Hello and welcome to the Grand Line review, your source for everything one piece, and today I would like to leap head first off of Sky Island and land into the hard ground of embrace that is the philosophy of Kaido. For the past almost 100 chapters of Wano, we really haven't had the chance to delve too deeply into Kaido's mentality, which most prominently includes his hobby of repeatedly attempting to kill himself, or at least that's very much how we've described it. However, as Kaido slowly reveals more and more bits of personality and I mean very slowly, one thing has become quite clear to me with this man, or I suppose this creature, which is his ultimate goal and tragic path forward in the series, culminating in what is either going to be a spectacular death, worthy of rivaling or perhaps even surpassing Whitebeard, or his comparatively meaningless erasure from this world.  Why does he believe this, and how will it affect the events of Wano? Well stay tuned, but for now it's time to play Kaido or Kaidont, and the rules of this minigame are quite simple. Here we see sake bottles. Inside one of them is going to be our emperor of the sea, and inside the other two will be subscribe buttons for the ground line review. You need to select one of these bottles, either A, B or C, and if your bottle contains a bread button then you Kai do need to subscribe to the ground line review for regular one piece content uploaded straight into your youtube feed, and if you manage to find Kaido, then you Kai don't need to subscribe. Sounds easy enough, right? So go ahead and pick your bottle, I'll give you a few seconds to make your selection now, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. Bam! If you picked bottles A and B then welcome to the grand fleet, and if you picked bottle C then I'll get you eventually. But heading back into the actual video, one thing that we've known about Kaido ever since his introduction is that he is a death seeker. In fact the very first thing the narrator said about Kaido is this man claimed he was searching for a place to die, and the death seeker concept is nothing new to media, in fact it's not anything new to one piece. One of our most loved characters Niko Robin was also a death seeker prior to the events of any slobby. In her case this mentality was caused by her childhood trauma and distinct lack of hope for the future. Particularly because the one thing that she had been told over and over again is that she simply did not have the right to live. So trauma could be one motivation, but one piece has another example of a death seeker that we spot in chapter one being Goldie Roger. In his case he had an incurable disease and was going to die anyway, so he decided to choose the way in which he would rather leave this world, and you could say more or less the same thing about Dr. Hiralok on Drum Island, however brief a quest that was. But there are a slew of reasons for characters embarking on their own journeys with the intent of ending their lives, and ever since Kaido's introduction we've been looking for his particular motivation, and for most of the series we've assumed it was one of two things. Either it was the afore mentioned trauma reasoning, albeit different to Robin's case, sort of like the idea that Kaido had suffered ever so much that he just wanted to put a full stop to this whole life thing. Which is backed up by the narrator stating how many times he'd been captured, sentenced to death, and all of that stuff. Meanwhile the other potential motivation would be she aboard him. As the strongest creature in the world, Kaido is like a player using God mode in any given game, thus making playing the game of life eternally boring, and as such he keeps throwing himself into the worst of the worst situations, just to see if he can gain some sort of entertainment even if it results in his demise. Both of which were quite difficult to reconcile. The trauma angle because Kaido does seem very active and motivated with particular goals on this planet, so it's hard to see him having given up on life, and at the same time his chronic mood swings and depression indicate far more than simple boredom. And recently I think we found a new and more accurate answer. I won't go into manga spoilers for anime only watches or people who just aren't caught up, but Kaido recently reiterated a point that he has stated once before. There was a very curious line in chapter 795, the very first piece of dialogue we hear from Kaido in the series actually, where he states that old white beard did it right. It, of course, being death. And basically Kaido has now said the exact same thing again, except that he also included Roger in the statement, the latter part of which is fascinating for many, many reasons. But firstly, I think this does clear up Kaido's motivation. As a death seeker, he is actually something of a death worshipper. Someone who believes that the act of dying in a correct and impactful manner is what completes an individual's life. In fact, what is done in life is effectively secondary to its final conclusion. And with this in mind, Kaido becomes really interesting to me because I'm seeing this incredible inferiority complex developing within him. Think about it this way, Kaido is the pinnacle of life.  Which would be an ideal scenario for most people because that does bring a nice sense of safety. However, for Kaido, being burdened with this overwhelming strength is almost sort of like a great shame. The fact that he is too strong and too invulnerable to achieve what he desires most, which is death, to complete his life. It's a cool dichotomy. And as such, Kaido is stuck in this really depressing state where he turns to alcohol to drown his perceived failures. But in addition to that, he also develops a hobby of suicide and is even now trying to structure the biggest war that this world has ever seen. All in the service of creating something hopefully capable of being able to give him the death and glory he craves so much. It really doesn't seem like Kaido wants to die to get rid of any existing pain. He just wants to achieve his own ideal of perfection, which he has seen embodied in both Whitebeard and Roger. With Whitebeard, his departure at the Paramount War was one of the hardest-hitting moments in One Piece as a reader or watcher, but it also sent incredible shockwaves throughout the planet. He passed away after almost single-handedly leading an assault on the Marines. He died standing proudly, and with his final words he claimed that the One Piece did indeed exist, which set the world on fire. And this is the sort of thing that Kaido wants to achieve. And if anything, Kaido was probably incredibly jealous of how Whitebeard was able to exit life. Considering he was the strongest man in the world and he's still found a way, something that Kaido has been unable to do. And thus, even though Kaido is the one still living, he is inferior to Whitebeard because he can't find that path forward, at least in Kaido's mind. Meanwhile, Kaido also cited that Roger did it right, which is quite unexpected actually. Throughout One Piece we've repeatedly heard people mocking Roger's death, particularly the idea that he was quote-unquote caught by the Marines and executed in the weakest part of the planet. Like he met his end in east blue, what a disgrace. But Kaido doesn't see it that way. He doesn't seem to care about the symbolism of the location, or the fact that one of the most powerful people in the world met their end via a very basic execution. What Kaido sees is the effect that Roger had in how he chose to pass, which is undoubtedly the most important death in One Piece. And that's also a key difference to remember. Roger was not captured, he turned himself in. This end was chosen by him, and Kaido holds immense respect for Roger's completion, I guess is what we're going to call it. And just a short spoiler section now because we have something else relevant to this topic to talk about. If you're an anime only watcher or just not caught up with Act 3 of Wano, then please do skip to this time to hear my thoughts on Kaido's future in Wano. But for everyone else, here we go. Someone else who we desperately need to add to this respect list is Kozuki Oden. In fact, before delivering the final blow, Kaido even states that the citizens of Wano would speak of Oden for years to come, saying that he died a spectacular death. And Oden goes on to state that he doesn't care if they forget his name, which is fine because that's Oden's ideal, but Kaido sees things differently. And then, rather than letting him live and ride around in the pot, Kaido shot Oden, which I always found interesting. Kaido does state that he is going to shoot Oden to put him out of his misery since his body is already effectively dead, but I think about the situation differently now. With this new perspective, I can now see a scenario whereby Kaido assisted Oden in completing the glorious death that he himself is seeking. Death completes a person, so Kaido completed Oden, rather than letting him slowly melt away in a more anticlimactic manner. So instead of a gradually deteriorating Oden, the last image that people have of this man is a samurai standing proud. I am Oden and I was born to boil. After that line, Kaido hits his cue with perfect theatrical timing and made sure that Oden would be the most memorable figure that Wano had ever seen, which on the one hand is very counterproductive because that memory is leading to the rebellion against him, but then again, this is Kaido's guiding philosophy. He can't just stand by and not have such a respectable figure achieve completion. And that brings us to Kaido's future. For quite some time I've suspected that he is destined to die in some form or another, and that is a bit of a controversial thought in one piece about any character really, because death isn't a thing that Oda likes to engage in all that often. In fact, rather infuriatingly, he more commonly writes and draws death scenes only to retcon them in a late date and reveal that character X has somehow survived, thus ruining the retrospective dramatic impact of their actions. And wouldn't Kaido just hate that? Imagine Kaido watch Pel sacrifice himself for an alabaster. I think Kaido would be quite proud. Pel had completed himself as a guardian of the nation. And then imagine the sheer disappointment Kaido would feel learning that Pel was still alive. What a waste of a character he'd think because Pel will never have a better opportunity for completion than that. But with a character whose guiding philosophy is intrinsically linked to death, I have a hard time seeing a situation where Kaido survives his major role in the story. With that said, we're still going to consider it so things can really go one of three ways with Kaido. Firstly, he achieves his ultimate goal and dies in some sort of spectacular manner at the climax of Wano, perhaps he gets brought down by the worst generation, slowly coming to respect them, maybe even seeing a hint of Roger and Luffy, at which point he welcomes his completion, which is both tragic and satisfying. Then again in option two, we have Kaido meet his death but not in said spectacular manner. He dies in some incredibly ironic way, like maybe drowning, and having his legacy being forgotten by the world, because he passed away quietly on an isolated nation, as opposed to say Whitebeard, who died loudly and proudly at the center of the planet, being broadcast to everyone in the world. And I think that would be so incredibly depressing to deny Kaido his goal, but then again, he is an antagonist and they can't usually have the thing that it is they want. And as for option three, that would be Kaido surviving, which I don't see as highly likely, because he would need to have his entire philosophy changed over the course of the Wano climax. He would need to do something like develop a different appreciation for life, one that doesn't focus on the completion of death, which isn't impossible, I suppose. I mean, Luffy was able to change Kartakuri's perfection philosophy during their battle, so there is precedent for it, but it's quite a tall task. And the reason why that needs to happen is because, well, what happens if Kaido's philosophy doesn't change? Well, he gets beaten and then he just continues to do that same thing that he's always done. He might retake Wano, he'll definitely continue to instigate a world war, and who's going to stop him? As it is, it's going to take an impossible combination of forces and fate, just to give us a singular opportunity to defeat Kaido right here and now. And if we don't, then he'll just keep showing up and we just don't have the time to deal with him going into the final saga. So that's why I think it needs to be one of two things. Either he dies and is removed from the story, or he changes his views and retires quietly into a corner somewhere, never to bother people ever again. And I suppose thinking about it, it's not as ridiculous as I might have thought to Morph Kaido's philosophy. That's kind of what Luffy does best, really. Crush the dreams and ambitions of his opponents rather than kill them. And then said opponents just sort of fall away from prominence, allowing Luffy to proceed with his own wild ambitions. I'd be pretty incredibly curious to see how it happens, I guess, to find a way to disenfranchise Kaido with the whole death idea. Once again, I think it's a tough ask though, and I'm still much more on board with the idea that Kaido will get what he wants during Wano, and that somehow everyone will be a winner. But I do feel much more invested in Kaido after exploring his thought, he isn't as flippant or as shallow to me anymore, and I very much look forward to learning even more about the strongest creature in the world. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you'd like to see more videos like this then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious One Piece business uploaded straight into your YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review, and I'll see you next time.


