, whose habitation is in Jerusalem, 16 and all the silver and gold that thou shalt find in all the province of Babylon, with the freewill-offering of the people, and of the priests, offering willingly for the house of their God which is in Jerusalem; (Just as above, Ezra was granted to lead the people of God out of Babylonish bondage with a grant from the King to build the temple of God, which is a type of God's people so it will be granted today.) (Est.5:8) If I have found favor in the sight of the king, and if it please the king to grant my petition, and to perform my request, let the king and Haman come to the banquet that I shall prepare for them, and I will do to-morrow as the king hath said. (Esther the Bride was granted to save the people of God from the D.S. Beast kingdom and bring them to their spiritual Red Sea destruction so it will be today.) (Neh.2:7) Moreover I said unto the king, If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the River, that they may let me pass through till I come unto Judah; 8 and a letter unto Asaph the keeper of the king's forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the castle which appertaineth to the house, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into. And the king granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me. (Again a grant from the King to rebuild the true Temple of God and so it will be in our day.) (Est.5:6) And the king said unto Esther at the banquet of wine, What is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee: and what is thy request? even to the half of the kingdom it shall be performed. (So ask today, Bride, for whatever you need!) (Est.7:2) And the king said again unto Esther on the second day at the banquet of wine, What is thy petition, queen Esther? and it shall be granted thee: and what is thy request? even to the half of the kingdom it shall be performed. (The Bride is granted to be a joint heir with Christ.) (Est.8:11) wherein the king granted the Jews that were in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them, their little ones and women, and to take the spoil of them for a prey, (The Bride is granted to give authority to destroy the D.S. Beast kingdom.) (Est.9:12) And the king said unto Esther the queen, The Jews have slain and destroyed five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Haman; what then have they done in the rest of the king's provinces! Now what is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee: or what is thy request further? and it shall be done. 13 Then said Esther, If it please the king, let it be granted to the Jews that are in Shushan to do to-morrow also according unto this day's decree, and let Haman's ten sons be hanged upon the gallows. (The Bride is granted to give authority to utterly destroy the D.S. Beast kingdom.) (Job.10:12) Thou hast granted me life and lovingkindness; And thy visitation hath preserved my spirit. (Pro.10:24) The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him; And the desire of the righteous shall be granted. 25 When the whirlwind passeth, the wicked is no more; But the righteous is an everlasting foundation. (Psa.20:4) Grant thee thy heart's desire, And fulfil all thy counsel. (Psa.119:29) Remove from me the way of falsehood; And grant me thy law graciously. 30 I have chosen the way of faithfulness: Thine ordinances have I set before me. 31 I cleave unto thy testimonies: O Jehovah, put me not to shame. 32 I will run the way of thy commandments, When thou shalt enlarge my heart. (Psa.140:7-11) O Jehovah the Lord, the strength of my salvation, Thou hast covered my head in the day of battle. 8 Grant not, O Jehovah, the desires of the wicked; Further not his evil device, lest they exalt themselves. Selah. 9 As for the head of those that compass me about, Let the mischief of their own lips cover them. 10 Let burning coals fall upon them: Let them be cast into the fire, Into deep pits, whence they shall not rise. 11 An evil speaker shall not be established in the earth: Evil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him.   Abiding in Heavenly Places Alenna Timoshchuk - 12/17/21 (David's notes in red) I dreamt that my husband went to visit David Eells and Michael, but instead of visiting them where they lived now, he actually was visiting them in heaven. (Representing the first fruits Man-child ministers living in “heavenly places in Christ”.) None of them were dead; they were still alive on this earth, but it was like there was a lower part of heaven that was open to those who abide in Christ, and they could visit it, even though they were still alive on earth. (The first fruits come into perfection through Christ first by abiding with Him in heavenly places.) I got to see a bit of it as if I was looking through my husband's eyes and it looked like it was just above all the mountain peaks. (Looking through our husband's eyes represents seeing the way our heavenly husband Jesus sees. The Bride has the eyes of a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, just as her husband Jesus does. (Son.4:1) Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; Thine eyes are as doves behind thy veil. Thy hair is as a flock of goats, That lie along the side of mount Gilead. And (Son.5:12) His eyes are like doves beside the water-brooks, Washed with milk, and fitly set.) It had beautiful pine trees and rivers, and Michael and David lived in a beautiful large log cabin, a really fancy one. (For anyone who loves the outdoors and appreciates nature, this would be their dream place. Just the prettiest scenery you could ever imagine.) (I was shown in a vision years ago a tower of logs that represented the UBM ministry that the Lord was giving me. This log cabin represents the UBM ministry living the crucified life, represented by the cross timbers at the corners.) My husband stayed with them for three days, then came back to me and was just so excited, telling me all about it. He was saying how Michael (Meaning, “Who is like God”) held a staff in his hand, and if someone wanted to enter that part of heaven, then he'd hold it out, and if the color turned red, then the person could not enter because they were not abiding in Christ. But if it turned green, then they could go in. He told me how relieved he was when the staff turned green and not red. He started telling me about how wonderful and beautiful everything was up there. (The first fruits have very good discernment; the discernment of Jesus, and the wicked don't ever get past them. (2Co.10:6) and being in readiness to avenge all disobedience, when your obedience shall be made full.) Then he pulled out a branch from a pine tree and gave it to me. It had the most beautiful aroma. I thought it was so sweet that he brought me a souvenir from heaven. (Pine trees are evergreens, and they represent everlasting life. Jesus is the Father of Eternity and the Branch. This is the gift or souvenir that Jesus has brought back to us with His resurrection. (Isa.9:6) For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father (Hebrew: Father of Eternity), Prince of Peace.) Then I told him, “I want to go so badly. I want to be in heaven.” And he smiled and hugged me and said, “Let's go for your birthday on March 6th. (3/6 or 3+6=9. Nine was the hour that Jesus died on the cross, and there are 9 fruits of the Spirit for those who have died to self. And, as in the natural, those who die get to go to heaven. Our birthday begins when we begin to die to our flesh by living the crucified life; then we begin to bear the fruits of the Spirit of God as He makes us a fully born again new creature in Christ.) Then he said, “Maybe then we can stay there for a month.” (30 days? Jesus was 30, as the Law states, when He began his ministry.) I was so excited! I knew it would be the best birthday I've ever had, but I worried a little that we wouldn't have enough money to not work for an entire month. (God will always make provision when He holds the green staff because we walk by faith to follow in His footsteps.) Then I woke up.   Seeing Others Through Faith Eve Brast - 06/13/08 (David's notes in red) The Shulamite bride in Song of Solomon had the eyes of a dove, meaning she saw things the way God's Spirit sees things. This dream teaches us to see others by faith as God does, to see that they have already been given godliness through Christ. This is the opposite of the way the faction views righteous people. (2Pe.1:2) Grace to you and peace be multiplied in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; 3 seeing that his divine power hath granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that called us by his own glory and virtue; 4 whereby he hath granted unto us his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in that world by lust. Spiritual eyes see the end from the beginning. I had a dream that began in an indoor swimming pool area. The voice of David Eells was talking over my right shoulder throughout the whole dream. He was showing me different people and situations; people that I had wondered whether they were saved or would be saved, or if these people were making the right choices or living their lives the right way. These things had disturbed or concerned me throughout my life. (Rather than wonder about them, we should have faith for them to be saved. (Php.1:6) being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ: 7 even as it is right for me to be thus minded on behalf of you all, because I have you in my heart, inasmuch as, both in my bonds and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel, ye all are partakers with me of grace.) David would show me these different people. Some of them were close friends or family members; others were strangers whom I had never seen before, or people I had only had brief encounters with. I was walking on the right side of the pool. David's voice was talking over my shoulder in my right ear from behind me. Suddenly, I could hear the voices of my son Noah and his friend Nathan squabbling ... I walked up to them, not sure how to handle their squabble, and was frustrated with their childish foolishness ... Then David Eells walked over to both of them and, in a gentle way, started teaching them ... He calmed them with a gentle voice. Then he showed them how to…reconcile their differences. (Mat.5:9) Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.) Then the scene changed. David's voice was still in my right ear, teaching me. The more he taught me, the more my spiritual sight opened up, and I began to see these people the way God sees them or knows them, even when they are still living in sin or ignorance. (We have to be the peacemakers between the immature and teach them to let God be the judge between them.) The next scene was outdoors on some land that David owned... I drove up in a flatbed pick-up with food, plants, flowers and one small crate of special baby birds. I was contributing these things as a gift to UBM. (No buying and selling but giving and receiving.) All of us lived on his land and had our different positions and chores or things we were assigned to do, based on what we were good at. (Everyone will work according to their assigned gifts and abilities from God, Him working in them to will and to do of His good pleasure; this creates peace and rest.) ... The women and I carried all the food, plants and flowers into the greenhouse nursery to tend to them. I set the baby birds on the top right corner of a table in the center of the nursery. (Baby Christians in the nursery will grow up like the Father's planting.) One of the women who was older than me in her 50's with dyed, dark brown hair walked past the birds and looked down at them with presumptive irritation and said, “What are those?” I started to tell her, but she cut me off because her true intention was to make a point that she wasn't going to help me feed them or care for them. She said, “Well, I hope you don't expect me to take care of them”. I was offended at first by her presumptuousness. But David's voice on my shoulder explained to me why she said that, because that was not God's calling for her and then something amazing happened. All at once, I was able to see her heart attitude and knew this woman intimately as God saw her! All my anger just melted away …and I loved this woman and was so grateful for all she had done for UBM. I was shown how precious and valuable she was to God, and I cherished her like a hidden treasure! (Everyone will learn to appreciate individual callings and gifts as the people manifestly become the body of Christ. No one will do without, for the body will minister to itself as it was in the Book of Acts.) After this, the scene changed, and the plant nursery turned into my grandmother's house. It was Christmas, and there were gobs of Christmas décor everywhere. My mother's family was celebrating Christmas and standing around, eating and talking to one another. My grandmother was being the good hostess that she has always been, preparing food and asking everyone about themselves ... (In God's nursery, the babies can grow up out of their Babylonish traditions without condemnation.) Suddenly, I realized that my grandfather was there. (He passed away back in September 2007.) He was dressed in a colorful Christmas sweater and he looked so young and full of life! (Representing those who are immature, who are dead in their sins, can grow up out of Babylonish works.) My grandmother acted as if it were normal to have a dead man mulling around her house! My mom finally came in, and I rushed over to her in a panic and said, “Thank God you are here! Grandpa is alive! And he is running around here talking to everyone!” I was fearful and horrified. My mother was surprised and concerned. She didn't know what to do except pretend like everything was normal and talk to my grandpa like he was still alive. My mom and I were the only two who realized that my grandpa had died. (Resurrection life will come to those in immature Babylonish habits when we see them and talk to them as though they are alive from the dead and new creatures in Christ. (2Co.5:14) For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; 15 and he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again. 16 Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know [him so] no more. 17 Wherefore if any man is in Christ, [he is] a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new. 18 But all things are of God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave unto us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 to wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses, and having committed unto us the word of reconciliation. 20 We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were entreating by us: we beseech [you] on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God. 21 Him who knew no sin he made [to be] sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.) As I stood there, I could hear David's voice over my shoulder again, and it calmed me down, and my fear melted away. ... Then that amazing thing happened again! I started quietly observing my grandpa as he talked and interacted with the other family members. He was beautiful and radiant. He was kind and his heart was childlike. I saw him the way God had seen him! (Yes, by faith and renewed imagination as a new creature in Christ.) He was going around, really just pouring his soul into his children and grandchildren! I couldn't believe what a precious soul this was! (My grandpa used to be a very hard man in his younger years. When I was a child, I heard him and my father arguing as my dad tried to share the Gospel with him. A stream of obscenities would pour out of his mouth. He said he didn't need God. Later in his life, during his 60s, he had a change of heart. He got involved in a local Methodist church and went to Sunday school and church most Sundays and dragged my grandma along, who also got involved with that church. They were really serious about it all. (As baby Christians, we were all involved in a simplistic experience of Christianity, so we should love these as Christ loved us as His babies who are learning to walk -- at the same time correcting the system and leaders who would keep them as babes.) When he had been alive, I judged them for their denominational choice and what I viewed as a shallow, almost worthless relationship with God. (Babies play in the shallow end of the pool until they grow up. We must speak justification by faith to them to give them the joy and confidence of their salvation.) As I was observing my dead grandpa at this Christmas party, I was able to see his heart the way God saw him. It was incredible to me how I could feel how God felt and saw my grandpa! I saw that God cherished his childlike faith and his desire to help others understand things and mentor them, and his desire to help others with their projects. (We must see the immature as accounted righteous by faith.) At that moment, I knew that he was with the Lord and not in hell, as I had been concerned about it since his death. The scene changed again, and my grandmother's house turned into the apartment of two homosexual men. As I observed them, they couldn't see me. I was immediately disgusted that I was in their home. (We are forbidden to judge any of the lost, for they have not grace yet to obey and are in bondage, to be pitied [1 Cor.5:9-13].) I was fearful of some sort of defilement or something. These two men were nicely dressed. I listened to them talk. They had several Great Dane dogs that were running around in the backyard. I wasn't happy about those dogs. … As I was feeling threatened by these men and their dogs, I heard David's voice talking in my right ear again, and as I listened, the threat melted away, and I began to see these men's hearts. They had such compassion and loving kindness in their hearts! I watched them love and care for their animals, when suddenly I heard a knock at the door. One of the men went over to open the door. There was a naked man who was obese and hairy all over his body, sitting in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag taped to his lower abdomen that was filled with feces. He was homeless and needed a place to live and someone to help him change his colostomy bag every day. The sight of this man horrified me, and I doubted these men would take him in. I watched as they happily discussed the possibility between themselves and eagerly agreed to take this crippled, naked man into their home and take care of him! I was astounded at their love for other people, their compassion, and their blindness to the flaws of others. God showed me all the qualities that he had formed in their hearts, how He used the betrayal and rejection that they had experienced throughout their lives in order to form Christ in them! I was seeing the end from the beginning in these men (even though they were still in ignorance and lost in their sin). (Those who have been sinners and rejected can appreciate the acceptance of Christ through the Gospel. Some lost people have more of the nature of Christ than some Christians, but they are not justified through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus. In everyone whom God will ultimately draw and call to Himself, He prepares the soil by breaking it up through adverse circumstances and failure, so that through repentance and faith the seed of Christ is planted. Those who are forgiven of much are able to love much. (Luk.7:47) Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, [the same] loveth little.) God told me, “These are mine!” And they were so beautiful!! So perfect in heart! Such compassion that I had never seen or experienced before! It just made me want to weep. I felt defiled by my own attitudes and judgmental self-righteousness and was horrified at myself. David's words had helped me to see things and people the way that God saw them, in process. I was able to finally see my own heart clearly and repent to God. After this dream, seeing others the way God sees them became a permanent gift. (God sees us as a finished product from the beginning through Jesus' sacrifice, and we must do the same for others. As we forgive them, God forgives us. We can tell them the good news that they are free from sin. The repentant sinner will appreciate this greatly.) They looked so precious to me, and I just cherished each one in my heart like a rare jewel! I didn't see their sin anymore or their imperfections. I wasn't concerned about their immediate state or what they were planning to do that was sinful or wrong. I just saw the end from the beginning and felt such rest! (Seeing our loved ones through the sacrifice of Christ by faith gives us rest that God will do the work in them.) Not only did God settle my uncertainty about the salvation or spiritual condition of all the people whom I have prayed for or been “concerned” about in my family or other people's families, but He gave me the faith I needed to believe in the sanctification of others that we pray for and believe for their salvation. (When we pray for lost loved ones, we are commanded to believe we have received what we prayed for and see it as done. (Mar.11:24) Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye received (in original Greek) them, and ye shall have them.) This has been an issue for me that I have worried over and struggled with a lot. These situations were representative of all the lost loved ones whom the saints of God are praying and believing for! Praise God for peace of mind and for His great mercy! To be balanced on this subject, we must not give grace to believers who walk in willful disobedience. (Heb.10:26) For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries. 28 A man that hath set at nought Moses law dieth without compassion on [the word of] two or three witnesses: 29 of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him that said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense. And again, the Lord shall judge His people.   Learning to Walk in the Spirit Winnie Osegueda - 1/25/22 (David's notes in red) In this dream, I was at my mom's house and there were quite a few different types of people of all colors and nationalities. (I believe this could be part of God's elect still stuck in the mother harlot Church.) There was a man who came into the house who looked like Brandy Arney when he was a bit younger. This man looked like a mix between Brandy Arney and the actor Daniel Craig, who plays James Bond. (Bond is a play on words representing the first fruits Man-child who are bonded together in the agape love of Christ to teach the woman, as Revelation 12 shows. The Man-child body of all nations teaches the woman to fight for the Kingdom like Bond fought for his.) I wanted him to come in because he was going to show me how real the spiritual realm is, and I invited him inside. He was wearing a white or light cream sweater as he stood across from me in front of my mom's front door. As “Brandy/Bond” stood there, I saw his spirit man come out of his body and I was blown away. I asked him how to do that, and he began to teach me. (This represents learning to walk in the Spirit and be led by the Spirit rather than walk in the flesh. (Rom.8:12-14) So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh: 13 for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. 