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Matters Of The Heart · SOLID START

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Solid Start, a podcast designed to get your week off to a solid start by focusing on life from God's perspective.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Greg Reed, life coach with Merrill Bros up in Kokomo, Indiana, and joined by my ever popular and amazing co-host and world traveler, Brian Herzog.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yay! Good morning.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning, Brian.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you're here today.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're the one that left.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's true.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: That is true.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you were in Mexico?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Mexico, yes.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me about it.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me about that.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was great.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: We were at an all-inclusive resort.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think the highlight for my uh grandson is he had 50 um virgin daiquiries.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so he just kept being his goal was 75.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't quite make it.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we figured out it probably would have cost, you know,$450 just for his drinks.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: So he loved that.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: He could swim up to the, you know, in the pool, you could swim up to this little bar and get they'd fix you whatever every time we went to supper or any any meal, he was getting some kind of a fruit smoothie or daiquiri or something.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh yeah, it was great just to be able to have time with uh with my wife and uh and adult kids, their mates, and uh five of our seven grandkids.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was so fun.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: And just having a place where you never really had to think about, hey, where are we gonna eat?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, how does everybody agree?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we just uh would pick a different restaurant each night, and uh there was one that was like kind of like a Japanese steakhouse kind of thing, that's all kind of a tako thing where they do a show right in front of you and light the grill.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the kids, they were just you know mesmerized by that.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: My eight-year-old granddaughter never seen anything like that.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, whoa, look what he's doing.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it was just fun to be able to do that and to have a week that we could enjoy the beauty of what God's created.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is just a gorgeous place right on the ocean, and uh it was remarkable.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's great, yeah.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Other than other than flying and all of that, which um, you know, that gets to be just a lot of sitting and waiting.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it was great to think that you know we could have breakfast in Mexico and end up having supper in uh in Indiana.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's it's world travel is really very uh very convenient and so uh so great to be able to get somewhere.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it was great.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: We had a great time.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: The kids uh they have lots of memories, and I think they said it was their number one vacation so far.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: So we're very thankful.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Good to be back.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Good to be back.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Missed uh uh last week, I think um we did uh we had our fellow Marcus, I think was our uh He was here.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was great.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: So good to have uh Marcus on the podcast.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Good to be back with you.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: We've uh not done one just ourselves for a while.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: We've had a lot of guests, which have been great.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, enjoy bringing on guests, and I think I think our listeners enjoy that as well.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll continue to do that here in the uh near future, get more and more people on.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we've been looking at this whole idea of shape and how God has shaped us, and our focus has been um, you know, exploring the evidence for purposeful design.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of people, and it's taught almost universally in uh in our education system that it was an accident over billions of years.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we started in the the goo, graduated to the zoo, and now you're you.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the the design, that's kind of the the teaching method.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just you know, I was taken back as I was preparing for this today to my uh my dad's brother, my uncle Bill, who was a prominent heart surgeon in Kansas City.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I was, I think, probably a junior or senior in high school, and he invited my dad and I to go into the operating room with him.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, we were, you know, I was probably 10 feet from the patient uh two different times that he operated on, and how he had literally had their heart in his hand.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like I just never seen anything like that before.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, I mean, you see stuff on TV, but it's like like I was in the room and I see this, and thinking about the fact that our heart, just the miracle of what I think has been created, because it's only about the size of an adult fist.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, that's just not a very big instrument, uh, not a very big organ to be thinking.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Look at all that it does.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood every day through 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just pause to think about that.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then our heart, the the heart beats roughly 35 million times every year.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if you live a normal lifespan, that's over three billion times.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And like, what what it what machine have we created that can do that kind of kind of work?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so just uh it was just so so uh humbling uh to think that man, there there's this incredible design just for one little part of who we are.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we could talk about our eyes, our ears, we could talk about every part of our body, but the heart, because I got to see that, that was remarkable.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a part of what you know kind of uh encouraged me and kind of pushed me toward pre-med when I uh was in college and God God had other direction for me.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: But uh I just really thought this is this is beyond remarkable that someone could create something like a heart and it could be repaired and it could go on beating again.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: So have you ever watched any surgeries or anything that you thought about the human body?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: You think that's that could not have been by chance.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not one to go looking for surgeries.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I understand.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I guess I've been a medical pastor, I've been around way too many hospitals and I've seen way too many things I didn't really want to see.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't bother me to watch those things, but uh yeah, I don't go looking for medical procedures.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but yeah, like you said, the eye, just in general like just the simple things that we take for granted every day with our eyes and our heartbeats.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: How many times a day does our heartbeat?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: What did you say?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, th well, in a year, it's 35 million.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: 35 million.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Do we think about that once?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Never even yeah, I don't even stop to think about that.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's in it's crazy.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when we were in the uh on the ocean one morning, I went down just to be able to have some time of quiet and to sit in a chair and to look out at the Gulf and to see those waves rolling in and the wind.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was just breathtaking to think, God, look what you've done.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like how does that like how do those waves happen and how does all of that take place?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh it was so breathtaking to think, man, God, look what you've done.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so it's no wonder that the uh that the psalmist talks about the fact that uh there's something very unique about this human body of ours.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh especially uh Psalm 139 um probably is the most uh descriptive verse of what this body of ours is like.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'll have you read that uh Brian while we uh are looking at at this whole thing of the heart.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: It says, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: After those surgeries, that uh verse took on new meaning for me to think that it was hard to believe that something this remarkable could have been by accident.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so this week uh we're thinking about, you know, where there's coordinated complexity.