Welcome to Fluid Scaling Technology, when you want to go fast by Paige Watson. Paige Watson is a senior technical coach at Industrial Logic Washington. He has got three decades of experience as a developer and he has been a technical coach for five years. Without further delay, over to you Paige Watson. Good morning, let me share here. All right, thank you very much for joining. I know it's kind of earlier. I'm in Seattle, Washington in the United States who were about 12 hours difference. So just the opposite it's evening here, but I'm really glad to get this opportunity to talk with you.  It's an insurance company here in Washington state. Using what came to be known as Fluid Scaling Technology. And yeah, first I want to do, I like to do three truths and a lie. So here's some some things. One of these things is a lie and and I'm going to go through. You know, when I was sorry. When a 5000 line basic file failed to render a picture of Farrah Fawcett when I was in high school, I decided to give up programming forever. You know, in 2000, I heard about XP development and asked a coworker to try pairing with me, but he he just laughed at me. I left a lucrative career in the adult entertainment industry to teach the world to build better software. I'm one of only two people in the world to attain the extremely hard to get certification of certified fast instructor. And I helped the singer Haroon to be the superstar that he is today and which one of those is the is the lie. Well, actually in 2000, a coworker came up to me and said, I have heard about this thing called XP development and pairing where like two developers work on the same computer and they share their knowledge and they write really good code. You want to try it? And I told him he was crazy and I laughed at him. And and now that's what I do. I teach I teach teams and companies to use better processes and better practices like pairing, mobbing, ensemble programming, you know, all those great things. So it's come back around. So I'm going to talk a lot about open space technology. Open space technology was created by Harrison Owen and you might know it from the conferences. You open space conferences, sometimes called unconferences. Open space technology has has four rules and one law is the way they put it, that the rules are whoever comes are the right people. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it's over, it's over. And whatever happens is the only thing that could happen. And there's one law and that's the law of personal mobility. And that sort of states that if you are in a session and you are not learning or helping others to learn, you have the option and sometimes it's almost the responsibility to go to another session where you can learn or you can help others learn, right? It's a really great way of holding a conference and having having great discussions around that. But I want to talk about that because here I'll give you some pictures. Here's an open space conference where they're starting out. You start out in a large group and the people that are there are the ones that self-selected into the conference. You'll notice there's papers and pens and stuff in the middle. After they open and welcome everyone, they actually will dynamically create a full day of conference in about 20 or 30 minutes. And they do that by writing the topic that they want to talk about or they want to hear about. And they'll put it on the wall on this grid and you'll see across the top, they've got the rooms. And down the left side, they've got the times, right? And the person who chooses to, they're not leading this topic. They're stewarding this topic. They're facilitating this topic. Maybe they're not the person with the most information about it, but they're the person who has interest in hearing about it, right? And then once the market places, this is called fills up, they'll split up and everybody will go to the places they want to see and the ones that are interesting and exciting to them, right? And so my friend Ron Cortell had this idea at an open space conference in 2014. He said, if 800 people can self-organize a conference in 20 minutes, why aren't we using open space technology to solve agile scaling? He thought, how can we use open space principles to allow teams to work in large scale? You know, there's got to be something there. And he thought about this idea for several years. In 2000, at Primera Blue Cross, which is that large insurance company that we worked at, we actually had the opportunity to try it out. And it wasn't called fast at the time or fluid scaling technology, but it is what became fluid scaling technology, right? We sat down, excuse me, and came up with a few sort of overview ideas of what we wanted fluid scaling technology to become. Now this went through a lot of iterations, right? We had part of our work was also learning to do processes better and experimenting on them. So we decided we wanted to bring everyone together to work as one collective. We want to visually represent the business goals on the wall, make it visible, make all the work visible, right? Let the collective self-organize into teams and break down and do the work. We actually called them tribes for a long time. The group of people was a tribe that made up our area. And I say that because we didn't really use the word team so much. We used tribe. And when I started there, we had about 20 people. When I left, we had over 50 in our collective. We started using collective as the word and kind of like that a little better. And then finally, on a short cadence, we would sink and repeat those above steps. And that's just kind of a high level overview of what we kind of thought we could accomplish, wanted to accomplish with this process. So we wrote those out and some other thoughts on giant stickies. And you're going to see we put these up all over, all around our work area. We have one that says fast rules, not really rules, probably standards. They weren't like, you have to do this. They were like, this is what we should do, right? Do the right thing for the release. Do the right thing to make the good code, to make the good release, right? Be a team player. Be a coach and be coachable. Strive for excellence in your craft. Those were simple enough, and yet they encompass these values that we wanted our collective to have. And then the other values, the things we valued about the way we work, face to face communication, code craftsmanship, pairing, mobbing, or ensemble work, test-driven development, a good CIECD pipeline. We valued self-organization, including trust and collaboration. This was really important to us. A shared vision, a single purpose and alignment.  And we continually went back to our vision and our alignment as a group. And then Kaizen, or that idea of continuous improvement, learning, growing, was really important to our collective. So we had several roles in the collective. I don't know if they were, I mean, they weren't really assigned to one person. One person would fill them. Sometimes you would fill more than one, right? We had a product manager. And this wasn't a role of authority over the team. But one of vision, the product manager role was to communicate the vision to the collective and interface with the business. They were to motivate everyone to, like, yeah, this is what we're going to do. It's so exciting. Here's how it matches with our vision. Let's go to it. And of course, they were there to answer questions that we had for the business. Most of the people on the team were just the collective members. We're part of the group. And we focused on growing and hiring in what we call T-shape. And you might have heard of that. But the whole idea is that each person has a highly, a broad set of valuable things that they are highly skilled at. We all know how to write code. We all know how to work on computers. We all know how to write tests, all these sort of things. We all know across the top. That's our flat bar across the top. But then alongside that, each would have an expertise or, excuse me, specialization. And that's that leg of the T that comes down. So some people would be strong in testing. Some people would be strong in data. Some people would be strong in ops or leadership or multiple areas. So when we put everyone together, we had a good, full-rounded team. Really interesting thing that came out of that. They asked us to sort of give our title so we could have our titles as part of our work, our name, our emails, and all that sort of thing. We talked about it quite a bit. And we actually came up with one title that everyone, no matter where you were in the group, everyone had the same title. And that was Solutions Developer. Because that's what we did. We didn't have developer one, developer two, senior, DVA, all that sort of thing. We were all solutions providers is what we were. Team Steward, the team Steward was very much like the facilitator in open space. Their job was to steward a chunk of work through a value cycle or an iteration. We tend to refer to them as value cycles because that's what they were. So they weren't necessarily the boss. They weren't necessarily the subject matter expert. They could be someone who has a connection and an interest in seeing that chunk of work get done. Or an interest in learning more about it. And so they're going to steward it through the process. That means that they weren't necessarily like in charge of fixing blockers. But their job was to make sure that someone was found that could work on those blockers. Or if we had to talk to another team, their job wasn't necessarily to go and talk to the other team and say, I'm the steward of this. Their job was to find someone that would talk to the other team and make that connection. So they more stewarded the work through the process. Maybe they were updating the reporting and that sort of thing. Finally, we have a market facilitator. And I put this on here. It's not really a role that we call out a lot. And it's a rotating role. And this person was just to run the fast meeting. And I'll show you that in a minute and why I put Kat Herder on here. Because their job was just to keep everybody on track or at least try to keep everybody on track. And people would usually take this role for a month or two and rotate wasn't a major one. So let's look at our fast meeting, right?  