Our next speaker is a PR campaign genius. Shannon McGurk has strategically been crafting campaigns and honing effective outreach for years. And when I reached out to her current boss, Patty Mugen, for some fun insights, he mentioned that she also has a newish puppy named Hudson. Such a cute name. She's a huge lover of cheese, pasta, and carbs in general. And in fact, she actually set off the office fire alarm once while making toast. And firemen arrived. That is unbelievable, Shannon. You are my hero. So buckle up. Here is the head of content and PR at Aira Shannon McGurk. So we've got a problem within our industry. Here is what Twitter has to say about our digital PR campaigns. Digital PR is getting ridiculous. The industry itself is becoming attention-seeking. And finally, and probably most prominently for me, the digital PR community shouldn't feel pressured to post their best work and highlights all of the time. But you know what? I'm guilty. And I'm really guilty too. So here I am back in 2017 excited as we're coming to the end of the year. Really proud of the team. I take to Twitter and announce that this year we generated 2,400 pieces of coverage for our clients. Then in 2018, I keep going on this theme. And instead of talking about our clients, travel supermarket, sharing their coverage and the top 15 most popular cities that tourists will be in by 2025. Then you can really see the sheer impact and how much I was tweeting around the successes of our campaigns. And ultimately, this comes down to the fact that I'm super proud of the work we're doing. And I want to be lifting the team's confidence up, sharing the wins, sharing the successes as well, so that we can hopefully inspire others out there who are doing lots of digital PR and link building. But it didn't stop there. So this time last year, I stood on the Mazcon stage.  And I spoke about the campaigns that had generated the most successful numbers of links that our team had gone out and created. We've got this one here, Modern Santa, that got 468 pieces of coverage and 324 linking domains. A second one I stood on that stage and spoke about was the most popular beaches according to Instagram. This one we were nominated for an award for 224 as well. And again, this one got 150 pieces of coverage and 66 linking domains. And finally, and this campaign is super close to my heart. It's one that I will always be proud of. It didn't get the biggest and most viral results in the world, but the story behind it and the approach that we took generated 68 pieces of coverage and 45 linking domains. So here is one of those successful campaigns stood alone. You can see here on this graph, we're mapping coverage against the month. And this was a really, really good month when we launched this. We got up to 70 pieces of coverage and a really solid amount of links too. But this is what it's like in context. And you can see that we see that really big spike, but then after that, the months to follow, they're a little bit more inconsistent. You can see the highs and lows of link building. And I'm going to be honest and tell you guys that there, I'm not showing you the full picture. When I'm talking about those successes and those successes alone, I'm not being honest and talking about the other challenges or the other wins that we potentially have in the months to come. So my promise to you guys today is that I really do want to show you the full picture. Now, for me, the full picture covers these three pillars with creative campaigns. We've got the huge wins that we love talking about. We share them for inspiration. We have those steady performers in the middle. And that's really the day to day of what we do, the campaigns that go out there and get 10, 20, 30 links. And then we have those fails, the ones that crash and burn and the ones that really struggle to get off the ground because of whatever reason. But this is how we talk about our work. So we place a huge focus on those wins, right? They're the things that we talk about on social media and LinkedIn and Twitter. They're the things that we write case studies about and we talk about on stage, but we don't necessarily talk about those steady performers that are actually generating real business results because of the SEO KPIs in place. And we don't necessarily share those fails. Those campaigns that, yes, they're hard, but we can learn from them the most. This, in reality, is what the day to day looks like, right? So we have one in four campaigns, maybe a huge win and one in 10, maybe a huge fail. But our day to day lives is digital PRs. Actually, the steady performers are what we do day in, day out, the campaigns that go out there and do get those 10, 20 links. So what's the problem then? And why am I showing you this? Well, ultimately, if we talk about those huge wins all the time, we're giving the impression that we don't have those campaign fails. And that means we're putting too much pressure on ourselves as digital PRs and newbies within the industry, people that are junior coming into things and feeling the pressure to get more than 100 links with every campaign. And because of that, we're starting to normalise the idea that each campaign launch actually does need to go out and get those 100 plus links. Now that feeds into really setting unrealistic expectations and KPIs. And that can lead to really difficult conversations as clients further down the line, because what you put in front of them and then what you produce versus a sales meeting and a pitch to then the reality of what you do could be two very different stories. But one thing we need to recognise here that if we constantly talk about those huge fails, those huge wins, sorry, all the time, it means that we're making others think that those 510 or even 20 links can't be effective. Now we know that those steady performers, they can be effective. And actually, as an industry, we need to talk about them more, we need to celebrate the impact that they have. If you're generating those three links that go out and boost that page, you know, that product page up to page position one, celebrate them, learn from them, share those tactics. There's nothing viral about that, but you're still winning. So I believe, as an industry, we can do better. Now, the first step in doing better is really looking at the habits that our industry has, and this rinse and repeat nature. So why do we focus on the wins? Let's go back to our first era viral campaign. And this is the campaign as a status presentation that really is close to my heart. It's the first campaign we launched in 2017 as a really small team that actually went off and started to generate links and coverage on its own. And that really is kind of the key to success, right? When your story that you're sending out starts to get picked up organically. So we launched this in January, it was a dry January in the UK, a time where most people really aren't supposed to be drinking after quite a heavy Christmas. But I don't know about you guys. January for me is the time that I'm more than likely to drink because of the doom and gloomy weather, the pressures that you face as well coming back after relatively slow December most often. And so this campaign here got 68 pieces of coverage and 45 linking domains. So really, it was around the point of this campaign then that we as an as an agency and as a relatively small team at the time, we started to really focus on the wins and only the wins. So guess how many maps we launched that year for one client and one client alone. We launched 12 campaigns out of a total of 18 campaigns. 