I'm going to talk a little bit about what the White House Office of Science and Technology policy is and what we do, what kind of tools we have at our disposal. And then I'll talk about two distinct frameworks that I put on the table as ways that we think about science and science policy and ways that you might be able to, as a collective, consider or organize microbiota research. And I also want to say after Dr. Realman's talk, I think maybe I had a misuse of terminology here so I apologize. I should say human microbiota research. All right, so the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is one of a handful of policy councils in the White House and we have three main missions. The first is to make sure that the president and his senior staff are properly informed about the science and technology components of all matters that come across their desks. The second is to ensure that the policies broadly of the executive branch are informed by sound science. And then the third is to ensure that the scientific and technical work of the executive branch is properly coordinated so as to provide the greatest benefit to society. We have a handful of tools that we use in order to achieve those missions. The first is that we can help to put out statements of national policy which can come in a variety of different forms. Executive orders, presidential policy directives, agenda-setting documents that go to the executive branch agencies. The second is that we help the president coordinate his budget so we work closely with all of the agency leadership and with the Office of Management and Budget to make sure that the budget is in line with the president's stated priorities. We can work with Congress and we sometimes work with Congress on legislation. We also help to contribute to presidential events and speeches. So when the president is out there talking about science, which he really likes to do because he is a very strong believer in the importance of science, you know, those are opportunities for us to contribute. And then finally, and this is something that I will put on the table today, is an ability to convene. So we do have the ability to bring together partnerships that might be difficult to establish in other settings, whether they're public-private partnerships, public partnerships, whatever. And so one of the questions that we are asked to think about is if you could call anyone, who would you call and what would you ask for? Okay, so something that the president is very excited about is what are the grand challenges for the 21st century. We all are familiar with the concept of grand challenges, the mission of getting a man to the moon that President Kennedy called for in the 1960s is a great example. The Human Genome Project is another one. More recently, we've seen other decentralized, non-government-organized types of grand challenges such as the establishment of Wikipedia, you know, putting all of the world's knowledge online where anybody can access it. It's important to think a little bit about what the attributes of a grand challenge are. So this is how we define what a grand challenge is. It should have some type of significant, identifiable impact in an area of national and global priority. It should be ambitious, yet achievable, and compelling, motivating, and able to capture the public's imagination. And it's very important that it has this Goldilocks level of specificity. So you should be able to clearly define what it is that you are trying to accomplish in the grand challenge. And then, of course, because I come from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and because I am a scientist, you know, we think that the grand challenges that we are interested in should be able to harness innovation and science and technology. So this is a newly launched web page that we have from the White House website. And it talks about the president's call to the public to identify and support the 21st Century grand challenges. I apologize for the difficulty in reading the text here. Hopefully you all can read the link there and I'm happy to provide it afterwards. But at the bottom, you'll notice that there are four images. And these are some examples of grand challenges that federal agencies are actually promoting and supporting right now. So the one on the left is NIH DARPA and NSF's Brain Initiative, which Dr. Collins mentioned earlier today and which the president launched with Dr. Collins at his side in April. The next is DOE has two grand challenges, EV Everywhere, which is aiming to make the electric vehicles as affordable as today's gasoline-powered vehicles within 10 years. And they have a SunShot grand challenge, which is trying to do the same with photovoltaic power, making it cost competitive with coal-powered energy. And then there's NASA's Asteroid Challenge and the USAID has a whole suite of grand challenges around global development. So one question that I would pose to this group to think about over the next few days is, can you identify and articulate a grand challenge for human microbiota research? And there are implications across many administration and I would say probably national and social priorities. Food safety, nutrition and health and agriculture are some that come to mind. And someone earlier had talked about, I think it was the previous speaker, encouraging our children to eat dirt, which is not what I'm doing with this picture, but I thought it was a great picture from the New York Times magazine article that was out earlier this year. Okay, so another separate framework for thinking about opportunities in microbiota research are platform technologies. Now, the NRC published a new biology report in 2009. And in that, they described the recent technological advances in a bunch of fields outside of the life sciences that are contributing to analysis.


What's up everyone and welcome back to another video. Today, I'm going to show you how to create vertical in-camera transition using a gimbal. So I'm using the Xeon Crane 2S with the Sony a7S III and the Sony 28mm f2. And I'm going to have B-Boy Matthias do some break dance moves while I'll shoot with this gimbal. So what I like about the Xeon Crane 2S is that I can mount my camera vertically. It also has a locking mechanism on the side so it doesn't move around when I carry it with me. And it also has really strong motors and you can get some really smooth shots with it. I could also use it with the focus wheel right here but for this video I'm just going to use the autofocus. And when doing in-camera transitions you basically want to make it look seamless like it was taken in one shot. And we're going to create these transitions using camera movement to avoid doing a lot of post-production or using third-party plugins. And it's important when doing these in-camera transitions is to plan ahead. Really think about the transitions you want to create. And I also have written down the locations that we're going to look at so we're not going to waste any time. So the better prepared you are the easier it is to shoot and you will have less stress doing it. For our first transition we're going to do a lens cover and I'm gonna have Matthias walk down and do a dance move over there. And once he's done with his move he's gonna cover the lens with his hand. And in the second shot he's gonna uncover the lens with his hand and do a move again. So let's do that. So for our second shot we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna uncover the lens and we're gonna do that by having Matthias close to the lens with his shirt and then moving away. And then to transition to the third shot we're gonna do a match cut. So you're gonna see what I mean. So this is gonna be our third shot. We're gonna start with the match cut. So I'm gonna have Matthias do his freeze like we did in the second shot and afterwards he's gonna do some awesome moves and I'm then gonna do a sky transition where I tilt the camera upwards and then in the fourth shot I'm gonna tilt from the sky downwards. So this is gonna be our fourth shot. I'm gonna start off with the sky transition going from sky downwards to Matthias and then he's gonna do a move a break dance move and after that he's gonna swipe with his hand to the left. We're gonna do a swipe transition and I'm actually gonna set my gimbal to sport mode so that I can swipe quickly to the left. So I'm actually recording in 4k 25 frames per second and the shutter speed is set to 1 over 50. This way I get a natural motion blur to make the transition look seamless. Go! Nice! Perfect! So for a fifth shot I'm gonna have my camera swipe in from the left to the right and Matthias is then gonna do a swipe which is a break dance move.  Roll! Okay so this is our final shot and in this shot we're gonna do the same we're gonna start off by having Matthias walk straight forward after that he's gonna do his some of his signature moves and he's gonna do a freeze in the end and there's actually an open way right there where he's then gonna walk off the frame because in the first shot you remember that Matthias was walking down the stairs and by letting him walk off the frame and in the first shot letting him come into the frame we're gonna have like this nice continuity shot so we're gonna then create a sort of loop video where the video keeps repeating itself. So let's see how that goes and bistabi! Alright guys it's a wrap for us I'm gonna head back home and gonna edit the video together I don't know how it's gonna look like but so far what we have done I think we did a really good job. Another thing I forgot to mention for the last shot I used the POV mode to actually follow his movement which again creates an interesting shot so before I say goodbye just want to let you know that when doing these in-camera transitions make sure to plan them out so really create these transitions with meaning otherwise there's really no purpose in creating these it really should help enhance your story so really keep that in mind. Thank you so much for watching I want to thank Matthias Thank you Matthias for helping out man you did a great job and also George come over here. Don't be shy. Awesome I want to thank George for helping out so thanks for watching take care and see you in the next video


What do you do for work? Who me? Oh, I'm a product manager. Oh cool, so you help build products? No, the devs do that. I help guide them.  English. Anyways, I synergize the look and feel of the product. Ah, there we go, a fellow designer. Nope, no. Look at me as like a train conductor. Streamlining communication. So you talk to clients and do sales? How about that game on Sunday?