We actually did this every two days. We had one meeting and we did it every two days. So there's a very handsome market facilitator up there. And that job is just to clear off the board, get things ready. Here's all the people standing around. These are all the members of the team. Like I said, when I left, we had over 50 people. We probably have 30-ish there. Here's our product manager. Notice he's way in the back. His job is pretty much to hang out to answer questions. He doesn't have much, much input on, you know, he definitely doesn't assign work. His job is to be there to answer any questions for those of us that are going to steward the work. And I'll get into that a little more in some of the pictures. And then some of us sometimes, excuse me, we had guests. And guests, people that, would come from other teams because they'd heard of what we were doing. You know, other managers, the C, C level. People would come down to see what was going on. Sometimes we had guests actually come from outside of the company. Cause this was pretty amazing stuff that we were doing. And, and word got out. So let's actually look at what, what we were doing. And what we were doing, what we were doing, what we were doing, what we were doing, what we were doing, what we were doing. So let's actually look at what, what we were doing in this fast meeting. Right. So the fast meeting. Was. One, one meeting. That's all we had. It took about 30 minutes. Everyone attended. We would start out. The, the meeting with a group activity. You know, we would start out with a, a, an ice breaker sometimes. Usually announcements since we were all there. Sometimes a recap of process. If we had, like I said, the guests who kind of. Didn't know what was going on or we wanted to follow them. You know, excuse me, we wanted to show them. Get them. That knowledge of here's what we're going to do. And here's how, how, how we work type of thing. We're going to start out with a group activity. We're going to do a group activity here. Right. Here group activity. We're stretching together. We did that pretty regularly. Although I noticed our PM is in the middle and not doing it. So I don't know what that says, but I found that kind of funny. So. Following up. We would close the previous cycle. We would close that previous iteration. And then we would go and tell, and this wasn't a. This wasn't a demo, like, like your scrum type of demos. Maybe this was a sort of. A time to say what, what did we learn. In working on my chunk of work that I worked on this iteration. What did I learn that. Everybody else needs to know. What did I learn that. You know, that I need to communicate since everybody's here. Sometimes we would show, show demos, but not usually. We all sat together. We all were in the same area as you saw in that picture. And so. We didn't have to do that demo. Sort of separate meeting. Because our, our PM was there. We could show him at any time what we were doing, where we were at. After the demo. We did a thing called turn up the good. And if you know Woody Zool, he is kind of the, I don't know if you. I would call him that the sort of modern day founder of, of ensemble or mob programming, maybe. But he's a fabulous person who has great ideas. We had him come up and teach us several different subjects from mobbing to talking about how we work and how we track work. And that sort of thing. One of the things he taught us was this idea of turn up the good. Their ideas and processes that we value. And if we value them, let's do more of them. So we started out doing ensemble work mobbing. Just a small group of us and once or twice a week. And we decided at one point that like this was really good. We got a lot of work done. We, we tended to. We tended to really learn and really write good code. And so let's turn up the good. Let's try and experiment where we don't just do it once or twice a week. Let's try and experiment where we do it every day. And so we did, you know, and that's we, we tended to experiment with that with the things that worked well. Then we would plan our next iteration. Our PM would come up and set our direction. He would reiterate the vision of the team. He'd tell us like we're building this excellent thing. Here's where we're at. We're excited about it. He would then give us sort of not really a list of work that we would do for the, this iteration, but more. Work that he would like to see on the board for this, this next iteration. And when I say that we had five, the five work in progress slots for most of the time. That meant that the whole team, we would work on five things. And so the PM, his job was to supply us with eight, the top eight priority things. And then we would choose five of those things and work on them for this iteration, right? And this allowed him to, to change it up to, you know, to easily decide that priority changes and move to the next iteration. And then we would do a marketplace where stewards would step up, choose an item and they would say like, I want to work on this new user login. And I'm going to be in room one. And so just like we saw on that open space board, they would put their work into room one. They would put their name on the top of it. And they would say, maybe I need someone who knows the user database. And maybe someone who's worked with OAuth before since, since I don't really have that, that understanding. Right. They would kind of point out those things that they could, that they are going to need for that, that iteration. Once we filled up all those work in progress slots, then we would open the marketplace to everyone else and self organize. And everyone would go up and take their name and put it on what they were going to work on. Right. And we'll take a look at that. Here is a, here is one of the boards. I think this is kind of one of the break off teams. We had several teams throughout the time, throughout the time I was there. Sort of break off and work either separately for a while or, or separately, you know, they became a separate team. But sometimes they would be separate for a while, and then they would come back and join the rest of us. But let's work, look at this board very much like the open space board. We have work in progress lanes. We had five that was tended to be the, the like most of the teams that use this had five. We had magnets with our names on it. And you'll notice the people with their names at the top, those tend to be the shepherd or the, excuse me, the stewards. So they would put their name at the top. So it was really easy to kind of point out who that steward was for that story. Everyone else when they were, when they were ready to work on it, they would put their name on one of the, the stories that they wanted to work on. This team has a next up block. So this was a, not necessarily what was coming for the next iteration, but if they got to a point where they had finished working on this chunk of work that they had picked up for the iteration and they were needing work, they could come and look at the next up next in line box and maybe grab one of those things. We called out blocked work. We visualized it and put it right up front so that we were continually monitoring it. Right. We also use those red stickies on them. And then once they were unblocked, they moved to the main area and got picked up again. We also moved names of those people who were on vacation. So, so it was a really easy way to track of who was around and who wasn't. And this team, interestingly enough, also made a little section for offline time so that they could keep track of, you know, upcoming outages or something that would affect their work. Here's another view of the board. This is a, this one has a discovery tree on it, which is the, in the center there with the red and yellow stickies. The discovery trees were how we, how we found out the work that we needed to do. And that's, that's kind of a whole nother talk. I'll have some resources at the end. You can, you can either see the videos, read some blogs, or I'd be happy to talk with the, about those, you know, after this as well. So once we plan this whole iteration, the next step was to go forth and do all the things. And you'll notice here, for instance, we have two mobs here. We're working on two different things, but we were very close. And this allowed us to, to collaborate not only with the others in the mob, but the other people, you know, if, if that mob was working on something that we had interest or, or had a connection to, we could just turn to them and say, Hey, you guys, do you want to join us for a minute? Well, we talk about how we're going to, you know, architect this or how this is going to connect or, or whatnot. It was a fabulous way to work and, and it made the knowledge transfer quite easy. We also had a guild process guild. This process guild was really important in, in getting us to the fluid scaling technology model that we're, we use now in that the process guild would meet once a week to discuss processes and suggest experiments for improving how we did things. And that process guild would talk about the benefits of different changes maybe and then take that to the entire, the entire collective to talk about. We did experiments, our experiments had a start date and an end date and an expected outcome. We would do those experiments and at the end we would sort of retro on them and say, What did we learn? What can we do to change this experiment so that it has a, you know, is there something that we expected to get but didn't and how do we change that so that, so that we can continue this experiment or another experiment with the same expected outcomes. And this was really important because it allowed us to, to find ways of working better in, without actually making wholesale change of like, okay, we're going to throw out this entire process and do this. It's like, no, what's one little experiment we can run to try? Maybe we could try mobbing all, all the time instead of just twice a week. We'll do that for the next two weeks. I think it'll make our production better. At the end of two weeks we'll talk about it and see if that works. We learned discovery trees. This is how we, we, I talked about those a minute ago. This is how we tracked our work. Again, we, we have one on a window and one on a giant white board, but it made it very easy for everybody to kind of look at the work and what was done, what was in process and what, what hadn't been started. And again, probably another talk. Team agreements were really important. One of the things we often said around working this way is that you have to be an adult, which when I look back is kind of an odd way of saying it, but really a big part of, of the great work that we did was learning how to, to act together for the good of the team, for the good of the company, how to collaborate. And it's not easy. And it required us all to really do a lot of work. It's not just the team members, but the management as well. Right. We learned to, to value these agreements. And we took time. Two or three days, maybe even, it was maybe even a week in the beginning, out of our regular work schedule to sit down and sort of hammer out, have decision, you know, hammer out all our decisions around these agreements and get buy-in. We all agreed to, to the agreements we made about how we were going to organize, how we were going to, you know, promote natural leadership, how we were going to resolve conflicts. That was a really important one. Wasn't just like, okay, everybody run to the