In our organization, we own a lot of old documents. We have about 120,000 documents from before 1812, so documents on black history or church history or military history, whatever. And we've got a lot of original writings from this particular founding father. And one of them is he's got a prayer journal in and he's got his memoirs. And it's interesting that his memoirs, he was going through and as a Christian, he was trying to be very grateful for God for all the blessings he had. And so as he's going through and listing all these blessings, I'm reading them going, oh, that's good. Yeah, that's good. And then he gets to someone who says, and I thank God for all the times I have not fallen down the stairs. What? And I started thinking about that. You know, the only time you notice stairs is when you fall down them. If you walk up them and don't fall, nobody notices that. They notice if you fall, what's the blessing? Falling down the stairs or not falling on the stairs? And I got to thinking, as many times when we drive the car, we go to the store, whatever, we make it back home, we don't have a wreck. We don't think about it. If we had a wreck, that's when we notice it and that's not the blessing. I thought, you know, there's a lot of things in life that are blessings that we just don't notice until something goes wrong. The blessings of health until something happens. The blessings of a job until something happens. The blessings of family until something happens. It's just things we take for granted. And literally we live in a nation where we take a whole lot of things for granted. Just to give you an example, even with our government. And there's plenty to gripe about and plenty of things we don't like, plenty of things that need to be fixed. And yet having said that, if you look at our former government, and we're one of 195 nations at the UN this year, there's 195 nations that goes up or down every year, but there's 195, they all have governments. Everyone in the house of government. Now our government, we started, we wrote the Constitution in 1787 and we've had the same Constitution since 1787. Look at all the other nations in the world and compare what it would be like to live in other nations that don't have that kind of stability. For example, France has had 15 constitutions while we've had one. Just look at other nations and imagine the instability. We have so much stability, we just take it for granted. We just think it's natural and it's normal and it's not. I was in Poland last year with the Congressional Delegation and talked to people in Poland.  If you're a baby boomer from South Korea, you've lived through six constitutions and we consider South Korea to be a very stable nation. So do you know what the average length of the Constitution in the history of the world is? The average length of the Constitution in the history of the world is real simple. It's 17 years. Now we've had ours for 232 years. That's a huge blessing. I mean, that's just, we can grab all we want about the problems with America. I like not having a new government every 17 years.  We've had one for all that period of time. We also have creativity. When you look at where we are with creativity in America, there's a lot of ways to measure creativity, copyright, patent protection, et cetera. But America is 4% of the world's population and yet every year we produce more technology, more cures, more medical discoveries, more plays, more symphonies, more entertainment, more everything than the other 96% of the world combined. Now 4% of the world's population should produce 4% of the world's whatever, not around here. Our 4% every year produces more than the rest of the world. We just take that for granted. I was in Germany last year and went with some military to some military bases there, doing some military stuff. And while I was there, now I'm a cowboy from Texas. I got the boots to go with it, got the ranch, got the horses, got the pickup, got everything that goes with it. I'm a cowboy from Texas. So I got to stay at a five star German hotel. And that was really elegant and it was really cool for a cowboy to do that. And it would have been especially cool if that had internet at that hotel. Now, I'll point out even Motel 6 in America's got internet.  There's so many things we take for granted that we don't even think about and they're blessings. We also had the blessings of productivity. Our 4% of the world's population every year produces 25% of the world's gross domestic product. And America does not produce more because we have greater natural resources because that's just not true in so many areas. You know, go back to me as a cowboy. That makes me part of the agricultural community. And farmers and ranchers in America, that's only 1% of America's GDP. So 1% of America's GDP, we as farmers and ranchers every year produce enough food. We're number three in the world in agricultural production even though we're only 4%. We're number three in the world. And as it turns out, we're number 66 in the world and percentage of farmable land. There are 65 nations that have a greater percentage of farmable land than we do. But at number 66 in the world, we're number three in the world in production. We take what we have and make it go further than any other nation. So we are blessed in so many ways. Now here's the interesting part. With all that we do, with history and all these documents we have, we have so many textbooks. We got the first textbook printed in America, 1690, printed in Boston. You go from there for the next three and a half centuries and you just look at textbooks. And it's interesting that in our textbooks, we continually, regularly, generation after generation, told students, students, the reason America is different from other nations is because of the Bible. We specifically said the Bible's what made, and we did this in textbooks. Now try finding that in textbook today. And most people, they wouldn't believe you if you said that, that America made the, that the Bible made America different. But it's easy to prove. I mean, even the way we talk to one another, the way we use phrases and what we call idioms.  I mean, it's really kind of interesting. If you happen to be a baby boomer or Gen Y, you'll recognize these. These are all Bible verses. By the skin of your teeth, I'll give you my two cents worth. Lever can't change his spots. There's nothing new under the sun. Signs and times, these are all Bible verses. Now, if you happen to be Gen Y or Gen Z, millennial or Gen Z, these are the kind of phrases we've heard for the last 15 years. They're all Bible phrases. They're all quoting specific Bible verses. And it's interesting. One of the things I like doing is when I hear on the news or hear on some TV program or something, somebody quoted Bible verse. I'll write it down on a note. I'll send it to the office at ABC at this time on the state. Did this report and they quoted Bible verse. I will tell you that over the last two years, the single entity that quotes the Bible more than any other entity quoting the Bible on air is ESPN. Now, they don't have a clue they're quoting the Bible but they use these things. All the bronze gonna take us to the promised land. There you go, there's a Bible verse. So we get all these phrases all the time and people don't recognize.   