And it's so nice to get out of the office and get out of the house and come to a place where I can just truly be quiet. You hear some cars, you hear airplanes, you hear people running and talking, but it's just so self contained and it's great.

And I thought it would be the perfect place to talk about seven breakthroughs that have changed my life. Now when we talk about a breakthrough, what do I mean by breakthrough? You know, in our lives we have different experiences and some of them seem major at the time. Some of them don't seem like anything at all, but once we experience it, we can never unexperience it. And some of those experiences are what I call a breakthrough. It's a massive experience that when you look back at it, you realize that transformed everything. My entire thinking changed based on that thought, based on that experience, based on that, whatever it is. And it could be a relationship, it could be a song you heard, it could be an experience that you experienced, or it could be an idea that you had, or it could be a comprehension and understanding of life that you never had before.

Those are breakthroughs and certain breakthroughs will truly just transform the direction of your life. And so I've gone through all my notes. I've got so many of these that I've had over the years and I, I journal quite a bit. Many years ago I started just writing stuff down and I do that all the time, just constantly. A lot of it's just jibberish, but I just write stuff down. And so I've gone through and I thought about seven breakthroughs that if I could just go back and say that one right there, that pinpoint that one right there, that one changed my life. It changed the direction of my life. And so the first one I want to share with you is this. It was the day I discovered that God loves me and he wants me to be happy. Now that may seem kind of like esoteric to you if you're not really into God, if you're not into church or for others of you that may seem really elementary, but you have to understand my background.

You know, I grew up in church, I grew up down here in the south and church is a major part of our culture. But it's not just a part of our culture. It comes with a whole lot of rules and it comes with a whole lot of regulations and things that you're supposed to do and things that you're not supposed to do. So for me, that was, you're in church every Sunday morning. Every Sunday night, every Wednesday night, every week. You never miss it. You know, you can't go to a ball tournament because a church and it just controlled everything. But it wasn't just the fact that it was the routine of church, it was the structure, it was the do's and the don'ts and you can't do this and you can't do that and you can't be friends with these people. And for most of my early years, that really controlled me.

And then as I grew up and I became an adult and I started thinking about it, I started to question, started questioning my faith, started to question all of those things. And I remember one time when I kind of just reached the breaking point and I went off to actually a different part of this very same park, but it was this very same park almost 20 years ago now. And I went off on my own and I just said, okay, this can't be real. This can't be what the God of the Universe is. And I started questioning a higher quality question. And eventually that that reasoning just kind of led me to answer some basic questions like, hey, why is it that the birds of the air don't seem to be afraid of God? Why is it that the rabbits that are jumping around don't seem to have these deep fear of their creator?

And are they jumping the right way? Are they hanging out with the right rabbits? Are they hanging out with the right squirrels? And I started just looking at nature, the creation as it is speaking and saying, this is what we were created for. And I asked the most important question, I think maybe I've ever asked. I said, what is it that would really create the purpose for my life? What would structure the purpose for my life? And as I started thinking about that, I said, you know, really if I believe in God, then probably the greatest thing I could do is to give God glory. And then I asked a better question. I said, well, what would give God the greatest glory ever? And I realized that really the greatest glory I could ever give God is to experience this world, to experience this life that he created us to live and to enjoy.

And as I started kind of going down a road of experiencing life rather than following rules my entire world, my entire universe opened up and I started to realize that God does love us. There is a God, he created us and he loves us so much that he wants us to enjoy this world that he created and it's full of birds and it's full of squirrels and rabbits and gophers and all these other things that are running around us out here. And it's we the people, we, the human beings that put these rules in place. It's we, the people that, uh, that make things complicated and we're the ones who are afraid that we're not good enough. And you know, that's addressing a whole different issue. Am I good enough? That's really the root of it. The root of it was not that God was angry.

The root of it was not that, you know, I couldn't be good enough for God. It was that I couldn't be good enough for myself and I was unhappy with that. And that was one of the major breakthroughs for me when I realized I'm not fighting God, I'm working with God and the person who needs to to grow up, the person who needs to mature was me. The person who could get better was me. And as I started getting more comfortable with myself and saying, okay, I am good enough. I'm good enough for me. I'm good enough for God. I'm good enough for everybody in my life. That was a major breakthrough. And so I want to encourage you wherever you are on your journey, whether you believe in God, whether you're super spiritual, whether you're barely spiritual, wherever you are, this isn't about religion.

This is all about just recognizing what is your purpose in life? What is your purpose on this planet? And I want to suggest to you that if you have any baggage, whatever that may be, whether your baggage says, oh, I can't believe in God because I feel like God's an angry person and I can't ever please him, or whether your baggage is, I have to follow all these rules. I want to encourage you to step back and just look at the universe and look at the world and say, what does this world have in common? What is the one thing that this world has in common and what you realize is outside of people, the world's not fighting itself. What you realize is the world actually does work in an amazing unity, and it turns out that we, the human beings are the ones that need to grow up.

We're the ones that need to learn how to work in the universe and we're the ones that need to realize that you know what? God created us for a purpose and I believe our purpose is to love each other and to share with each other and to contribute to each other, which is why I do all this stuff. It's why I do my businesses. It's why I am starting to do these video series and all these different things is because I believe that our greatest purpose that we can have is to help other people. And in doing that and showing love and showing kindness and caring for other people and sharing our experiences, both good and bad, we're actually making the world a better place. So I hope that encourages you and if you just have one note here. Here's your breakthrough for today. God loves me and he wants me to be happy.

And if you don't believe that today, choose to believe it, test it, question it. Go out into nature somewhere and say, God, is it true? Do you really love me? Do you really want me to be happy? How would your world change if you realize that knowing and believing in God was as simple as realizing and believing that God loves you and he wants you to be happy and he's not fighting against you, but he's working with you and he's working for you. And if you can conceive that, and if you can comprehend that, I promise it's going to be a major breakthrough for you as well.