14 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.) Then, as I stood there, my spirit man also came out of my body. This aspect of the dream felt so real. I literally felt myself leave my body. (living in the flesh no more) As I was “walking in the spirit,” I could see and feel my spirit man's arm and hand touch a white lady's sweater with ruffles on the shoulders that was folded over on the back seat of a wooden chair in my bedroom. I believe this sweater was for me. (These are the righteous acts of the saints that we are clothed with when we walk in the Spirit, denying our flesh.) (I see this dream as a parable of coming out of the flesh and walking in the Spirit, and how we are able, by faith, to put on the Lord's righteous garments.) Then I woke up. I asked the Lord for a couple of verses regarding myself in this dream and I received by faith at random: (Joh.3:12) If I told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things? (We walk in Heavenly things when we walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh.) And (Eph.4:14) (14-16 for context) that we may be no longer children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, in craftiness, after the wiles of error; 15 but speaking truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ; 16 from whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love.   Seeing Christ in the Mirror Marie Kelton - 1-28-22 (David's notes in red) During the night the Lord gave me a vision of my spiritual man in a dark place. (1Co.13:10-12) but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known.) She was wearing all white and standing in front of a vanity that was all white with a desk and a chair. My spiritual man was looking in the mirror and saw a black being there. I knew it was my flesh man in the mirror. (Jas.1:23-24) But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deluding your own selves. 23 For if any one is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a mirror: 24 for he beholdeth himself, and goeth away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.) My spiritual man broke the mirror by hitting it. (Because we cannot see the old man in the mirror, or we will not be justified by faith and not have the power to obey.) Then I saw the Lord standing next to my spiritual man in front of the vanity. (2Co.3:18) But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.)   Get the Beam out of Your Own Eye C. P. - 1/15/22 (David's notes in red) In a vision, I saw a mist and heard the word “fumigate”. (Fumigate means to exterminate or disinfect using smoke or chemicals.) (I believe this mist is the prayers of the saints, as well as the Holy Spirit). Then in the mist I saw a wooden beam. (Mat.7:1-5) Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you. 3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? 5 Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.) In the wooden beam, there was the tiniest little black speck, but as the mist continued to stay on the beam, the black speck became bigger until something wriggled out from the wooden beam. It looked like a newt or a small lizard. It was struggling to survive so it left. (The black newt or lizard can be the spirit of judgement, which hangs around with rejection and fear of rejection. These unclean spirits are curses from the evil one. All factious spirits of criticism, judgement, rejection, etc. leave when the fumigation mist of the saints' prayers comes. We need to be praying for our brothers and sisters! (1Th.5:23-25) And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 Faithful is he that calleth you, who will also do it. 25 Brethren, pray for us.) The prayers, both personal and collective, for ourselves and for others, are how we cast out the beam from our own eye. Then you can see the beam and what was in it. Our prayers to be cleansed from all unrighteousness are heard, and He will complete the good work He has started in each one of us! Praise God!) This vision greatly encouraged me, and I have been trying to use every opportunity in my daily disciplines to pray for others, even if it is in the Spirit with tongues. I asked the Lord if I should share this dream with the body to encourage everyone, and received by faith at random (Psa.65:5) of them that are afar off, so that's an affirmative! (In context 5-7) By terrible things thou wilt answer us in righteousness, O God of our salvation, Thou that art the confidence of all the ends of the earth, And of them that are afar off upon the sea: 6 Who by his strength setteth fast the mountains, Being girded about with might; 7 Who stilleth the roaring of the seas, The roaring of their waves, And the tumult of the peoples.   The Lord is Cleansing His Body Winnie Osegueda - 9/20/21 (David's notes in red) I dreamt that I was at the house where we (UBM) meet locally. (Winnie here represents the Bride body that the Lord is faithfully attending to in order to get them cleaned up and ready for ministry during the 7 years of tribulation.) I was sitting on the couch that I normally sit on with my family, which is on the right of David. Instead of David sitting on the chair he normally sits in, however, he was sitting beside me. As David sat next to me, he turned into another man, whom I had not seen before. This man was regular-looking and was younger, but not too young. He also had a nice tan, like someone who'd been out in the sun often. (I believe this man was Jesus, but at the same time, he was also still David.) (Jesus and David 'merged together' represents the Lord through the David/Man-child body of ministers shepherding and caring for their flocks in faithfulness and love.) The man began to speak to me and told me that when I sing, it sounds very beautiful to the Lord. (Our praise and worship are not just songs that we sing to the Lord, but we worship Him with the sacrifice of our lives through obedience to His Word and taking up our cross daily to follow Christ in our suffering of death to self. (Joh.4:23) But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers. The Greek word for worship here is Proskuneo, meaning to “kiss towards.” i.e. an act of love towards God is worship. This could include praise, singing, or what we normally think of as worship or other acts of love towards Him and our fellow man.) (For the morning prayer meeting on the morning that I received this dream, the verses I got by faith at random were the story of the woman with the alabaster jar of expensive perfume, which I received confirmation of when Chuc received the same story in a different gospel the following day or two. (Mar.14:3) And while he was in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster cruse of ointment of pure nard very costly; and she brake the cruse, and poured it over his head. (This was an act of love toward the Lord.) (I believe this could be symbolic of giving the Lord our all and holding nothing back.) Winnie went on to say: He also said that He hears my pain and that it echoes through the kingdom. In the dream, I knew immediately that it meant I needed to cast my burdens onto the Lord. When the man said this to me, the thought came to me that I had to lay down my pain and give it to the Lord. (When we allow the enemy to inflict his pain upon us by receiving his fiery darts, it affects the whole body of Christ, and everyone suffers when one is suffering. This is how it echoes through His Kingdom.) The man also said to me, “Can't you see the angels around you?” I looked up and saw several angels above me, almost forming a circle. (Psa.91:11) For he will give his angels charge over thee, To keep thee in all thy ways. (Psa.34:7) The angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them that fear him, And delivereth them.) (We must keep our angels who are assigned to go forth for us into battle against our enemies employed. (Heb.1:14) Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation?) As this man was talking to me, I could see his eyes were very kind, and they also teared up. The man had a lot of compassion, and as he was telling me all these things, my eyes began to well up with tears. As a tear began to fall down my left cheek, the man reached over to wipe it away. As he wiped away my tear, he also began to rub a black spot off of my face. (Jesus not only came to wipe away our sorrows and give us His joy and freedom, but He also came to take away all our sins, spots, and blemishes.) A feeling of shame tried to creep up on me, as if I did not want the man to look too closely at my faults and flaws. (Shame and condemnation will keep us trapped in a prison and an endless cycle, and we will not be effective for the Kingdom of God if we stay in this state.) Then I woke up suddenly. The verse that came to me as I was typing this was: (Eph.5:25-27) Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it; 26 that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word, 27 that he might present the church to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. This is a work that the Lord will complete in us, and all we have to do is repent and believe. (1Jn.1:9) If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  I asked the Lord if I should share this dream with the body and received by faith at random: (Eph.2:21-22) in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; 22 in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit. (I thought this was a pretty good confirmation.) (I believe, and also Winnie, that when the Lord removed the black spot, she was representing the Body.)   Loving the Hidden Treasure Eve Brast - 07/30/2016 (David's notes in red) I dreamed that my son Elijah and I were in the basement of a greenhouse where David and Michael lived. It was painted forest green. (I believe Father is using a word play here for a greenhouse where plants are nurtured and protected from the harsh elements.) (This is what we do. Eve represents the Bride of the “last Adam”. Elijah means “my God is YAHWEH”, meaning “my mighty one is YAHWEH”. Those who trust in God's strength to do their works.) The basement had a dirt floor, and the dream started with Elijah and me pulling up a large golden crate out of the ground that had been unearthed. (An obvious hidden treasure in the UBM house. The golden ark of the covenant.) We opened the lid and golden light shone forth from its contents. I don't know who had unearthed it, but he and I were excited to carry it upstairs and show it to our brethren. It was surprisingly lightweight and wasn't at all hard to carry up the basement stairs. (God's hidden treasures are Jesus' light burden. His treasures put faith in us, which gives His power to bear any burden.) Elijah and I brought it and set it on the threshold between the living room and dining room, and I knelt in front of it as Elijah moved around to the other side in the dining room next to Michael Hare. I thought in the dream that it was a “hope chest”. (A hope chest is something that young girls used to have in the old days, where they would store things away for the time when they would be married.) (Representing a treasure hidden for Eve, as a type of the Bride's marriage.) There was a well-lit kitchen off to my right and in front of us, where David was busy preparing something for us all to eat. (Jesus said we must eat His body and He is the Word made flesh, the manna from Heaven that the fleshly tire of, for they value flesh.) Several brethren were standing behind me, waiting to see what was inside the crate. They seemed perturbed at us for bringing the crate up out of the basement. (These are not one spirit with the Bride because of a critical spirit. They are not in one accord to prepare for the coming outpouring.) It's hard to explain, but I could see things through their eyes, as well as my own view. I was going back and forth between what I was seeing and what they were seeing and thinking. Once I knelt down in front of the golden crate, I was then inside the minds of those behind me. I saw myself through their eyes kneeling down in front of an ugly, old wooden crate that had mud and dirt on it. (They do not value the treasure of the Bride as she and the Groom do.) When I opened the crate, the people stepped forward, and when they looked inside, they saw nothing but a small piece of white paper lying on the floor of the upper right-hand corner of the crate. It looked like the corner of a larger piece of white paper that had been torn away. (They don't see the whole page but only a small portion. God gives knowledge and wisdom to those who will use it. He does not give the hidden treasure to those who are only hearers and not doers because they would just be more condemned for not obeying.) They began to make critical comments and think critical things about the crate. They said, “There is nothing in there but a little piece of trash! Why did you drag that old thing up here?” (They who speak against the gifts and Word of God become defiled by what they speak. (Mat.15:18) But the things which proceed out of the mouth come forth out of the heart; and they defile the man. 19 For out of the heart come forth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, railings: 20 these are the things which defile the man... The righteous treasure everything that comes from God. Those who are satisfied with the world don't hunger for the things of God. (Pro.27:7) The full soul loatheth a honeycomb; But to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. (Psa.17:15) As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with beholding thy form.) At the same time, I was able to see myself opening the crate through my own eyes, and when I opened it, Elijah, Michael, and I saw that same warm, beautiful golden light come shining forth out of it again. We saw a rich, golden crate and, as we watched, two silver trays of thinly sliced sourdough bread came rising up out of the light. (Sourdough represents “bitter in the belly” or flesh. The bread of Heaven is the light, and it is Christ. Search for Him as for treasure. (Pro.2:3) Yea, if thou cry after discernment, And lift up thy voice for understanding; 4 If thou seek her as silver, And search for her as for hid treasures: 5 Then shalt thou understand the fear of Jehovah, And find the knowledge of God.) One side was completely full of bread, and the other side still had a third of its bread left on the tray. (Two tablets in the ark that were placed there with a bowl of manna and Aaron's rod.) (Both the manna and the tables represent the bread of the Word: (Heb.9:4) ... the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was a golden pot holding the manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant...) I said in amazement, “Look at that!” But the people behind me asked, “Look at what? There is nothing there!” Then I heard Father say to me in my right ear, “My promises and entrance into My Kingdom are obtained by faith, but they (meaning the ones behind me) only walk by sight. They can't see what you see.” Michael then gestured with an open hand toward the two trays of bread floating in front of me, cocked his head to the side and said, “Y'all have got two days to eat this bread or else it's going to go bad and we'll have to throw it out! Now get to eatin.'” (Those who saved the bread for another day, saw it go bad. Eat it now or lose it. In Exodus 16, what was the manna that was given? Actually, the word given in Exodus 16 for manna is the word “man”. Look at your footnote at the bottom of the page. The footnote says “man”. Do you know who that man was? The man who came down out of Heaven and gave life to the world. The one we have to eat in order to have life. It is Jesus, the Word. How do you eat Jesus and have life? You have to consume Him. He is the Word made flesh. The Word has to go into you and become a part of your being. How does it do that? You have to believe and obey it. This is exactly what the Word says: (Exo.16:4) Then said the Lord unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you... Jesus said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven for you”. Exodus continues, 4 ... and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in My law, or not. What is it to eat your portion every day? It is to walk in God's Word. He is proving them to see if they will walk in His law. We are supposed to partake of God's Word and walk in it every day. Did you know that for six days they went out and gathered the manna? When they tried to store it up, it bred worms; but when they gathered it for the seventh day, it did not breed worms. What does six mean? Six means “man” and what is earthly and worldly. Seven means rest for those who believe it.) At this point, I had a vision of a flock of Mallard ducks outside the house waiting for that molded bread that had not been eaten after the two days were up, to be tossed to them. (Ducks are waterfowl.) (The bread of the Word is to bring us into the resurrection life of Christ on the third day. (Luk.13:32) And he said unto them, Go and say to that fox, Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I am perfected.) I picked up a slice of bread from the tray that had one-third of the bread left and took a bite. It was good but really sour. The people behind me were angry and were asking, “What bread? What are you talking about?!” They couldn't understand because they didn't have the faith to see what was right in front of them. All they saw was the natural state of that crate and all the negative things. They couldn't even see the bread to eat it. (Luk.8:10) And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to the rest in parables; that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand. (Mat.11:25) At that season Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes... Notice that the treasures are hidden from those who are wise in their own eyes. At this point, I was sad for them and felt alone. I obediently kept eating the bread, but I asked Michael, “How am I going to eat all this myself? I'm only one person.” (Those who love the hidden manna are one in Christ.) He didn't answer; he only smiled at me because I was helping to eat the bread so that it wouldn't go bad. Then I woke up. When I woke up from this dream, I asked Father for a verse or text for this dream and received Acts 1:12 (12-26). This is also the verse I gave at the morning prayer meeting. This text talks about the need for us to be in one accord (for the outpouring) as God replaces Judas with another who is faithful to eat the bread. I asked Father for a verse for the critical brethren behind me and received (Pro.8:13) The fear of Jehovah is to hate evil: Pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, And the perverse mouth, do I hate. This whole chapter is an excellent parable for this dream!   Why Die Walking After the Flesh? Suani Guzman - 03/01/2011 (David's notes in red) I asked the Lord for a dream, and He gave me a very good one. There was a woman whose name was Delilah (meaning “weakened, uprooted or impoverished”) who had lost her son. (She was weakened and uprooted because she lost her spiritual man or fruit of the womb of her heart, as in the parable of the sower. How can we lose our spiritual man or fruit? (Jud.12) Twice dead plucked up by the roots. Jesus said in (Joh.15:2) Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away.) Some Christians gathered to pray about finding the boy. (Praying for her to find her fruit again.) They were waiting for me to finish washing my teeth. (Son.6:6) Thy teeth are like a flock of ewes, Which are come up from the washing; Whereof every one hath twins, And none is bereaved among them. Each tooth has its opposite so that a person may be well fed spiritually. (Gen.49:12) His eyes shall be red with wine, And his teeth white with milk. The teeth must be washed with the milk of the Word. In this way, clean teeth mean clean spiritual food of the Word.) My son began to pray a mellow prayer, and I felt that prayer wouldn't do it. I started to pray with power and faith. We finished and went on the search. I think the boy's name was Elijah (“my God is YHWH”) and his father's name was Onesimus, a carpenter, who was a very good father. (Onesimus was the runaway slave who met Paul and became “profitable or helpful”, as his name means, when he brought forth the fruit of the spiritual man, his son.) I found an old man who was attaching a boy to a pallet. (The old man had taken the spiritual man captive. It's called walking in the flesh. A pallet is for moving merchandise around. So the old man makes merchandise of the spiritual man, much like false ministers do.) I went over to him and took the boy off and grabbed him. I put the old man on my side like carrying a baby (We must take the old man where he would not go, as Jesus said to Peter) and asked him, “Where is the boy, and who do you work for?” He wouldn't say. I said with a firm determination, “I will win”; then he said, “You already won.” (Through Jesus, we have already won against the old man, who works for the flesh and the devil. (Gal.2:20) I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me: and that [life] which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, [the faith] which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me. (Gal.5:24) And they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof.) While still carrying the old man, I noticed the empty packaging of what he had been using to attach the boy, and I picked it up. I read the label, hoping to trace it to the kidnappers. The price tag read “Humble Oct. 6-11”. (The Lord paid the price to set us free from this bondage above. And the old man will pay a terrible price for taking authority over the spiritual man. What is “Humble Oct.6-11”? This is the opposite of and solution for what happened above when the old man took authority over the spiritual man. This symbolizes the 10th month or book, 6th chapter, 11th verse (Watch this formula), which is (2Sa.6:11) And the ark of Jehovah remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months: and Jehovah blessed Obed-edom, and all his house. A Gittite is a Philistine of the city of Gath. This is the old man of the flesh that dwells in the land. When the flesh is “Humble”ed, as Obed was under David, and serves the spiritual man, who is the ark of God's presence, he is blessed. The very next verse says that the ark was taken to the city of David, which is Zion, the Bride. 12 And it was told king David, saying, Jehovah hath blessed the house of Obed-edom, and all that pertaineth unto him, because of the ark of God. And David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David with joy. It is the most joyful thing for the ark of God's presence to rest in the Holy of Holies of our spiritual man in the Holy City. In the time of Eli, the ark was taken captive under the authority of the Philistines or fleshly man in 1 Samuel 4-6, and it brought a curse to all their cities so much that they returned it under the authority of the spiritual man, Israel. So when we walk in the flesh, we bring these curses on us, but when the spiritual man is in the lead, we are blessed. The moral of the story is so perfectly written in (Rom.8:12) So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh: 13 for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. This warfare against the gods that rule over the flesh man and seek to bring under subjection the spiritual man is spoken of in the New Testament, (Here it is again) 10th book, 6th chapter, 11th verse: (Eph.6:11) Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual [hosts] of wickedness in the heavenly [places]. Amen.