And they're gonna look at you like you're crazy but the problem is they're gonna say, no, I don't. What Bible phrase was that? And we won't know either. You know, we don't have a clue where this stuff came from. Every one of these has a specific address to it. I mean, you can track every one of these back and read the Bible where that this is the language that came directly out of the Bible. I think where America is today is well described by President John Quincy Adams who said this. He said, with regard to the history contained in the Bible, it's not so much praise worthy to be acquainted with it as it is shameful to be ignorant of it. You see, America's had a cultural default in the last generation or so. Back in their generation, if you did not know that stuff came out of the Bible, they'd look at you and say, whoa, how can you call yourself an educated person and not know the greatest book in the history of the world? You didn't know that came out of the Bible? You're kidding me. Today, if you had known that stuff came out of the Bible, we'd praise you. You say, that's unbelievable. You know the Bible that well to recognize those phrases. See, we've had a cultural shift where that today to know the Bible is praise worthy back in their generation, not to know it was shameful. Another quote, great quote from President Teddy Roosevelt. And by the way, I'm gonna use presidents for the next few minutes because I want you to see that for 150 years, it was the presidents of the United States who carried the water on the Bible in America. It was the presidents who were continually reminding the people, hey, the Bible's what made us what we are. If we're gonna be a great nation, we gotta have the, I mean, the president's doing this. Yeah, and I want you to see that. Teddy Roosevelt, this is what he said. He said, the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and so entwined with our civic and social life, notice he did not say spiritual life. We all know that. He said, no, no, the Bible's so much a part of our social and our civic life that it would be impossible for us to figure what life would be if these teachings were removed. If you take what the Bible has bruised out of America, you wouldn't recognize America. Huh, let me give you an example. This prosperity that I was talking about that we enjoy here more than any other nation in the world, as a matter of fact, people according to census data, people who live in poverty in America live higher than middle class in Europe. And that's not facetious, that's not hyperbole, that's not rhetoric, that is actually the truth. The World Bank says it's global standard for poverty. The World Bank says if you live on $2 a day or less, you live in poverty. Right now, 25% of the world lives $2 a day or less, that's $730 a year. In poverty in America, we consider poverty level for a family of four to be 41,000 or below. So 41,000 versus 720, our poverty level is completely different from the rest of the world in so many areas. So I'm not at all condoning poverty or saying it's not a big deal, I'm not saying that. I'm saying our level is so much higher than where the rest of the world is, even with something like that. If you happen to be in Hawaii, if you happen to be in Mississippi, both of those states say you should not get a job and come off welfare unless you can make more than $61,000 a year because that's what you're given in benefits if you're in poverty. So you look at that and say, wow, that's an economic system that's totally different from everywhere else. That's part of the free market economic system. Now, what people don't recognize today is the free market economic system that's produced all this wealth and prosperity in America is the result of five Bible verses. Historically, it came from 1 Timothy 5a, 2 Thessalonians 310, came from Matthew 25, Luke 19 and Matthew 20. People today in economics say, well, Adam Smith, he's the father of economics. In 1776, he did the two-volume book, Wealth and Nations, and that's where we got the free market system. No, America had the free market system fully in place 100 years before he wrote that book. What he did when he wrote that book was just take what was already happening and talk about it. So we had that free market system. We were prosperous and so different from every other nation even back then. If you took out the free market system out of America, you wouldn't recognize us today. We'd be a totally different nation but nobody recognizes that came from the Bible. Same with our form of government. There are seven different human forms of government you can look at. America chose what's called a Republican form of government. That means we choose representatives to, we choose representatives, we elect representatives that will represent us in legislatures.  Everybody had a king.  King of Italy, not us. We did it different. And the guys who wrote that into the Constitution, by the way, article four of the Constitution says we can never become a democracy. That's one of the seven forms of government. We have to stay a republic. I have a Republican form of government, very different from a democracy. And they specifically said the reason we want a republic is Exodus 1821, Deuteronomy 1, 15 to 16, Deuteronomy 16, 18. That's where in the Bible, before they had kings, before there was King Solomon or King Saul or King David, the Bible says, choose out from among you leaders of tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands. Have elections. Elect your local, county, state, and federal people. The Bible says choose able men, such as fair God, men of truth, hating covetousness. So not only do we have elections, we're told the kind of people we ought to be electing to office. And that's what we wrote into our form of government. So our form of government, if you took elections away from America, you would not recognize us. Now, so many nations have elections now, not when we were doing this back to the beginning. We pointed to the Bible as the reason we did it and we broke the tradition of what was going in Europe, what was going to South America, what was going elsewhere. So you see so many of our things that we have today come from the Bible. We just don't know that today. There's a quote also from Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt says, in the formative days of the republic, directing influence the Bible exercise on the fathers of the nation is conspicuously evident. He said, we cannot read the history of our nation, of the rise and development of our nation without reckoning the place the Bible is occupied in shaping the advances of the republic. So he's saying there's no way you can read American history without seeing what the Bible did. Now, he's wrong because look at any textbook today and you will not see what the Bible did. You can definitely read American history today and not see anything about the Bible or any role that it had in early, but old history books always had the Bible in there. It's interesting if he's saying the fathers of the republic, you know, that was his first part of the quote, the fathers of the republic, Bible influenced him. Let me just give you an example. Let me take Ben Franklin because Ben Franklin certainly is one of the least religious of the founding fathers. We have about 250 folks we call founding fathers. He's one of the five least religious. But Franklin is the first guy ever to call for the United States of America. Way back in 1754, he said, let's not be 13 colonies, 13 nations. Let's be one nation. Let's be the United States. Didn't happen. But 22 years later, he's one of the 56 guys who signs the Declaration of Independence trying to make us a nation. Seven years later, he's one of only three guys who signs the peace treaty to secure us as a nation. And then four years later, he is sitting at the Constitutional Convention helping create the United States of America. He's been wanting this for 33 years.  This is his life dream, is to have the United States and now he's helping create it. And by the way, this has been Franklin right here. He's the white haired guy in the middle. He's 81 years old at the convention. And that's not impressive today because the average lifespan in America today is 80 years old. So he's a little bit older than average yesterday. When they signed the Constitution in 1787, the average lifespan in America was 33 years old.  Because when you hit 18 is more than half over, you're sliding from 18 on down. We just don't think this way. Nonetheless, here's Franklin 81. And so he's wanted this, but it's not going the way he wanted because it turns out as the states got together with the Constitutional Convention, they had their own agendas. You had the New York plan and the New Jersey plan, the Connecticut plan, the Virginia plan. Virginia didn't want New Jersey's plan. New Jersey didn't want Connecticut plan. Connecticut sure didn't want New York's plan. So what happened? Everybody had their own agenda. And after five weeks at the Constitutional Convention, it is literally falling apart. Alexander Hamilton said, see you guys, I'm out of here. I'm tired of all the fighting in bickering. George Mason from Virginia, bye. I got better things to do with my time than fight with you guys. So they're leaving. And at that point is when Franklin gave the longest speech he gave at the Constitutional Convention. It's on Thursday, June the 28th, 1787.  