This is the VOA Special English Education Report. A study in Norway has found that students who stayed in school longer than others their age scored higher on intelligence tests. In the 1950s, the government began requiring students to attend school until the age of 16 instead of 14. Communities had almost 20 years to make the change. So some students went to school for seven years while others went for at least nine years. This difference gave researchers the chance to see if the additional schooling had any effect on intellectual development. All young men in Norway must take a test of their cognitive ability at age 19 in preparation for required military service. This is commonly called an IQ or intelligence quotient test. University of Oslo researcher Taryn Ann Galloway says the young men who were basically forced to stay in school for two years longer actually did have higher IQs. So based on that, we were able to say that increasing compulsory schooling did actually have an effect on their cognitive abilities as measured at 19 years of age. An average IQ is 100. Most people score between 85 and 115. Ms. Galloway says students who attended school for nine years scored seven points higher than those who attended for seven years. Those who went for eight years scored about four points higher. The findings appear in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Experts have long debated the extent to which we are born with intelligence or develop it influenced by environment and education. Another recent study in the journal Nature found that IQ scores can rise or fall during the teenage years. In 2004, researchers from University College London tested 33 young people ages 12 to 16. The researchers repeated the tests four years later. They found increases or decreases of as much as 20 points. Brain scans showed that as IQ scores increased so did the density of gray matter in some areas of the student's brains. Professor Kathy Price says the differences in performance could be the result of some teens being early or late developers. But she says it is equally possible that education played a part. She sees a lesson for educators. We have to be careful not to write off poorer performers at an early stage when in fact their IQ may improve significantly given a few more years. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal.


Well, welcome to this session of the World Economic Forum 2021 Davos meeting. I'm Nairie Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government here at Oxford University. And today I'm in conversation with Michael Sandell, Harvard Professor of Political Philosophy, rock star teacher to crowds of tens of thousands of people who ever thought political philosophy could be so popular. His latest argument is about meritocracy. In his new book, The Tyranny of Merit, he provokes us to think about whether merit and deservingness justify our positions and our lifestyles. And that's an interesting topic for this discussion at Davos, a gathering of some of the world's most credentialed, most deserving and meritorious people. But let's stop and think for a moment. In 1950, the average CEO earned 20 times the typical worker of his or her firm. When the very first meeting at Davos took place, it was nearly double that. Today it's more than 200 times the salary of the average rank and file worker. Think about the fact that in the corridors of Davos when we meet in person, so many people are discussing comparing notes on their brilliant children who were at university at Harvard, at Stanford and at Yale. Michael Sandell points out that America's Ivy League universities take students, take more students from the top 1% of American earners than from the entire bottom half of the American population. Michael Sandell, speaking to this year's Davos participants, what is it that you most want them to take away from this conversation? Well, thank you, Nairi. It's great to, and an honor to be in conversation with you. I think the biggest takeaway, and it's provocative, I admit, is this. We gathered here at Davos are the beneficiaries of a meritocracy. But we are also living through a time when our politics is deeply polarized, when many of our fellow citizens are attracted to authoritarian populist figures who channel anger and resentment against meritocratic elites. And the argument of the book is that this anger, this resentment, these grievances are understandable. And they're understandable because in recent decades, the divide between winners and losers has been deepening not only because of the widening inequalities of income and wealth, but also because of changing attitudes towards success that have come with. Those of us who have landed on top have come to believe that our success is our own doing, the measure of our merit, and by implication that those who struggle, those left behind must have no one to blame but themselves. This is the dark side of meritocracy. Meritocracy is corrosive of the common good because, and we see this in our politics today, it generates hubris, meritocratic hubris among the winners, and demoralization, even humiliation among those left behind. And until we come to grips with this, until we find a way to address that sense of demoralization and disempowerment and humiliation, we're not going to put to rest the appeal and the source of support for the kinds of authoritarian populist politics that still are very powerfully present on the political horizon. Thank you, Michael. Today we're going to dive into those arguments, but just before we do, can we step back for a minute and tell us a little bit about you? Are you from one of these credentialed elite families with your pathway to Harvard professorship an easy one or is it that you've been thinking about this all your life? Well, I had all kinds of privileges and advantages growing up in an upper middle class background. I went to a public high school in West Los Angeles, California, but it was one of those public high schools like many around the country that are the beneficiaries of high property values and therefore high property taxes that can support good public education. And then I was fortunate enough to get a good education and to land, actually, Nairi and I were both Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. We both went to Bayley Old College, though Nairi, I emphasize to say, quite a few years after me. So we are, I suppose you could say products of the meritocracy and in my case, a beneficiary of the advantages that go to those who have the kind of background and upbringing that enables us to compete effectively for these kinds of privileges. And of course, part of the problem is that the meritocracy is far from perfect because affluent parents have figured out how to pass their privileges onto their kids. But it's not only that. It's also that even if we had a perfectly fair meritocracy, even if we had perfectly fair equality of opportunity, there would still be a problem, a dark side, to do with the attitudes towards success, to do with the tendency of the successful, to inhale too deeply of their success, to believe it's our own doing and to forget the luck and good fortune that helps us on our way. But even before we move to that argument, it's worth us pausing to think about how those opportunities have changed that in your and my lifetimes, we grew up in a world which was less unequal. And the very fact that the world was less unequal gave people more aspiration, let alone more livelihood to succeed. So can you take us back? Can we, you know, we think about the 1950s, the American dream, the G.I. Bill, the war on poverty and the idea of equality and equality of opportunity that many of the world's democracies saw. What happened to that? When did that die? I think the change happened most dramatically. Beginning in the 1980s, the equality of opportunity that you described was not only equality of opportunity, there was also a broad democratic equality of condition.  I grew up in just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the American Midwest and the broad middle class of the 50s and 60s in the United States included public places, public institutions, common spaces, including public schools, but also public parks and public recreational facilities that brought people together across different class backgrounds. There were more class mixing institutions when I grew up than there are today. And beginning in the 1980s, when market thinking and market mechanisms were seen as the primary came to be seen as the primary vehicles for defining and achieving the public good, there was a kind of loss of the public spaces and common places that bring people together and across all walks of life. I think this is an important change in the lived experience of equality that goes beyond differences of income and wealth as such. One of the things you bring out in your book is it's not just a change in material inequality, it's values and the stigma. So with Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher came, not only the argument that to support the poor is to encourage them to keep being poor and therefore you should reduce welfare benefits, you should reduce opportunity in order to increase the incentive on them to succeed, but also the 80s was a time of introducing language which stigmatized the poor, welfare cheats, you know, the lazy and the indigent poor. And isn't that part of what your argument brings out? Yes, the idea of individual responsibility, the idea that we are responsible for our state in life. This is a healthy impulse and teaching up to a point because we want people to strive and to work and to cultivate their talents, but carry to access. This admirable ideal that we are responsible for our state has two damaging effects. One of them is the tendency to assume that those who struggle, those who've been left behind must be responsible for the fact that they have stagnant wages over the past four decades, for example. But is that their fault they're doing or is that largely to do with the changing shape of the economy for which we are collectively responsible? The other damaging effect of carrying the idea of individual responsibility for our state to an extreme is that those who flourish, those who land on top come to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and that they therefore deserve, morally deserve all the benefits that a market society bestows on the successful. And this is what gives rise to the toxic attitudes toward winning and losing that have polarized our politics, driven us apart and made a large spot of the population believe that elites are looking down on them believing that their failure is their fault. And it's from this toxic group of resentment and exclusion that arise the authoritarian populist figures like Trump who promise to re-revenge on those elites, those meritocratic and credentialed elites who've been looking down. This is a potent source of the anger that I think we overlook at our peril. But Michael, is