WHAT WE COVERNumbers 4 reveals that every burden connected to the dwelling of Yahuah had to be carried according to His exact command.We examine:The burden assigned to the sons of MerariWhy the boards, bars, pillars, sockets, pins, cords, and instruments had to be carried and accounted forWhy every man was appointed by name to a specific burdenHow Ithamar governed the service of Gershon and MerariWhy structural service was just as necessary as carrying the most holy thingsWhy no servant could choose his own assignmentHow every family was numbered according to its service and burdenWhy faithfulness is measured by obedience to the assignment Yahuah gaveIf we complete Numbers 4, we will begin Numbers 5 and examine how purity, restitution, and truth governed the camp where Yahuah dwelt.WHY THIS MESSAGE MATTERSNumbers 4, Part 1 established that the holy things could only be approached, covered, and carried according to the order of Yahuah.Part 2 reveals that the structure surrounding the holy things also required appointed men, exact oversight, and accountable service.The sons of Merari did not carry the Ark or the holy vessels, but their burden upheld the structure in which holy service could take place.No burden was unimportant. No assignment was self-appointed. Every servant, every instrument, and every responsibility was established by Yahuah Himself.The question is not whether our burden appears greater than another man's.The question is whether we will faithfully carry what Yahuah assigned to us.SCRIPTURE REFERENCESNumbers 4:29-49Numbers 3:33-37Numbers 7:6-9Exodus 26:15-30Exodus 27:9-191 Corinthians 12:12-27ABOUT AHAVA ~ LOVE ASSEMBLYWe teach the pure Word of Yahuah.No religion. No traditions. No compromise.SUPPORT THE WORKGive via Zelle:ahavaloveministry.comFINAL HEART CHECKAm I faithful to the burden Yahuah assigned to me?Or do I despise my assignment because it does not appear as visible as another man's?Every part of the dwelling mattered.Every servant was accountable.Every burden had to be carried according to the command.The question is whether I will remain faithful to the service Yahuah placed in my hands.“Every one according to his service, and according to his burden.” — Numbers 4:49#Numbers4 #BookOfNumbers #TorahStudy #AhavaLoveAssembly #ShabbatTeaching

