Journeying to Jesus - Audio
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- Well, Merry Christmas! I'm waiting. For me, for those of you who are visiting or joining us online, I'm Tom Lead Pastor here. And one of my, if I remember stuff from Christmas growing up, like a tradition that we had, it's actually, it's going up to my grandparents ranch. My grandparents lived in northeastern California. So like, it's called Modoc County and the town is called Alturas. It's about three hours east of Redding and several hours north of Reno. It's in the middle of nowhere. And my grandparents had a ranch. And so probably for about 30 years, maybe more, every year we made the long trek in by car up to my grandparents ranch. And interestingly, some of my most vivid and perhaps traumatic memories come from the journeys to their ranch, not necessarily being there. I remember when I was a little older guy, we were in our Dodge Grand Caravan and I was laid out in the bench seat asleep and my dad, I think, was speeding. And we got, oh, by the way, when we would travel, we would always travel on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day to avoid any other cars in the road. So this is Christmas Day. It's like, I mean, we started at like 2 a.m. So it's like 8, 9 in the morning, where somewhere on 3.95 in the middle of our 10 to 13 hour journey and my dad gets pulled over by a motorcycle CHP officer. And I don't have my seatbelt on, so my mom turns around, get your seatbelt on, you know? And the guy, you know, he comes up and he's like, hey, do you know how fast you were going? But I was like, I don't know. I mean, there's nobody here. Like, it's empty. It's Christmas. And the guy's like, you know what? It is Christmas, sir. Do better. And they let us go. (whistling) Fast forward, maybe 20 years. This is about, I don't know, 14 some years ago. Aaron and I had recently married. And instead of taking 3.95,
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No one's journey to Jesus is the same, but it will take us out of our comfort zone and the hardships are meant to change us.