manager. Right. How do we resolve conflicts when you think one way and I think another? And, you know, we had to figure that out so that we could work. We could work together well. We talked about how we're going to experiment. We talked about our rules around code quality and collaboration. Are we going to have, you know, in the beginning, we decided everything had to be, had to have a pair to go into production. It had to be paired. In the end, by the time, you know, we had this large group, we were actually, everything had to be mobbed in production and had to, and had to be, we used a test driven development at the time had to be written with test driven development to go into production. That didn't mean we couldn't spike on things, but it couldn't go into production unless it had gone through them all. Right. And then we had rules or agreements around team growth and learning. How would we learn and grow? We actually decided we wanted to take time to learn. And we did. We took, in the beginning, we took like an hour a week. By the end, we had the first three hours on Monday morning was learning time where we did an open space event around learning. And someone would say, for instance, hey, I want to learn about Siri or Alexa skills today. And other people would put their names on that and they would go off and, and spend three hours learning about this. And they would come back and give us like, okay, here's what we learned. Here's how we can incorporate what we learned into our work. And there were some really great things that came out of that, that we were able to apply, not just, you know, about Alexa skills or whatever, but about process and about how we work that we, that we spent time learning about and applied to make our team better. And of course, we wrote all these agreements on a big poster and put it everywhere. We could see it. So what was really good about this? Right. If you're familiar with Daniel pinks book drive. He talks about motivation 3.0, which is the three things you need to really have a fabulously motivated team. And that is, you have to have the ability of mastery. You have to be able to get better at your job. You have to have autonomy, right? You don't want to be continually told what to do because you know how to do your job. And you have to have a purpose.  A job without purpose is, is, is boring really.  And, and we, we really achieved that well, we really enjoyed our work. And I don't think there was anybody there that, that really didn't. When was the last time you woke up on Monday morning and work cited that it was Monday and you got to go to work. That happened all the time for me. Because it was great stuff. I was doing great work with great people. And, and, you know, it was, it was amazing. We had this emergence of natural leadership. Right. This, the people that, that, not just because they've been there the longest, the, you know, but people that, that really wanted to do. Wanted to, to be part of that really kind of stood up. If someone would say, oh, we have to talk to, to security. And someone would go like, oh, I can do that. And they would stand up and say, yeah, I'll do it. We had a team ownership and team responsibility. And that was amazing. It wasn't just, it wasn't just my code. You know, it was all of our code. There wasn't just a bug that, that I'd written. Oh, Paige has written a bug. Look out, you know, he's got to go work on it. No, it was all of us. If there was a bug that got into production. It was all of us. It was all of our fault. Right. And we were all responsible for the work. We were all responsible and we own that. We were excited about that. We had a really good pride, amazing pride in our work. We learned, we learned as a team and grew as, as developers and, you know, people. And that was quite fabulous. And then we had, we made better software at a more rapid, but sustainable pace. And I, I bring that up. It always kind of seems like when I say, Oh, we made better software. It sounds kind of a, I don't know, maybe a little conceited, but it was because of our process. We really did make good software. We continually, and not only did we write test driven development, but with, with the mob or the ensemble group, the knowledge that spread around made the software better. We continuously and mercilessly refactored. So we were continuously cleaning up and making our software better. And I believe the last two years that I was there, we, I think we had two bugs that made it into production. And one of those bugs was due to load balancing that we didn't know about. And the other one actually was because someone had written code on their own and committed it and pushed it going totally against our, against our team agreement. And so it was kind of, kind of funny. Maybe it pointed out the fact, the reason why we had that agreement. But yeah, it was, it was pretty amazing. And the code was, was great. So there were some negative aspects. And, and I'll bring these up because it's important to know when you think about working in a way that, that is empowering for everyone. It's not collaborative work is hard and it's not for everyone. It is really hard. It requires this level of maturity that a lot of people aren't comfortable with at the office. Right. You have to be able to put yourself out there and say, I don't know, or, you know, this is wrong. Or you have to be able to be vulnerable. And a lot of people don't, don't like that, don't want that, don't want to work on that. And that's fine. I totally understand that, that it does require that work. So it's not for everyone. Right. We, we had several people that joined us. We always had an onboarding way of, of allowing people to, to join us. They knew what they got coming into it because we, you know, we, in the interview process, we actually had them be part of the work and they knew exactly what was coming, but there were times when the company merged other teams with ours. And there were people on those teams who, who weren't comfortable working in our, our processes and didn't want to be necessarily part of the collective. They, they wanted to just come to work and, you know, tell me what I need to do. Give me my story. I'm going to go work on it. I'm going to, you know, finish it. I'm going to go home and that's, that's fine. That's a, that's not an issue. It just isn't how we worked. And unfortunately, well, we had a, an onboarding process. We didn't necessarily have an off-boarding process where we could say, look, you're a great developer.  There are other teams in this company that could use your, your amazing skills and, you know, how do we find that? Didn't exist. Maybe it's something that we, we could have thought about and come up with. If we'd had more time. And I, I use the past tense because of what I call the corporate immune system, very much like the immune system in our bodies. When something is different, it becomes attacked. Right. We were doing something that was radically different. We were, we were not doing scrum. We were not doing safe. We were doing this crazy thing where there wasn't a lot of, there wasn't any top down management telling us what to do. Right. And it requires a lot of trust from those outside of that collective. The business trusted us. We had to, we had to get them comfortable with it. They had to kind of learn as, as they went, just sort of like we did. But they, they, we gained that trust. But there were a lot of people that didn't trust us. A lot of other groups that, that didn't trust us from outside. Because it was different. Right. Management has to give up that power. Over feeling when, when you work this way. Management, it can't be a top down. You have to have that, that. Manager or management structure that lifts up the team that's there. Their job is not to tell them how to work and what to do, but their job is to make sure that they unblock all the, the blockers that they open up the. The channels that are not, the channels that are not. The managers that they open up the, the channels that are necessary. And they do the administrative things as well. The other thing that was interesting, we found other teams and managers. Sometimes felt really threatened by our team.  You know, and because we enjoyed our work, we did. Like there were times when we, when other teams were like, how come they get to spend time learning? Why can't we do that? Right. And, and I think that's one of those things that, that I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how we could have fixed it. We tried often to, to, you know, invite other teams, other people to come join us whenever we were learning. Anyone was welcome to join us. Whenever we had interaction with other teams, those teams, we would like, hey, come, come mob with us. Come be part of our collaborative effort as we solve this problem with our dependencies. Didn't, didn't work out unfortunately. So. Beach time check five minutes more. Okay. Thank you. I am, that's, I am right on schedule, which is excellent. Thank you. Thank you. So. A little about fast agile. I'm talking a lot about the fast meeting, but there are a lot of things that, that come around the outside of this fast meeting. The fast meeting is sort of the centralized glue that holds it all together. All of these things you can learn a little more about at, at fast agile IO. I've got the link on here and I'll have a resources slide at the end. So. So. Or use. Just by going to the. To the, the agile. Agile India 2022 site. And there's a link to all these slides there as well. But we had a thing called fast forecast. Excuse me. Fast forecasting, which was a wisdom of the ages. Wisdom of the crowd. Forecasting. So. It was, it was. When we needed to forecast, we didn't really estimate a whole lot. Once in a while we did, and we used fast forecasting. We use the opportunity and discovery mapping techniques that I was, that I was showing you. We, we think. That we could have scaled up to about 150 people, which is give or take a few is done bars number. We haven't tried it. And I actually haven't heard that it's gotten that high. It's gotten much higher. And some other teams that have tried this other companies that have tried this. We definitely found that mastery and reflection and improvement were a really important part of this as well, along with, with several other things. And again, you can go to the fast website and read about those. So just here's a little word cloud of kind of everything that I think I touched on. I'm more than welcome to talk about any of these with anyone. If you have questions. Yeah, my name is Paige Watson. I'm a senior technical coach from industrial logic. In the United States, and you're welcome to, to, to send me an email to contact me on Twitter. I love talking about this. And so I could go on for another four or five hours. Thank you very much. Thank you, Paige for sharing your information with us today. Thank you very much.