Holy Hunger: Come to the Table Rev. Austin Gilliland John 6:35, Deut. 8:2-3

Pastor Steven Helfrich's sermon at the Bridge on Luke 16:1-18 taken from the August 2nd, 2026 Sunday service. Services are held every Sunday at 10 AM at 504 E 12th Street in Alton, IL. www.thebridgealton.com

Have you ever prayed with everything you had, only to hear silence, or worse, a clear "No"? It stings. But what if God's "No" is actually one of the greatest expressions of his love? Join us as we conclude our series, “Holy No.” 

Because Jesus imparts righteousness to the lives of His disciples, I must live in and live out that righteousness as a singly devoted citizen of His kingdom.

Read OnlineGod's Providential Care“Five loaves and two fish are all we have here.” Then he said, “Bring them here to me,” and he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds. They all ate and were satisfied, and they picked up the fragments left over—twelve wicker baskets full. Matthew 14:17–20In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, there are two distinct miraculous feedings of large crowds. Today's Gospel depicts the first one, given primarily to Jewish people near the Sea of Galilee. Five thousand men (not counting women and children) were fed from five loaves and two fish, resulting in twelve baskets left over. This feeding of the five thousand is notably the only miracle of Jesus recorded in all four Gospels, underscoring its significance. Matthew and Mark also recount a second miraculous feeding—this time of four thousand people—in the largely pagan region of the Decapolis, using seven loaves and a few fish, with seven baskets left over.This first miracle takes place within the context of Jesus' sorrowful heart, as He mourns the death of His cousin, John the Baptist. Jesus knew that John's death occurred for the Father's glory and according to His permissive will. Yet this divine perspective did not eliminate His human sorrow. Holy sorrow is a profound expression of love in the face of suffering.Because Jesus' love was perfect, His sorrow was genuine and deep. The depth of His sorrow is evident from His deliberate choice to withdraw by boat to be alone, to fully embrace His grief. It is beautiful to note that Jesus' divinity does not overshadow or diminish His humanity. Rather, with divine love, He fully accepts John's death, and with a genuinely human heart, He properly mourns. In Jesus, humanity and divinity intertwine perfectly.Upon disembarking, Jesus finds that a large crowd has followed Him on foot, anticipating His arrival, hungry for His teachings and miracles. Here we encounter a second revelation of Jesus' divinity shining through His humanity. Seeing the crowd and perceiving their brokenness, sinfulness, and suffering, “his heart was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick.” The Greek word translated here as “pity” indicates a deeply felt, visceral compassion. This compassion, divine in origin, flows perfectly through Jesus' sacred humanity. His compassionate gaze vividly reveals God's merciful love: Jesus does not merely sympathize; He acts decisively, healing the sick and alleviating their suffering. His divine love compels Him to act for the good of His people.The miracle itself recalls God's providential care for the Israelites during their forty years in the desert, when manna appeared each morning, providing sufficient food for the day. That miracle, coupled with today's Gospel, teaches us a consistent truth: God always provides for us when we turn to Him, seeking Him earnestly as the crowd did.The multiplication of the loaves and fish also foreshadows the Eucharist, likely the reason it is recorded in all four Gospels. In the Eucharist, God provides abundantly for our spiritual nourishment. When received with faith and trust in God's providence, Jesus' Body and Blood nourishes every virtue within us, empowering us to flourish spiritually. The Eucharist prepares us for eternal life, where we anticipate sharing in the eternal Wedding Banquet of Heaven—a perfect, everlasting celebration free from all sin, sickness, and suffering.Reflect today on Jesus' tender care. He looks upon your needs with the same compassion He showed to the crowds in the wilderness. Consider especially how He desires to feed you daily through the Most Holy Eucharist, the true Bread from Heaven. Bring to Him whatever you have, even if it seems small or insufficient—your struggles, weariness, prayers, and hopes—and trust that in His hands, they will be multiplied for the good of your soul and the souls of others. Let this miraculous feeding stir within you a deeper faith in God's providence and a more fervent desire for the Eucharist, where Christ Himself is our sustenance, our healing, and our foretaste of eternal joy.My Eucharistic Lord, the Gift of the Eucharist is beyond my comprehension. Just as the crowds were amazed at the multiplication of the loaves and fish, astonish me with an understanding of the Eucharist and Your providential care that fills my heart with openness and gratitude to You. Jesus, I trust in You.  Image: Main: Feeding of the Five Thousand, by Jozef SedmakSource: Free RSS feed from catholic-daily-reflections.com — Copyright © 2026 My Catholic Life! Inc. All rights reserved. This content is provided solely for personal, non-commercial use. Redistribution, republication, or commercial use — including use within apps with advertising — is strictly prohibited without written permission.

Hebrews 11: 33-39; Luke 12: 1-8; Haydock and Lapide CommentaryCheck out my books and consider buying or gifting one, or just spreading the word to help support the podcast! Thank you!"Ancient Meditations on the Mysteries of the Rosary" is available on my page in PDF (see below) and on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0eJFr37j"Praying the Psalms with the Saints: Select Psalms with Brief Meditations and Commentary from the Saints" is available on my page (see below) and on Amazon::https://a.co/d/040Am2FI“The Fathers Explain the Sunday Gospels: Ordinary Time, Year A”, available as a PDF on my page (see below) and on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0avKNVZC And a volume for Advent: https://a.co/d/0eFm6sMd“Soldiers of Christ: A Traditional Catholic Handbook for Young Men” is available as a PDF on my page (see below) as well as on Amazon in paperback form: https://a.co/d/0iuT0LPG"5 Minute Theology: A Primer on Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine" is available as a PDF on my page (see below) and in Kindle and paperback versions on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0cF4XpHc"Commentary on the Traditional Latin Mass Readings For Every Sunday of the Year" Volumes I https://a.co/d/01qdaN4aIV https://a.co/d/02IgWoJn and Appendix I https://a.co/d/09rddkCA are also available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and on my donation page as PDFs (see below)You can purchase the PDF versions of these books on my donation page; just click the link”Shop” tab.buymeacoffee.com/catholicdailybriefPlease consider giving a five star rating and sharing the podcast with your friends and family.

August 1st, 2026:  St Peter in Chains & the Holy Maccabees - Pray First, THEN Go to War;  St Alphonsus, Zealous Doctor;  The Holy Maccabean Martyrs;  St Peter Julian Eymard;  St Alphonsus de Liguori;  St Peter in Chains - Who Knows When You'll Be Bound

Resources: The Heidelberg Catechism: A Study Guide - G.I. Williams Growing in Christ - J.I. Packer Rediscovering Catechism: The Art of Equipping Covenant Children - Donald Van Dyken

SPIDER-MANN, SPIDER-MANN, zieht uns immer wieder in seinen Bann: wir ranken alle SPIDER-MAN-Filme. Also die ingesamt 11 Filme, die wir dafür halten. Angefangen bei SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN 2 und SPIDER-MAN 3 von Sam Raimi bis hin zu SPIDER-MAN - BRAND NEW DAY, der uns den Anlass für diese Folge gegeben hat. Und einen Grund, um überhaupt einmal über die Figur und ihren Werdegang in der Popkultur zu sprechen. Deswegen klären Alwin, Antje, Matze und Schröck erstmal über die Anfänge der freundlichen Spinne aus der Nachbarschaft oder wie sie jeweils mit ihr in Berührung gekommen sind auf, während parallel noch geklärt werden muss, wie wohl ein Auftritt bei AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY wird, falls es ihn geben sollte, und wer beliebter ist: Batman oder die Spinne? Und schließlich geht's nur noch um die Filme und wo sie aufgrund der jeweiligen Toplisten landen. Wie hart wird es THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2: RISE OF ELECTRO treffen? Können SPIDER-MAN FAR FROM HOME oder THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN so viel mehr Punkte sammeln? Ist SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME so unantastbar wie es sein Einspiel an den Kinokassen glauben lässt? Und welche Worte haben die beiden Animations-Spektatkel SPIDER-MAN: A NEW UNIVERSE und SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE mitzureden? Findet es mit uns heraus, habt ansonsten noch ein schönes Wochenende und bleibt bitte daneben so gesund wie gut drauf. À bientôt. Und jetzt alle: Here comes the Spider-Maaaaaannnnnn! Rocket Beans wird unterstützt von Holy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sermon explores the reality of spiritual warfare, distinguishing between the internal conflict of spirit versus flesh and the external battle against satanic powers. Drawing from Job, Daniel, and Revelation, it illustrates how believers are engaged in a cosmic struggle against principalities and rulers of darkness. The central focus is on Ephesians 6, detailing the full armor of God as the necessary defense for standing firm against these spiritual attacks. Each piece of armor, including truth, righteousness, faith, and the Word of God, serves a specific role in protecting the believer and enabling offensive spiritual action. Ultimately, the message encourages persistent prayer and reliance on Christ's power to overcome the devil's schemes.