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: We instinctively just think design.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when I walk around this morning, been walking around Merrill Brothers seeing panels being put together and seeing all this complicated machinery, and never once have I thought, oh, I bet that just all happened by accident.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, somebody's down working on all those specific things, putting putting all these electrical panels together so carefully in order for us to be able to operate the machinery that we operate.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the engineers even designing that very beginning.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there has to be all of this uh very intricate work.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe some of you are listening to this and think, you know, I just never even given much thought to the fact that it probably just happened by chance because that's what you were taught.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just Brian, I just want to challenge you today uh to look for design all around you, which won't be too hard to uh find, and to say and to ask yourself, can chance really explain this?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe some of the individual parts you say, well, maybe that could have just happened.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: But when you put all of this together and there's this coordinated complexity with something like our eyes or ears or a heart uh or a machine that just um, you know, all these semis that I see down there, you we would never assume that over billions of years that semi just put itself together.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we'd we'd never think that, and yet throughout science, uh we're tr they are trying to brainwash us to think that given enough time, billions of years, that it just happened.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just to me, uh that's a ludicrous statement because we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: So our challenge for this week um is to look for design as you drive around, as you walk around, uh, as you do life, is to look for design and then just to ask yourself, can chance really explain this?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Some of you have already settled that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: I know in your hearts and minds that, well, of course there was a design or there was a God who created all this and put it all together.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not at that place yet, we just challenge you to be asking questions and to think, can chance really explain this?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if not, then does that lead you to thoughts of a designer?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And next the next two weeks, we're gonna talk about who is that designer and then what's our responsibility.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: If there's a designer that arranged all of this to happen, then what's our response to that designer?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's where we're going to head in the uh in the next couple of weeks.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: So anything else, Brian, that you think would be good to add to uh our conversation today?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: If you have questions, if you are considering that, then just reach out to us.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: Just go to Merrillbros.com, click on that prayer tab at the top of the page, and uh get in touch with us.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: We'd love to have a conversation with you.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have to do this on your own.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, you don't.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: No one no one has said, you know, if you make that decision, good luck.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um you have support all around you.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't find the support with us here, find it somewhere else.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um God wants you to take that next step and follow Him.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really saying, God, if you're if you are real, then continue to show yourself to me, and I promise you that He will do that.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: He will absolutely make that happen.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: So please let us know how we can be praying for you, how we can encourage you, and how we can help you to think through this challenge.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: There are lots of lots of great resources you can listen to, you can read, uh, and then you can simply say, God, I want to know who you are and show yourself to me.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, Brian, it was uh very uh surprising today and and exciting to have both Ted and Terry Merrill here, the two brothers that were uh involved with the two pigs back in the day, and uh we've grown to where we are today.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it was great to have them around.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Ted's just finishing up a big project in Kennewick, Washington, and so we want to give thanks for that.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Terry, the other brother, is uh is working on finishing up a big project in Cochle, Indiana.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's I wanted to have you to uh to pray for uh Ted and I will uh I'll pray for Terry and just for their continued leadership.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: We've got some projects going on in Michigan and all around the country, and obviously a big contingent of people down in Florida.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we want to continue to pray for them anything.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely for our guys.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: We've got a lot going on.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: We do belt presses all over the place.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um when and when we have belt presses, we have guys running them.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in in those locations.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, just pray for pray for our Merrill Bros family.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's uh let's take time to do that.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Father God, we thank you for this day.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: We thank you for how you have provided uh for this company, and we thank you how you provide for each one of us in our lives.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for Ted Merrill.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh God, it has been a blessing to get to know him and know his heart and his passions, and his passions for people, and his passion for uh just spreading the gospel.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh just pray for his his safe travel for him today.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: I know he's heading back down to Florida.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he's been all over the place as we've wrapped up uh just the construction part of the Kenwick project.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I know we're getting ready to move into the operational side there, and so we're just praying that things run smoothly.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: We know you've been involved from the beginning in that project, and we just ask that you continue to help as we uh start running product through that facility.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we have a lot going on in Florida as well with meetings and uh just additional projects that are coming up, and Ted is heading down there to um oversee some of those.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: So we're just praying God you just just be with him during those meetings, be with him during uh future construction projects, because we know he will be there.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: And uh just so thankful for just how you have just provided for this company.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: And God, it's because both Ted and Terry have put their faith and their trust in you.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so yeah, we're so thankful for those two guys and just excited to see what you're gonna do in their lives here to come.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Father, we are thankful for Terry Merrill and for your work in his life rescuing him uh from near death when he was in high school to um who he is today.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so thank you for the brilliant mind that you've given to him, for the work that is happening in Kokomo, uh at our bagging facility there that we're uh wrapping up and excited about all the new changes that we're making and all the improvements in order to be able to make this world a better place.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh just continue to be at work in his life, body, mind, and soul.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, we're grateful for uh what you're doing uh in in the lives of the people who work at this company.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Father, pray for the people listening to this podcast, some that may be questioning uh where did we come from, why are we here, uh, what happens after we take our last breath.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: We just pray that you'll continue to provide answers and you'll send people into their lives uh to be able to help them take a next step.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're just so thankful for this podcast and the privilege that we have uh to be able to be reminded of the fact that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: We give you thanks for all these good gifts to us in Jesus' name.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Brian, you already mentioned the uh the way that people can get a hold of us, but go ahead and just remind them one more time.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: If uh somebody's thinking, well, I don't I'm not sure how all this is put together, I'm not sure why I'm here, not sure what my purpose is for existing.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um help us to know how they can take a next step.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just go to Merrowbros.com, click on that prayer tab at the top of the page, and get in touch with us.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, let us know how we can help you to take a next step, and uh that would be a great delight for us.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: So we want you to have a great day, have a great week, and we'll look forward to uh having you back next week.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.