Welcome to the course introduction for groundwater hydrology and management. This is Professor Penan Chinnasami from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. I am a faculty with the Center for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas, SITARA, which is a very unique department for rural technology and development. Water is a very important part for rural development. Of the water resources in the world, almost 2.5% is the only available freshwater. Remaining are mostly saline and not usable. Of the 2.5%, only 21% is easily accessible. So of the freshwater, only 21% is easily accessible and of that 1% is in the lakes and rivers whereas 20% is in groundwater. On this note, groundwater is such an important freshwater resource. Most importantly, with climate change, groundwater acts as a buffer because during a flood or drought there is a lot of scarcity for water, plants do not get enough water for which people use groundwater. So groundwater has silently become a mitigation and adaptation tool for climate change. With so much benefits and also ease to access, groundwater has been used widely. We should also note that groundwater has played a key role in increasing the agricultural productivity for India. Groundwater opened up a decentralized water system because every house would put a well and take groundwater for their needs. With such prolific use of groundwater and ease in access for pumping, the groundwater use has almost become unsustainable because groundwater takes a lot of time to recharge whereas with technology we could easily access it. So it is very important to conserve groundwater. Before we need to conserve groundwater, we also need to understand the physics behind it, how groundwater occurs and how to manage it. So this course would give you an introduction to groundwater hydrology. We will discuss the physics about groundwater and understand the key drivers for groundwater recharge and discharge. We would also go into the equations, specific equations to understand groundwater movement. We would discuss about the shallow and the deep aquifers followed by some modeling concepts. We will also look into some case studies on groundwater use and how you can use it sustainably by different methods. So we would look into a focused groundwater hydrology scheme to understand the key drivers for recharge and discharge. At the end we would stop by giving some recommendations. So this course is tailored made for understanding the groundwater and then sensitizing people on why groundwater occurs, how it occurs and how it is being used and what are the methods for sustainable groundwater management. The course takes a lot of understanding and lessons from course textbooks which are given in the website. We would also be using government reports and records, some data we would be pulling out from the government websites to look at how we can understand the data. We would also look into some remote sensing analysis, how satellites are used for groundwater and we will discuss some case studies. The lecture also would use some of my field experience as a groundwater hydrologist, some of the data I have collected over the past 15 years and we would discuss that in class. This course is very important for water resource managers who want to understand the water and conserve water and more importantly groundwater. This course is suited for earth and environmental science students, civil engineers and water policy makers. I would like to welcome all of you to this groundwater course. Thank you.


I do believe you should provide for your family and so on. But the way that most guys use provider is in that we give women things in order to get them to like us. We do things for them just in order for them to like us because we think that's the way we have to do it. There's absolutely nothing sexy about the provider I'm talking about.  I've done it for sure. Then there's the other guy. He doesn't spend any money on the girl. He's not a great dresser. He doesn't seem to have many skills but she's addicted to him and can't get enough of him. And this guy doesn't do anything that the other guy does. He's not the provider. He's more of the friend with benefits type guy. He's more carefree. He's not trying to push her into doing anything and she's addicted to this guy. Always trying to find out where he's at. What is he doing? She's texting him and sometimes this girl goes from the date with the rich guy and texts the friend with benefits guy and the way home goes over to his house.


We are continuing this series of There Is More and today I'm going to share with you a message about going from professing to possessing. Many of us we profess God's blessings that God has for us. We know that in Christ we are seated in the heavenly places because somebody say amen. In Christ we already have everything pertaining to life and godliness. Can I get a witness? In Christ we are already victorious. In Christ there is no condemnation. In Christ we are healed. In Christ we are blessed. In Christ we are delivered. In Christ we have victorious life. Is anybody happy and thankful that you are in Christ? See people in the world live in crisis. We live in Christ. Can somebody say amen. Touch your neighbor and say you are in Christ. Touch your neighbor and say don't live in crisis. We live in Christ amen. But the problem that many of us have is the fact that we like to profess these things. But then when we look at the reality of our life many times we don't possess the meaning we don't see the reality of them. And the Lord wants to shift that and he wants to change that. Amen. Somebody say there is more. There is more. We believe that there is more. That's why we show the testimonies. Every testimony that we see sometimes people come up and say I googled this guy. I saw he has this and that. The testimonies we show is not us saying we approve and we know everything about these ministries. When I read Joshua it doesn't mean I approve of every action Joshua did in the Bible. When I read Solomon I don't approve of Solomon's idol worship. One time I had a person who said I can't believe I'm going to stop listening to your sermons because you mentioned Benihim. I said well you better also stop listening to my messages because I mentioned David. He committed adultery and killed the guy. And I keep reading his Psalms almost every day. I was like and if that doesn't offend you I don't know what could. We're not we're showing God's glory. He uses people in the Bible who are not perfect and people on this earth who are not perfect. And we're also showing what's possible the potential that God has for us. What we see today is not what God has for us. God has more. Even Jesus who we see as the ceiling of the supernatural. He looked at the crowd and looked at his disciples and says you will do great works. If Jesus being the ceiling always saw something more how much more with the floor we have to constantly be aware there is more. That's why we're seeing I'm hungry. I'm thirsty for the living God. I don't want to be a preacher who only explains the gospel. I want to experience it. I don't want to be a person who only gives information. We want to see the demonstration of his power. We want to see his power being manifested. That's why I want to present the stories. We come to church those of you who are visiting us for the first time. We're a little bit crazy. Yes, I know that you're getting that little smoke right now in your nose and stuff. But the church in hungry generation is not satisfied. We're just preaching cut sermons and eloquence of speech without providing an opportunity.  Where you get on your knees and say God I need you.  Because I'm here to taste God. Not just to hear about God. Not just to sing about God. Not just to read about God. But to taste God. Can somebody say Amen. Can somebody say Hallelujah. Anybody here tasted God and found him to be good. Found him to be faithful. Found him to be, never leave you, never forsake you. If you are, wave your hand at me. Come on somebody. Joel, if you can give me a little bit more juice. Thank you. There is more. Come on Jesus. Somebody is getting it. Let's open Joshua chapter 1 verse 3. Every place that the soul of your foot will tread upon I have given you. As I said to Moses. Last few weeks we talked about this whole series is based on Israel entering the promised land. We started to talk about the paddling in prayer. How when you pray the promises of God you see what's available to you. Even when you stop being desperate. You should never lose your desire. If you focus on what God has promised to you. Also we talked about the supernatural supply. How when you enter the promised land. Moses the rod and man that doesn't enter there. But God's promise still is intact. Meaning certain people will help you to get here. But they will not help you to get there. And when you lose them don't lose your hope of the future. Because your future is never attached to people who left you. It's attached to God who is still with you. That's a good preaching and a shouting point right there. Thank you Jesus. Hallelujah. This week I'm going to talk to you about moving from professing to possessing. I want us to take notes. Statistics says if you take notes higher chance of making to heaven. I just made that up. Sorry. The first point I want you to write this down. Is that we have to move from waiting upon God. To working with God. Wilderness was a time when Israel was waiting for the cloud to move. I love those prayers. This sounds so spiritual. Lord if you don't go with us. We will not go. But these are not prayers. We have to pray. Because God is already with us. And he's saying if you don't go. I don't go. When the cloud moved. So did God. But when they entered the Jordan River. The Bible says God changes the rules of the game. He changes the rules of supernatural. Where he says now. When your feet step into the Jordan River. I go with you. God didn't say I will split the Jordan River. And then you go. God says you go. And I split the Jordan River. With the Red Sea. They were waiting for the river to be split. And then they went with the Jordan. They went and the river split. You are not facing a Red Sea. You are facing a Jordan. In the sense that God is not going to do it. And then you go. You are going to go. And God is going to do it. Don't just wait on God. Work with him. Many Christians they know what it's like to say. I have nobody without God. Jesus says you're nobody. You're nothing without me. And we know that we say oh Lord. I am nothing without you. If you don't do it. I'm not going to be able to do it. And that is true. But that is only 50% of the truth. The other percent 50% is when Paul says. I can do everything through Christ. I am nothing without Christ. That's only 50%. The other 50% is I can do all things through Christ. Who strengthens me. You got to combine both of these truths. Can somebody say amen? We see that Jesus tells his disciples. Go into all the world. Preach the gospel. Baptize people. Teach them. And then he says in Matthew chapter 28. He says. Low I am with you. Always. The low is after the go. First is the go. And then is the low. Jesus adds the low to go. That means that he says. I'm going to go with you when you go. He didn't say. You know what? I want you to wait. He only said the ones to disciples. And they waited for 10 days. And no longer is the church required to wait. Now we pray in our prayer time. We wait upon God in prayer time. That is true. And that is extremely important. We come to dependence on God. But what I do not want us to have is this. I don't want you to shift the responsibility for revival on your life on God. We don't shift the responsibility for miracles on God. We share responsibility with God for miracles in our life. If revival depends on God, every church would have it. If revival depends on God, every nation will have it. God doesn't play lottery with revival. God doesn't just blindly say, I like the city. Yeah, I like that church. I like that church. God doesn't pick and choose. We