Welcome to Through the Psalms, a weekend ministry of The Truth Pulpit. Over time, we will study all 150 psalms with Pastor Don Green from Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. We're glad you're with us. Let's open to the Psalms now as we join our teacher in The Truth Pulpit. Pastor Don's Books: https://ttwpress.com

116 MinutesNSFWPete, Beau and Redhawk talk about the headlines.Old Glory Club YouTube ChannelOld Glory Club SubstackOld Glory Club WebsitePete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

Patrick opens with a compelling reflection on freedom, government power, and the meaning of self-government in America, weaving in a personal story from a Cuban immigrant and a quote from President Reagan. Throughout the conversation, Patrick takes on everything from questions about authentic Catholic voices in a world thick with AI and misinformation to concerns about Church leadership, historical contradictions, and the real risks of relying on opinions rather than fact. Audio: Ronald Reagan - Last Stand for a Refuge for Freedom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHyxP6qbBk (00:20) Michael (email) - Please stop vilifying Dr Fauci. (02:03) Adrianne - How do I authenticate Catholic YouTube channels? How I do I know if it is really Catholic. Also how do I know what is fake vs not fake? (07:16) Peter (7-years-old) - Why do people have to be 8-years-old to receive Communion? (17:39) Eric - I wanted to know why the Holy Roman Emperors were called Holy? (22:21) Maria Christina - I have been in the USA for 60 years after escaping Cuba. The USA is starting to look like Cuba when we left. (32:42) Alex - I'm a new mother. Is it acceptable to go into the Confessional with my new infant? (36:20) Bob - Sola scriptura: Why don’t we embrace once saved always saved? (36:46) Are You Guaranteed to Be Saved? If salvation can’t be lost (as some say), why does the Bible warn about it so often? By Patrick Madrid - https://patrickmadrid.substack.com/p/are-you-guaranteed-to-be-saved Janet - The results of a Covid shot. My friend had an infection and had to go through a number of specialists. Specialist blamed covid shot for her affliction. Was this ever in the Fauci Diaries? (46:22) Steve - I have been using AI to restore family photos. It’s been really good but you have to be careful because it will mess up the likeness. You need a human touch to monitor that. (47:34)

Emily Pilbeam presents a mixtape of her personal selection of tracks from BBC Introducing, with music from IMISSMYMOM, Leah Cleaver, Vehicle, Paisley Jones, Fíobha, Curiosity Shop, Dying 4, Sandhouse, Those Holy, Nico Harmony, Fuzz Council and a new Track of the Week by Maddie Ashman.Produced by BBC Audio for BBC Radio 6 Music.

Holy nostalgia, Batman! Join us as we count down our favorite episodes from the legendary Batman (1966 - 1968) TV se4ries starring Adam West and Burt Ward. From outrageous villains and unforgettable cliffhangers to colorful sets, clever gadgets, and unforgettable one-liners, we're revisiting the episodes that made Batman '66 a timeless pop culture phenomenon.  We'll discuss the stories, villains, performances, and memorable moments that keep fans coming back to this beloved classic superhero series. Whether you're a lifelong Bat-fan or discovering the Caped Crusader's campy adventures for the first time, this trip back to Gotham City is packed with fun and nostalgia. What are your favorite Batman '66 episodes? Let us know in the comments! If you enjoy classic television, superheroes, horror, science fiction, and pop culture retrospectives, be sure to Like, Subscribe, and hit the Notification Bell so you never miss an episode.

The devotional explores the transition from the Old Testament tabernacle to the believer's direct access to God through Jesus Christ. It contrasts the physical restrictions of the Holy of Holies with the spiritual reality that believers now enter the throne room of heaven through faith in Christ's sacrifice. The speaker emphasizes that worship and prayer allow for a face-to-face encounter with God, transforming ordinary spaces into holy ground. This intimate relationship results in personal transformation, reflecting God's glory in the believer's life. Ultimately, the message encourages believers to approach God with confidence, knowing their sins are covered by Jesus' blood.

Send us Fan MailPositional holiness means to be seated in heavenly places with Christ. It is having a reservation there before we get there. It is like responding to a wedding and having a seat reserved before the wedding takes place.Experiential holiness is living it out in life. This message gives seven aspects of what practical holiness looks like. They really make up the foundation of our spiritual life upon which we can build. So listen closely and start building.Feel free to make a any comments in the send us Fan Mail above.

The devotional explores the transition from the Old Testament tabernacle to the believer's direct access to God through Jesus Christ. It contrasts the physical restrictions of the Holy of Holies with the spiritual reality that believers now enter the throne room of heaven through faith in Christ's sacrifice. The speaker emphasizes that worship and prayer allow for a face-to-face encounter with God, transforming ordinary spaces into holy ground. This intimate relationship results in personal transformation, reflecting God's glory in the believer's life. Ultimately, the message encourages believers to approach God with confidence, knowing their sins are covered by Jesus' blood.

In this episode, we welcome Tommy Green to the show. He is founding member and frontman for the legendary Christian metalcore bands Sleeping Giant and HolyName. In this interview, we discuss how his abusive upbringing led to unbiblical thoughts about righteous violence and also how it likely led him to the hardcore music scene, how he began his music career, the stories behind the creation of both Sleeping Giant and HolyName, why he calls HolyName's music “holy drone violent worship”, his thoughts on non-Christians making “Christian Music” in order to make money, his response to people that claim all metal music is “Satanic”, how Brian “Head” Welch of KoRn helped their music go viral, the future of HolyName, and much more. Let's get into it… Episode notes and links HERE. Donate to support our mission of equipping men to push back darkness. Check out our SHOP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Living in a corrupt culture, it can be easy for Christians to conform to the lifestyle of unbelievers and forget our call to be separate from the world. We tend to justify this behavior by using God's forgiveness and grace as an excuse to allow behavior God has forbidden. But if we examine Scripture closely, it is clear that our freedom in Christ is a call to something higher. 1 Peter reminds us of this when it calls every believer to, “‘Be Holy for I am Holy,' says the Lord.”   Have Any Questions for Us?

Watch our services live at http://wcfav.org/ Free Downloads of Pastor Shane's E-books at https://westsidechristianfellowship.org/free-ebooks/ Donate to Westside Christian Fellowship here: https://westsidechristianfellowship.org/give/ Westside Christian Fellowship is a non-denominational Christian church that meets every every Sunday at 8:30 am & 11:00 am in Leona Valley, California (9306 Leona Avenue). For more info, or to read our statement of faith, visit westsidechristianfellowship.org/about-wcf/statement-of-faith/

On the latest Bat Bits, we finish our look at the draft of "The Ring of Wax" by Jack Paritz and Bob Rodgers, featuring a nonexistent fountain, a gun that doesn't make it to the final, the return of a familiar building, and more! Subscribe to our Patreon for $2 a month to see the script and hear our discussion of it in our bi-weekly examination of Batman 66 on BAT BITS, or, for $4 a month, get that AND our monthly discussion of Silver Age Batman comics, as Paul or another in our stable of co-hosts joins Tim to examine individual Batman stories from the 1950s and '60s. In the latest episode, Tim and Paul discuss "The Ice Crimes of Mr Zero" from Batman 121, which was the basis for the Batman 66 episodes "Instant Freeze" and "Mice like Cheese"! Holy treasure trove of Bat info! Sign up today!

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;the whole earth is full of his glory!”Isaiah 6:3"Earth's crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God;But only he who sees takes off his shoes—The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."Elizabeth Barrett Browining“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.Matthew 5:8By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.Hebrews 11:3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.John 1:3O Lord, how manifold are your works!    In wisdom have you made them all;    the earth is full of your creatures.Here is the sea, great and wide,    which teems with creatures innumerable,    living things both small and great.Psalm 104:24-25Colorado Picture*Fish Picture*GOD IS NOT HIDING HIMSELF FROM YOU.THE LIFE OF WONDERWonder: a feeling of awe or astonishment.2 Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called to another and said:“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”Isaiah 6:2-3Wonder is for the CHILDREN of God.At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them 3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.Matthew 18:1-4God is better than you think.25 Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.John 21:25THE BARRIER TO WONDER24 Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”John 20:24-25The barrier to wonder is a heart that cannot see beyond physical sightWe are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments, instead of up at the snows of purity, whither the should of Christ is climbed.George Macdonald26 Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”John 20:26-27THE BRIDGE TO WONDERThe Bridge to Wonder is the eyes the heart being opened to see Jesus rightly.It is not His will that one of His little ones should perish and, therefore, He chases away unbelief, which is their deadliest foe. The Good Shepherd will leave the 99 to seek the one wanderer! If Thomas is the most unbelieving, Thomas shall have the most care! He is only one, but yet he is one, and the Lord Jesus will not lose one whom He has ordained to save!Charles Spurgeon27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”John 20:27THE RESPONSE TO WONDER28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” John 20:28It had flashed upon the mind of Thomas that this august Person whom he had regarded as the Messiah was also God. He saw that the Man at whose feet he had sat was more than man and was assuredly God, and this amazed him so that he used broken speech. He does not say, “You are my Lord and my God,” as a man would say who is making a doctrinal statement, but he brings it out in fragments. He makes adoration of it.Charles Spurgeon27 To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.Colossians 1:27

Send us Fan MailTrying to keep up with every social media platform can feel like a full-time job. The truth is, your best marketing strategy may not be posting more. It may simply be showing up in the right place.In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, Kendra Corman talks with travel advisor Ali Raymer about how she rebuilt her marketing strategy after COVID by asking one simple question:Where are my best clients making buying decisions?Instead of chasing every new platform, Ali focused on understanding her ideal clients, choosing platforms that aligned with both her audience and her own strengths, and creating a marketing system she could actually sustain.Whether you're a business owner, marketer, or entrepreneur feeling overwhelmed by social media, this conversation will help you simplify your approach and build a strategy that attracts the right customers without burning you out.In this episode, you'll learn:Why you don't need to be on every social media platformHow to determine where your ideal clients actually make purchasing decisionsThe importance of consistency over constant expansionHow to know when a platform is worth investing your time inWhy your current clients are your best source of marketing researchPractical ways to build a marketing routine that supports your business instead of taking it overAli also shares the story of how one missed client opportunity completely changed the way she approached branding and marketing, ultimately helping her attract the exact type of clients she wanted.If you've ever wondered whether you're spending time on the wrong platforms, this episode will give you a fresh perspective and actionable ideas you can put into practice immediately.Connect with Ali RaymerLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alipicturethistravelWebsite: www.peaceandpearltravel.comIf you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Imperfect Marketing and leave a review. It helps more business owners discover practical, honest marketing conversations that actually make a difference. Looking to leverage AI? Want better results? Want to think about what you want to leverage?Check and see how I am using it for FREE on YouTube. From "Holy cow, it can do that?" to "Wait, how does this work again?" – I've got all your AI curiosities covered. It's the perfect after-podcast snack for your tech-hungry brain. Watch here

Dr. Tom Curran shares insights on the Scripture passages: Martha and Mary (Luke 10: 38-42) and The Raising of Lazarus. (John 11: 1-44) Tom explores themes, such as: the practicality of hospitality, prioritizing a relationship with Jesus, doing what is “necessary,” radiating Christ in the world, and more!