12 of them were maps and some of them, yes, were interactive, others were static, but you can really see the sheer volume there because we found this recipe of success and we wanted to push it as hard as we could. Now that is us focusing on those huge wins, right? That is us realising that we've got something that really works for digital PR and link building because we know as an industry, it can be risky and results aren't are given. So we keep pushing it and we keep pushing it because we know that we're going to get something back. And those maps, they went out, they did their job. They got links from top tier sites all around the world and no doubt they had a positive impact on traffic and rankings. This sounds really familiar though, right? This is something we're really guilty of as an industry. And so if we take a look and rewind time a little bit, what do we actually do to get links then? So in 2009, we focused on guest posts and that was the tactic we relied on to generate links for our clients and brands we worked with. In 2012, Distilled started to set the precedent for creative and they were producing high quality static infographics that were going out. The Instagram one comes to mind, for example. In 2014, again, pioneered by Distilled, I would imagine, we were looking at creating lots of interactive infographics, they could have been interactive maps, for example, indexes, that kind of thing. In 2017, we saw the trend of Instagram maps emerging. We alone, obviously, you can see we produced the one around the best beaches. You could tie this into proposal locations, business locations, anything really relating to that platform because the platform was booming and again, tying it into maps, we know it was going to generate links. In 2018, we move forward into indexes and that was creating an asset that had multiple data points so that we could go out to different sectors of the press and continue to push different stories to generate those all important links and coverage. And then in 2019, we saw the rise of the best job ever. So within the US, we saw theme park testers for theme parks in Orlando, Florida. And over here in the UK, we saw Yorkshire pudding testers because, you know, we all love a roast on a Sunday. Then finally, in 2020, we're starting to move towards product stunts. We're seeing new products be created on behalf of brands and then we're driving links into those product pages. They're often stunty and creative and add a new dimension to link building. So what about next year and beyond then? What are the trends that we think might start to shine through for digital PR and link building formats? Well, in 2021, I think as a prediction, it's very likely we're going to be moving towards video. We've seen the emergence of video within our industry kind of dominate over the last couple of years. And I think more and more, we're going to see journalists and consumers want this. So we'll be creating video assets to drive links and coverage. In 2022, we can look to move towards virtual reality, that's gamification, starting to use headsets to really immerse our brand audiences in creative campaigns in order to go out and again, get those all important links. And in 2023, I think we'll be moving towards more experiential stuff. So setting up, you know, stunt like rooms and takeovers, for example, to submerge our brand audiences, to really get them feeling emotions that tie in with the brand. And again, all comes down to getting that coverage with those followed links. So that's 10 winning formats in 14 years. But we were doing more in those 14 years, weren't we, than just those winning formats. We were doing different types of link building and experimenting with different formats. So what about those formats? And why didn't we celebrate them? Why didn't we share them more? Well, because we were focused on celebrating those wins and those recipes for success. So as an industry we're guilty and we love to rinse and repeat those formats. And again, I understand why, because what we do can be risky. But unfortunately, that doesn't show the full picture. So again, another step in, you know, showing this full picture today and sharing the truth about digital PR is talking about failure and embracing failure. So I want to share a couple of failures with you. And for me, this is really, really important, right? I want to air out some of the challenges and struggles we've had as a team, because for me, one of the biggest steps in sharing and talking about the full picture is to actually address failure. So hands up, who's had a campaign fail? Now I know I would have hopefully have been on stage doing this with you. But this is a safe space.  I'm even going to show you it. So this is a campaign that we launched in the first three months of me joining Arrow back in 2016. I was working with Mark Johnson, who headed up for some time, the creative team, it distilled and again, still in my preparation, really had something to prove, especially with Paddy as my boss as well.  Now this shows you just how quickly the US is going to go through their oil reserves if we don't start to address things like climate change and being more efficient with our energy use. So when I launched this and I was a lead PR at the time, I was the one that was hungry to go out and get links and coverage. I was asked by the Daily Mirror, a leading national publication in the UK, their science editor at the time, where I've been for the past four years. He actually emailed me that back and I got that gut wrenching stomach drop feeling where I thought, OK, something's not jelling. And it turned out there was some questions over the data. So it was no surprise when we got zero links, but actually I'd missed something else and that wasn't the only hurdle that I had to overcome with this campaign. Why then? What was that additional thing that I'd missed? Well, actually, we launched our campaign here in early November. I think it was around the second week and you can see that something huge happens and that big spike there that I probably should have caught at the time. Can anyone guess what that was? Trump beat Hillary and won the US presidential election. And I had taken my wonderful campaign that I thought was going to do really well out to US press in the same week. Now, it's no surprise there was a bigger story that week. And actually most of the news outlets in the country were covering this. Most of the news outlets in the UK were also covering this. It was not wise of me at all to launch a campaign to press during that week of the US presidential election. I should have caught it. I should have known better. You know, that that falls on me in that instance. And no doubt you can imagine I kept that one pretty quiet on Twitter. You didn't see me tweeting about this. Now failures, they also come in all shapes and sizes. And this is a format that again tying into that map wins there that we were talking about that works very well for digital PR building. You'll notice that, you know, some of you in the audience may have even created a similar kind of format here. But this idea essentially shows the words top selling car model in every country. You can see it's very visual, quite busy. That's kind of the point with these. But one thing that actually is a huge challenge with these is that during the QA process when our designers and our content strategists are reviewing everything, you have to because there's so much text, you have to really, you know, have a BDI and keep your own attention to detail because in really busy sections, just like this one here, you can see we're not just talking about countries, we've got the brand names there of the cars and also the models. So there is quite a lot going on. And if you haven't spotted it yet, I will reveal the big mistake. You can see here rather than say Hong Kong, we put Hong Kong huge fail. And what's more, we actually launched it with that on the map. This had got through our QA process. This content campaign was live on our client's site. And we even got a link with that typo in place. Now, luckily, I had a really understanding client at the time, we kind of went into panic mode the next morning, was really honest with them, said we needed to fix things quite quickly and damage was really, you know, limited in that sense. We, you know, we were able to turn it round. And eventually this campaign went out and got 80 or so links. So all was not lost. But again, that's the kind of thing that you don't see and hear us talking about in the industry. And I have to admit that Hong Kong will always hold me. This is one of the failed stories that we can sit and kind of laugh about now and have a joke about. But at the time, it was absolutely mortifying. Now that two campaign failures, right? But as an industry, failures don't stop there. So again, hands up, he's had to report on a campaign fail. I know I definitely have. And you can see this email here that I received at 10 to nine first thing on a Monday morning, which is brilliant. Our client of ours and actually one of our favorite clients comes to me and says, Hi, Shannon, how are you? Have you had a good weekend? I just wanted to get your view on how January unfolded as it was below normal standards on a link building front. Now this hurts, right? The clients got there before I have it's 10 to nine on a