choose revival. The Bible says it is the will of God for everyone to be saved. Why are people not getting saved? Because it's not your will. When it becomes your will. When it becomes your passion. When it becomes your desire. When we partner with God. God begins to move. Somebody shout amen. God's power is already connected to us. You and I are like a faucet in the house. The city connects the water to your house. And then there is these pipes that go through every single bathroom. Every sink. The water is already there. The city did their job. They connected the water. They opened the water to your house. But there will be not one drop in the sink of your house until you open the faucet. The Holy Spirit has already been connected to you as a Christian. The temple of God. The Holy Ghost is connected. God opened the wall in heaven. He already sent the angels. He already sent the Spirit. He already released the promise. He already released. And now everything is connected to you. And so my assignment today is not for wait for God to send a city official to open the faucet. My assignment today is to use my own hands and to open the faucet in my own house that the city has its water connected to. I open my mouth and God says to one prophet prophesy. God tells you speak to the mountain. God says pray. God says fast. God says trample upon the surface. God says open up your faucet. Somebody give God a shout of praise right now. Come on. Somebody give God a shout of praise right now. Hallelujah. In Mark chapter 16 it says the following. And as they went out and preached everywhere. While the Lord worked with them. Shouldn't your neighbor say God wants to work with you. God is not working for you. Because some of you think you have God on the payroll. I need this, this, this, this. You know God is not running errands. He doesn't work for you. He works with you. We're partners. You're not the boss. Some of you say he is the Lord but he wants to work with us. He says you step in, I step in. You step into the Jordan. My glory steps into the Jordan. When Samson caught foxes he put their tails together and put a fire in their tail. Not under nose in their tail. Means whatever they went the fire went behind them. We have to embrace a New Testament mindset. And the New Testament mindset is this. We don't wait on God to preach the gospel. Heal the sick and cast out devils. We work with God. The idea that oh if the Holy Spirit doesn't go with us. What else is he going to do? He will go with us. Now in our private time. In our fasting time we wait upon God. We come and say Lord I am nothing without you.  You say Lord I can do all things through you. Never in public acknowledge that you're nothing. Because that's not true. And in private don't come and make up something that you're something. In private remain a beggar. In public be a lion. In private be a lamb. Saying Lord I love you so much. I am absolutely nothing and I don't want to be anything without you. But the moment you come out of that. You better be a lion. You better be a warrior. In private I'm a worshipper. In public I'm a warrior. In private I commune with God. In public I command the mountain. Because God's power is attached now to you. God says let's share responsibility. Don't shift the blame on me. Don't say revival is God's job. Revival is our job. It's God's and my job. We are yoked together. That means we're carrying it together. God is not pulling everything. I'm pulling it with him. And he got the heavy part of course. I'm doing the light part. Because somebody say amen. Revival is our job with God. It's not God's job. If everyone in the city.  Would we have revival in the city? Would we have revival in the city? If everyone in the city would pray like you pray. Would this city be changed? If everybody in the city would read the Bible like you do. If everybody in the city would sneak out at Friday night and Saturday night as you do. Would we have revival? You have to ask yourself this question. I ask myself regularly this question. If every member in our church will live like I do. Would our church experience revival? Revival. Because nobody, I shouldn't expect revival out of you. Until I expect revival out of me. Revival can only happen through us.  Our desire is not to bring revival to the city. Our desire is first to bring revival into our own life. And let it spill into our sphere of influence. And affect our cities. Take care of revival in your family. Actually, men, take care of revival in your personal life. It will spill into your family. It will spill into your marriage. It will spill into your kids. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later. Amen. I want you to write down point number two. Before the sword can conquer your enemy.  When Israel crossed the Jordan River. The first order of God was not for them to go attack the enemy. God's first assignment for Israel was to be circumcised. Now during the first service, a young man on the drums started to drum it. When I said circumcised. And I wasn't sure if he was giving praise report for the fact that we no longer need to do that or something. But it was very important. We no longer need to do physical circumcision. And I say, Lord, thank you for that. Amen. But the circumcision that God wants to do in our life. Is using a knife, flint knives of the word of God. God wants to cut away the reproach of Egypt. God wants to cut away our old stinking thinking. God wants to cut away bad attitudes. God wants to cut away habits that do not glorify his name.  Before he uses that sword to conquer our enemy. The word of God, Hebrew chapter 4 verse 12, it says it's a double edged sword. One of the reasons why one side of that sword doesn't cut the enemy. Is because the other side hasn't cut me. Why should the devil respond better to God's word than you do? Why should demons tremble if you don't shake? Why should the devil flee if you don't even humble yourself in front of God's word? I'm going to give you a secret. One of the reasons why our words against the enemy has no power. Is because God's word in our heart has no power. The Bible says submit yourself to God and then resist the devil. Rebuke is only as powerful as the depth of my repentance.  Shift some things. Build some things. Make me weep. Make me shout. Make me praise. Make me change my mood. Literally mess me up. If that word has no power in me, why should it have power through me? See before the word of God can conquer the enemy. There is one part of that word that will cut you. I'm not saying make you feel bad. Actually it will cut something bad. It will bring comfort. It will bring conviction. It will bring power. It will change you on the inside because God's word is a double assert. One blight is for the devil. One blade is for me. Come on Jesus. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.  It's barely going to be sharp against the devil. Let God's word be fresh in you. You won't be surprised. You'll be surprised how fiery you'll become against the enemy. If you wanted to work against the devil, let it work first in you. Meaning become a student of God's word. Pick up your Bible again. Download the U-Version app again. I know you deleted it because there was not enough space on the phone. Get the streaks again. Start a Bible reading plan again. You will say, but I failed so many times. Start again. Begin to memorize the word again. Don't just read the Bible. Let the Bible read you. Have a time where the sharpness of God's word makes you go, ah, this is good. It's a bread. It's a seed. It's the hammer. It's the oil. The word of God is a fire.  Let it be something that feeds me. Only then it will fight the enemy. If it doesn't feed you, it won't fight your enemy. And so what he teaches us, Joshua teaches us is this, is that before you use the blade against the Philistines, Medianites, Parasites and every other aides. Let the blade go, ah, man, this is so good. I'm going to tweet this because this is good. This is minuscule. When it's good to you, it's going to be the devil's going to say here, this is so bad. This is so bad. This hurts. Do you know why Jesus could say it is written and the devil was wounded? Because that it is written first was ministering to Jesus before he ministered to the devil. Before he administered that word, God's word has two sides. One blade is for your flesh. One blade is for you and the other blade is for the enemy.  Prune your thinking, prune the negativity, prune the defeated, prune the trauma and the drama, prune the hurt and the pain, the habits, the hang ups, prune all of that out. Let it work in you before it works through you. This applies also in marriage. The principle of cutting before conquering, you can't conquer happiness in marriage until you cut back on certain things, certain habits, certain attitudes. You can't conquer financial prosperity until you cut back certain subscriptions and leaks in your finances which take up a lot of money. When I was 16 years of age, I realized that I don't need to compete to win public approval because I was already behind. My physical appearance didn't help me. So I knew that I was way behind on winning people's approval. So I'm like, since I'm so behind, I'm just not going to even run that race. So I did not need to buy the latest coolest. The reason why is because I knew it will never help me to win the public approval. So what I did is I didn't care what people thought about me. I started to save money more toward eventually building an investment instead of buying money to impress people that I don't like. With money I don't have to buy things I don't need. At the age of 20, I conquered my first real estate property, but the only reason is because at the age of 16, I cut back certain things. You can't conquer if you don't cut. Some of you, you're saying, why am I cannot conquer this deal, this dream? See, in order to conquer, you got to cut. Even right now, one of the reasons I released the book, three years ago I felt the Lord lead me in my heart to reduce my life to one thing. Not to do everything, but to do one thing. And I fell in my heart that one thing that I'm called to do is to lead and to feed. And that is to communicate. And so I do one thing. I did a little bit of real estate. Now I trimmed that what I want to do only communication. So for me, book is communication. Social media is communication. YouTube is communication. Audio podcast is communication. When I travel, it's communication. Yes, I do many things, but in reality I do only one thing. And the reason I'm able to conquer the area of my calling is because everything else is being cut to help me fulfill only that calling. If you want to conquer, you got to cut. Can somebody say, man? See, some of you, you have so many things growing right now. And you're saying why none of it really takes off is because you're growing everything. Grow one thing and it will grow. Amen. I want you to write down point number three. When there is no solution to the problem, seek to live in awareness of the promise or the presence. When there is no solution to the problem, seek to live in awareness of God's presence. So we see this Israel coming to the Jordan and God is teaching them the importance of stepping in first instead of just waiting for God to step in first. So you take the risk. You move by faith. It's actually incredible because if you read the Bible, you will see that God called Israel at people until they got to promised land. The moment they enter the promised land, God calls them a nation. I believe when you start living by faith, God begins to change your name.   But when you begin to take that first step with God, God begins to change your name. And he says, listen, you're a believer now. I've given you a word of faith. I've given you a spirit of faith. I've given you a measure of faith. I've given you a household of faith. I've given you a gift of faith so you can live a life of faith because I am pleased by faith. God changes your name. And then when we come out of that Jordan, the Lord begins to bring cutting in our life. He begins to allow his word to create a powerful change within us, positive change, good change. And this empowers us to conquer the enemy. Israel faced their first challenge in the promised land. I like what Pastor Ilya mentioned today. How success is a lot of responsibility.  