In the final message of our The Temple series, Pastor Micaiah challenges one of the biggest misconceptions in modern Christianity: that God is satisfied with "some" of us.Looking at Jesus' words in Matthew 22:37-40, we discover that the greatest commandment isn't to love God a little more—it's to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. God isn't interested in improving one area of your life while you keep the rest for yourself. He wants complete surrender because He gave everything for you.In this message you'll discover:Why "some" obedience is still incomplete obedienceThe difference between giving God more and giving Him allHow we've compartmentalized our faith instead of living fully devoted to ChristWhy true transformation only happens through complete surrenderWhat it looks like to become the holy temple God created you to beJesus didn't give us part of Himself on the cross—He gave all. Our response should be no different. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Electric work. A hole. Time zones. Transcript

How can building an audience in advance help your stories reach the people who make movies? And how can you prove there's demand for your book or screenplay before you've written it? Brooks Elms shares his advice after more than 20 years as a WGA screenwriter. In the intro, what doesn't work for book marketing and what does [Amy Chan SubStack; Unsingle; Rephonic]; Goodreads giveaway for Bones of the Deep; FutureVision XPrize. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How to see the opportunity in AI when others only see the threat How to test a story with samples, and what a 16-second movie can do Building the trailer before you write the screenplay Letting your audience finance the film once they have validated the idea Why Hollywood still wants existing IP, and what makes them pay attention Feeling safe enough to write the truth, and finding a concrete path forward You can find Brooks on LinkedIn or email him at brooks@brookselms.com. Transcript of the interview with Brooks Elms Jo: Brooks Elms is a WGA screenwriter with over 45 scripts, over a dozen sales, and he has directed two indie features. He is the creator of the Answer the Call system and has trained over 1,000 writers. So welcome to the show, Brooks. Brooks: Thank you. It's awesome to be here. Jo: Fantastic. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into screenwriting. Brooks: I started filmmaking first. A buddy came up to me in high school and said, “Hey, we're making a karate movie, do you want to help us?” I was like, “Oh my God, yes, that sounds amazing.” So next thing I know, I had this karate outfit on, and we were just making this completely ridiculous and totally fun movie, and it was amazing. It was so fun. Then it went to a whole other level when we shared it with a friend, this guy Jay Sharon, and he watched the movie and he laughed so hard he literally fell out of his chair. I was like, “Oh my God,” the fun I had making it could actually transfer to somebody else. I was hooked. So from there I went to NYU film school, and then made a few independent feature films which were good but not great in terms of how they were received. They were great for me in terms of enjoyment, but I knew I needed to iterate faster at that point. So then I was like, “Well, it's expensive and it takes a long time to make a movie,” at least back then. So I pivoted to screenwriting, and pumped out two, three scripts a year, got signed at UTA, got writing assignments, and basically launched a screenwriting career. Then I still tried to get some stuff going, but it's hard when movies are so expensive. It's not hard, it's just that it takes a lot of precision in the marketing, and a lot of conversations to find the right matches to finance something, and you're either interested in doing that or you're not. I just was like, “Well, I'll just mostly write screenplays.” Then I started teaching at UCLA Extension and then coaching after that, along with writing. Then all the way up to the future. What's great about moving forward is that with AI, shot-making is becoming very close to cinematic quality. You can actually match cinematic quality in moments in some genres, but probably by next year. Right now you could actually do a really good horror movie all AI for 10, 20,000 bucks, depending on how much you're doing yourself or getting other people to do. So the economics are going to absolutely explode. So I'm sitting on dozens of scripts that didn't get through the Hollywood packaging bottleneck because they're too expensive, and I now have this giant slate that's ready to go, and I'm just absolutely thrilled. It's been a lifelong dream for me. Jo: Oh, so much to come back on there. Where to start? I do want to talk about what you just said there, sitting on dozens of scripts and now seeing the opportunity. I actually wrote down in my journal about a year ago, I see what's coming with AI, and I think that the best thing I can do is create as much original IP as possible, so that I can make the most of the opportunity ahead. So let's just get into the AI, because a lot of people feel it's a super bad thing. Talk about the opportunities and the attitude that you've got [around AI], and that you've seen others have around this, for what is ahead in a positive way. Brooks: It's fascinating to see how people respond to AI. I wonder, when the printing press rolled around, if there was some sort of backlash. Books must be handwritten. They can't be mass-produced. Here's one of my theories. At a deep psychological level, it's so profoundly powerful that I think the default setting is, “Oh, crap.” When I was a kid, some things were hard, and that power imbalance, when something big, new and powerful comes along: I'm going to get screwed, and so this is somehow a bad thing. I think that's the base psychological thing going on with most of the noise. Obviously there are some legit problems, in terms of copyright infringement from learning models, or from some of the environmental situation. So I'm not saying it's all rainbows and butterflies, but I think 90% of the noise around it comes from a fear of change. Here's the other one—a fear of, “Oh, yikes, I'm going to get taken advantage of somehow by either robots, or the corporations are going to use the robots against me,” or something like that. I have real empathy for me when I feel that way a little bit, but I don't feel it much, and for other people that do feel it. The other thing is, you know what it is? I think they fear their own empowerment even more. I had a therapist who was really good. He said, people aren't so much afraid of failing as they are afraid of succeeding. Because if we fail, we're stuck in act one and we don't go anywhere. The fear is answering the call and going to act two, when everything effing changes in the new world. So I think people are afraid of how goddamn powerful they're going to be when they can have a team of AI agents helping them do everything they want in business or life or whatever. I think it's the same thing with the internet. People are like, “Oh, I don't like social media, blah, blah, blah.” And I get it. There's a lot of noise and a lot of crap. Yet we have access to billions of people, and the algorithms in social media right now I think are level three out of 10. They're just going to get better and better. Even as it is now, if I do a post about something and it gets ignored, that's on me. The algorithms are trying to match me to my people. So if I'm not unique enough and authentic enough and aware enough of how virality works, that's on me, and it's a learnable skill that I can embrace and then change and then get better at. So I think people then resist that change. They resist the empowerment of learning the art of virality, or learning the art of some sort of social media stuff or whatever. The last thing I'll say about this rant is, I don't want to act like I'm the guru on the hill that has all the answers. I refuse calls all the time. I'm scared about all sorts of things. I'm certainly not perfect. I feel frustrated when I'm trying to put my big ideas into action and I can't get this technology thing to work or that one, and I throw tantrums. I'm trying to come at it from a real human perspective, but by and large, I've got stars in my eyes. I'm like, “This is amazing. This is going to be so powerful.” For so many people, you just have to be ready to embrace it and just go along for the ride, because there's going to be some big-ass changes. There already are, and that's going to accelerate. Jo: You mentioned there learning the art of whatever it is. One of the things is, I've spent 20 years, and so have you, learning our craft and our art, and now it can be done very easily. I'm generating video, as you mentioned, which is a craft I haven't spent 20 years on, but now I can generate. So things have definitely changed in that way. Just coming to the screenwriting side. Probably about a decade ago now, I did my first screenwriting course. I've written screenplays. Then I looked at the game you have to play and, like you said, the conversations you have to have, the events you have to go and network at, all the things that you have to do to put a screenplay in front of the right person at the right time. I was like, “I cannot do that. It's just not going to happen. I can't do that along with everything else.” So I put it aside, but now I feel maybe it's time to bring it back because things are changing. So can you maybe talk about, if someone has a screenplay now that they've written, or some IP like a book that they have now— What would you recommend people do in terms of wanting to get that [IP] in front of somebody, or doing something with it themselves? Brooks: It's such a good question. By the way, not even a screenplay—you could do the same things with a novel. Let me try to be succinct here, which is a good challenge for me. A simple way to look at it is, you're giving samples. Let's say it's a lemonade stand, and you give out a little shot of your… maybe you have cayenne pepper lemonade, some sort of fun lemonade. If you give out a sample and people are into it, they're going to come back and they're going to tell friends. If you give a sample of the lemonade and they're not into it, then you go back to the kitchen and you mix up a different flavour. So that's some basic business, but the internet allows us to do that at scale. So what I like to encourage people to do when I coach them is come up with the minimum viable material. It can be a 10-second clip. There's a writer in my community who made a really beautiful 16-second movie. It's one shot. I love it so much. It's two wine glasses. There's a lipstick smudge on one of the wine glasses. They're half full, and it's just that shot. It's sitting there, and all of a sudden you hear this thundering, thumping down these stairs, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Then you see out of the corner of the frame one person runs by, and then the other person behind her runs by and goes, “Wait.” That's it. That's the whole movie. It's 16 seconds. He did that with his phone. So there's so much going on. There's a couple of basic elements, but he just did it with his phone, and you can evoke enormous emotional impact on people through social media, whether it's just words. You guys have a big advantage as novelists because you're so good with words. Whether it's a little bit longer, like sudden fiction, that's a couple of pages or whatever. Even just copywriters are really in a good position for the future because they're super potent with two words or three words or 10 words. Then novelists are probably really advantageous because it doesn't cost anything to just put some words out on the internet. The point is, if you put something out, it's a signal, and you're talking about billions of people who could find that signal. If you do it and then you look at the response, and then you try again, you look at the response, we can do this iteration infinitely for free. So you can do it already. You've been able to do it for 10, 15, 20 years, just with words. But now you're going to basically be able to do that with movies or clips or trailers. So the thing that I'm leading in my community of writers is having people build trailers in advance, or clips. When a book or a movie is done, how the heck do we get people to see it? One way is a trailer or some sort of behind-the-scenes material. You can just do that stuff now before even writing the screenplay. I saw that you were doing this project, a trailer for this competition. And then you mentioned, “Oh, I've got to write the screenplay.” Not really. You have to develop the story enough to know what you're referring to, and then it's about studying the craft of either trailer construction, or whatever the clips are, or viral clips. They all have a structure, and then you just test it. If you enjoy that testing process, which I find absolutely thrilling, it feels like the filmmaking version of a stand-up comedian. If I did stand-up, I say a joke, they laugh or they don't laugh. It's really beautiful feedback from the universe. Nerve-wracking, right? But we can do that now as storytellers. We put a story out there in any format, and the audience responds. Just like you have to read any room, you have to learn how to read the engagement on social media. What do likes mean? What do shares mean? What do comments mean? How do you deal with trolls? All that is just part of the new art. Once you get good at it, holy smokes, that's the key to the kingdom. You can build audiences in advance, and for movies you could even have them finance your movie in advance, if you've built an email list of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people because you kept putting out all these viral clips around your story, novel, or screenplay. Then you go, “Okay, now 30,000 people are on my email list and I tell them about me and my perspective and my world. We're going to make this darn thing with AI for 20,000 bucks. You guys have got to pony up some money. Put in a dollar, five, 10, or you get the VIP $500 experience.” It's like crowdfunding, but much more sophisticated, because most crowdfunding was like begging friends and family to donate to your crazy dream. What I'm talking about is going to the audience directly, developing enough of the story, then going to the audience second, and then only when they validate the idea, to the extent that you're happy with. You could do a crazy idea that's going to have a small audience, and you don't have to have a blockbuster audience. You get to pick the audience size that you want, and then put the samples out there and see if you have a relevant audience size for this next project. Once the audience tells you, “Yes, we want this,” then you go make it. So you're ultimately reducing risk to almost zero. It takes time and you have to learn how to do this stuff, but it's thrilling to me because we just have the capacity to test the material and listen to the audience upfront. The last thing I'll say, and I've rambled a lot, I'm sorry. When I made a movie in 1994, a feature film right out of NYU, it took me three years to find out what the audience thought about that movie. I had to make the damn thing, and then I ran out of money, and that took me years to edit it, and I finally got it, blah, blah, blah. And again, I loved it. I loved every facet of it, and it was fine, but it was super inefficient. Today, I could take those same elements, create an AI trailer this weekend, put it in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and they could tell me right away, “This sucks,” or, “This is interesting,” or, “Holy smokes, this is amazing. I want this.” If it's not, “Holy smokes, this is amazing, I want it,” I can go ahead and re-edit the whole damn trailer, and just keep reiterating at almost no cost. Then once the demand is there, I can take that demand and that audience and go to Hollywood, and that's when they're going to want to work with me. Then it doesn't take a million conversations and finding the needle in the haystack, because Hollywood sees the numbers and they go, “Oh, you're the people we do want to do business with. You've proven demand. We want to do business with you.” Jo: Yes, it's so interesting. I can hear people listening and they're like, “Easier said than done, getting an email list of 40,000 people.” And in fact— It's exactly the same as building up a career as an independent author. This is as a filmmaker, as a visual person, and the industry is visual, so doing a visual trailer is the obvious thing. And as you say, the tools I use just to do this one, I use Midjourney, and I've used Seedance as the main video model. It does take a while, but it is pretty fast now, if you have a visual image of what you want in your head, which obviously you're a visual person as well. But is it… Brooks: Hold on. I want to push back on that a little bit, because I think it's really important. So yes, that's true, but underneath that, my friend, it's a relationship. It's the relationship, and the media is secondary. You have been prolific in connecting with your audience, and that's why I think a lot of people like you, because you share and they get to know you in that sort of cadence. I saw you in another podcast, you mentioned Seth Godin, who just said, “Hey, I want to be the type of person that has this relationship with my audience. I'm going to share some of my thoughts every day.” He happened to do it with words, with his background in marketing, but you could do the same thing with still images. You could do the same thing with a five-second movie clip once a week. It's the relationship you want with your fans. I'm not saying you snap your fingers and you have 50,000 people on your email list. What I'm saying is, what else are you doing? If we're artists and our impulse is to create and share, and if you do it in this way, if I can create and share and inspire trust in this relationship with a stranger because they like my genre thing and they like the way they felt when they experienced my media, words, images, movies, it doesn't matter. They just like the feeling, and they go, “Ooh, I want more of that feeling. How do I get more of that? Oh, this person has this email list or community.” If I can do it with one, then I can scale it out. So getting the first one, or the first 5 or 10 samples, that is a whole process. But then once you do that, scaling up is more of a mechanical thing. It's not even that hard, especially when you can do paid ads. So you can scale up very quickly if you have the sauce. If you don't have the sauce, it doesn't matter who you're related to, you've got to get the sauce right. Jo: Yes, and again, it's so parallel to the indie author community. I've just got to ask you, in the olden days, an author might write a screenplay, or a screenwriter write a screenplay, and then they would send it. They'd find an agent. They'd pitch an agent, and I guess then they'd hope that someone would turn that into a movie. So is that just dead now? Is it realistically that you need to get yourself out there, build the audience in the same way that it often is for authors? Brooks: So, no. I've got two screenplay deals going right now. So here's how it's going to work. Think about Broadway, or the theatre district in Britain. It's like West End or East End or whatever… Jo: The West End. Brooks: Sorry for my American ignorance. West End, okay. So every town on the planet has a stage, but there's only one Broadway, there's only one West End, right? And every town has its own festival, but there are a few significant tastemakers. There's Cannes, there's Sundance, there's Toronto. Hollywood is always going to be a tastemaker in our lifetime, for sure. What they don't have anymore, what they enjoyed for the first 100 years of the industry, is that they had a stranglehold on basically the equipment, the financing, and the audience, and that's all going away. Do you want to hear a fun story about the birth of cinema? Do you know why Hollywood started in Hollywood? Jo: No. Brooks: So Thomas Edison invented the camera, or the type of model camera that they were using in, I don't know, 1910 or something around there. They didn't want to pay his patent. They didn't want to pay the patent to make these movies, so they went all the way across the country, a bunch of outlaws, and they set up shop in California because he couldn't enforce his patent that they were basically stealing. And reason number two, LA enjoys amazing weather almost all year round. The weather here is either nice or really nice. You have mountains, you have beach, you have desert, you have all these