Monday morning. I probably haven't even had enough caffeine yet to deal with this. But ultimately, you know, we were struggling at this point and reporting back on this has its challenges on its own. This is not the kind of email that anybody wants to be receiving. So here's how to pull their team through a campaign failure. And again, I can put my hand up to this. And this is the reality right of heading up a team and having different kind of disciplines within the team as well, where we all have to muck in and drive forward together. And you can see this again, it's a real life slack message where I'm saying, well done for pushing the team on things today, guys. You know, they've been a bit of a bit of a slow start on a campaign. We repivited and got it out there. Our account manager, Livy was in a bit of hot water with the client. And again, having to report on things. And you can see that we all have each other's backs at this point. And we're literally saying that to each other as well. So you have to have each other's backs through these failures. You have to have each other's backs through thick and thin because we have them struggles happen with what we do. And sometimes it really hurts, right? It's painful when you believe in a campaign, you're emotionally invested, you believe you've got something that's going to go out and deliver on a link building front. When things don't go to plan and those links don't come in and you've got a team that you're trying to boost morale on, you know, it can be really challenging. And that is the reality, unfortunately, with link building. That is, you know, the industry that we work with them. So to continue on this theme of truth, then, what is normal then when it comes to digital PR and link building? Well, earlier this year, Paddy led this survey and launched a survey questionnaire style research piece out to our industry. We had more than 300 replies from digital PRs, content marketers, heads of marketing all around the world. And we were eventually able to create this asset, the state of link building report 2020. And it covers things like the future of link building, where brands are spending their money, the tactics they're using, and also the realities, how many links that we're generating. So there's a couple of data points that I just want to bring to your guys' attention that almost shows you the reality of link building, right? And this is a really important question throughout this report. Have you ever had a campaign that received the following number of links? And you can see in the top spot there that actually 61% of respondents that even answered this survey got between one and nine links. Then in second place, you can see that 55% of respondents got between 10 and 19 links for their campaigns. And then in third place, you can see that 46% of respondents got between 20 and 39 links. Guys, there's nothing viral about that. These are all steady performers. Now again, in position five, talking about that theme of fails and struggles with what we do, 28% also said that they'd launched a campaign that hadn't got any links. Now, I'm a little bit suspicious about that. I know that, for example, we've had more than one that's been a struggle over the last four years. We've got processes and stuff in place to bounce back. But I do think more than a third in our industry and more than a third of campaigns or people out there have, you know, experienced zero links. Now, despite what Twitter shows then not every campaign is going viral, right? Those are steady performers that we just talked you through. And the research here from our state of link building report shows that actually the majority of campaigns are getting between one and 20 links. And you know what, that's really good. Let's celebrate that. Let's learn from that. Let's look at those campaigns and find out what's working and take that forward with our strategies as well. So to give you a bit more insight into, you know, normal and what normal is for digital PR campaigns, I want to talk you through what's normal for error. So across a 12 month period, we launched 138 campaigns. That received 2381 followed links and around 5000 pieces of coverage. That gives you an average of just 17 links per campaigns. Now I have to caveat that some of those campaigns in there, yes, they did go off, do a brilliant job. They got into, you know, top tier figures and stuff like that. But when you're looking at the law of averages, there's nothing again viral about this number. Actually, all of the averages that we've just shown here fall into the study performer category. And these study performers, we know because they're high quality links, they're relevant to our clients and from, you know, they're all earned organically.  But one thing I have to say here is that actually link numbers themselves are almost irrelevant because if they're not having those bigger impacts on SEO KPIs, you know, from my position, I would rather have 17 high quality links that are having an impact on those keyword rankings and traffic and driving the audiences into our client sites than a hundred spammy links that aren't going to shift the needle at all. So for us, really, it is about quality over quantity and it's about consistency over virality. Because you don't always need loads of links to go out and generate those business results. And again, I want to talk you through some examples here. So this is what 47 links across five campaigns with the perfect blend of technical SEO and research and keyword research can do. You can see session traffic here for a client of ours doubles year on year because we have that perfect mix going on. And what's more, the client then provides a testimonial to say the error have consistently provided great guidance on setting targets, setting targets, communicating their progress and helping us grow as a company. Now, the most important thing to me and error at this point will be that last line there. Those 47 links, that perfect recipe of technical SEO as well, is adding revenue to the client's bottom line and is inspiring and achieving growth. So actually, those steady performers can make a big difference to the bottom line. We need to talk about them more. We need to embrace them. We need to, you know, celebrate them. So I want to take you through next around learning from these steady performers and what we can do in order to take them forward into our wider strategies. So let's go back to that challenging email that I received on that gloomy Monday morning in February last year. We actually managed to turn it round to this. And by the end of the year, last year in December, the same client, the same guy came back to us and said, great job, guys, you're finishing the year on a real high. Keep it going. Now, there's a reason that we were able to finish the year on a real high. And that's because we've got a number of processes in place that help us learn and develop as a team and help us get things back on track when they might not be going quite to plan. One of them is the content evaluation matrix. So where this matrix started then was with Mark Johnson.  He's recently just launched a new project called content Hubble. You should definitely sign up to that because it analyzes some of the most important and, you know, biggest campaigns and shows how agencies out there like Aira, Rise at Seven, Digital Last and stuff like that had come up with the ideas. But essentially, we were sitting in a brainstorm and you can see the squiggles on the side here that are really hard to decipher. We started to look and pull apart some of these campaigns. And this is what our matrix looks like in person then. So we have successful campaigns versus not successful. And that's in terms of a link building front. And then we have complex versus not complex. And that is in terms of a build and creative front. So design, dev, coding, that kind of thing. Now, what we were doing at the time when we came up with this matrix was necessary with kind of really focusing on those wins. And we were looking at that top box there, going back to those campaigns, trying to work out why they, you know, why they performed so well, what the formats were, what the pitch angles were, how we were speaking to journalists building relationships from them. And we were able to spot trends off the back of that. And we could see that, you know, at this point when we were starting to really drill into the data here, that maps were great