This is his life dream. He said, gentlemen, in this situation of this assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we've not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of life to illuminate our understanding? He said, in the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. See, this is the room in which 11 years earlier they signed the Declaration of Independence. And back then we did a lot of praying. There were Congress have made up of only one body, didn't have a housing sentence, just a unicameral body, but we had three chaplets. And so we did a lot of praying. And by the time you get to 1815, there had been 1400 government issued calls to prayer in America by 1815. So we did a ton of praying. He said, guys, don't you remember what we students, we prayed all the time. He said, our prayer, sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. He said, all of us engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a superintending prop in our favor. And have we now forgotten this powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? He said, I have lived, sir, a long time. And indeed he had. He said, in the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of man. He said, if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We've been assured in the sacred writings that except the Lord built the house, they labor in vain that build it. He said, I firmly believe this. And I also believe that without his concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel and we should become a reproach and a byword down to future ages. He says, I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers employing distances of heaven and its blessings in our deliberation be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business. May I point out that's not bad for your least religious founding father? He just chewed the other guys out for not praying enough. But here's what I want you to see. That little speech you just saw was 14 sentences long. Now, in those 14 sentences, here's the question I got. How many Bible verses did you just see Ben Franklin quote? The answer is 14 Bible verses. These are the Bible verses that Ben Franklin just quoted. Now, if you had recognized those 14 verses, we would be praising you. You said, that's unbelievable. You knew the Bible that well. See, that's the day. Back in their day, even the least religious founding father knew the Bible that well. Even the least religious, see, that's the thing where there's praise worthy today, but it was shameful back then not to know the Bible. That's the default that's happened. You see it with Franklin. By the way, the rest of the story is after Franklin gave the speech, they had discussions on what to do. George Washington reports part of what they did. He said that they took three days off. They went to church and they listened to patriotic orations at church. The Reverend William Rogers prayed over them. And I've actually got the actual prayer that William Rogers prayed over at the Constitutional Convention, pretty cool. He had the whole church, he had the whole Constitutional Convention sitting there in front of the church and he prayed over them. And it's not the kind of prayer we would have to open a city council, meaning something, a dinky little civic prayer. His prayer was so significant, they printed it on the front page of the newspapers of the day. And on the front page of the newspaper, his prayer over the Constitutional Convention was three-fourths of the front page. I mean, it was a serious prayer, he prayed. And so after that time of three days off and going to church and patriotic orations and getting special prayer, when they came back, Delix, like Jonathan Dayton said, the whole atmosphere had shifted.  And so they started making progress after all this stuff had fallen apart. And so they get back together, they start on progress and 10 weeks later, they come out with the Constitution of the United States. The most successful Constitution in the history of the world almost did not happen. Those three days, things turn around and then they do it. Now, today, if you know the Bible and if you read the Constitution, you find Bible phrases in the Constitution. And you find all these Bible concepts and Bible ideas there. Now, they didn't put Bible verses beside it because again, everybody knew it back then. Today, we look at that and say, ah, the Constitution is a secular, godless document. Look, when somebody tells me the Constitution is a secular or godless document, what they've actually done is they've just told me that they are biblically illiterate because they wouldn't recognize a Bible verse if it bit them in the ankle because it's throughout. You find these Bible verses throughout. We just don't recognize it today and they didn't feel the need to have to tell everybody back then. But again, you can look at the Bible verses, pretty significant stuff. So you look at what happened and it was so obvious that even for a president like Andrew Jackson, who, he's one of our least religious presidents, is a no brainer even for him. He said, the Bible is the rock on which the Republic rests. And president Zachary Taylor, Zachary Taylor was a war hero, his nickname was Old Rough and Ready. This is what Zachary Taylor said. Zachary Taylor said, the Bible is the best of books. I wish your enhance of everyone is indispensable to the safety and permanence of our institutions. He did not say our faith. He said our institutions. It's interesting that the more you look at our institutions, the more secular they become, the less well they operate. The more secular education becomes, the more the scores go down. The more secular economics becomes, the more we have corruption. The more secular government becomes, the less well it works. The more secular judiciary becomes, the less you get justice. I mean, all this stuff, the more secular becomes the less well it operates because God had principles for all this stuff. So that's what he points out, but he continues. He said, especially should the Bible be placed in the hands of the young, it is the best school book in the world. I would that all of our people were brought up under the influence of that holy book. Best school, he can't say that. That's unconstitutional, which is the great irony. We've had the same First Amendment since 1791. We've not added any new religion clauses to the constitution. And for all of nearly two centuries, it was fine to have the Bible in schools. It's not now, not that we've changed the constitution, but we can't do it anymore. Why is it that we had the Bible in schools for nearly two centuries? So it's because we knew our history.  We talked about him earlier. Benjamin Rush, in addition to all that he did, is also known as the father of public schools under the constitution. He's the guy who said, all right, now that we're no longer 13 nations or 13 states, we're one nation, what are we gonna have to do to stay a nation? And in March of 1791, he came out with this piece that gave a dozen reasons why we would never take the Bible out of public schools in America. And by the way, he started five universities. Three of them still go today. He's the first professor of chemistry in the United States. He was the first chemistry tech, spoke, started academic education for women, education for black Americans. I mean, what he did as a pioneer in so many areas of education, unbelievable. But here he says, we'll never take the Bible out of schools. That's what will keep us a nation. So much did so many founding fathers write about that, that when you get to 1844 in a case called Vidal versus Gerard's Executors, and a unanimous Supreme Court decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Philadelphia has the government-run school, and it's not gonna teach the Bible? They said, no, no, no. If you're gonna be a government-run school, you will teach the Bible. We're not gonna have any government-run school that won't teach the Bible. A unanimous decision? Now, by the way, all of you did study that case in your American History