different locales. So when it was really important to be on location, LA was the perfect place. Anyway, that is all going away. For many decades, more people could make movies. In the early '90s, Robert Rodriguez made a movie for 9,000 bucks. There was a book in the '80s that I bought that I loved, it was Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices. This guy, Rick Schmidt, I think his name was. There were the independent filmmakers really in the '60s and the '70s. So the cost has been going down and down and down, and now it's less than ever. Once social media came along, now you have access to the audience, so why do you even need Hollywood? That being said, there are tons of people. There are 400,000 people already working in the movie and the TV industry here. And they're voracious. We have a voracious demand. Humans need stories. We need big stories, long stories. We need stories, and Hollywood is so good at giving them stories. And so they have a need for these things, and they're still spending a lot of money on those budgets. So yes, there's still a demand for turning books and optioning them and turning them into movies. Books are great. Any sort of existing IP is great because there are marketing efficiencies there. People already know that stuff, know the vibe of it, and so it's easier to market than something that's totally creative and new. When you're spending that much money, you want those marketing efficiencies. They're really important. So the point being, the power is shifting away from Hollywood. Hollywood will still be a tastemaker, but you and me can reach anybody on the planet now. Almost. Billions of people. If it's making a movie, right now you could make a movie that most people wouldn't realise is an AI movie. If it was a horror film, I know a handful of people that could make a feature-length horror film right now with AI and 99% of the audience couldn't tell, if it was professionally written. Jo: I think the point here though is, I'm an author, the people listening are authors, and we don't want to make movies. We want to license our IP to people who want to make movies. Brooks: Yes. Great. Okay, good. So then you could, if you wanted, build an audience. Hollywood loves when something's already proven, so that's that IP thing, right? So if you just have a great book, then it's all about the sales. You guys have Dragons' Den, we have Shark Tank here. And what's amazing about that show is these are people or entrepreneurs pitching an idea, and there's an amazing rhythm that happens. They say, “We've got this great idea. It's this sort of company.” And the sharks, or the dragons, will listen. And there's a huge turning point when they reveal sales. They're either really excited about the idea and then they go, “Well, how are the sales?” And the person goes, “Well, we don't have any sales yet.” And they go, “Uh,” and they're not interested. Or they might even be like, “Eh, it doesn't seem like a good idea.” And they're like, “Well, how are the sales?” And they're like, “Oh, well, we've sold through the roof.” And then all of a sudden they perk up. So it's all about the sales. So step one is writing something that you want. Step two is making sure other people in your target audience are also loving it as much as you do. Step three is proving in some way at scale that there's real demand for it. So you could do that with trailers, you could do that with clips, you can do that as an indie publisher. There's all sorts of things that you can do. Humans are much more persuaded by concrete data than they are by just vibes. So if you can bring Hollywood concrete data of any type, like viral videos, like audience, like obviously bestsellers. Awards mean something, but not quite as much as sales. Then you're going to get Hollywood's attention because that reduces risk for them. So even now, when Hollywood's definitely shrinking and contracting, there's still very significant money being spent because it's a huge demand. If you ever walk around a studio lot, those things are opulent places. It's stunning. Like, how are they paying for all this stuff? These lots are enormous. It's because humanity is voracious for stories, and movies are one premium type of storytelling. The demand for stories is steady if not going up. It's just that we have a wider variety of types of stories that we can do, whether we're an indie author. So anyway, did I answer the question? You get me too excited with these questions, Jo. It's a problem. Jo: Yes. I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of ways in, but the parallels with being an indie author I think are quite clear. One of the things I found interesting about your profile and what you do is that you help clients who are already accomplished but not quite breaking through, and that sounds like a lot of mid-list indie authors, probably a lot of mid-list screenwriters, mid-list filmmakers. This is a hard place to be because, on the one hand, we are grateful for what we have achieved and what we can do, and yet wanting more, wanting that big Hollywood deal or the Netflix deal, or wanting the massive bestseller or whatever. So if someone wants to get to that next level, what are some of the ways that they can perhaps try and get there? Brooks: It's a great question. Coaching is a really wonderful way to learn anything of this sort of complexity and challenge, especially if it's a hyper-competitive business. We need two things, I think, to write a great novel or screenplay or both. A, we need to feel profoundly safe in our space. If we can't really feel deeply authentic about the things that are embarrassing, or that we feel shame about, or just our shadows, or anything that we don't feel completely comfortable saying and sharing in public usually. We need to be able to touch those things, and be articulate about those things, and that's one part of it. Then we need a concrete path forward. Maybe you're thinking about some tragedy that you had in childhood, and how you dealt with it and how difficult that was. So you need to be able to be real precise in those observations about what it felt like, and how you tried to compensate for it, and that didn't work and it made it worse. Whatever your observations are about your life journey, you need to be really specific and really deeply felt. A good coaching relationship allows you to be in that space, to be really honest with yourself and authentic. g Aood coach will push you back and say, “You know what? That sounds interesting, but maybe not quite as true to you deeply.” So that's one piece of it. Then there's a concrete path forward. You need to have the emotional access to that truth, and then you need to know what to do with that truth in a step-by-step way. Because most people, the ones that you're talking about, they're accomplished in something else. What happens is when we first start writing, and maybe this happens with novelists, but for sure it happens to screenwriters, you just start typing words. But you haven't really thought through the theme, the concept, the structure, the character, all the deeper questions that really matter. The milestones, like a North Star: winning a major award, or getting a publisher. That's the direction that we're heading towards, and then you set it and forget it, but you want to keep checking it every week, every month or whatever. But you want it very specific. “I would like to sell a book, or sell a book to Hollywood, or write a screenplay, or get a producer attached to a screenplay.” Whatever the milestone is, make it really specific, really concrete, and then reverse engineer. This is what I do on the concrete path. I reverse engineer every step to get there, starting with a really tiny one we can do today, and I make sure they feel really safe, and then we just walk through. Then what happens is, if you do that, if you feel safe, if you're showing up authentically and you have a process that's repeatable, not just willy-nilly, it's got to be something that's proven to work. It wasn't an accident I wrote 45 scripts. I've got a whole system. But by the way, the first five scripts took me forever. The last movie that I made took me three years to write that script. I can write a better script with those same elements in three months now, because I know I have a concrete path. So if you want to do something new, whether it's playing the piano or getting six-pack abs or writing a screenplay, work with somebody who's got a system that's already proven, and make sure you relate to them, and then just follow the system. Then when the doubts come up, and they will, that's where the feeling safe is really important. Because, oh, I want the six-pack abs, but I don't feel like going to the gym. I want the extra donut. If I'm working with a really good trainer, they go, “Dude, do you want the six-pack abs or not?” And then you go back and forth, and I go, “Okay, now I can make peace with myself and say I can take one tiny bite of the donut and then still do my workout,” and then I'm moving towards that North Star. Does that make sense? Jo: Yes. I think, like many independents, I resist anything that is systematised. I'm a discovery writer, and I follow the muse, and all of that kind of thing. I think I would say something in a similar vein, which is sustainable creativity for the long term, because your 45 scripts are also years of work, and my books are years of work, and we get better at what we do. So my system, I do have a system really, because— My system is that I do the work, and I write my stories, and I get them out there, and I do the marketing. So even if it's not as systematised as such, it's still a process that I have repeated over and over again. Brooks: That's fascinating to me. Would you consider yourself a pantser? You're like, “I've got an idea,” and you just start writing? Jo: I don't use the word pantser. I guess I call it discovery writing, which is… Brooks: That's a better term. Jo: Yes. What I'm writing for this prize, for example, I know the characters, I know now what's happening. When I had the idea, it was very much a vision and a theme, and the competition has a theme: a positive future with AI and technology. But the things that came around that, I then started playing with ideas around the treatment. I haven't written the screenplay yet. I don't do a plot, or I don't follow Save the Cat or any of that kind of thing. When I write a novel, I just explore and I never write in order. Then at some point I stop and then I have to think about the structure and putting it all together, so the edits are quite big. But my fun is in that discovery, really. Brooks: Oh, that's awesome. Okay, so let me ask, that's really fascinating. And by the way, that doesn't, to me, negate the system that I use. The one that I use is ultimately… the thing is, these questions, the audience is wanting your unique answers to. You don't necessarily need to do it in a certain order. I think that's actually really cool that you write out of order and you have a few elements in mind. All that stuff sounds awesome. The only thing that then makes me curious is, how's your pace? Are you actually completing novels at a pace that feels good, or do you feel like you go too fast, too slow? Jo: I do one or two a year at the moment. Well, two a year, really. But I would say I'm not as successful as I'd like to be, so I'm not saying that my system is the best. I'm saying I want to be better. It's just that my fun is this sort of creative chaos, which I then try and control later. One of the things I really like about screenplays and treatments and doing this kind of thing for film is that it is much more structured, I think, than a 70,000-word novel. You can go in all kinds of directions, whereas with screenwriting you do have to be more disciplined really. Brooks: Yes, so this is going to be fun probably, to hear my view for your audience, and the differences as I see them. For starters, you're talking about what, 10, 20, 30 hours reading a novel sometimes, or maybe less, whereas a movie's a 90-minute experience, right? So that's different. Or if it's a TV series, you might see an hour and then an hour. So that's a very different experience. What happens is when it's condensed like that, you're loading up layers. So every scene is stacked with exposition beneath the drama, and done in a certain way. So specifically, movies are only what you can see and only what you hear. Whereas novels, if you can think it, you can write it, it can be in there. So you don't need to have a plot, but if you want to sell your book to Hollywood, it helps. So I was very resistant about structure. I went to NYU film school, where we really just made short films. It was funny, I had friends that were in the dramatic writing department, and I was like, “You guys are wasting your money. You're just learning to write scripts. We learn to write the scripts and make the movies.” What I hadn't realised is it's a different skill set to hold somebody's attention across an hour-long play, or a 90-minute movie, than it is to make a movie that holds their attention for two minutes or five minutes. I found out years later when I made a feature that was like a lot of shorts patched together, and people were not… They liked it, but they didn't love it. I was like, “Well, what's going on?” And so then I learned to really love Save the Cat in particular. It completely changed me. What happened was, I got a big old slice of humble pie. I had made my second feature, and I put everything I had into it, and it had loose structural beginning, middle, end, blah, blah, blah. But I was still, “Eh, Hollywood BS. What do they know? It's all fake.” So I was very anti-Hollywood structure. Then I was like, now I've got two independent films out there, people saw them, liked them, whatever, but it wasn't getting me consistent work. It wasn't really advancing my career in the way that I wanted. And I was like, “Well, maybe there is something to the Save the Cat.” So I went to the Save the Cat workshop with Blake when he was still alive, and he was delightful, a really awesome guy. He's got this kind of cutesy style, for people that don't know. For context, Blake Snyder was a working Hollywood screenwriter, and he had this system called Save the Cat, which actually has some really interesting ideas. He's got this very light, breezy sort of style. A lot of people don't like him and some people really love him, and everything in between. But I took his weekend seminar, and it completely changed me, because at that point, like I said, I took three years to write a script. Then once he had a process and he had a way of thinking about craft that was just much more screenwriter-friendly, I was like, “Oh my God.” It was so much easier, because I was just focused on the right thing at the right time. So it just sped everything up. After that, I was banging out two to three scripts a year, and better and better quality. So for me, because I went from winging it and wrote five scripts in 13 years, and then wrote two to three scripts every year, I became a huge proponent of system and process. Then my own system really came from that, but it's modular. I have a nine-step system, but you don't necessarily have to go in that order, other than the last three steps, but I won't get into the details. Sometimes you kind of jump from two to three and then back to two and then back and forth. So I love that you get the feel for those elements, and then you just felt your way through. But writing screenplay pages doesn't make sense until you really understand concept, you get a deep sense of beginning, middle, end, character arcs, and these other threads. There are just way better tools for those jobs than screenplay format, because it's a really weird format. It's got these weird slug lines at the top that are all in caps, because a screenplay is a blueprint for somebody else to make the movie. It's not an end-user document like a novel. I don't let my clients even go to that format because it just gets them focused on the wrong things. What they really need to know is, what is your perspective about this theme? What happened in your life that you're fascinated with, that you'd even want to write about this? And tell me what your real life lessons are. So we go into… again, I go back to relationship. What's your relationship to the universe? And what's your relationship to your best friends, or where you got your heart broken, or whatever you want to write about. And then we get that clarity, and then I show you how to express it in terms of developing a screenplay. It's really long-form storytelling, and then the structure just makes it build on itself. But with the structure, because you're talking about so much money and people involved to make it, at least traditionally, what ended up happening was narrative structure that was not so much rigid. Because here's the thing, you can look at 50, 100 years of European cinema and you can look at Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood laps them. When I taught at UCLA Extension, I had lots of foreign students. Let's say there'd be two or three students… if there were 12 people in the class, two or three people would be from America, and everybody else would be from other countries. I would go around, I'd be like, “What movies and TV shows have you been watching?” Almost in every single country, they watch half from their own country, half from Hollywood. So Hollywood storytelling works, that's just the data, and they're dominant. The reason it works is what Aristotle was saying thousands of years ago.. There's a way of thinking about beginning, middle, end that just deeply speaks to the psyche, and you can ignore it if you want. I think Godard said, “You need beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order,” right? Which is great. Just the way we experience life, there's a beginning, a middle, an end to this podcast interview. There's a beginning, middle, end to the day, a beginning, middle, end to me eating lunch. So if you don't lean into the beginning, middle, end psychological aspect of your story, you're going to bore your reader. But to your point, you don't necessarily have to sort that out in the beginning. It's more efficient probably if you do, but you don't have to. Go into it wherever the muse tells you to go, and then at some point, like you do, then you go, “Okay, now I go back and I edit.” If you're saying there's another level, you have another gear in you, then yes, I'd be curious to slowly go through how you're making those decisions. Because what's happening probably is there are ways you're holding back a little bit. There's maybe something you're afraid of being vulnerable about. That's usually where me or other writers are holding themselves back, and we can take a look at that. There are different ways I show writers to do it. Then you can go, “Oh, I was doing it here, and now I can do it there.” And it could be with process, or just a certain creative choice. With story, it's clear and compelling. Those are the simple things. So, is this clear enough? Is it compelling enough? And there are almost always ways to up-level on any facet, whether it's one sentence, or a sentence that describes the whole concept of the book, or a chapter. Each one of those can be looked at with that lens and we can just say, “Hey, this is 70%, 80%,” whatever, and then we say, “Well, how do we get a little bit more?” And then when you do that enough, it piles up. Then especially if you bring in an audience and people are flipping out for your work, they'll tell you. Jo: Yes, I love a challenge, so thank you for everything you've shared today. So where can people find you and everything you do online? Brooks: Well, one way you can find me—if anything I said seemed helpful for you, if you have questions about Hollywood or you have a screenplay in your heart—you can just email me, brooks@brookselms.com. You could look me up on LinkedIn. I'm at Brooks Elms. I also have a Skool community called Screenwriter Marketing, but it's really for any sort of storyteller, and it talks about my favourite way to engage an audience and get through it. So anybody can jump into that if you like my vibe. If you really think anything I've said, or the way I said it, seems like it could be helpful for you, just reach out. Let me know what you're up to, and maybe there's a way I can help you. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Brooks. That was great. Brooks: You're welcome. It was a total pleasure. It was lots of fun, and I really appreciate you.The post How To Prove The Demand For Your Stories And Get The Attention Of Hollywood With Brooks Elms first appeared on The Creative Penn.