the problem that the well-paid CEOs have too much of a sense of their own deservingness and pay themselves too much? Or is the problem that they're too individualistic in their sense of success and that they should be paying more attention and their sense of worth should be much more based on how their own workers are faring? Which side of it is that? At Davos, we hear a lot of arguments about stakeholder capitalism and the need for CEOs to start thinking more broadly about society. But are you saying slightly more sharply that they should be actually questioning their own position as well? It's not just their own sense of responsibility. It's their own deservingness as well. Both. I think it's both. Stakeholder capitalism is a very good and important first step. Because it can broaden our sense of responsibility for all of those who are impacted by corporate decisions, not only shareholds. That's important. But the second part I'm suggesting is equally important. This has to do with values and attitudes toward our own success. Because unless we question the idea that we, the successful, are morally entitled to all the benefits that the society has bestowed on us, unless we question that attitude, then even stakeholder capitalism, even more generous welfare state measures and safety nets, will be seen as a kind of gesture by those who deserve what they have. But in order to sustain of what they have, they need to make various investigations. The values and attitudes need to be rethought. One of the attitudes that's missing from our collective public life is humility. The humility that comes from recognizing the role of luck in life. And that comes from recalling our indebtedness for our success. To parents, to teachers, to neighborhoods, to communities, to our country, to the times in which we live. So this is why I think it's not possible to address the polarization and the inequality that we're all talking about, including here at Davos. It's not really possible to address that successfully without also asking about values and attitudes, including the way we understand the sources of our own success. And whether it really is our own doing, or whether there's a lot of luck and a lot of indebtedness that go into enabling some of us to flourish and others to struggle. In your book, you talk about, because a lot of discussion this week at Davos has been about this polarization of society. And you talk about an American society that almost only comes together in shopping malls to consume together, to spend together. And you say that that's not the public good. I think you quote Robert Kennedy. What for you is the public good? Well, I mean, and it's a fair challenge if not the meritocratic ethic. If not, I call it the rhetoric of rising. The great many politicians and political parties have dealt with the deepening inequality by saying, don't worry about stagnant wages. If you go to university, if you get a degree, then you can rise as an individual. So part of the problem is we've offered as a response to the inequality. Individual upward mobility through higher education, what you earn will depend on what you learn. This is a political slogan, though, almost a mantra that has become familiar. But what this misses is the importance of recognizing the dignity of work, the dignity of work performed by people who may not have a university degree. And it's worth remembering that even in well educated societies like ours, most people do not have a four year university degree. In the United States, nearly two thirds don't. And it's similar figure is true in Britain and in most European countries. So it's falling to create an economy that sets the condition of dignified work in a decent life, a university degree that most people don't have. Now you asked about Robert Kennedy, and this is one of my favorite expressions of the dignity of work as a civic aspiration. Fellowship, community, shared patriotism. Robert Kennedy said, these essential values do not come just from buying and consuming goods together. They come instead from dignified employment at decent pay. The kind of employment that enables us to say, I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures. What's galling about the inequality of our time when compounded by these the meritocratic hubris that goes along with these attitudes towards success. What's galling is not only the economic inequality. It's the sense that the work that many people do isn't honored, isn't respected, isn't recognized as a valuable contribution to the common good. I think this is the deepest source of the anger in recent decades. We've failed to accord adequate respect to the dignity of work. We've assumed that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good, but this is a mistake. So I'm suggesting we shift in our emphasis, in our public discourse, from arming people for meritocratic competition toward renewing and affirming the dignity of work, including the work of those who may not have luscious credentials. And to be clear, Michael, for the adult CEOs, does that mean just paying people more? I mean, COVID's highlighted to us that the nursing assistants and hospital cleaners that keep us safe or our elderly relatives safe when they go to hospital with COVID, the bus drivers that get those nursing assistants to those hospitals to do that work, these are essential workers, but they're still very low paid and on very precarious contracts. So what is your message about the dignity of work mean for the CEOs who are part of this community? Well, the pandemic is very revealing in exactly the way you suggest, Mary. Those of us with the luxury of working from home can't help but recognize how deeply we depend on workers we often overlook, not only those heroic workers in hospitals caring for COVID patients, but just as you say, bus drivers, truckers, delivery workers, warehouse workers, home health care providers, daycare workers. And these are not the best paid or most honored workers in our society. And yet now we are calling them essential workers. So this could be the opening for a broader public debate about how to bring their pay and recognition into better alignment with the importance of the work they do. So this is a challenge for companies. It's also a challenge for politics and for public discourse to begin a debate. And there will be different responses across the ideological spectrum, but at least to begin a debate about how to reconfigure our economy, to reward in economic terms, but also to honor and accord dignity and recognition to forms of contribution to the common good that in our current system go under recognized and underappreciated.  Usually at Davos, Harvard hosts a reception as does Yale, as does Stanford, as does Oxford. These are the biggest receptions at Davos. It's a reminder that an education in one of these top universities gets you a long way in life. And it's shocking that you tell us that the Ivy League universities in the United States take more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 50% of America. So do you think your own university should do about that? What is it that Harvard should be doing about that? My worry is that we have converted, here's what I think broadly we need to do. We need to rethink the role of universities in higher education as the arbiters of opportunity in a meritocratic society. It's they, we've assigned the task of conferring the credentials and defining the merit that a meritocratic society will honor. Now, encouraging more students to go to university, that's a good thing, but casting universities as sorting machines for a meritocratic society is a damaging thing, not only for those who can't compete and who are left out and who don't get a degree and are consigned to jobs that are less honored and well paid. That's the unfairness we've been discussing and the resentment that breeds. But it's also damaging, I think, to the universities themselves. That we become sorting machines because the obsession with credentials and with networking crowds out the intrinsic goods that universities and higher education should cultivate in students. The love of learning, the ability to step back and explore, to figure out what one cares about and why, what passions are worth pursuing. I worry that our students have been put through through their adolescent years. Such a stress-strewn meritocratic gauntlet for high achievement, that those who survive, those who prevail, those who win admission are often injured in the process. We see this in very alarming levels of mental health challenges, anxiety, depression and the like, much of which comes from this intense pressure to succeed. But even short of that, students very often find it hard to break the habit of assembling credentials and networking and viewing education instrumentally. And I think that's beginning to crowd out the intrinsic educational mission of our universities. So the tyranny of merit, which I write, points in two directions. It oppresses those who are left out. But it also, in a way, damages and oppresses the universities and the students who survive, who seem to flourish, but who have so little space to explore, to reflect and to figure out what's worth caring about during their college years and why. But Michael, in the end, what does that mean for Harvard? Should Harvard just accept a random allocation of Americans?  Right. I would not say to take a random assortment. But I do have a provocative proposal in the book that Ivy League universities, which have vastly more applicants and well-qualified applicants than they can admit. More than 50,000 young people applied to Harvard this year. A great many of them could do the work, could do it well, could flourish, could help educate their peers in the process. I suggest that the admissions committee call out those who are not well qualified to perform at a high level. And that among the rest, the remaining 15 or 20 or 25,000, we do admission by lottery. I suspect the quality of discussion in my classroom would be equally lively and engaged and more important. I think that it might send a message to the young people who are admitted and to those who are not admitted, that there's a lot of luck involved in who gets in where, in who lands where. It would not be introducing luck, my proposal, for a lottery of the qualified. It would be highlighting the element of luck that is already present, but hidden through the sometimes quite harsh meritocracy that governs admission to a higher education. And for that matter, to the higher reaches of our social and economic life. What do you think about that, Nairi? Is that scandalous? Thank you, Professor Michael Sandel, a wake-up call, I think, for everyone at Davos this year to stop and think about not just to what degree they have benefited from luck and opportunity, but what that means about their duties towards others as well as the position that they hold at present. Thank you, Michael Sandel. Thank you all for joining us for this session.