textbooks, right? Y'all saw that one? No, don't think so. See, we had all this heritage and history for nearly two centuries, and then it all changed. And it all changed in a case in 1963. That case in 1963 was called Abadian Shemp and Murray Collette. In that case, the Supreme Court for the first time said, hey, this deal we've been doing for two centuries and having the Bible in schools, we're not gonna do that anymore. Now, these are the guys who gave us that decision. By the way, they said in their decision, they said the decision to remove the Bible from schools was without historical or legal precedent. Wait a minute, did you just say that you took the Bible out of schools without any historical or legal basis? Yes, we did. Why did you take it out? This is where you read the case. This year I'm involved in my ninth case at the U.S. Supreme Court. Every time we wanna know what the Supreme Court says, we read the decision and it tells you why they did what they did. If you read that decision, you find this statement. If portions of the New Testament were read with that explanation, they could be and had been psychologically harmful to the child. Wait a minute, the Bible causes brain damage and you're now gonna save Americans from brain damage by taking the Bible out of schools. I would argue America suffered massive brain damage since we've taken the Bible out of schools. I mean, we've lost our brains in so many areas. But nonetheless, this is what the court says. So you look at that, Dr. Rush, way back in 1790s, he said very simply, he said the Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life. And by the way, we do a lot of national polling and we know this to be true. The younger you are when you start reading the Bible, the more likely it is to be a life habit all the way through. If you start when you're four, five, and six, going into school, first grade kindergarten, it'll stick with you. You can start when you're 14, 15, 16, but it's a little harder to make it a lifetime habit. You can start in your 20s or 30s or 40s, but the older you get, it gets harder. You can start in the 80s and make it a lifetime habit. You have to work at it a whole lot more.  It's why today we have such a high level of biblical illiteracy.  As a matter of fact, everything that's popping up on the screen here is something that has been in the news in the last 24 months. That's why it shows these titles. Every one of these titles is popping up here. The Bible specifically addresses that issue. Whoa, there's no way the Bible talks about capital gains tax. Yes, it does, it doesn't call it capital gains tax. It talks about taxes on profits. The Bible also talks about the estate tax. The Bible also talks about capitation taxes, progressive income taxes, et cetera. All that stuff's in the Bible. See, as Christians, we should be able to look at anything in the news and say, oh, that's crazy, here's what the Bible says about that. That's what they could do back in previous generations, but we don't know the Bible in the same way anymore. And so that's why we say, oh, that's secular stuff. We do spiritual stuff. No, God spoke to every aspect of life. You know, God built a nation called it Israel. When he gave Israel the laws, he gave him 613 laws. The 613 laws covered everything from military to immigration to education to taxation. You name it, he built one of the most successful nations in the history of the world and did it with 613 laws. So God's word addresses every aspect of it, addresses things like abortion, addresses all sorts of things, even transgender issues or addressed very clearly in the Bible, things we struggle with today. The Bible dealt with long time ago. God made it real clear. So within this framework, it's interesting to me that Benjamin Rush, again, 200 years ago, said the Bible contains more knowledge necessary to man in its present state than any other book in the world. See, that's back when we believe the Bible applied to every single thing in life. Let me just give you some examples. This guy's a guy named Matthew Murray. Matthew Murray, we used to study all the history textbooks. We don't study much anymore, but he's called the father of oceanography. What he did is he's the guy who discovered that there were jet streams in the ocean. That if you'll move your ship over here about 50 miles and get here, you'll get to Europe about a week and a half faster than all the other ships, which is huge for commercial purposes, for everything else. And so he did now, you need to understand, he did this in the early 1800s. No satellites, none of the technology. How did he find the jet streams? How did he even know they were there? And by the way, pretty fascinating. He grew up early 1800s listening to Thomas Jefferson and listening to James Madison. These founding fathers, when he was a single digit kid, he went to school, he went to sea as a cabin boy.  He loved the sea, that was his whole life. He was ashore one day and got in a stagecoach accident and crushed his leg. And it never grew back right, so he was never able to go back to sea because he couldn't keep his balance, couldn't walk right, but he studied the sea. And what happened, in this particular case, he was home sick one day and he asked his family to read the Bible to him. And so what happened is they were reading out of Psalm 8. And this is what they were reading to him. And out of Psalm 8, the scripture says, Lord, thou madeest man to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yain, the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea and whatever passage through the paths of the sea. Read that again. And see what jumped out Evan was paths of the sea. He'd been on the sea his whole life and he'd never seen paths in the sea. Now of course, if he'd watched Finding Nemo, he would know that there were paths in the sea because we've got these ocean currents. He's the guy who discovered that. He said, well, read that again. And they did and he said, no, no, slow down, read it again. And he had them keep reading it and reading it. They're going, we just read it to you, read it again. He said, if God said there's pathways in the sea, I'm gonna find the pathways in the sea. And that's when he started looking and that's when he started finding, if you wanna go from Europe to South America, if you wanna go from South America to Australia, they mapped out these pathways and unbelievable stuff back for, again, a time with not the technology we have. But he didn't just stop there. There's another Bible verse that was significant to him is Ecclesiastes 1-6. Ecclesiastes 1-6, the Bible says, the wind goes toward the south, turns around to the north. The wind whirls about continually and comes again on its circuit. Wait a minute, the wind has patterns, yeah, found out that one hemisphere goes one direction, the other hemisphere goes the opposite direction, started mapping all that. He's the guy who discovered that there were jet streams in the air. Now, again, we're talking technologically. Think about where he is in the 1800s. He discovered jet streams in the air and because of that, for the first time ever, weather prediction became possible. He's known at the father of naval meteorology. He said, guys, see those clouds right there? You do not wanna sell this week because here's what's gonna happen. If you'll wait till next week when we're predicting the weather, yeah, back then. And it's all in the Bible. It's interesting, this guy had such an impact on science that we built monuments to him all over the United States. There's great monuments to him, great recognition of him. This happens to be a monument to him in Virginia, a big monument, and if you get up close and look, right there is the Bible. It says Holy Bible on the back of it. That's a source of his ideas. That's where he drew his knowledge and inspiration. So here's this, in the summertime, we take 18 to 25-year-olds, college students, and we do two weeks with them, and we just take them through all the scientists. You know, if I took you through, for example, Harvey, who discovered blood flow, blood circulation.  And he said, here's what the Bible says. He looks to the Bible and he points that out. And then you've got Mendel, who's the father of genetics, who said, here's the Bible. Actually, he was a Catholic priest studying the Bible against genetics. And then you get people like Max Plank, the quantum physics guy. I mean, I take you through all these scientists and how they used the Bible today. We just know they found this stuff. They don't know, we don't know how they found it. Go back to their story and they tell you how they found it. Let me take you to another guy. This guy is John Adams. The constitutional form of government has lasted 232 years. Probably the biggest reason it has is what's known as separation of powers. Separation of powers. Now, there were always three branches of government. Isaiah 33, 222 tells us three branches of government. What we did in America said, yeah, there's three branches of government, but we need to keep them separate. And we didn't make sure that there are checks and balances so that if the president goes crazy, he can't ruin all the branches. If the court goes crazy, they can't ruin all the branches. If Congress gets out of line, the other. So we always had these checks and balances. Now, that's unique. No nation had ever done that before we did. We came up with checks and balances and John Adams said that they got it out of Jeremiah 17.9. He has three writings on where they found this. And actually, Jeremiah 17.9 says, the heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can know it?  He doesn't naturally do the right thing. He does the wrong thing. And we need to plan on that because if you have a king like King George III, even if you had a British bill of rights and a British court system, the king screws it all up and it's all bad. And so that's where they got this. And you'll find that not only did he talk about Jeremiah 17.9, John Quincy Adams did, you'll also find James Madison, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton. That's what they point to. That teaching in Jeremiah 17.9 is what they point to as the reason that we have constitutional separation powers, which is what's made us last longer than any other nation. You also have people like James Kent, who's the father of American jurisprudence. He's the guy who put our original judicial system together. And we have an America which is called Circuit Judges. Now people don't know that today. You know, there's circuit courts. You know, you've got that in the state and in the federal. But the original Supreme Court, they were all circuit judges. They all got on their horse and they rode a particular circuit. Today, they still ride a circuit, but it's electronic. See, the Supreme Court justices all have a circuit today. The Second Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, the Seventh Circuit. They all have a circuit. So they still are circuit court judges. But the whole concept of circuit court judges is pretty different. Other nations don't do that same thing. Why did we do it? Well, he points to 1 Samuel 7, 15 to 16. It says, Samuel was a judge over Israel and he rode the circuit from Gilgal to Missby, got on his mule and rode the circuit. He said, that's what judges did in the Bible. That's what judges need to do in America. So that's why we have a circuit court system comes out of the Bible. You also have individuals like Ben Franklin, who started the first healthcare system in America, started the first hospital in America, the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751. Why would he start a hospital healthcare system? Well, he says actually Luke 1035 is the reason he did so. That's actually the motto he put on the hospital. If you go in the hospital today, go in the old door, you find the motto right there that Franklin put. This is why we have healthcare. This is why we do hospitals. You have Alexander Hamilton, who specifically says Exodus 31, 18 is the reason that we have a written constitution. Now, a written constitution didn't want everybody was doing it that day. To this day, Great Britain still does not have a written constitution. We didn't separate from Great Britain and say, let's do what they did, except we'll do it right. They didn't even have a written constitution. We have a written constitution. They cite Exodus 31, 18. And by the way, James Madison cites the same thing. I mean, there are so many other specific verses I can point to where they cited the verse as why we have this particular trade in America. Traits we still have today. We just didn't know where they came from. By the way, if this stuff is of interest to you, over in the chapel store, the campus store, there is what's called the Founder's Bible. And this is the Bible, it's a Bible, New American Standard Bible, but it takes the Bible verses to shape particular traits in America across four centuries and shows you how that Bible verse built really the nation that we've just come to take for granted. And there's another book over there that's called this precarious moment. It shows what individually we can do to make a difference in the country. So those are over at the campus store if you want them, but you see the problem we have in America today is very simple. And it's just summed up in this picture right here. We just don't know the scriptures very well anymore. It's interesting, national studies right now show that only 14% of Christians read through the Bible on a daily basis. Only 14% of Christians read the Bible daily. Now, I started with John Quincy Adams. I wanna finish with John Quincy Adams. Going back to John Quincy Adams in 1848, a book came out from John Quincy Adams that showed 10-year-old Americans how to read through the Bible from cover to cover once every year. You can imagine what would happen today if a president wrote a book showing 10-year-old Americans how to read the Bible cover to cover once a year. That's what happened back then. It was such a popular book. It went through so many editions so quickly because everybody in America wanted their 10-year-old to see, hey, here's what the president says when reading through the Bible, cover to cover once a year. And this is what John Quincy Adams explained to 10-year-olds back then. He says, notebook in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied and so profoundly meditated on as the Bible. He says, I myself for many years have made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year. And by the way, if that's not your practice, let me challenge you this morning. Make that your practice. If you've never read through the Bible from cover to cover, make a commitment. This morning says, you know, 12 months from now, when we get back 12 months from now, I'm going to have read the Bible from cover to cover. Now, this is what he's recommended for all students. And by the way, this is a real common practice in America back then. It's what we did in schools, et cetera. So he's saying, read through it, cover to cover. I do it once a year. He was 70 years in public life. Not only was he president, he was secretary of state, foreign ambassador to five different nations. He was a U.S. senator, 17 years in the House of Representatives, appointed and confirmed to U.S. Supreme Court, turned it down because it was end in the War of 1812. Man, the guy's unbelievable. 