She was a maiden from Antioch who lived (perhaps as a slave) in the house of Sabina, wife of a Senator. When Seraphima brought the senator's wife to faith in Christ, the governor summoned Seraphima before him. When she held firm in her faith, he cast her into prison and send several young men to her cell by night to defile her. When they arrived, she was praying to God, and an angel of the Lord appeared before them, clothed in light and bearing a sword; and the young men fell down unconscious. Finally, Seraphima received her martyr's crown when she was beheaded by the governor's order. Sabina, the senator's wife, recovered and buried her body, from which a healing myrrh flowed. This was during the reign of Hadrian.

Today's episode is a WILD ride! Lol we're a bit all over the place as we share what we've been up to, updates on our new Bible study AND our new book, our latest beef about Kenz's new company, our monthly favs, and of course some of what God has currently been teaching us! BUCKLE UP because it's a FUN one to say the least! Thank you to today's sponsor! Hiya Health... our favorite vitamins + more to give our kiddos! Get 50% off your first order using our exclusive link! Grab our NEWEST Bible Study... Freedom Looks Good On You! It's officially out today! Grab it here on Amazon or here for 30% off + free shipping! Pre-order our book book... This Wasn't The Plan! Follow us on the Gram: @forthegirl___ Our Book Recs: Being with Jesus by Jim Branch The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Towzer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices