Dear Family: (Thank you Lord for the gifts you have entrusted in me. I pray those who hear this message receive it as you intended and be blessed in your favor. AMEN.)

I've got a word for you. It's short, it's simple. But I think it may be the most powerful and freeing letter I've sent home.

Consider this less of a breadcrumb and more of the whole slice.

Over this week, as I usually try to do, I had a Bible study alone during my morning prayer and walk. I landed on one of my favorite chapters in the whole Bible. Hebrews 12. To be specific, I got stuck in verse 11.

It's a known verse, especially in sports, and I'm sure you've heard it before.

"No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

I read this and stopped, and I studied. And I realized something. I realized God was trying to tell me again about the laws of the land.

And that in this there are 2 promises and one caveat.

Promise number one: It didn't say discipline was hard, difficult, or easy. No, he's promising us that it's painful. Family, he said painful, and I believe this is why when we are being difficult it sometimes feels as if we are alone. It's not because others don't want to be disciplined, it's not like they don't want the goal, the loss of weight, the financial success. I think the pain of discipline is all too much to bear.

And this should excite you. Because Robert Frost said it best: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Promise number two: I was a little shaken when I realized after promising us the difficulty of being disciplined he promised that if we stick with it. It will produce the fruit it bares.

You get that? Read it again. The law states if you are disciplined you have to reap the fruit, not maybe, not kind of, but you will.

That should set you on fire because if you do that thing, that hurts, that's painful, so tough and goes against you in order to become all you can. Then you will.

But there's a caveat. Sure, you will reap, but most of us don't. Why? Because it says LATER ON, however. That's all. Think of it as eventually, someday, once the discipline is complete.

THERE'S NO TIMELINE.

So if the thing we are going after, we want, or we believed God has promised us hasn't shown up yet and you are doing all the disciplined. Then it's not done. 2 years in and you look up and nothing has changed? Keep going; it's not done. 10 years? Keep going because it has to show up, IF you are doing the disciplines that can bear the fruit.

That's all. I want you to chew on that.

I won't leave you with a bread basket of questions; I'll leave you with a poem that I recite to myself on the hard days, I know it by heart. It's my favorite poem and its by ― Jessie B. Rittenhouse:

"I bargained with Life for a penny,
and Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;

Life is a just employer.
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial's hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid."

TTYL.

— Cousin Earl