That's not what success is. Success is that you're faithful what you have and your employer comes in and gives you more work. Your pastor comes in and says, you're running this ministry. You're so great. Can I put three more ministries on you? Success is more responsibility and responsibility is not fun. Israel comes to the promised land and they face the first problem. This problem was something they've never faced before. Up to this point everybody they did not like and everybody that hated them came after them. So it was easy.  They come into promised land and the enemy hides behind walls and not only hides behind walls their enemy has walls so big Israel has no weapons to defeat them. Their enemy shuts the door and keeps the lock inside. Israel is in the promised land but they have a problem.  Yeah, her name, yeah that's Jericho. And she doesn't want to talk to you.  And this is the third day you're sleeping on the couch. The woman, the Jericho doesn't want to talk back. You're like, I thought this will feel better. This looks good but it's a problem. You wish to have children. Children is such a great blessing from God. They're the quiver. They're the arrows in your quiver. Then they become teenagers. Then you face your Jericho. When a spoiled bread that you fed and brought into this world things they got the world figured out and they're telling you how to run the world and how to run the family and they don't want to talk to you and try to threaten them. I brought you into this world, I'll take you out. And you see them calling the police from the phone number you are paying for. When you finally get that business and you got that one or two people working for you and things are finally going great until you start realizing you gotta pay taxes. Until you start realizing you gotta look for a job.  You have to look for contracts. If that doesn't go through it's on your food on the table that goes out. We don't realize but the Promised Land has its challenges and sometimes these challenges are so much bigger than the challenges of Egypt and it makes the Promised Land feel like pit of hell. We loved having interns when we didn't have them. Interns, you're great but I'm just gonna tell you the truth. Until we got interns, first year that we had interns I remember I came to prayer and I said, God I will never ever do internship again in my life. I was like why did you Lord take the most difficult people all around the world and ship them all at once to hungry generation? Why? Because the first week I faced with challenges they came with problems, they came with difficulties some of them didn't even know they had these difficulties but then by the end of internship I was like you know what? We can try one more time and next week we tried it again then this internship started and the first week I was like Lord Jesus what did we got ourselves into? 32 teenagers, they are so... Amen. One person texted me this is happening not the person, this drama is happening and sometimes I feel like eaten by hyenas like by news report and then I was like man this is so hard but this is what I remind myself I said Lord if it wouldn't be for the interns I wouldn't have these challenges I remember when we didn't have challenges because we had nobody at church I said Lord I thank you for every problem every difficulty, every Jericho every challenge I have because of the promised land I stepped into never let you own Jesus Thank you Father, thank you Jesus Never lose sight of the beauty of promised land because you met your Jericho that's the beautiful part about promised land is you get Jericho, you get challenges you get hardships but God is always with you and you will always overcome if you want to get rid of the Jericho you will lose the promised land so overcome the problem with Jericho but I want to speak about something right now that I believe will be a catalyst in overcoming our Jericho Jericho shuts its doors and Israel is facing a battle they're not equipped to win right now and instead of running from that battle or instead of Israel allowing this to overwhelm them I want you to see what God tells Israel to do He says I want you to take an Ark of the Covenant put it on your shoulders and walk around the city of Jericho seven times the first day I want you to walk around the city I want you to see what they were supposed to carry on their shoulders not the weight of the wall but the weight of the presence they don't know how they're going to conquer it they don't have some secret weapon they're developing they don't have a tank they don't have a nuclear weapon they don't have any kind of explosives that they're hiding somewhere in the wall nobody is planning a secret secretly to remove to open the door from the inside Israel does not know how to conquer it have you ever faced something you don't know how to conquer? let me tell you what not to do don't let the problem climb on your shoulders don't let the doctors report climb on your shoulders don't let the fact that your kid is not talking to you climb on your shoulders don't let the fact that you promise you will never do that sin and you've done again climb on your shoulders I know you're struggling with that but don't let your struggle land on your shoulder keep walking around that struggle having something different on your shoulder you will say well it's impossible not to let that be on my shoulder think about this two minutes after you're dead it's not going to be a problem no problem whatsoever whatever financial problems you have two minutes after you're dead whenever I say that it's so hard to get the problems off of me I say this is crazy how my heart stops beating and the problem leaves if my heart stops beating and removes the problem why can I stop the problem with the power of the Holy Spirit right now I keep this rule 5 by 5 if in 5 years this problem is not going to be a problem I will not take more than 5 minutes to care about it move on from it 5 minutes ok 4.50 4.30 5 minutes is gone that's it you have to move on why because these problems I know they're big I know they scream the loudest you can never land them on your shoulders because when they are on your shoulders they can't change you change they crush you they affect your knees they affect your back and instead of seeing walls fall you fall I stand and on the walls God begins to put his finger on his walls because he sits on me so he's closer to the wall so he goes in to the wall like this and the reason why God wanted them to be close so he could keep the finger on the wall did you know the walls fell supernaturally they fell supernaturally they didn't just fall supernaturally God put his finger on it why did he put his finger because they kept him close to the wall and he was on the shoulders when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death walk with arc on your shoulders when you walk through divorce walk with the arc on your shoulders when you walk through a heartbreak or maybe abuse or maybe something very difficult and you're being healed as you walk through the still don't let the devil fool you and say you have to carry you're called to conquer it and the only way you conquer it is if you don't carry it carry the presence somebody say I carry the presence say I will conquer the problem by carrying the presence that's why Jesus says you will receive what power when the spirit will come what power is never released if he doesn't come upon but if we want to see power released he has to come upon but for some of us before he comes upon you gotta do something he's saying you know what that is the problem yes it's true it's a terminal illness I'm in my marriage yes it's true it's a problem I have but you know what right now if it's not gonna be a problem two minutes after death it's not gonna be a problem right now because the living God lives in me and in the midst of Jericho I'm gonna walk in the presence of God I will walk in the peace of God I will walk in the power of God and as you do that your walls begin to melt your problems begin to change and you are preserved can somebody say amen somebody say praise God hallelujah last point and we'll come to prayer build memorials to God's miracles not monuments to your mistakes when Israel passed through the Jordan river after they finished God circumcised them actually Joshua circumcised them but according to God's instruction the Lord tells Joshua send twelve men back to that place and I want you to go into the bottom of Jordan river and I'm gonna come down I want you to go to the bottom of the Jordan river and once you reach the lowest point of the Jordan river I want the twelve men to find some stones from there take the stones out from there and bring them to the promised land and set up like a monument and God says this is to remind future generations that I was with you I did the miracle God once actually Joshua set up six or seven memorials during his lifetime sometimes he killed one king and put a huge pile as a reminder the king is dead Joshua wanted the nation to have memorials of God's victories and God's miracles not monuments of what God has not done what has not happened prayer God has not answered that person God has not healed that time when God didn't come through that time where was God in that God does not want you to build monuments to unanswered prayers but memorials to his miracles in your life some of us struggle with our faith not because our faith is weak our memory is short we remember things we should forget and forget things we should remember don't remember your mistakes remember God's miracles we tend to our mind gravitates to always remember what we've done wrong disciples were the same way Jesus heals the, Jesus feeds the nations feeds so many people and then finally he gets in the boat and he says stay away from the leaven of the Pharisees and the Pharisees and the disciples are like dude you forgot bread no you didn't man we forgot bread I can't believe this and Jesus is reminding right in front of us about the bread man we could take somebody to bring us bread but we were already in the middle of the lake we forgot bread and Jesus says what are you guys talking about we forgot bread he says why do you always remember your problems he says do you remember how many people I fed and I want you to see Jesus gravitates their mind to what he did instead of what they have not done don't let your mind like a magnet be drawn to your mistakes draw to God's miracles you see but I ain't got much miracles on the cross Jesus died for you that's a miracle he loves you that's why the last supper Jesus says do this in remembrance of me if you have nothing else to remember remember how much he loves you remember that he loves you so much that he died on the cross for you and rose from the dead for your justification remember me Jesus said hallelujah promised land is when you set up memorial stones in your mind the memorial stones are of God's activity in your life do you know why you have to do that because there will be moments God is not going to speak you will have to rely on what he did before to give you faith for what you're facing right now there will be moments when you will face the Goliath and Sam and Samuel Prophet Samuel is not going to pick up the phone and there's going to be no words from God popping from the Bible to encourage you and you're going to have to go back to your memorial stone of killing the lion and the bear to say if God was with me there and he is with me now and this Goliath will fall can somebody say amen even an angel of God when he came to marry and said Mary you're going to have a child and Mary says that is not possible angel you understand I'm not married it's going to be controversial there's going to be a lot of drama there and the angel instead of saying well you know what I was in heaven we kind of saw how God kind of created the gold out of nothing and so angel wasn't telling her what happened in heaven and so she gave Elizabeth angels watch testimonies angels reference testimonies angel didn't touch her so she filled the power he filled her mind with a stone your relative he never said something about Mary's life sometimes there are no memorial miracles in your life borrow it from your neighbor borrow it from YouTube borrow it from someone else that is why we play these things at church that's why I regularly play this in my whole life I want my mind to reflect the possibilities in God not the problems of life not the challenges of life not my issues but my identity can somebody say amen some of you you have a monument that's built it's what you've done I understand it ended up in the newspaper I understand your driving record confirms it I understand you have a little blower thing that you blow before you can start your car yeah I understand you lost your virginity maybe you understand you've been abused and you feel like your second best I am here today to ruin your monument I am here today to devastate that monument and say stop building that God says pull the stones from the lowest point of your life not to remind you you've been hurt but to remind you that didn't kill you to remind you God was there with you and that did not end your life and if it didn't end you there it will not end you here God is still with you he did not leave you he did not abandon you come on somebody give God a shout of praise hallelujah hallelujah the only thing Jesus left was a tomb and you're not a tomb you're a temple he is always with you that's why you gotta pick up the stones from the lowest point of your life not to remind that you cannot trust people not to remind yourself that listen you're done with marriage because you got burnt no God says pick up that stone to remind you even when you failed he was still there he was still there he is still here right now he is the God of second chances he is the God of third chances he is the God of fourth chances he is going to be the God of fifth chances he is your God he is your God listen this room right now that of some of you you went to the lowest point you of how somebody dropped you how somebody betrayed you and you relived these things I'm here to ruin those monuments push them push those rocks that they slip you were convinced you'll never succeed you were convinced you will never prosper you will never be healthy because everybody in your family dies by 50 from cancer I'm here to push those stones and to say this set up a memorial in your mind set up a reminder that God's been with you if he has not been with you he's been with your family he's been with this church and he will never leave you never forsake you Karamanaldis hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah if you are surrounded with problems right now it's wading you down and you came today crushed quickly run out of your seat come to the front we're going to pray right now if you feel like you know what I've been through stuff and I'm feeling it right now I just need some prayer right now just come out of your seat it's not enough to go for salvation God's going to do something right now God's going to begin to ruin the monuments and build the memorials you don't have to be a member of our church to receive prayer but just run to the front say Lord I just need more of you place an ark on my shoulders place an ark on my shoulders place your frizzes on my shoulders place your anointing on my shoulders I'm tired of getting these demons I'm tired of getting these problems I'm tired of getting these problems I'm tired of getting these issues right now I want more of you God just run just run just run to the front God's going to meet you come on lift those hands and then begin to worship let me put this book just worship just worship it right now if our prayer team can come out right now if intercession team can come out as well let us pray let us bless these people right now now place your hand on their shoulder and I want you to pray for the ark to descend right now miracles are going to be taking place right now play for their shoulder begin to pray right now that under shoulder there is going to be a grace of God if somebody standing in front of you you can place it under shoulder in front of you let's begin to pray right now that the praise the presence of God will descend under shoulders and it will live and it will live in the awareness of the glory of God in Jesus name as Father we pray Lord the heaviness and the problems on our shoulders Father we exchange for your presence Lord for your freedom, for your peace we're not going to be carriers of our mistakes we're not going to be carriers of our problems of our worries of our anxiety of our fears but we'll be carriers of your presence come on inviting right now in your situation I expect miracles your presence in my situation finger of God's power the hand of God's power in your hand do what only you can do in my marriage do what only you can do in my relationship God you see I can do this on my own but you live in me right now how the river Jordan the waters closed back that very place where Israel went through and the feeling the Lord is telling somebody here right now is God is closing the womb and turn it into a scar and this scar will become your testimony this scar is something you will be no longer be afraid to even talk about it this scar will turn you into a star God is closing the river God is closing that womb that thing is healing up right now the Holy Spirit is supernaturally stitching things up right now and you will no longer remember it as a place of your wound but as a place of your wonder as a place of your healing as a place of your destiny has become something that is a memorial to God's goodness not a monument to your mess not a monument to your failure not a monument to your past people will no longer see you that way people will no longer call you that way in Jesus name it is yet to come


There is a legend circulating around the television industry. It is about channel infinity. Channel infinity is hard to get to and reports vary as to what it actually is. I will tell you how to get there and then what to do. Acquire a television, preferably with analog for the best experience and the older, the better. Acquire a remote control. It does not have to go with the television you are using. Turn on the TV and set it to a channel that is static, or just a plain black screen if you are using a digital TV, basically any channel you do not receive. Leave the room for about 3 hours. If you have a significant other in the house, have them with you. It is also best to call over a few friends. During those 3 hours, you should acquire a few items. I will list them in order from the most important to the least. Note, none of these are mandatory, but they help. You will want an item that you hold dear. Two handheld mirrors, a weapon, a favorite book, a mobile communications device, a key, a sledgehammer. After roughly 3 hours have passed, re-enter the room. Have everyone else wait outside the door. Close the door. Stare at the static or blank screen or whatever you set the TV to until you feel disoriented or freaked out. Call the others into the room. Give the item that you hold dear to the person that you care about the most in the room, then send them back out. If you did not grab an item that you hold dear, hug that person and whisper a secret in their ear. Send them back out and command them to not come back in no matter what until you open the door again. Note, this will be harder for them if there are more of them, but it will be safer for you if there are more people. Trust me. Hold the mirrors so that no one is reflecting the television screen into the other and the second is reflecting you, so it looks as if the television is behind you. Stay like this until a question appears on the screen. If you did not grab the mirrors, then sit in a chair facing away from the TV until you hear a noise. Grab the remote. There will be a question on the screen. Press channel up to answer yes, channel down to answer no. There will be anywhere from 3 to 26 questions if reports are to be trusted. The questions will be anywhere from trivial to deep philosophic personal questions. Answer truthfully or you will not succeed in reaching channel infinity. After the questions, one of three things will happen. One, your favorite show of all time will come on, but in the episode, all of the characters will be heart wrenchingly killed. Two, you will see a picture of your least favorite person or thing ever. This is where you use your weapon. Break the TV screen. It will then fix itself. Note, this is obviously the easiest of the three things. Three, a strange shimmery vortex will surround you and you will be pulled into an alternate dimension. If you find yourself here, here's what you do. You will find yourself in a twisted replica of your house. You will need to go to your room where you will find the four items listed that you will need for this part. Take them. Exit your house. Outside will be a more evil looking version of our world with red sky, a gray sun, dark orange plants, and an ever present thin vermilion mist. You must go to the nearest public building, a school, mall, gas station, etc. Use the key on the door and enter. The key will fit the lock. If you did not get a key, climb in through a window. Upon entering, find a room with only one entrance. Sit down and begin reading the book. If you did not get a book, just sit down. You will hear footsteps outside of the door sometime within the next hour. Don't look up from the book. After you can no longer hear the footsteps, count to 250 out loud. Every 10 numbers, you will hear another footstep closer and closer to the door. Upon reaching 250, you will hear a knock on the door. If there are three knocks, open the door. If there are four, say I forbid you twice, and then open it. You will see a stone statue of someone you love deeply outside of it. It could be a family member, best friend, romantic partner, or even a fictional character. Smash its head to bits. If it is a female, also destroy the left hand. If you no longer have a weapon, push the statue over. Exit the building from the entrance you came in through. It will be night. Look up at the moon. It will either be pink or green, and either full or half. If it is pink and half, pull out the phone and call your third most recent contact. If it is pink and full, pull out the phone and dial a random number. Before they pick up, bite through your tongue. If you did not get the device, pretend to do the things above. If it is green and half, strip off all your clothing and sprint back to your house. Don't look behind you, no matter what. If it is green and full, to put it bluntly, you're screwed. You'll be dead within half an hour. If it is one of the first three, you will wake up in front of the television and you can continue the ritual. After this, you have reached Channel Infinity. What you do now is up to you. If you go to the guide function, you will see shows listed as the meaning of life, or how to acquire true love. Choose one. Note, the more people you have outside the door with you determines the revelations that are the shows. The more people, the better chance you have of seeing shows with more life changing results. Or if you keep watching the static without going to guide or breaking eye contact with the television, you will see a series of images that will, if deciphered, reveal the answer to your greatest question. There are at this point many options. Too many to write here. Just do what you feel like you must, and something will happen. The overwhelming majority of things will be good, but some will be bad. You may leave the room at any point, however, there are two catches. You may never speak of what you learned after accessing Channel Infinity. And you may only reach Channel Infinity four times in your life. I hope you find the experience enlightening.


To my knowledge, I don't know if I've ever done a movie feuds episode so highly in-demand, so sought after. So grab your rosary and pray we make it through this episode unscathed. It's Sister Act vs. Sister Act 2, back in the habit, on movie feuds. Please rise for the song. Listen, I know this video is going to put up dismal numbers, but I'm past the point of caring, folks. I just want to do videos that I'm proud of, and I just rewatched these two classics with my family, so I thought, they're fresh in my mind, let's do a feud about them. Speaking of the views, or I should say the view, host Whoopi Goldberg is the main attraction here in Sister Act. To say Whoopi was a big deal in the 90s would be a tremendous understatement. And in Sister Act, the egotte winner gets to showcase why audiences and movie studios alike loved having her in roles.  In the first film, she's joined by a variety of fellow penguins with Mary Patrick and Mary Roberts being the big fan favorites. I'm not going to lie to you, not only did Wendy Mackinaw have an incredible voice, she was also a smoke show in the eyes of young Adam. As an adult Adam, she's heavenly. Harry Potter fans get to see Mrs. McGonagall as Mother Superior here. The no-nonsense head mistress who constantly comes to blows with Whoopi's character. The villain of the picture is Vince Larroca, played by Harvey Keitel. He's a mobster out in Vegas, always a looming threat in the background. In the sequel, we get to see all our favorites back, but the focus now is on a bunch of troubled teens. Which is a shame because I really enjoyed the nun hijinks in the first. That's not to say the sequel doesn't have anything going for it. There are definitely a few breakout stars. The most notable ones would be Jennifer Love Hewitt and Lauren Hill, pre-Fugies. It's a band. For the most part, I can't stand most of the teens outside of my boy Amel, played by Ryan Tobi. Although Hill can obviously sing, I just enjoyed Tobi's songs and personality far more. We get a small set of monks this time around, too, with Michael Jeter being the easy standout due to some great physical comedy. I'm thinking about that red-headed nun again. Let's head to confession. I don't think Mother Superior considers Dolores the poster child for the Catholic community. To say she's rough around the edges would be another statement. Dolores got in bed with the wrong guy, and soon she's going to be sleeping with the fishes.  The cops put her on the witness protection program and placed her in the last place Vince would think to look. A convent. Dolores, now referred to as Sister Mary Clarence, will need to learn how to blend in to St. Catherine's. Or she's going to be rubbed out. He's writing on this show. After a rough start, it's clear that Dolores would be best suited to head up the music department at church, where she quickly whips the choir into shape while adding a little bit of that Vegas flair to it. These penguins may not be able to fly, but they sure can sing, which is fortunate. As it's revealed that church turnout is so low, they may have to close down. Word spreads around the community quickly, and before you know it, the pews are full. St. Catherine's is safe. The same, unfortunately, can't be said for Dolores. As the publicity from the choir has put her right back in La Roca's crosshairs. With Mary C kidnapped and brought back home, it's up to the nuns to save the day. On the surface, the second movie may seem quite a bit different than the first, but the playbook still is the same. Instead of a church on the brink of closing, it's a school. Instead of Maggie Smith butting heads with whoopee, it's Bernard Hughes as Father Maurice.  What am I doing with my arm here? It's just so unnatural. The good news is these kids can sing, and wouldn't you know it. There's a competition out there that can not only give them a nice little bit of change, but it could also keep the doors open. There's a bad amount of time dedicated to Lauren Hill's character, Rita Watson, and her Footloose-esque storyline. Her mother hates singing because it doesn't put food on the table. Rita is so she forbids her daughter from being part of the choir. This makes Rita a bit of a sour patch kid to be around. She's kind of a rotten apple. I don't really like her character. She's pouty, she's just snotty, she's mean. No. Our hard pass on Rita. By the end of the picture, everything you think will happen does, and the credits are up before you know it. And the credits we're sticking around for as they happen to be the best part of the film, as we get to see the students and the nuns interacting, singing together for the one and only time. I do appreciate that the second film at least tried to branch out a bit from the first, but the formula seems a bit stale, and there's just not much life to any of it. So, it's like real religion. Sorry. I'm sorry. The first and second films may look, sound, and feel familiar, but they had different writers and directors. That blow your mind? Probably not. I mean, we're talking about Sister Act here. Dirty Dancing Director, E-Mile Ardalino does a great job directing the music numbers in slower, more intimate moments. But I think he lingers far too long on some of the unnecessary sections. The beginning, for instance, is a complete slog to get through. Toward the end of the film, we see far too many nuns for a small helicopter run into a casino. This little Scooby Doo chase stretches far too long as well. Music-wise, I think the first has the edge here, but I could easily see a case for the sequel. They both have good numbers. I will follow him, rescue me, shout, and some other classics really keep you engaged. I just think the nuns are far more fun to watch. The unconventional group of ladies have impressive range, and every time Sister Mary Roberts busts out, I fall in love all over again. Mary Patrick is used the perfect amount, too. By the sequel, she's already a bit of a character of herself. Rookie director Bill Duke takes over on the sequel, and after perusing through his IMDb page, this was pretty much a one and done situation for him. He just did a lot of TV movies after that. To be fair, once you've done Sister Act 2, back in the habit, all you can do is go down from there. That's like the top echelon of films. I didn't notice anything heinous in the production that's worth pointing out, besides some of the slang terms and dreadful outfits. Frankie, at one point, dresses up like a reject from a Super Mario Bros. game, and there isn't near enough Jennifer Love Hewitt in this thing. I need more of her in this. In general. The nuns only get one song in the film, which is brutal. What's even worse is the song chosen is just bizarre. They sing ball of confusion to a bunch of elderly folks. And while the ladies still sell me on the performance, I think a better number could have been selected. Oh Happy Day is easily my favorite song of the bunch, with Joyful Joyful and Ain't No Mountain High Enough working well, too. I think I've said enough, let us pray for a winner. Ain't no mountain high enough I gathered my flock here on Adam Does Movies in the community tab to vote for the winner of these two films. The chosen one was obvious, with 83% of the votes going to Sister Act. 17% of these heathens voted for the sequel. The Sister Act movies are harmless, easy watches. They don't get preachy with the messages, and they have a good uplifting spirit about them. Family flicks seem harder to come by these days. So if you're a sucker for these types of films, give them a watch. And remember, this is more than just reviews, this is movie views. Pitch Perfect trilogy next? I'm in a weird place right now.