[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, what's up?
My name is Stuart Edge.
When I first started college, I had a pretty interesting job.
I cleaned porta-potties.
I would work for 13 hours a day starting at 5:00 a.m.
and cleaned about 100 toilets in a 30-mile area.
Rain, sun, or snow, I was always at work.
Even though it was a unique job, I
started asking myself questions we might all ask ourselves
when in situations we're unsure about.
"How did I end up here?"
"Where is this leading?"
"What does my future hold?"
I found that in those stuck moments, if we take time
to pause, breathe, and reflect, we
begin to feel the smallest sense of hope
that God is aware of us being in that stuck place
and is working diligently in our lives
despite any feelings of loneliness.
Even though I wanted to quit the porta-potty job,
I had a feeling that staying there would
be the best option for me.
In an act of hope, I got out a pen and paper
and wrote my future self a letter.
Dear Stuart, this letter is from someone
who knows you quite well.
You're cleaning porta-potties right now,
and you have no idea how you do it.
You wonder where you'll be in six months.
I explained some of my hopes and how I felt God telling me
things would work out if I stayed and held
on a little longer.
Over the next few weeks, not much changed at work.
The porta-potties still smelled as bad
as they did the day before, and the truck I worked in still
didn't have any air conditioning.
I did make one change.
Instead of listening to talk radio and music,
I decided to listen to inspirational podcasts.
I felt so uplifted while I cleaned
that I started looking forward to waking up in the morning
to clean toilets.
One day while cleaning, I was inspired by one of the podcasts
to buy a video camera and start making YouTube videos.
It'd been something I'd been interested in before
but never knew how I could get started.
I gathered the courage to buy a camera
and started taking it with me everywhere I went.
One place the camera accompanied me was a neighborhood campout.
A friend who was there saw me with the camera
and gauged my interest in filmmaking.
I told him it was something I was getting into,
and he offered me an internship learning
how to make YouTube videos.
Now, it'd been six weeks since I wrote myself that letter,
and this was the first sign of something starting to work out.
By a miracle, I was able to quit the porta-potty job,
and I started the internship learning how to make videos.
During this internship I soaked in everything I
could and learned all I could about video, editing,
and production.
A few months into the job, I decided
to put my newly acquired skills to the test,
and I created my own YouTube video
I titled Mistletoe Kissing Prank.
It was a simple hidden camera prank some friends
and I did, asking people if they celebrated
the tradition of the mistletoe.
If the survey takers said yes, we dropped a mistletoe
from the second floor to see if they would hold to their word.
I uploaded the edited video to YouTube on December 12, 2012,
to a channel with nine subscribers.
The next day my life would never be the same.
That morning the video had somehow gone viral
and received one million views.
The craziest thing is those nine subscribers turned into one
hundred thousand subscribers.
Over the next few years, my channel continued to grow,
surpassing two million subscribers,
and I've been able to continue to make videos to this day
and amaze and inspire people all over the world.
Telling the story now, it's easy to see
how one little impression and one answered
prayer led to the next.
But in the moment, it was a lot of small steps into the dark.
Recently, I came across the letter I'd written myself
in the summer of 2012.
I opened it and saw the date, June 12, 2012,
then saw the line about wondering
where I would be in six months.
December 12, 2012, was the day I uploaded my mistletoe video,
exactly six months from the day I wrote the letter.
God knew what was ahead for me.
I felt prompted to not quit my job and to not move apartments,
and looking back I realize, it was in that job
that I had the environment where I could listen
to the talks that inspired me to buy a camera,
and being in that neighborhood provided that opportunity
to have a friend offer me an internship making videos.
It made all the waiting during those porta-potty summers
feel like they finally had purpose.
Hope does work.
One way I've found of making that hope tangible and easier
to take steps into the unknown is
by writing my future self a letter.
It's a small practice that seems to go a long way.
I believe God is involved in our lives.
And when we have hope for the future
and then are consistent in our efforts,
our spiritual eyes are opened, and we more clearly
see our Father's hand working in our life,
even if it means staying put a little longer in a figurative
or sometimes literal messy situation.