70 years in public life. And he says, I read through the Bible every year. And by the way, if you have already read through the Bible before, read through it again next 12 months. But I've read through it a dozen times, make it 13. One of the founding fathers, Elias Boudinau, who signed the peace treaty in the revolution, he said, I've read through the Bible more than 50 times. He said, every time I go through the Bible, I see things I've never seen before. And that's true. That's why the Bible calls itself unsearchable. You will never get to the bottom of the knowledge that is in that Bible. Every time you go through, it's like digging away, like peeling an onion. You get deeper and deeper and deeper. You just unpeel it every time. And that's what they did. So here's what John Quincy Adams explains. He says, my customers read four or five chapters every morning immediately after rising from bed. It employs about an hour of my time. Seems to me the most suitable men are beginning the day. Don't be intimidated because if you want to read the Bible from cover to cover once a year, you don't have to read four to five chapters a day. You don't have to spend an hour of time. To read the Bible cover to cover, it takes 3.2 chapters a day, takes about 15 minutes. And there are so many apps now that actually read it to you. Besides getting ready this morning, coming, brushing my teeth, combing my hair, had the Bible app going. It's reading me the chapters for the day. I mean, it's real easy to do. There's no reason not to be able to go through the Bible in a year, 15 minutes a day. Now he spent an hour a day because he loved God's Word and he got into it and he kept notes and his diary and his memoir is a lot of fun to read with the Lord showing him. Nonetheless, he's talking to 10 year olds and he says, now I've always endeavored to read it with the same spirit which I now recommend to you. 10 year olds listen up. Here's the way I read the Bible. This is why I think you should read it. He said, I've always endeavored to read it. I always read it with the intention and desire that may contribute to my advance in wisdom and virtue. When I read the Bible, I'm not looking to get blessed. This is not a spiritual blessing. I'm looking for something that will change my life. I want something that'll change the way I think, my wisdom. I want something that'll change the way I act, my virtue. I'm always looking for application, which is why they find it applied to judges and applied to economics and applying to government, applying to education, applying to immigration, applying to military. It applied to everything because they're always looking for practical applications. That's the way to read God's Word. Take and get into God's Word and look for stuff to apply. It is revolutionary. The amount of wisdom that's there. God knows how to build nations. He built a great one. We'll use His principles to get as many warts as we have in our nose in America. Now we got less warts than other nations, but my gosh, no one's been anywhere close to what we've been able to accomplish. And so much of it goes back to people who would apply God's Word. And again, we had blemishes and we didn't do everything right. No question, but there's a great promise God gives in Joshua 1-8. Joshua 1-8, God says, if you will constantly think about my Word every day and every night and be sure to obey it, then you'll be prosperous and successful. And I would argue that America has been more prosperous and more successful because more than any other nation, we tried to take and apply principles in so many areas and that's why it's worked for us. Again, we're not perfect, but we've done more than other nations have. Now, if you as an individual will make that, if I'll get into it and I'm gonna be in it and I'm gonna apply His Word, you'll be prosperous, you'll be successful. That's the guarantee God gives us. So a challenge, you take God's Word, start applying it in a very real way, but get into it, go through it from cover to cover once a year, God bless you guys.


I'm Marcia Martin and this is the 2021 version of Capital Conversations and I am here with our state senator, Sonia Hockas-Lewis and she is here to talk about what we are doing to help the public along with their prescription drug costs, which I know is a big issue for many, many people. Senator Lewis is a pharmacist and we love to have these people in the legislature with technical know-how. Sonia, please take it away. Thank you, Marcia. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about healthcare. So as the first pharmacist ever elected to the house, and now I'm serving in my first session as the state senator from Senate District 17, my wonderful home of Longmont and Lafayette and Louisville and that sliver of eerie in Boulder County, we can't forget. We know that the number one issue right now in Colorado and in the United States is really our healthcare. Obviously living in the age of COVID and this dreadful pandemic with the loss of life that we've seen, we have to do everything we can to make healthcare accessible and at the same time address the life-saving prescription drugs that people rely on. So before COVID hit, reducing prescription drug prices was the number one issue and as we have now lived through this pandemic, it remains the number one, if not the very top because what we found is that COVID has shown a light on health disparities in our community. Not everyone can get access to a doctor and can can get that access to those prescription drugs that they need. While I was a pharmacist practicing, there wasn't a week that went by where someone wouldn't come in and say, I've got this budget for my groceries. I've got a budget for my prescription drugs. They're not matching. I can't do this. They would hand me, we call it a brown bag and hand me a bag of prescription bottles and say, which one can I do without this month? And I mean, that is heartbreaking. We are the wealthiest, the greatest country in the world and we can't get prescription drugs for our citizens and residents. That makes no sense. So I'm looking at introducing and we start back on February 16th for our 2021 session. We'll be introducing several bills to help with healthcare. The first one is a prescription drug affordability board, which will review the drugs and if they are affordable or not affordable. And the reason why we're looking at doing it that way is because the United States is one of two countries in the entire world that do not take a look at affordability for prescription drugs and the other country is American Samoa. So it just, again, it is a travesty that we can't negotiate. We're not allowed to look at what drugs cost for Americans and we can fix that here in Colorado. And one more piece about this bill that's important to know is that it's already passed in other states. We've had two states that have already passed a form of this and we now have six states that are looking at doing it for their session this year. So Colorado is a little behind when it comes to doing something about reducing the price of prescription drugs and this will get us back to where we need to be because this is really a vital issue for so many people. Yes, and what you said about COVID and what we are seeing is that it's a real social equity issue because the people who have been rationing their own healthcare for financial reasons are more vulnerable. They're not as healthy and so they're more vulnerable to the ravages of the pandemic. And it probably isn't the only reason why persons of color in Colorado have a higher infection and a higher death rate, but it's certainly one of the reasons. Right. You're hitting it right. You're hitting the nail on the head, Marcia, because we have black and brown communities in our area that have, you know, double, triple the death rate from COVID. There's many reasons that contribute to that, but one big one is access to proper healthcare. And, you know, we could go on and on about the reasons of how we got into this depth of this pandemic, but certainly now I commend the governor for trying to get the vaccine out as quick as he can, but we need to do more because even the most recent numbers released by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, CDPHE, one of our acronyms, is that more white affluent Coloradans are getting the vaccine compared to communities of color, communities of disparity. So we need to basically address making the vaccine more available and making healthcare in general and prescription drugs more affordable. So I'm hoping that this bill, as it's doing in other states, and we've seen other countries do it, I'm hoping that this will go a long way. Do I have time to talk about a few more bills that are coming? Yes.  