If you need Madden's 21 Coins for anything, make sure to go to buymotcoins.com. It's cheap and reliable and my code MMG is 20% off. It is about time. It is about time that EA finally sucked it up and gave Justin Jefferson an absolutely ridiculous card like he deserved all season. Justin Jefferson. The coolest thing about this guy. What was he, a two-star recruit in high school? I don't know what exactly up the top of my head, but point being, it's not like he went to LSU as like the top drafted, top rated wide receiver coming out of high school. Honest to God, he almost should get offensive rookie of the year, but I feel like there's a pretty heavy bias towards QBs getting offensive rookie of the year. So I know Herbert's gonna get it. Herbert played awesome, but Justin Jefferson damn near deserved it. 94 speed, 93 jump, 94 catch. All of this, by the way, is gonna be even higher once I put Sprinter and everything on him. So just off the rip, he's got 97 spec catch. Pretty much everything you want out of a wide receiver. I wish it was a little bit faster. For some reason they made like all the team of the year players the same speed. Like every team of the year players like 93 or 94 speed. I don't know what. Also, next year, if there is not a gritty celebration and I can't do it as Justin Jefferson's signature, I'm gonna be super pissed off. Do I, how sick would it be if you've got like six yards to the end zone with the Justin Jefferson and you just hold down showboat and you just start doing the gritty at the end zone? That would be sick. Not gonna get up and do it.  Now I would buy him, but there's actually an awesome store in the pack for training, which is the team of the year fantasy. So I'm gonna be able to show you guys all of them. Russell Wilson, man.  By the way, wheel of mud. I already recorded the Super Bowl. I won't tell you the outcome. Dalvin Cook, two from the Vikings. Vikings fans are pumped and so am I, but I recorded it before today. Today Dalvin Cook came out, obviously so. The next episode of the new season, you'll see Dalvin Cook on the squad. Darren Wall, well deserved. He played so goddamn good. This game is so fun to watch. Definitely gonna get a Darren Wall gameplay. He usually wouldn't do tight ends, but I think he deserves it. Digs. Everybody's questioning why Devonte Adams didn't get a team of the year card. It's because they assume he's gonna get some like NFL honors card. I don't know what it would be. It might be offensive player of the year and then Rogers gets MVP. There's our man right there. That's who we're gonna be rocking with today. And then I'll make sure I show you the rest of them. Pack animation is nasty. And some of these defensive players are absolutely, oh, I'm so pumped. And of course the Lions get a player. It just happens to be a punter. Jamal Adams. I was very good about my prestigious this year and we all won. I made some really good calls. Kalil Mag is so much to rock with. So let's grab Justin Jefferson. First in for this video, I'm actually gonna grab two more players. Yeah, we're gonna add some players. Let's add two defensive players. Why not? Completely random, random defensive team of the year. I got Levante David, okay. I have him unpack and play. I don't know if I wanna do that. I had Jesse Bates unpack and play too. Give me a specialist. I'll take someone just bizarre. Jady McKissick. Wait, this will actually be really fun. Yeah, I'll throw Jady McKissick in there too. So it'll be Justin Jefferson, Jady McKissick and Levante David, I guess. Let's just send best team overall. See what we're rocking with. Damn, we got a 94. Bates is my QB. I wouldn't say I'm the happiest man in the world about that, but it'll be fun. Let's mess around a little bit. All right, now we just gotta figure out what abilities are we putting on this man? What's gonna be second to Justin Jefferson? We'll just go route technician. There's honestly not much more I can do unless he gets reached for it. Yeah, I'll do route technician, reach for it. Should be really all he needs. And then the obvious double B. Gotta get that activated today. Yup, with West Coast and Sprinter, he's a 97 overall. The fact that Jady McKissick is a 96 overall is so funny to me. Yo, receiving back, he gets a redstone threat. That's actually so sick. And he's one AP for Backfield Master because he's a receiving back. He also gets a route technician.  I'm serious. It's just too bad he's slow, bro. He's at 93 speed. I mean, Sprinter helps out though, right? Yeah, I mean, he's got 95 now. That's a legit card. And defense is good to go. There's Levante, David holding it down. All right, boys, 94 overall. Let's go make Justin Jefferson look like the absolute best player in the world.  So I'm going to go ahead that season. And since I just reset Wheel of Mud, it doesn't matter if I do this right now. DK, Metcass, Steven, Nuss, damn, we got pretty similar teams. All 97s on the top three. I like it. I'm going to cherish playing with an awesome team like this because once I go back to Wheel of Mud, my team's going to be so bad. So I'm going to enjoy this 94 overall. Demon squad right here. It's a little playmaker here on Lance Alworth. Lots of hot rods for Mr. McNair. Ooh, crossers. Little crossers action. Wow, that's an impressive layout I just saw. Let's see what they want here.  Oh my God. You get it, bro. I don't, oh, oh, that is, that might be open. Nope, it's not. Oh, Jamal. Was that Jamal Adams? I don't even know who's up there, but damn, you're at a pick. Second in 10. Oh, underneath. Come on, throw it. Oh my God.   Chidavius White, and he's in both. Oh, damn, wow.  Chidavius White, bro, what a stud. All right, let's see if he's running. Looks like he's running the same defense house running. I'm literally just going to send Justin Jefferson deep and see if somehow he just burns his man. I don't think it's there. Looks like man coverage. Let's see who he commits to. He's going to go on Metcalf. There's Justin Jefferson, big catch for 12. All right, we're just going to go with a dive to McKissick. He's running these, ooh, that had so much room. I don't know how that freed up like that. I'm pretty sure that these post routes are really, really good against, uh, I'm pretty sure these are good against man. Let me see.  Pretty much just running big man blitz every time, right? So we just hang out in the pocket and deliver where we got to deliver to. All right, so he goes that side. This time Metcalf is wide open, barely gets the catch and run it. I'm not across. That's depression. I'm just going to handle McKissick super fast. I don't know if this is going to work or not. It's half bag zone week. Ah, he got it. All right, so we had to throw Metcalf on one of those. Oh, he might not actually be in the main coverage anymore. Or is he? Dude, can you run something else? I don't want to do this all day. Okay, we're gonna have to give the touchdown to Metcalf, but a touchdown to touchdown. I'm not too mad about it. You know we're going for two. That's just how we do it around here. We're going with the out route to Justin Jefferson. I've thrown some horrible out route passes. Let's see if we can get a redemption here, please. Yes, yes. Oh, he dusted him. He absolutely dusted him. Let's go Justin Jefferson. That won't go in the stat books, but hey, he's got two points. Five wide. Oh my God, the magic. I love to see a man run this. I don't know what he's doing though. I think he's forcing my hand on a route on this side. Oh, okay.   Man threw right at the user. Depression, bro. Who does he want to go to here? He just want to go to Allworth or does he want to go to DK? Dude, could you call like a couple more audibles, please? I don't think you'd call enough. Oh my God. All right, so I got this deep post covered. Oh, he clipped. Not sure what he'll be looking for here. I got this dog. Why do you call 80 audibles just to throw at my user? What's the point? No way Jamal Adams is taking this. That was sketchy. That was a sketchy showboat. That's not even the upgraded Jamal Adams yet. Goodbye. Thanks for the dog.  I didn't really get to show off Justin Jefferson there, did I?  Wow, I'm a little scared. First and 10.   Oh, that's a pick. No, no. Don't start the game like that. I can't believe that just happened. Oh, he just broke a tackle and he got that first. Stop, please stop Luke DK 14. This is so painful for me. Let's get in there, boys. He's running this ball. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Oh, I was there with makeup and that's okay, Jamal Adams got the tackle. This could be a lot of things. This could be inside zone. It's not. Okay, right here, right here, right here. Ooh, Ross is trying to take off. He's got an open man. Who's out of bounds, out the back. Let's go. You're not getting a garbage throw twice, my man. Are you really gonna feel goal it? I feel like this is a fake. This looks like a fake to me. I'm gonna bring Levante over here for when this is a fake. You got all the way up here to kick a field goal. You know, I actually think this is cover two. I think there's a chance Justin Jefferson is gonna get some serious yards to start this game out. Yes, sir. That's what I'm talking about. Clean post caught it, 17 yards. Wait a second, am I on the right hash still? I don't think this works from here. I'm gonna try it again. I'm just gonna try it again. Oh, it's open. What are you running? Justin Jefferson, you see like right here, bro. If you could just gritty. Oh, be way cooler than the airplane. I'll still take it though.  Hey, that's how we started out of game, baby. This guy's got a squad too. I just did that on the 99 Jumol.  Wait, he's so ready for this. How did he know, bro? This is my signature. First and 10. I swear if he does another volleyball simulator to me, I'm gonna cry. Ooh, do you think he's running it? Is it pitch? Yes, it is. Get there, I say a Simmons. Damn, he's fast. All right, this is a run. I'm coming down with that read. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.   He doesn't have any momentum yet. He just got the ball. How does he break that tackle? I had 20 steps of full steam and you had one step. Oh my God. Whatever, whatever, dude. You win some, you lose some. That's just part of the sport, baby. That's just part of the sport. You don't deserve this ball. I might as well pitch this back. I don't know why he thought that was dope. I'm actually gonna hand this off to McKessick. Third and sixth, it just looks so open. I don't know why. It just looks so open.  I'm actually so dumb. Fourth and fourth, I'm looking for a really sketchy slant. That was the tightest window. Oh my God. Just how I like him, baby. You like him tight. Whoa! First tag, let's get it. Jefferson Deep, is it there? I don't think it is, to be totally honest with you. But escape artist Baker Mayfield on the Vikings is. That is one of the most disgusting, weirdest-looking things I've ever seen. I wanna try this. This deep comeback to Justin Jefferson. I'm interested in trying out some new stuff right now. All right, so the rollout's there for sure. I'm gonna throw it. Dusted him. Oh, what he caught that? Damn, that was kind of sick. That was against a cover forward. I've literally never ran that. I'm gonna try it again, bro. Exact same thing, but for a touchdown this time. And that's gonna be on top of who? That's on top of prime time. I don't know about this one. I don't know. Got him! What?  I'm going for this again.  It is what it is. He's five winding up. I just gotta float Lavante David over top of this Metcab. Thank God, that was a touchdown. Lavante David could not keep up with that DK. Fourth and 17, this guy's not having a good day. I'll say that much. If I stop him here, there's a chance he rage quits. So I wanna make sure I check the stat line before I go anywhere. Oh, get there. Easy. Easy. If he pauses, I have to scream. Ah, he just paused. Game stats. Ah, receiving. Receiving. Boom, I'm there. Okay, he's about to rage quit. Six receptions, 133 yards. Two touchdowns in the first half with a minute 20 and a half possession, bro. I was gonna go for like 20 receptions, 300 yards, four touchdowns. That would have been the dream. Can we just talk about how he had 399s on his top three and he just got massacred? All right, boys. I'm gonna close that one off for the Justin Jefferson video. That was hype, y'all. Honest to God, one of the best wide receiver cards I've played within a while. Such a fun card. That's so awesome. Hey, I love you, boys. Thanks for watching, guys. I will see you in the next video. Peace out.