for link building. Here were some of our most successful maps that we've ever launched. There's 300 links alone between these campaigns here, which is brilliant. And it's something that we're really proud of. But again, to go back to that rinse and repeat nature that I was telling you about, we really, really pushed maps and probably a little bit too hard at the time. One thing we didn't do, though, was look at this second box here, the campaigns that weren't so successful, that actually were quite challenging to build. And we didn't go back and learn from our phones. And this is one of them. So the most lucrative movie quotes of all time. And this was for a voucher code company that we worked with. And essentially, we launched a huge internal data pool. We looked at a number of films. We were able to essentially put a monetary value to some of the leading movie quotes that are famous all around the world. So we can see here that Tom Hanks, a hefty amount there, saying his all important line, Mum always said life was like a box of chocolates and you never know what you're going to get. Again, we did this with a number of other quotes. So you can see here the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club. And you can see how much the actor earned for saying that quote them. One thing to note here is that this is quite an experimental format, right? We probably could have made this quite simple. We might have been able to put this stuff in a blog post. We could have done a different visual with it. But at the time, we were trying to push our designs and created formats and a second example them. So here we were working with an online gambling company. And to play on the pun and a theme of odds, you know, you can get odds against horses at the Grand National, you can get odds against American footballers and stuff like that with the Super Bowl. We wanted to look at the odds on life events. So the likes of getting into college, if my baby will be healthy and we were able to plot these against you know, life and death, politics, curiosities and stuff like that. And we were sure that this campaign was going to go down really well with top tier press and specifically lifestyle press. Then when you go down into the campaign design a little bit more, you can see some more of these scenes coming through. So we were able to, you know, talk about living in a simulation and that tapped into things that Elon Musk was talking about at the time. We thought this campaign was going to be a huge success. And it was one of the hardest campaigns that we've ever launched and had to outreach at the time. But we should have taken a step back at that point. And what should we have learned from these campaigns then? Well, actually, if we looked at that trend, we realized that we were complicating things too much. The ideas themselves were quite original. They were quite inspiring. But the formats and the design that we choose to illustrate our stories actually they could have been potentially quite off-putting. We could have distilled them in a much more simple way that let the data and the story sing. Now, not learning from these, it did produce inconsistent digital PR results. You know, there were fluctuations with the link building results. And ultimately, this can put you in tricky situations with clients. And ultimately, you can lose them. You end up having graphs like this. So you have huge spikes. And then you really topple off because you're not getting things right and you're not going back to look at where things were challenging so that you can learn from them. Whereas if we look at the study performers, instead they can produce consistent results. So let's look at the middle of this matrix. So the trend we found here then was that campaigns with multiple data points on their evergreen can work really well for consistent results. So this is a campaign then that does just that it does what it says on the tin. It was for a travel tech client and it reveals the world's best cities to stay connected. So you can see we took a multitude of data points. We looked at free Wi-Fi hotspots per square kilometer. We then combined that with airports with free Wi-Fi and the cost of downloads and stuff like that. And we were able to produce this unique data set that could provide us with a ranking to be able to go out to more than one sector of the press. We could go to Paris and Parisian press and say, hey, you guys took the crown for the world's best city to stay connected. We could go to business press and say that, you know, if you're in, you know, you're working and traveling as a business traveler, these are the best airport cities to stay connected. And again, it allowed us to take all of these different angles and generate really solid consistent results. So that's just the steady performer. I think that campaign alone got, you know, 25 links again, nothing viral about that. But looking at those steady performers in that middle category of the matrix, it helped us get a 95% increase in organic traffic for this client and a 63% increase in organic revenue. Again, the perfect mix of digital pair link building, technical SEOs producing solid consistent results that are impacting this brand's bottom line. So when it comes to the content success matrix, then you should be reviewing your work every quarter to find these trends and implement them. I've given you a template here. I'll be sharing my deck and no doubt Moswell as well, that you can download. You can mess around with it. You can put all of your campaigns against every quarter and start to draw out these trends and insights so that you can take it forward into your future link building strategies. So in summary, I just want to circle everything background and say that today in sharing the full picture with you guys, digital PR can be really hard. And we focus so much on the winds, but we're doing so much more. You are going to experience a campaign fail, maybe two, maybe three. It's going to happen. It's in the nature of what we do. It's important to keep consistency and quality in mind over virality again, going back to that point. Huge campaigns that fly are great, but you need those links to be high quality. They need to be relevant. And in my opinion, I would rather have 20 solid high quality relevant links than a hundred that aren't going to shift the needle when it comes to traffic and rankings. We are the consistent guys here. So step one in doing all of that really is taking the viral pressure off yourself and start talking more about those steady performers and sharing those styles so that you can learn. Step two is to realise that those steady performers can consistently impact weighty SEO KPIs like traffic, rankings and ultimately revenue. And finally, step three then is to use that success matrix to review campaigns, patch those trends early, jump on the recipes for success with those wins. Look at those steady performers to see what the steady B is for consistency and learn from those fails. Today I really hope I've showed you the full picture. Thank you.


Ukraine changes its battle tactics, the reasons for the drone attacks on Moscow are revealed. Repeated drone attacks on Moscow and its surrounding areas reflect a shift in Ukraine's war strategy to chip away at Russia away from the front lines, experts have told the Moscow Times. Russia's capital, located some 450 km from the Ukrainian border, has been targeted by drones nearly every night for the past several weeks, damaging buildings and forcing airports to temporarily close. The once-unthinkable attacks on Moscow have now become a routine part of the war for many. As key of summer counter-offensive in the east and south has so far failed to make a major breakthrough, it is looking for other tactics to change the course of the war, analysts say. Ukraine is in a difficult position, political risk analyst and geopolitics founder Yosef Rabina told the Moscow Times. It has been fighting against Goliath since the beginning, but now it fights a well-fortified Goliath that outnumbers it in every measurable aspect. A larger-scale deployment of drones to weaken Russian defense lines would make sense in this regard. With the attacks on Moscow, Kiev aims to demonstrate that it can bring the war home to Russians, who for 19 months have mostly lived detached from the grim realities of the conflict, including alleged war crimes and the wholesale destruction of Ukrainian cities by their country's military.