But please go ahead. Great. I want to talk about the unfairness of why we're looking at this, like what makes us want to do it now, and what is happening in prescription drugs in general. So let's look to our neighbors to the north. If you look at what Canadians, as an example, and they're very public about the way that they do their prescription drug plans and the way that they purchase and supply prescription drugs. So their prescription drugs are the listing and the cost of those drugs is public. So if you look at the way we do prescription drugs, it's very secret. For instance, if you go to one pharmacy, it's going to be one price. If you go to another, it's going to be another. If you have Medicare, you pay a different amount than if you have private insurance. And this is really what makes this issue so complex. And one of the main reasons why I decided to run for office, because as a pharmacist and as a former Medicaid pharmacy director, I understand those dynamics. So let's look at just one drug. If there are any viewers that might be familiar with Humira, that is a product for rheumatoid arthritis. It also treats Crohn's disease. It also treats psoriasis. And actually, I could go even into more, but let me stop there. In the United States, a list price for a one month supply of the syringes is about almost $3,000. And that's on one pricing mechanism. Do you know what they pay in Canada? It's $550. Yes, we have a huge disparity. Let's pick an area that is really of concern to me. If you look at a cancer drug, this one is for prostate cancer. It's called Zytiga. In the United States, for one tablet, one tablet, it's $87.63. In Canada, it's $21. Why? Why it's the same manufacturing. It's the same company that makes it. Why is the United States subsidizing the rest of the world for prescription drugs? This bill, having a prescription drug affordability board, will even the playing field for Coloradans. Do I wish that this was being done federally? Of course I do. But can we wait until they take action? I don't think so. So that's why I'm introducing this bill. Good. So do you know why? In other words, is the underlying mechanism understood and we just can't do anything about it now? It's a great question. It's because America can't negotiate drug prices. That's as simple as that. When we put in the, for instance, there may be quite a number of your viewers that remember there was a time in Medicare where Medicare didn't pay for prescription drugs. When that bill went in, it was called the Medicare Modernization Act. It was passed in 2005. I actually helped work on that bill. Prescription drugs were added. That coverage was added. However, there was a clause that was put into that bill that said that drug prices could not be negotiated by the United States government. That is one of the main reasons. The other reason is that really companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers for years, have been able to say, well, we need to raise, keep raising the prices because research and development cost a lot of money. It's not the case anymore. We have multiple drugs that are specialty drugs or cancer drugs that even a recent CEO of a company said, out of $100 a month or $100 a tablet drug, they're paying pennies for the manufacturing. They can do it. They can get away with it. This has to stop. This unfairness, we can do something about it. This is the subsidy that you're talking about that essentially the drug companies are getting a really fast payback for their R&D investments. They could probably afford a longer payback that was not entirely on the backs of the mayor. You've got it. We already have a very long payback time for branded drugs. Those drugs would be said to be under patent. We have a long payback time for them, 15 to 17 years. It's one of the longest patent times for any industry. You don't see someone introducing a computer and then nobody else can introduce a computer similar for 15 to 17 years. That's unheard of. We really have to address what the root cause of this inequity is. This bill establishing an affordability review process will do that. Will the drug companies be required to make any kind of disclosures about what their R&D investments were as opposed to manufacturing costs, etc.? We have no transparency right now at all from pharmaceutical manufacturers. They're not regulated in Colorado the way they are in other countries. We're not trying to set any prices. We're not trying to say you can make this or you can't make this. We're not doing that at all. What we're doing is we're assessing is the product based on other competitors, generics, other brands, what's happening in the marketplace, the number of uses of the drug, supply issues, all of those things. We're assessing is this drug affordable when you look at all of it? Here's the interesting thing about that. In the United States, we already have some groups that are doing that, but they don't have any power to control where we go with that information. Now, every other country in the world, except American Samoa and the United States, has those kind of review boards and they look at comparing drugs and what's affordable and what's not. That's the direction that we need to have. Again, I would love to see this be something that we do on a nationwide basis, but we're not there. I will say that it's leaders in our country, like our state, like Maryland, like Washington, California, Rhode Island's looking at it, North Dakota's looking at it, Oklahoma's looking at it. If enough states get together and do this, I think that what's that saying about rising tide raises all votes. Hopefully, we'll be able to have the federal powers that be. Take a look at doing this. Well, that's a good thing and I have heard Governor Polis say before that he's looking at interstate alliances, too, as a lever about healthcare costs in general. Yes, that's a great lead in for, I think, another piece of legislation that I know is coming. And by the way, Governor Polis is a big fan of the approach that I'm taking on this legislation. We have what I think will be coming is the public option. That bill was introduced. There was a study that was done. It passed in 2019 and now we have some of the study information back. And I believe you're going to see a public option bill that will allow other counties. And I don't, I can't say for sure if it's a regional alliance, but we can look at what other counties are doing. And hopefully in the public option and the reinsurance that was done, that allowed premium prices to drop by 18 to 20% for some folks. So this is another wonderful aspect that we're looking at for reducing general healthcare costs and insurance premiums. So I think that that's another avenue that we'll be heading down this coming session. Good. So I can see two things about that. One is, is that because of the Colorado's distribution of population and industry, the burden of private insurance falls very heavily on our rural communities that don't have as much income. Right. So that'll be not as much choice of insurers. Yes. Right. Before they passed the reinsurance, they, I should say me, I voted for it too. Before we passed that in 2019, we had, I believe it was 12 counties in the state that only had one insurer. And that obviously is a monopoly, right? I mean, we're looking at that across the board. We can't, we have to have competition. Our country was built on being able to keep things affordable by having a fair and great playing field for everyone. And it should be true for healthcare. So I think that we'll be looking at something like that too. And if I can spend one more minute on where we're going, a great with healthcare, I think there's been a huge commitment to mental healthcare. In fact, in the house where I just finished serving for two years, they've even realigned the public health committee to be public health and mental health, which is wonderful because now we can give more increased attention and resources to looking at improving our access to mental healthcare. So I think that's another area that we can improve in in Colorado. We need more mental health providers. We need more mental health providers who are bilingual. We need access to medications for mental health. So there's so many things that we can do to look at behavioral health for our, for our Coloradans. That really strikes a chord with me because when people fall out of, of the organized world because of mental health issues, they become a burden on the municipality. And, and the city is doing things that it really is not equipped to do because we don't even have a public health department, but we're responsible for the people who are on our streets. Right. And, you know, Longmont has been a leader in doing partnerships with some of the police groups that are, you have police officers going out, social work officers going out. You probably know the name of the program, which escapes me right now. The initiative is one. There it is. I mean, that's, that's what we need more of. I know when I served on the Boulder County Board of Health, we had some of the same people we, you know, in the Medicaid world, we call them frequent flyers. And I think that's pretty obvious to your viewers what that means, but we had some of the same people coming in and out of the ERs in our community at the hospital. And that's just, that's not the kind of treatment that we need to be able to have those folks access. And that is something that I think that this improved focus on mental health by realigning our committees and looking at our policies that we can, we can get there. So that, that's another big commitment that I know this session of the legislature is going to be looking at. That's an important thing. We need to get Colorado back into being a model for the foundation as we are in other areas. Senator Sonia Hakez-Lewis, I very much enjoyed this conversation and thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Thank you, Marcia. I always enjoy coming to talk about what's going on at the Capitol. So I appreciate you inviting me. We'll do it again soon. Thank you.