Well, I knew we were going to be very young coming in, and we are very young, but we are also very athletic. When I look out on the floor how athletic our team is, the ability to make the great defensive plays and just hustle. We have seven freshmen at a 16. I know that's a lot, but they are high level players. They have come in and I feel like we're not going to skip a beat. They're going to go through a little freshman ups and downs, but by the time October rolls around, I really feel like they're going to be ready. Yeah, Sarah Straub played middle last year and did a fantastic job in the middle. It really worked out during the off season and came in really in shape and had a great season. Also, Shannon Bailey, who has started as a freshman and she plays right side. She plays outside. She's a pin hitter, and so we're going to be relying on her to do a lot. Our Libero, who is going to have a fifth year, Caleb Aith, so she is a phenomenal Libero. I think she's a little bit look pass as far as in the conference, but we block so well. She doesn't get as many balls to dig, but she is a solid passer and Haley Hoover, our other middle, has really strong blocker, has worked really hard in the off season and so I'm looking for her to have a big season. I believe there's like nine to ten teams that we play that went to the NCAA tournament. Hopkins, their preseason ranking of number nine. We play them the second weekend in October. We're looking forward to that and we get them at home. Also, the final weekend we play Scranton and we play Washington and Lee. Two other teams that went to the NCAA tournament and are really, really strong programs. And then Rowan is there the weekend before. They had their best season ever last year. They went to the NCAA tournament. Cabrini coming up. They went to the NCAA tournament as well and they won their conference. And we lost to them last year. We lost to Scranton last year. So we've got some big out of conference matches that we really need to play well in. Eastern and Messiah and York are our last three matches and they're all in the last ten days of the season. So we're focusing on this weekend coming up at the sales. How we're going to fare against those three teams. I think last year we played at Haverford and we beat Haverford who ended up going to the NCAA tournament. I think that helped us get into that large bit. So every single game is so important to us and putting our best foot forward.


Please open in your Bible, if you will, to Daniel chapter 3. Daniel chapter 3. So I was recently speaking in Calvary Chapel out in Rancho Cucamonga, and when the service was over, this lady came forward with her teenage son, and she said, Pastor Larry, would you pray for my son? I said, I'd be glad to pray for him. I said, what's going on? And she said, well, my son is in a public high school in Rancho Cucamonga. And she said, this week, the teacher walked in the classroom, about 30 students in the room, and said, hey, let's have a discussion on the same-sex marriage. The teacher said, is there anyone in the room who does not agree with same-sex marriage? She said, my son, he raised his hand, and he was the only one in the room who raised his hand. She said, immediately the whole class and the teacher turned on him. She said, will you pray for my son? We want him to stand up for what's right, but we don't want him to become a target. Dear ones, I can't tell you how many times in the past few months I have heard stories like that. In our day, in our time, it is increasingly difficult to be a Christian. It seems like the only unprotected group in America are the Christians. Other people can say whatever they want and do whatever they want, but dare a Christian pray or speak up for what they believe is right. All of a sudden, everybody turns on them and they become the target. We live in days like we've never seen before.  I believe there are so many of God's people, so many of you here today. What you just need is a word of encouragement. It says it's okay to be a Christian. It's okay to be a believer. It's okay to stand up for the Lord. As I was praying about what the Lord was having to share with you today, He so strongly directed me to Daniel chapter 3. The final of this message is standing up in a fallen world. Standing up in a fallen world. You know what is truly amazing? What can happen when God finds just one person who will stand up for what is right, who will do what is right, and who will have the courage to stand for Him, such as the case of the true story of a man in church history named Telemachus. Telemachus lived about 300 years after the time of Christ. He lived in an area known as Asia Minor, modern Turkey. He was a simple, humble, quiet man who tended his garden. He minded to his own business, and was working in the garden one day. He felt the Lord speaking to him. He felt a strong inner impression go to the city of Rome. At first he thought it was his own imagination. He thought it was himself. But the impression kept coming, and he didn't want to be disobedient to God. So he packed a few belongings, and he started out on his journey. It took him several weeks on foot to get to the city of Rome, the largest city in the world at that time. When he arrived in the city of Rome, there were more people than he'd ever seen before, and as he stepped into the street, it was almost like he stepped into a river of humanity, and he was swept along with a group of people, and within a few minutes, he found himself sitting way high up in the famous Roman Colosseum. And as he was sitting there, he'd never seen so many people gathered in one place at one time, and he looked down into the middle of the arena, and all of a sudden these two men, these two gladiators, they came out with swords, and they faced the emperor's box, and they said, we who are about to die salute you. He'd heard about these gladiator matches. He'd heard about these men killing each other just for the entertainment of the people, but he could not believe what he was seeing with his own eyes, and something deep inside of him rose up. This isn't right. And so right there in the middle of the stands, he stood to his feet, and he shouted in the name of Christ, stop. Well, of course, they didn't stop. They kept fighting, and Telemachus, he was serious. This was wrong. Nobody was doing anything, and so he made his way down the long steps until he came to the retaining wall that dropped into the arena, and again, he shouted out at them in the name of Christ, stop. Well, many people in the crowd, they thought he was joking, they thought he was a plant, they began to mock him, but he was serious. So he dropped over the retaining wall onto the dirt floor of the Coliseum, and he made his way out toward the gladiators, and as he approached them, he shouted at them in the name of Christ, stop. One of the gladiators wheeled around, and he thrust Telemachus through with a sword, and he dropped there on the floor of the Coliseum, and died in his last earthly words, or the words in the name of Christ, stop. The historians tell us that something amazing happened. The gladiators stopped fighting, and a hush came across that Coliseum. All of a sudden, way high up in the stands, one man got up from his seat and left, and then another, and another, and another, until in a few moments all 100,000 people had emptied the Coliseum. The year was AD 391, and historians tell us it was the last battle to the death that gladiators ever fought in the Roman Coliseum, all because one person, just one person, had the courage to stand up in their fallen world. Before us in the Word of God today is the story of three young men who were like Telemachus. Their names were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and as we read their familiar, encouraging, inspiring story, it gives us the inspiration, the encouragement to stand up for God in our fallen world. As we study the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego today, I want you to notice three qualities about their lives, three things about their lives that allowed God to use them in such an impacting way. If you happen to have a piece of paper and a pen, I would encourage you to jot these things down in these verses so not only can you go back and study this, but you can share what you've learned with others. Three things about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Number one, we're going to see their unbending commitment. Number two, we're going to see their unwavering courage. And then number three, we're going to see their unshakable confidence. The first thing that we see about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that allowed God to use them is their unbending commitment. That's what we see in verse 1 to 12. In Daniel chapter 3, beginning in verse 1, Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold whose height was 60 cubits and its width was 6 cubits, and he set it up in the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon. Stop there for a moment. Who was Nebuchadnezzar and what was it that he was doing? Well, as you read and study the book of Daniel, he discovered that Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful ruler on the planet and Babylon was the richest country, the most influential country in the world, one of the most massive empires in all of human history. And Nebuchadnezzar built this huge image of all gold. Who was he making that image? Well, you remember in Daniel chapter 2, he had a vision. It was an image of an image that had four metals on it. It had a head of gold, a chest and arms of silver, a midsection of bronze, and then legs and feet of iron and clay. And Daniel gave the interpretation that this was a preview of what history was going to be like that the Babylonian Empire, which was the head of gold, would be followed by the Medes and the Persians, which was the chest and arms of silver, which would be followed by the Greek Empire, the midsection of bronze, which would be followed by the Roman Empire, the iron and the clay of the legs, the thighs and the feet, four empires. And Nebuchadnezzar says no, not four, just one. All gold. Back in chapter 2, verse 38, you, said Daniel, are the head of gold. And Nebuchadnezzar said there are not going to be any other empires. My empire is going to be the only empire. I am the most high. I'm not going to listen to God. I'm going to defy God. I'm going to set myself up as God. And so he built this massive idol on the plain of Dura, just south of Babylon. It was all flat. So you could see this idol from everywhere. 60 cubits high, 6 cubits wide. A cubit is a foot and a half. So 60 cubits high, 90 feet tall. It was as tall as a nine-story building. Huge pedestal with an image of Nebuchadnezzar on the top. Verse 1 again, So Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was 60 cubits, 90 feet tall. And its width was 6 cubits, 9 feet wide. And he set it up in the plain of Dura, just south of Babylon, in the province of Babylon. And King Nebuchadnezzar sent word to gather the satraps, the administrators, the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the judges, the magistrates. Sounds like Washington, D.C. And all the officials of the provinces to come to the dedication of the image which King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. So the satraps, the administrators, the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the judges, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces, they gathered together for the dedication of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. And they stood before the image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up. Then a herald cried aloud to you it is commanded, O peoples, nations, and languages, that at the time you hear the sound of the horn, the flute, the harp, the lyre, and the sultry, in symphony with all kinds of music, that you shall fall down and worship the gold image that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up and whoever does not fall down and worship shall be immediately cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace. So at that time when all the people heard the sound of the horn, the flute, the harp, and the lyre, and the symphony, and all kinds of music, that all the people of the nations and languages, they fell down and worshiped the gold image which King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. Here they are on this flat plane, hundreds of thousands of people, and they're standing, the music starts playing, and they all fall down, all except three. Berset therefore at that time certain Chaldeans, certain Babylonians came forward and accused the Jews, they spoke, and they said, King Nebuchadnezzar, you, O King, live forever, you, O King, have made