I am Dr. Prakash Nafralis from Manipal Hospital in Malaysia. Today I thought probably I will briefly give you some inputs on the importance of salt. Salt I mean the common salt or chemically as it is known as sodium chloride. There is an interesting history added to this salt. Not that we have started noting about salt of late. It has been there for ages. If you had to really know almost as early as two million years ago when the human mankind came into existence salt was a topic which was alluded to and subsequently with a 13 year almost 1300 13,000 years ago salt again came into limelight wherein our Homo sapiens what you call as a wise man the only surviving human being consumed very less salt to the tune of almost 0.5 grams per day and then came around 8000 8000 years ago when we had these Romanians. Romanians realize the importance of salt. They used to preserve their meat in the brain and then slowly appreciated the importance of salt the taste of salt and subsequently it so became so important that the salt was traded in markets. Salt was actually used as a barter for gold. One ounce of salt was almost equal into one ounce of gold. That is how the importance of salt was introduced then and subsequently if you have to speak about what happened in India way back in 1930s or so the Britishers who were ruling us those years started that salt and taxed salt. Salt was taxed those days and then we all know that a great leader father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi went on a real march known as the Dandi march wherein he protested against the Britishers for charging or taxing salt. That's how it began and then subsequently it was a history which everybody knows. So coming to the salt the importance of salt salt has become a necessity for all of us now as a taste enhancing substance and salt to say is a combination of sodium and chloride 40% of sodium and 60% of chloride but we commonly use that term we don't really bifurcate the two but we can always say that salt is the common salt which we all take and generally the salt intake could be anywhere from 0.5 grams to 10 grams and if you have to really know what is followed worldwide in the US why I'm quoting US is that because there were studies which were done and they took into account as to how much of salt the Americans consume and it is known that probably they would take almost three to four grams of salt per day and we copied their practice and in fact our salt intake in Indians is almost equal into almost 8 to 10 grams so we generally take a lot of salt and where does the salt come from mostly it is from the processed food or canned food to the extent of almost 80% and 20% maybe we had a traditional salt into our diet having known all about how the salt is important where is it available I think we should also know why is it important for us to know about salt because it has its own effects on the body so anything excess anything in excess that is taken and I mean what I mean is the salt intake has number of effects on the body right from high blood pressure, heart attacks, heart failures, strokes, some cancers in the body especially the cancer stomach and other cancers then it is also known to have an effect on the asthma, osteoporosis and many other diseases see the some of the diseases which have been associated with high salt intake and coming to the hypertension part it is also noted that African Americans and Indians are salt sensitive that means 50 to 60% of us are salt sensitive and they tend to develop essential hypertension in addition to the other two reasons being the environmental factors and genetic factors so what happens in this essential hypertension patients is that kidney is most important vital organ which does a wonderful function of excreting the salt how much our salt do we take it will preserve what is required and the rest is excreted it is believed that the salt is not excreted to the extent which is to be excreted in these patients who have salt sensitive hypertension there are other reasons also as to why these people have salt sensitivity in the form of some of the enzymes these what we call as stress hormones there is increased secretion of stress hormones in the form of catecholamines and there is increased calcium in the blood vessels also according for this hypertension. Now coming to the renal or kidney effects what about kidney effects because of salt those people who take excess persistently persistent excess intake of salt can give rise to high blood pressure over a period of time not that they take salt today and they develop blood pressure tomorrow it is over a period of time that they can develop and that hypertension over a period of time say 15 to 20 years or more than that if they have then they tend to develop hypertension related kidney disease also in the form of chronic kidney disease or end cage in stage kidney disease some people are known to develop proteinuria some people known are also known to have increased incidence of renal stones. The hypertension part what I was trying to allude to is only the tip to iceberg and going by the research studies there are other things which have been associated with salt so we it is prudent for all of us to limit our salt intake. If I have to say in plain word about salt is that salt is almost second white poison you can say the first one all of you know is about the sugar sugar being the white poison and then this can be taken as a second white poison which has lot of deleterious effects on the body so it is prudent for all of us to restrict our salt intake how much ever is absolutely required to be palatable that much amount is what one should take and I would recommend that a salt intake of almost up to two grams per day is what one should take no salt also is not good and the other thing is people who have kidney disease had to be little wary of taking especially one other salt known as rock salt or in Kannada it is called saindra's Ravana so that they need to avoid. So ladies and gentlemen I think probably it is important for us to restrict these two white poisons to keep our ourselves healthy and fit and tidy thank you.


Fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was written, a gravely ill Thomas Jefferson wrote the last letter of his life. Very appropriately, he used the letter to give his thoughts on the Declaration of Independence in which he wrote, May it be to the world what I believe it will be, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form, which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them. Living in a nation more than 200 years after the establishment of its independence, it can be hard to appreciate the freedom we've inherited as much as we should. As the beneficiaries of American freedom, we should never forget how our forefathers fought so passionately to make our country what it is today.


What is your worst hair mistake and What did you do to overcome it? My big thing has always been that I It's just hair like no matter what you could you can really mess somebody's hair up But it is hair and it does grow back like if I was a tattoo artist I would be really really nervous about my job I would never get into tattoo industry but the fact that the hair does grow back like you don't have like just experiment Practice and and learn and understand the whys behind Whatever you can and you're gonna make mistakes and as you make those mistakes like every day I make a mistake in something that I'm doing and It's how you twist that mistake and come out of it that makes you the best, you know like that makes you better.  So, you know, you just got to be just keep pushing yourself make mistakes It's the best thing you can do because it's the only way you're gonna learn


It's a very small verse.  At this particular pool, Jesus himself walks into and he doesn't go in to stir the pool so that people can walk in and get healed, but Jesus comes to this man and he begins to interview him. He asks him questions, how long he has been sick, how long he has been laying there, what does he wants to be healed, and as he continues a conversation with him, eventually he tells this man these words. He looks at him and he says, "'Rise, take up your bed and walk.'" Well, this was Saturday and in the Jewish culture at the time, it was illegal, it was wrong on the Sabbath to carry any load on your shoulders or carry any load at all. But he still obeys, Jesus walks in with his mattress on the streets, people start calling him with names, said, dude, what are you doing? You shouldn't be walking today with carrying things. He's like, Jesus, who told me to do that, told me to do that, I'm gonna do that anyway. And he continued to walk. Actually, he didn't even know who told him to do that. When they asked him who told you to do that, he says, I don't know, somebody. And then later on, he meets Jesus and Jesus tells him, he says, listen, you've got healed. This is awesome.  So just don't sin so that you will stay healthy and you will stay whole. I want us to know one thing this evening from the bed. What our faith is toward our relationship with God, sin is toward our relationship with the devil.  