Bemidji Blaise softball and Fauston in the 12 U3rd place of the Bemidji Blaise tournament. Bottom of the first, Peyton Whiteman gets a base hit. The fielder can't get to it and Whiteman gets two extra bases out of that. She would then score the first run of the game on a wild pitch. Second inning, Tia Wickham gives Fauston the lead with this loop shot to right. RBI single puts him up two to one. But in the third, Bemidji got the lead back. Madison Nisler scores on a wild pitch. Blaise go up three to two, and then they piled it on after that. Next inning, Beth Bolte squeezes a single to make it nine to two. Bemidji runs away with this one. They win 10 to two. Your winners of the 12 U tournament, the Moorhead Crush. Bemidji takes the title in the 10 to U tournament, and Badger Greenbush, Middle River and Proctor, taking the 14 and 18 U tournaments respectively. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Beautiful plants here to try to help show the community how they can convert some of the vacant lots that they deal with into not only small businesses but places to supply the communities with fresh organic local food. The SARA program allowed a lot of this to grow quite literally. It would have been a much smaller scale project. We were looking at ways of putting smaller gardens on the lot and the SARA project allowed not only the opportunity to increase the scale of what we were doing but also to involve the community on a much larger scale. I think that this could be used as a model for what other vacant lots can become. There's a lot of initiative in the city right now to get rid of, well not necessarily to get rid of, but to change the lots and to change the face of the city especially in these areas. On some blocks there are five to six vacant lots in one block area and so my intention would be that this could be used as a model to create other local business owners and also community space. It's a really small space relative to the whole lot that is needed to share with the community and so it's incredibly feasible and viable for a business to exist on the same place where there's community space. We started out by canvassing the neighborhood and just letting people know that we were going to be here and that we were going to be installing a garden and asking for ideas and requests, things that they might want to see planted, things that they might just want to help out with all of that and then since then we've started putting all the plants in and all of that, we did a community planting day where we did a barbecue and we brought out, actually it was mostly kids which was fantastic and the barbecues are a way because you know food is in my opinion the best way to bring people together. People, it's like the oldest thing that people have done and so we bring everyone together around food and then we focus the gathering on a topic of discussion. So we've done mulching with grass clippings for soil, for water retention, for nutrients, for the soil and for weed prevention and that was awesome. We did composting rather and then we also did seed saving because we grow heirloom varieties here and so showing people how easy it really is to leave a few beans on the plant, let them dry out, pull the seeds out and then you can regrow those next year. So a huge part of what we're trying to do is I guess what I would say is the full circle, we compost for nutrients so that way you don't need to add ammonium nitrate fertilizer or anything like that. We do companion planting not only for pest control but also for pollination to bring in pollinators. One of our best pollinators is borage and also the water collection. We built this here structure and filling up these nice red barrels here with water so that we can water in times of dryness like we've had the past couple weeks. So yeah, so between the composting for nutrients, the seed saving for seed for next year and the water collection, you really have the full cycle of growth and then death and rebirth in the spring with the plants and you don't really need much input from outside sources. Yeah, we did a talk at Discovery World for, it was held by the Milwaukee Area Workforce Investment Board and they basically brought in groups of kids from different local organizations. One was Urban Underground, which is actually a youth program run by the youth. It's pretty cool. And the topics of discussion were specifically food and agriculture but then entrepreneurship in those fields. And so we talked about urban farming and the opportunity of kind of all of the things that we went through. So started with, well, you're interested in urban farming, what do you do? Well, you need a lot, you need a place to grow. So we talked about the opportunity to purchase these lots in Milwaukee and this lot here was after closing costs was $900. So it's incredibly affordable, incredibly available. And different ways of raising that capital, whether through cooperative ownership, so getting a group of collective owners together to purchase or anything like that. And then moving forward to where you can get resources, like this is all repurposed lumber, and opportunity for them to how they could grow the food, what they would do with the food after they grew it, so how do you get rid of it? We talked about value added product, so not just selling produce but doing things like pickles or we have some fruit, we have raspberries and strawberries so you can do jams and jellies. And because of the pickle bill here in Wisconsin, it allows you to sell those things without state licensing. You just need to register as a business, which is 20 bucks and it's a pretty standard process for becoming a business, registering as a business. So we shared with them all the steps and it was really actually, it was great, a lot of the kids were chattering and talking at their tables. And when they started hearing about the availability of this as an option, the fact that you're running your own business, I mean you are the boss, you are in charge. And the fact that they could sell these things without a whole lot of licensing, that they can get it out of markets, that it gives them opportunities to meet people and doing the markets, you just get to talk to people from all over the place. They were really, I mean all the chatter stopped, you know. And my kind of partner in all of this is my brother, who is 16, which is actually the same age as all of the students that were at the discussion. And so when they heard that, that's when noise came back into the audience because they were like, what, you know, oh my goodness. They couldn't believe it, even the man running the discovery world discussion came up afterwards and was like, you know, 16 years old, like really. So I mean that really caught their attention and it was great. We had, afterwards we took a walk around the discovery world, we had kids coming up to us asking us questions, now even that it was over, you know, they were so intrigued. So that was really cool, you know, it really made us feel really good, it was great, it was really gratifying.