a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, flute, harp, lyre, and the sultry and the symphony with all kinds of music shall fall down and worship this gold image. And whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace. But there are certain Jews whom you set over the affairs of the province of Babylon, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, these men, O King, have not paid due regard to you. They do not serve your gods or worship the gold image which you have set up. Amazing. Among the thousands and thousands and thousands of people there were three who said we are not going to bow. They had an onbending commitment, a commitment to serve the one true and living God. Their God had said, you shall have no other gods before me. You will not make any image and bow down to that image. And they and only they said we will not bow to the idols of our day. Idols? Say, well, you know, we're sophisticated, we're educated, we don't get down on our knees in front of gold, the images or whatever, maybe so, but we have our own idols. Things are idols. People are idols. Ideas are idols. Say, well, I don't get down on my knees and worship a golden statue, but you know what? For some people their house is their idol. Their car is their idol. Their boat is their idol. Their things are an idol to them. They've taken the place of God. I'll never forget when we were pastoring down in Orange County, one day on a Saturday I was going for a walk in the regional park near our home, and as I was walking through the park, all of a sudden I discovered that day they were having a car show, you know, and they had all these hot rods and expensive cars and they had them out on the grass and I thought, oh, my two young boys would love this. So I go home and I get Jeremy and Brian, you know, they're at that time they were seven and five and we're walking among all these cars and they're like, oh, isn't this cool? That's amazing. We look at the color of that car and of course all of these cars, they have these signs on do not touch, you know, and we're walking along all of these cars with my little five-year-old. He looks up at me and he says, these are their gods, aren't they? Oh, man. I thought, wow, out of the mouths of babes, things can become idols to people. But not only things. People are idols to people. Celebrities, superstars. There are television stars or movie stars, whether they're athletes or entertainers. People in our world worship those kinds of people. I fear for our young people. Sometimes I see them looking up to some sports figure and they almost worship him as some sort of hero and he might be able to play some sport very well.  But what about their lives?  They bow down to famous people and they bow down to the ideas of the world. What's an idol in our day? Listen, the theory of evolution. It's not a fact. It's not even a good theory.  And so people bow down to that idol. The LGBT, same-sex marriage. Listen, you better bow down to that idea because if you don't bow down to that idea, all of a sudden you become intolerant, ignorant, hateful. You become the target. Listen, the world tries to get you to bow down to its ideas, to its idols. But Paul says in Romans 12 and verse 2, don't be conformed to this world. I like the J.B. Phillips translation. It says, don't let the world squeeze you into its mold. The world wants to get you to bow down to that idol. And what I find amazing in this story, back in verse 7, all the people of the nations fell down. Not just the Babylonians, the rest of the Jews. Now somebody asked a good question here. Did Daniel bow down? No, he didn't. Daniel probably was someplace in another part of the kingdom doing business so he wasn't there because he definitely wouldn't have bowed down. But it wasn't just the unbelievers bowing down to the idols. It was God's people who were also bowing down to the idols. They were going along with the crowd. You know, it's so easy to go along with the crowd. It is much more difficult to stand up for the truth. I read recently of an amazing study that was done among a group of teenagers. And what an enlightening study. What they did is they gathered together thousands of teenagers and they grouped them in tens and they put them in a room by themselves. And in this room on the wall, they had three lines. One line was a foot long. One line was two feet long. Another line was a foot and a half long. And the responsibility of each group was to decide which line was the longest line. Only here's what they did. Before they let the group of ten go into the room, they pulled away nine. And they say, when you go in that room, we want you to say the shortest line is really the longest line. You know, that's not true. But say the shortest line is the longest line because we want to find out what the tenth person will do. We want to find out if the tenth person will go along with the crowd or whether the tenth person will say, no, that's not true. And here's what they discovered. When they did that, they discovered 90% of the kids would go along with the crowd and say, you know, the shortest line is really the longest line. When they knew it wasn't true, listen, we need people in our day, in our age, in our time like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who have an unbending commitment who say right is right and wrong is wrong and light is light and dark is dark and good is good and evil is evil. We need people, we need people like a pastor named Stuttered Kennedy in the last century, the beginning of the last century as a pastor over in England. And he got assigned as a chaplain in World War I and he went over to France from the trenches of France. He wrote a letter to his young son and he sent it home and he told his wife, I want you to read this letter to my son. In part, here's what the letter said, quote, the first prayer I want you to learn my son is not God keep daddy safe. The first prayer I want you to learn son is God make daddy brave. And if daddy has to do hard things, make daddy strong to do them. Life and death don't matter my son, right and wrong do. We need more men like that who understand it's right and it's wrong and I'm not going to bend to the world telling me something that's not true. We need more people like Aaron and Melissa Klein up in Gresham, Oregon, they're Christians. They own a bakery. All of a sudden a lesbian couple walks in and says we want you to bake a cake for our same sex wedding and they say no. The result? The result? They're sued. They end up having to pay a $135,000 fine but they didn't listen because they stood for what was right. We need more people like Kim Davis back in Rowan County, Kentucky that clerk in the judge's office who when they said we want license for seeing sex marriage she says I'm not going to issue them and she went to jail because of it but she had an unbending commitment. We need that in our day. We need people who have an unbending commitment like a man named Eric Little. His story is immortalizing my favorite movie, a movie called Chariots of Fire, a 22-year-old young man from Scotland who was such a fast runner in the 100-meter race that he got to go to the 1924 Olympics in Paris. So he got to Paris so excited to run this race only he discovered that the preliminary heats for the race were on Sunday. He believed Sunday was the Lord's Day. It was devoted to God. It wasn't your day, it was his day and so he refused to run on Sunday. People accused him. You're legalistic, they said. They accused him. You're unpatriotic, they said. He was brought in before the coaches. They tried to pressure him. Even the government officials from Scotland tried to pressure him. These papers tried to pressure him, but he wouldn't budge. Eric Little said at that time, if I know something to be right, something that God wants me to do, I will follow it even if it means being laughed at, facing hardship or suffering loss. The friend said of him at that time, what he knows to do right, he is doing. Looking either to the right or to the left, not yielding one jot or one tittle of conviction for approval or applause he should be admired. Well, he wasn't able to run the 100 meter race, but another runner inspired by his courage said, why don't you take my spot in the 400 meter race. A race that was four times as long. He never even trained for it before. The day of the finals, he went out to the starting line as he was walking out to the starting line. One of the other runners handed him a piece of paper. It was a note. When he opened the piece of paper, he looked down and he read these words. It says in God's book, those who honor God, he will honor them. Eric Little trumpled up that note in his hand. He got down in the starting blocks. The gun went off. He ran the race of his life, and not only did he win a gold medal, he set a world record. Why? Unbending commitment. Those who honor God with their commitment, he will honor them. A second thing that we see in Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is not only their unbending commitment to stand up for what was right, but their unwavering courage to not be intimidated by those who would threaten them. This is what we see in verse 13. Verse 18, notice verse 13, Nebuchadnezzar in rage and fury, he gave the command, you bring in Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, so they brought these men in before the king. Nebuchadnezzar spoke and he said to them, is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods, you do not worship the gold image which I have set up. Now, if you are ready, at the same time you hear the sound of absolute heart, lyre, sultry, and symphony of all kinds of music, and you fall down and you worship the image which I have made, then good. But if you do not worship, if you don't bow down, you shall be cast immediately into the midst of a fiery furnace. And who is the god who will deliver you from my hands? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they weren't going to be intimidated by this man. Think of it for a moment. This is the most powerful ruler on the planet. The city of Babylon, the kingdom of Babylon, was rich beyond describing. The city of Babylon, listen, the walls were 15 miles by 15 miles by 15 miles by 15 miles, 60 miles around the walls of the city. The walls were 30 feet high, 87 feet thick. They would do chariot races on top of the walls. Four chariots ride they would race. They had the hanging gardens of Babylon. This rich, powerful man calls you in and says, you're going to bow. You're going to bow. But the Bible says, listen, the fear of man is a snare. But those who trust in the Lord, listen, they're never going to be put to shame. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they wanted to please God rather than please men. And so God was going to use their life like a young medical student named Bethany Fox. Bethany Fox, she wanted to be a surgeon. She wanted to be a doctor. And so she got a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University back in Massachusetts. And she worked her way up until she had an opportunity to get on one of the elite surgical teams in America to work with one of the world renowned surgeons. And so she went in for a tryout. And her job in the surgery was to observe what was going on and to count the number of sponges that were used in the surgery. So she's carefully watching the doctor and she's counting all the sponges and she counts up 11. The doctor's ready to close. She looks down at the tray and there are only 10 sponges on the tray and you don't want a sponge sewn up inside of a person causes infection, even death. And so she said to the doctor, she said, excuse me, sir. She said, you used 11 sponges. There are only 10 sponges there. He looked at her and he said, no, I didn't. I only used 10. She said, excuse me, sir, you used 11. He snapped at her. Who do you think you are? I'm a world renowned surgeon. I'm telling you, there are only 10. In that moment she was faced with a choice. Her whole future or to stand up for the truth. She took a deep breath and whispered a prayer. She said, excuse me, sir. She said, there were 11 and you're not going to sew that person up until you get that 11 sponge out. All of a sudden the doctor smiled at her and he said, look down at my foot. He pulled his foot off the floor and underneath his foot was the 11th sponge. He had intentionally pulled it out, dropped it on the floor and covered it with his foot because he wanted to find out if she had the courage to stand up for him. He smiled at her and he said, you can be on my team now. That's how Shadrach Meshach and Abednego were. An unwavering courage. It doesn't make any difference. Who's threatening you? What they're threatening you with? I'm going to stand for what's right. I'm going to do what's right. And so you see in verse 16, Shadrach Meshach and Abednego they answered and they said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you on this matter. In other words, we don't even need to think about it for a moment. We can tell you exactly how we feel and how's that verse 17. We face our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace and he will deliver us from your hand. But if not, even if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image in which you have set. Listen, how could they have such unwavering courage? Because they knew this book says if God is for us, what? We can be against this. If God's on our side doesn't make any difference what the threats are, doesn't make any difference what people are saying, or who's saying it? God is greater than all of them. We're putting our life in God's hands, not your hands. And I like it in verse 18. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, we will not serve your gods nor will we worship the golden image which you have set. We're not going to go along with a crowd and we're not going to bow down unwavering courage. Reminds me of Martin Luther when he was brought in and put on trial and he stood there with boldness and he said, I cannot and I will not recant. Reminds me of that early church father named Athanasius. Athanasius was brought in before the emperor and threatened and the emperor said to him, listen, Athanasius, the whole world is against you. He said, well, if it is the world against Athanasius then it is Athanasius against the world. Not going to budge. If everybody in the world goes along with what's wrong, there's one man on the planet said Athanasius who's going to stand up for what is right. It's like the early church father John Chrysostom in the fourth century. He also was brought in before the emperor. The emperor said to him, you better stop saying that or I will confiscate all of your treasures. Chrysostom replied, sire, that you cannot do for my treasures are in heaven. The emperor said to him, well, then I will banish you. I will drive you from men and you will have no friends left. Chrysostom replied that you cannot do either for I have a friend in heaven who said I will never leave you or forsake you. Oh, the emperor was furious. I will slay you then, said the angry emperor. Nay, but you cannot do that either, said Chrysostom, for my life is hid with Christ and God and nothing can separate me from His love. How awesome, how wonderful, such unwavering courage. That is what we need in our day. But Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego may not only have an unbending commitment and an unwavering courage, but thirdly, they had an unshakable confidence that God was going to be with them, that God was going to help them, no matter what it was they had to go through. That's what we see in verse 19 to verse 25, verse 19, then Nebuchadnezzar, full of fury. The expression of his face changed towards Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. Ah! And he spoke and he commanded that they heat up the furnace seven times more than it is usually heated. And he commanded certain mighty men of Valor who were in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and cast them into the burning fiery furnace. Then these men were bound in their coats and their trousers, their turbans, and their other garments, and they were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.  I'm sure Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego wished God would have delivered them from that fiery furnace. They never would have had to go in it. But God in his wisdom, he allowed them to go into the fiery furnace. It is true God can deliver from a fiery furnace, but he allowed them to go in this fiery furnace. It didn't matter to them, though, because they still trusted God. There are many Bible teachers who think, and probably so, that the reason why Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had such faith in God at this point is they were thinking of part of the prophecy of Isaiah. Perhaps you remember this little phrase in Isaiah chapter 43, verse 1-3, where Isaiah said, Thus says the Lord, Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers they will not overflow you. Listen, when you walk through the fire, you will not be burned, nor shall the flames scorch you, for I am the Lord your God. How awesome. I like what Pastor Chuck Smith said. He said God didn't deliver them from the furnace, He delivered them in the furnace. And dear ones, it seems like we're headed into a fiery furnace. It seems like things are heating up all around us, and it's more and more difficult to become a Christian. More and more people see us as an alienated group, and we're a target to so many people in the media and so on. Listen, God could deliver us from the fiery furnace, but even if not, He's going to deliver us in the furnace. I like what Peter said in 1 Peter chapter 4, verse 12. He said, Beloved, do not think it's strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you as though some strange thing had happened to you with this rising persecution and difficulty around us.    Throughout most of church history, Christians have not had it easy, and in many places in the world, they have not had it easy. And now it's our turn. Now it's our turn. And like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we might find ourselves in the fire, but our faith and trust, listen, is in God. He's the one that is going to keep us in the midst of what we're going through because in going what we're going through, listen, we are not alone. Oh, this is awesome. Look, look at verse 24. The King Nebuchadnezzar, all of a sudden, he was astonished, and he rose in haste and he spoke to his counselors, did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire and they answered and said to the King, that's right, King, true King, but look, he answered, I see four men loose, not bound anymore. They're walking in the midst of the fire and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God. Who is the Son of God? His name is Jesus. Yeah, we can applaud for him for sure. I've got to imagine the God the Father is in heaven. He's looking down at these three courageous young men who stood up among the thousands and said, Lord, our life is on the line, but we're committing ourselves to you. And he turns to Jesus and he says, get down there and stand with him. Here's a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. He comes to stand with them. Dear ones, I wish we could get out of the fiery trial. Don't think we're going to. But here's what I know, no matter what fiery trial we're in, Jesus is going to be with us in the middle of that trial. He said, I will never leave you or forsake you and he never will. I love the story that's told about a group of Christians in the former Soviet Union. There were about 30 of them. They got together in these secret Bible studies knowing every time that they gathered together to worship and study, that if anyone found out they would die, they would be executed. Well, one day they're holding a Bible study and all of a sudden one of the government officials breaks in and he catches them. And so he takes out a piece of paper and he starts writing down the name of every single person, all 30 of them. And he counts them up 30. And when he's done counting them up, the leader of the group, he says to him, excuse me, sir, there's one name you forgot. He said, no, I didn't forget any names and he counted around there's 30, there's only 30 on the list. The guy says, no, there's one name you forgot. You got to write down one more name. The Lord Jesus Christ. Because we are not alone. He is here with us. Dear ones, in the midst of whatever is ahead for you and for me in your personal life, here in our nation, the one thing you can be sure of is Jesus will never leave you.  Well, what happened? So awesome. Verse 26 to 30. Then Nebuchadnezzar went near to the mouth of the burning fiery furnace and he spoke. He said, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, servants of the most high God. I'm not the most high. Your God's the most high. Come out and come here and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. They came from the midst of the fire. The satraps, administrators, governors and the king's counselors gathered together and they saw these men on whose bodies the fire had no power. The hair of their head was not singed nor were their garments affected and the smell of fire was not on them. I have a word for this. Wow! It was amazing. When I was a kid growing up the garage and our house it caught on fire. The firemen came and got it on and everything. But for years after that the whole house smelled like smoke. And here Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego not even one hair was singed. Not a thread of the garments of their clothes was burned. And they didn't even smell of smoke. What a miracle! Verse 28, Nebuchadnezzar spoke and he said, Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, servants who trusted in him for they have frustrated the king's word and yielded their bodies that they should not serve nor worship any God except their own God.  I have a word for this. Wow! It's amazing what God can do when someone will say, No, I won't bow. I'll bow along with the crowd. What if Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego would have bowed and gone along with the crowd and wanted to please men rather than God? Totally different story. But because they had an unbending commitment and an unwavering courage and an unshakable confidence they made a difference in the world that they were a part of and we can make a difference in the world that we are a part of. We can stand up in our fallen world and be a testimony for God. You say, Pastor Larry, are you talking about protesting? No. Pastor Larry, are you talking about being defiant and yelling and screaming and making a scene? You're doing the right thing. Sometimes it can be done in the most quiet simple, humble way. It's like the story of a teenager named Tiffany Clark. I finished with her story a few years ago. Tiffany Clark, the school district she was a part of, declared that every school in their district was a no prayer meeting. So that meant that students were not allowed to bow their heads or close their eyes to pray whether out loud or silently. After the edict was handed down none of Tiffany's Christian friends would pray at lunch anymore. Even though Tiffany was very popular, she was a cheerleader and even though she knew defying the edict might cost her her spot on the squad, she wanted to honor God more than be popular. So without fanfare she just bowed her head and silently prayed before lunch. The first day no one noticed. But the second day a lunch room monitor spotted her and told the administration. Tiffany was immediately suspended for three days and she was told when you come back you cannot bow your head, you cannot close your eyes, you cannot pray over your lunch. Well, Tiffany would rather obey God rather than men. So when she came back three days later she went into the lunch room without saying a thing.  She was immediately brought to the principal's office. This time she was suspended for two weeks and she was removed from the cheerleading squad. Huge price. But that second time the courage the conviction of Tiffany it had an effect on others and all of her friends got inspired. We need to do something. So two weeks later when Tiffany came back all of Tiffany's friends and Tiffany they went into their lunch room and they all bowed their heads and began to pray. The lunch room, man, there's too many heads. He couldn't write down the names fast enough. All of the parents found out. They took it to the school board and within a few days voluntary silent prayer was restored in her school. Pretty awesome. Pretty amazing thing. I'm talking about being mean, rude, nasty I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about doing what's right. Man, when I go to a restaurant I'm going to pray for my food. I don't care what people say. We're going to pray in school. We're going to do what God asked us to do. Listen, we're not going to bow to the idols of our day. We're not going to go along with the crowd. We're going to stand up in our fallen world knowing that when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did it when the early church did it God made a difference. When John Chrysostom and Athanasius and Martin Luther and all these great men and women of God of God before us when they did it made a difference. Dear ones, I've come with a good message for you today. Be encouraged. Be encouraged. Stand for the Lord. It's not an easy thing to do, but stand for the Lord right where you are and He's going to use you.