Through faith, God saves you. Through faith, God can heal you. And through faith, God can bless you. But Satan uses our sin through which he brings pain and brings suffering and torment in our life. And this particular man, now we don't know what kind of sin he did, but we know one thing that Satan had an access to his life and through this access, he made him completely paralyzed where this man was completely unable to move, laying there for a very long time in his life. Satan and demons are real and they exist. Their primary object is to bring people harm. And when people commit sins, this gives them a legal right through which they can bring people harm. Many times when the topic of demons or Satan comes up, many people become very little bit spooked out, especially when you come to a prayer lines and I don't have the clip today, but what happened last Sunday when the prayer was being offered and a lady begins to convulse and a voice begins to speak through her, when an evil spirit speaks through her and what he did to her and everything. And when the name of Jesus is used and you see this evil spirit comes out, a lady collapses on the floor, gets up and says, I don't know what's happening to me. And people sometimes who walk in for the first time and they see that they're like, what is that in church? So some people quickly think it's a show and we pay them and they're acting. Other people simply saying, what kind of nonsense and madness is this? But what this is happening is this, is that there are evil spirit, there's evil forces behind the scenes who are hurting and tormenting people and they are bringing pain and affliction and they can paralyze a particular area of a person's life until Jesus comes with his power and strikes that root. The biggest misconception that we have as Christians is this one, a person who is demonized is a person who is completely out of control in every area of his life, kind of like in the movies where the person is levitating, chained up, a neck is twisted, veins are coming out and all this really lion or kind of a voice is coming out of them and it's all the time happening like that and so when we hear the idea that a demon can bring affliction to someone, we're like, oh yes, of course, it's to that Emily Rose in the movie. But it can never happen to anybody else or if it happens, it's somebody in a mental institution. It is true that there are people where demons have so much control over every area of their life that they're completely out of control. But for most of the people, that's not the case. The words that we are afraid many times as Christians is this, demon possessed. In the Bible, in the original Bible, in the original Greek or Latin, they have said, the people who studied those, they said that in the original Bible, in the original language, there is no such words as demon possessed. There's only one phrase that is used in the Bible. It's called demonized. And word demonized has nothing to do with possession and ownership. It always had to do with influence and then control. So that simply means that in average, good looking, somewhat functional human being who goes to school, goes to work, can still be demonized in a certain area of their life. That doesn't mean they're levitating at night and speaking gibberish. They're still doing fine, but what's happening in one particular area of their life, they are paralyzed, meaning they don't have control. They lose control. And no matter how hard they try, in that particular area, they could not control them. For some people, it's the area of anger. Not every day, but there comes a heated argument and they lose control. And in the moment of anger, they can say things that they will regret for the rest of their life. In the moment of anger, instead of zipping their lip, they pick up a knife. In the moment of anger, their fists go on flying and hitting the doors and hitting the kitchen and breaking things, throwing things, slamming the doors and saying really horrible words and walking out. Let me tell you what that is. It's a person who is being demonized in the area of anger. We all get angry. But the Bible says some of us get angry in such a way where we don't sin. But when you get angry and other people suffer and hurt, the area of anger and cannot be controlled, that area in that area, you are paralyzed. And that paralysis is not just your human, natural, carnal, sinful nature. It is the enemy who has that area under his influence and therefore under his control. Any area Satan has under influence, he has under control. It's kind of like alcohol. If you open your body to alcohol and you receive alcohol inside of your body, you come under influence of alcohol. Guess what happens? You come under control of alcohol. Now nobody forces alcohol down your throat. When we choose to open our life to a demonic influence, we open our life to him being able to paralyze in one particular area of our life. And sometimes he can leave all other areas untouched. Pay very close attention to what I'm saying. We have to remove this idea from our mind that people who are under influence of Satan are somehow all in mental institutions. Some are CEOs, some are very wealthy men, very wealthy women. Some are actually even healthy. But a particular area of their life is being demonized. Jesus cast out demons out of many people. Casting out of demons did not exist in the Old Testament. It wasn't highlighted. It started with Jesus and continued with his apostles. But we see very interesting case that most of the demons Jesus cast out out of people, these people were not out of control, levitating, jerking and yelling. Some of these people lived a very dignified and very functional lives. For example, one particular time Jesus comes to a synagogue and there was this lady who was bent for a very long time. And Jesus comes to her and instead of healing her, the Bible says he rebukes a spirit of infirmity. And this when this was done, the Bible says the woman boom went straight. And everybody was amazed and because it was done on Sabbath, criticism started flowing in Jesus' direction. And Jesus in defense for this woman and himself, he says this. He said, wasn't it good to lose this woman whom Satan has bound for this many years and she is a daughter of Abraham?  The area of her back. A particular area in her health. Her legs worked, her eyes worked, her ears worked, her heart was working fine. There was one area where a demon paralyzed her back and he bent her. One particular time we see Jesus walks into the Peter's mother-in-law's house and she had a flu. She had a fever. We all get fevers, but this fever was something else because instead of praying for this woman, the Bible says he rebuked fever. Hmm. There could be a demon behind fever. And trust me, I had one few weeks ago, I say amen. I remember we were in California a few months ago. One particular man, I was speaking about the topic of freedom, how God wants to set us free. One particular man, he was an older man and I thought first he was drunk. He made his way, I just finished my message, I worshiped him, got up and kind of were singing a song. He makes his way to me in the front and the ushers over there were just staring to see how he's gonna beat up the preacher. There was no usher team prepared and our guys were kind of like not sure because we're not used to these things.  And I was like, well, we're gonna pray for you a little bit later, just hang in there.  And most of the kids, they just like any kind of disturbance. So everybody started paying attention and I was like, Jesus. And I told Leo, I was like, Leo, take him out and stuff. We're gonna pray for him, but a little bit later we first gonna do a mass prayer and then we're gonna pray for him. And so eventually I didn't get a chance to get to him. We prayed for other people. When I just finished prayer, I walked toward him to stop praying for him and I see his face completely changed. I was like, hey, can I pray for you? He said, that thing was gone. I was like, what thing? He said, that thing that I had was gone. I was like, well, praise God. You know, I don't have to pray for you. Amen. I move on. I guess someone else, one of our team members came in and prayed for them. Next morning, I walk into the church and this man runs up toward me. I was like, oops, scenario number two, on a parking lot.  And he says, he said, I had this spirit inside of me yesterday. He says, it was anger. So I asked him like, were you drunk? He said, no, I wasn't drunk. He said, but some violence came upon me.  And I was like, well, it's pretty obvious that you were not in yourself. And he says, after I received prayer, he said, something left me. And he said, my wife can testify. Ever since yesterday, today, he says, I have this supernatural peace in my heart. So here is a man who comes to church, but in the area of his emotions, he has no control.  Is the area someone else has paralyzed you? That's why we come to church so we can learn and not just pop in pills and not just shoot ourselves up with drugs and not just shoot ourselves up with alcohol and put bandits on our problem, but go to Jesus, who's our deliverer, who can undo the paralysis, defeat the devil and set the captive streak. And somebody say amen. And that night, there was a particular girl who also had this, she had this weird experiences where she would sit in church and her stomach would twist and she immediately starts getting dizzy. She said, the funny part is the moment I walk out of the church, I feel perfectly fine. She says, the moment I sit in church, I begin to be dizzy and I begin to just, my stomach begins to hurt.  And she says, I've received some prayer, but it's not leaving.  And you could see that she's not in her right mind. And so I asked if I could pray for her, started to pray for her.  And she began to shake and shiver. And you could see something was happening to her and something like, left. She didn't throw up anything, but you could see it and she just almost like yawned it out. And I was like, how you feel now? She's like, I feel like 75%, just something just left out of my body. But there's some still left. We prayed one more time. And in this time, you could actually feel it, praying for this person. And in that very moment, I knew when that thing was gone. Right away, you could just kind of sense it and feel it. And when that thing was gone, she said, I completely feel fine. Next day, she said, through two services, no nauseanness, dizziness, whatsoever. Amen. Sometimes it could be small things that the enemy can use like loneliness, depression. Some people have fear of elevators. I know Derek Prince mentioned when his wife, he was married, his wife was one day spooked out in one of the elevators or some got stuck or something like that. And she had fear of elevators. She would never take elevators only the stairs. It seems like a small thing, not a big deal. And he prayed with her and he says, I just commended that spirit to leave. And ever since then, she said there's no fear of elevators whatsoever. We have to, I am not saying that behind every small little accident, small little red light, and you got laid to work, there's a demon.  Also foolishness. Also foolishness. I remember praying for a young man this weekend. And this particular young man occupies a very high position in the church. I will not mention details. And he came up to me, asked me about ministry, asked me about advice for how to do home groups and everything we start talking and talking and talking. And then at the end, I'm about to release him and then there goes that awkward pause that I usually anticipate. I need to talk to you about something. I was like, okay. And usually, I know what that's gonna be about. And he start to mention in area of his life what he is completely out of control. He said, Pastor Vlad, no matter what I do, no matter how much discipline I apply, I lose it every single time. And I told him about an area of my life, what I had out of control, what I was a Christian. And I told him that this area, at that time, there was a demon there. I was like, I'm not saying I had a demon.  And I was a good person. I was not shooting up drugs. I wasn't drinking. I was pursuing God. I was fasting every Wednesday. I would fast first month, first three days of every month. I would pursue God. I would give my money to church. I would serve church. But one area of my life was under demonic influence. And I looked at him straight in the face and I said, your problem is not just with this and this and this. You have a demon problem.  There's nothing you can do because this area of your life, there is a stronger spirit there. And with the help of Jesus, renouncing this, you can find freedom and you will find victory. Had the opportunity to pray for him and I'm expecting awesome results. Somebody say amen. So here is a man who is paralyzed. He cannot move. Now this man, he's not paralyzed in his pinky. He's paralyzed everywhere. Every part of his body is under influence of paralysis. And Jesus comes to him and he touches his case and this man gets immediately relief and receives freedom. And that's exactly what the Lord Jesus Christ wants to do. He wants to bring freedom in the area of your life where you experience complete loss of control. Loss of control. Maybe it's depression. You wake up in the morning and out of nowhere you lose control. Maybe it's cursing. You cannot stop that. Maybe it's smoking. Maybe it's drinking. Maybe it's pornography, masturbation.  You lose it right away. And no matter how hard you try to cold it, you lose it.  You may not demons might not come out of you when somebody receives prayer but you must understand your fight is not just against fleshly desires. Your fight is against the devil. And with Jesus only we can win against the devil.  You can pop in pills against depression and fear but if the enemy is behind it you're not gonna get rid of him with pills. You got to step in into your calling as a Christian. Ask Jesus's help. Renounce that claim Satan has and receive victory for the glory of God. Can somebody say amen? And that's why in our church we want to see more of people receiving freedom from the things the enemy bound them by. We are praying for that every single time. I am personally as a preacher reading books because I know the measure of grace God has given us now. The measure for salvation. I would go sometimes to churches where people don't come for altercalls for months. They don't even believe there's lost people no more or maybe everyone is lost. And people, the service has ended. I've seen this already when I would go and speak. Service already ended, it's 12 o'clock. Everybody, some people even leaving and I would take two minutes to do an altercall. Six, seven people would run and weep. And I was like, well I thought the whole service was kind of already disorganized. And God gave us this grace. Same thing with healing. Because we talk about it, we pray about it and now we see people, God's healing people. When this last conference we were there you know there was maybe 20, 25 people that rose their hands for, that they received healing. And I received a testimony right after where one lady, one girl was watching live stream and she had some eating digestive problems with her stomach and right on the live stream Holy Spirit's presence touched her. She said, I felt completely better and went and ate the food she couldn't eat and was completely fine, sends a text message to her friend, she was from Los Angeles, and said I just want you to let them know that God touched me and I got healed. Because God has given us that grace because somebody say amen. But we have to understand that God wants to give us the measure of grace where people will be free from demonic spirits. I remember hearing a testimony of Guillermo Maldonado. He's the pastor of the largest Hispanic church in the United States from Miami, Florida. He was mentioning when the church was stuck and the church wasn't growing and things were really hard. He says he took his main leadership team and during a retreat he started to pray for them. And the next thing that he said took me by puzzle and surprise. He said I was casting out demons out of my leadership team. He said there was many demons in my leadership team. He said when all the demons came out of my leadership team he says then my team became strong and healthy and we started to grow. And today that church is 14,000 members. Well before it was just a hundred members. And today in that church they have recorded documented resurrections of the dead, people who get translated from one place to another in split of seconds supernaturally. And God who does incredible things in their ministry. I know same thing happened to our ministry.  When we took trips to the ministry of property by Joshua, most of the people if not all in our team received also deliverance. There were certain areas of their life that were under control of Satan. They were still functioning really well. But certain areas of emotions and when they went through deliverance and they would come back walking God's word they saw changes in those areas of their life. That's why I believe what God wants to do with our team is going to be powerful because anytime God sets someone free he will always give them the grace to maintain that grace and see revival in their life. Can somebody say amen? And so freedom is our portion. Casting out of demons is our portion for the glory of God. Now for a moment the thought that I want to end everything on is the thought where Jesus delivers this man from this paralysis and he tells him rise up, he gets completely healed. And when he rises up Jesus then goes on and tells him take your mat, take your mattress. The one that you've been laying on for this many years source of your comfort and I want you to take that mattress pick it up and walk. Now I want you to with me to think with me for a moment. This is the man who has not walked for many, many years. That means that his bones are very weak. His whole body is extremely unused to walking here is Jesus who tells him not only to walk Jesus tells him pick up something heavy and carry it. Almost sounds like Jesus. This man is going to crumble and collapse under the weight of mattress.  He leaves the mattress to that man and gives that man power over the mattress. It's as though Jesus took the power from the mattress and put it into man's muscles and says I removed the paralysis out your body but I'm not going to remove the mattress out of your life. I will give you the power to carry that mattress and have dominion over that mattress. Why? So that people can truly see you are truly and indeed you are made whole because you can walk that is a miracle. But when a man who was laying for most of his life carries a mattress that is a super miracle. I find out sometimes when God touches our life and he removes a certain demon out removes a certain sin out and he changes a particular area of our life. There are things God leaves for us to still overcome. You would think Jesus would throw a match for the mattress and light it on fire. You would think Jesus will roll up the mattress tell Peter and John is this guy is so weak. Let's give him a break.  Let's hide the mattress plus it's the Saturday. Jesus doesn't play it like that. What he does is the very thing that was carrying you for a very long time Jesus flips it over and says I'm not going to take care of that. I took care of the paralysis but I'm giving you the mattress so that you will exercise your authority and your victory. When God sets us free from certain things there will be things God will not give us freedom over for one reason because he wants to give us a victory. Freedom is what comes for free. Victory is what comes when you exercise the freedom you already received to pick up what you've been laying on what has confined you and what has been the source of your comfort when you were paralyzed and God wants to not only give us freedom he also wants to teach us what it's like to walk in victory and to make us stronger as we walk in that victory and it's interesting when the moment this man picked up a mattress there came the haters and they told him this, what are you doing?  Today is Saturday. What is this thing that you're carrying on your shoulders? Did you know that it's illegal to do that on Saturday? And I love what that man said. He said the man who took the paralysis out told me that I can carry it and I should carry it. You didn't take my paralysis out, I don't listen to you. I want to tell you something this when you experience certain level of freedom God will steal, live, leave some enemies around you for you to exercise your victory as a young believer. When you begin to step into that position of victory there will be a devil right there telling you who do you think you are? You think you can have a home group? You were smoking weed three weeks ago. What you think God can use you? You think you can now do this? You think God can give you a blessed marriage when you had this and that and the enemy right away will tell you, drop the mattress. Rejoice in the fact Jesus took your paralysis and go home really quickly. And that's where you have to reply to every voice that comes against you and tell him you didn't remove my paralysis and you will not tell me what I can carry and what I will not carry. Be like that man who looked at them and said I don't know which day it is today. And I don't know all the rules, but I know one thing. I was paralyzed, feet up and nobody could help me. This man who helped me also told me to carry the mattress. They asked him a question, who is that man? Listen very carefully. He didn't even know who Jesus was. Yet he still obeyed him. I wanna speak to those here who come in coming to church for some time and you feel like you don't know much about God. It's not a problem. The problem is when you begin to know more about God but obey him less. It rather raise a generation where we have young men and young women who just learned something about God in the last few weeks, but they've learned this. If God says you can do it, you can do it. And every voice that comes against you, I might not know much difference about which angels and which spirits, even which realms. I might not know the difference, justification, regeneration, certification, but this is I know. If Jesus who took my paralysis gave me the power over this issue.  I will pick up my man and walk with it. It's better to know God less but obey him more than know God more and obey him less. The problem with us who come to church for long is we know so much about God but we never pick up our mattress. Certain problems that are left still around us and what we do instead of picking up our mattress and ruling over our mattress, we run from our mattress. We run from relationships, run from problems, quit jobs, walk away from relationships, walk away from certain opportunities. Why? Because we're scared to pick up the mattress. We think if we pick up the mattress, our spine will go crack. We think that we are so fragile. This is so hard. This is so difficult. Why didn't God remove my mattress? God left you a mattress so you will grow a spine. God left you a mattress because he doesn't want to just be free.   I wanna challenge you this evening.  It's pointless to pray over the things. God left on purpose to make you strong and to reveal. Will you obey God or will you listen to the voices of negativity, defeat, and the voices who say, you can't do it, you won't make it, you will fail? And someone say amen. Same thing happened with Israel. When Israel walked out of the Egypt and we see that in Egypt, God took care of the paralysis. God took care of Pharaoh. But in the wilderness, in the promised land, God left them some mattresses. There were some problems. They were not as big problems, but they were still there and these problems were left so not so that Israel can go and lay on them. Not so that Israel can run from them or crumble under them. God left these mattresses so that Israel will pick them up and against all of the feelings and voices in their head, they will carry that and say, listen, my God, who helped me in Egypt, he is with me. I overcome this, I am better than this, and I will reach my destiny. But instead of that, their mattresses became their graveyards. The Bible says God has given us the power to reign in life. Remember, there will be problems, Jesus will remove supernaturally. But there will be things he will leave on purpose to teach you how to be a fighter, to teach you how to be victorious.  That way, that is only one when we fight and when we win. It's somebody's same hand. Your lack of knowledge about God should never be your hindrance for the lack of obedience to him. And obedience to God is simple. Do what he says. When it's hard, you won't fail. It's somebody's same hand. You know, sometimes in my life, last few years when we started to run with this vision to see people saved, and when me and my wife started to take the steps, the sacrifice financially toward the kingdom of God. And I remember when last year, in the beginning of last year, a certain mattress God told me to pick up, a certain area where God placed on my heart to yield to him. And I had a big phobia because this mattress was so heavy and I was afraid that my weak fragile spine will crack under the weight of this mattress. And I remember when picking up that thing that God told me to do, it seemed like a heavy mountain. I was like, Lord, this is so hard. I'm gonna go under. This is so difficult. How am I gonna make it? People think I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy. This is just so difficult. You're just abusing me, God, telling me to carry this mattress. I am so weak. I'm barely walking right now. Give me some time. Let's take it easy. Maybe not a mattress, a pillow first. But this is what I learned when you pick up a mattress. God has no interest in breaking your back. His interest isn't making it stronger. You can't make your back stronger by Jesus laying hands on it. You can only make it stronger by picking up that which he said to pick up.  And maybe now Jesus touched your life but that comfort is still laying there and you're like, Lord, take it away. God says, no, no, no. I'm not just interested in saving you. I'm interested in raising you up and making you a soldier and a warrior. And I cannot do that without a mattress. I'm not gonna get rid of a mattress. I will give you the strength to rule and reign, dominate and overcome in Jesus' name. There are some things God will heal you supernaturally.  I'm a healthy person fighting sickness and standing strong in the promises of God even when you feel symptoms in your body and you say, but Jesus is my healer. There's some financial problems God will take care of it but just supernaturally just certain things will work out and others they will work out by you standing on the promises of God and this is what you will find out. The ones that took longer, required more patience, developed you stronger on inside than the ones that happen instantly and God will do both. He'll remove the paralysis and he'll make you stronger by leaving a mattress and telling you, pick it up and carry.  You will find out how strong you are in me and how strong I am in you when you walk in a bed.


Sometimes these hotels and motels are C-class properties. They haven't been updated in decades and they have a reputation of either, you know, poor immunity, amenities, bed bugs has been a frequent issue in the hospitality space. And then also some of these communities or properties are in transient neighborhoods or they have transient folks that stay in them. So if you're traveling with $80,000 worth of tools in your truck, you know, you're worried about tool theft.  And we categorize it as workforce travel.