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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast Author: Joel K. Douglas
Governance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast joelkdouglas.substack.com Language: en Genres: Government, Philosophy, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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A Christmas Carol for King George
Monday, 22 December, 2025
This story is true. Except for the parts with the ghosts. [SFX: Theater applause]Dim the lights.Prologue. London. December, 1776.One lone leaf on the London plane outside the King’s window trembles in the light breeze, like the whole city just let out a quiet breath.It had clung to its branch through the long autumn, through winds that had stripped its companions and sent them spinning across the grounds of Windsor Castle. But now, in the stillness of a December evening, with no wind at all to speak of, it fell. The branch did not shake. The leaf simply let go, as if it had finally grown too tired to hold on, and drifted downward through air that smelled of coal smoke and coming snow.It landed on the stones of the courtyard without a sound. A guardsman’s boot crushed it a moment later, unknowing. The groundskeeper would collect it soon enough.Inside the palace, candles burned against the early dark. Servants moved through corridors with the particular silence of those who have learned that kings prefer not to be reminded of their presence. Fires crackled in grates throughout the residence, and the smell of roasting meat drifted up from kitchens where cooks prepared for the Christmas feast. The King had already declared he would not attend.George William Frederick, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, sat alone in his private study. Most called him King George III. He was not yet forty. His hair had not gone white. His eyes had not drifted to that far-off place that later painters would catch. He blinked once, slow, like the weight of the crown had its own gravity. He was still a young king, or youngish. The rebellion in the American colonies had aged him in ways the mirrors had only begun to report.On the desk before him lay dispatches from America.He had read them twice already. He would read them again before bed. Again, when he woke. Again, mid-morning. Searching for the thing he could not find in them. An explanation. The reason. The sense of it all.The rebels would not break.This was the fact that he could not understand. Would not. By every measure that mattered, this rebellion should be over. The Continental Army had been driven from New York. Their capital had fallen. Their soldiers deserted by the hundreds, slipping away in the night to return to farms and families, to sanity, to submission. Washington’s forces had dwindled to a ragged few thousand, starving and frozen on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River.And still they would not break.George set down the dispatch and walked to the window. The courtyard below lay empty save for the guards at their posts, still as statues in the cold. Beyond the palace walls, London prepared for Christmas. He could not see the preparations from here, but he knew them well enough. The garlands and the wassail, the church bells and the charitable distributions. The goose being fattened in every household that could afford one, and many that could not.Christmas. The celebration of a child born in poverty who had somehow overthrown an empire. George did not make this connection consciously. It floated somewhere beneath the surface of his thoughts, unexamined.He touched the back of a couple of fingers against the glass. It was cold. On the other side of that glass, on the other side of an ocean, men wrapped their feet in rags, leaving bloody footprints in the snow. Men were choosing to freeze.Why? What word had reached them that could make men choose cold over comfort?He did not doubt the outcome of this rebellion. He had the strongest Army and Navy the world had ever seen. His generals would see to their submission. But didn’t they understand what he offered? Order. Protection. The steady hand of a Crown that had outlasted plagues and pretenders, fires and mobs. A world where the rules did not change because a crowd felt hot blood in its throat.Obedience, in return. That was all. One plain word, and it was suddenly the only word nobody in America could stand to hear.He had read their pamphlets. Their petitions. Liberty was a thing you could hold in your palm and keep clean. As if “freedom without order” could live out in the open without turning into smoke and shouting.He told himself they would come back. This rebellion was a fever, not a cause. Noise. A few men with printing presses and loud mouths. The larger crowd would quiet down the moment winter did its work.But right now, his eyes refocused from the daydream. The light grew dim. The glass fogged at the edges, as if someone had breathed on it from the other side. Odd, but no matter. It must be the snow coming. George turned from the window and walked to his desk.The candle nearest him flickered, then steadied. The shadows in the room shifted and resettled themselves. Outside, the temperature dropped, the smell of snow in the air. A white Christmas for London, if the clouds obliged.In the fireplace, a log cracked and sent up a shower of sparks. George watched them rise and wink, rise and wink, like small rebellions burning themselves to nothing against the indifferent air.The clock on the mantel struck nine. Somewhere beyond the walls, a watchman sang the hour into the cold.George gathered the dispatches. He placed them in the locked drawer where he kept such things, away from prying eyes and gossiping servants. He would read them again tomorrow. He would search once more for the explanation that was not in the dispatches. The King prepared for bed. His evening routine varied little from one night to the next. He allowed his valet to help him undress. He said his prayers, more habit than devotion. He climbed into the vast bed with its heavy curtains, warming pans, accumulated weight of royal tradition.He closed his eyes.His sleep came and went, shallow and troubled. George tossed in the darkness, talking in his sleep. Words that his attendants, just outside the door, could not quite make out. The fire burned low. The candles, one by one, became a trail of smoke. The room, black.Outside the window, the first flakes of snow began to fall on London. Gentle. Silent. It covered the courtyard where the plane leaf had landed. The city asleep in a blanket of white that looked almost like a fresh page.He heard the clock strike midnight and keep ticking.George, alone in his royal bed, surrounded by luxury and power that brought no comfort, found the wee small hours. The thin place where a man is neither awake nor asleep. Some time later, the room, which had been empty, was suddenly not. A voice spoke out of the dark, as if it had been waiting for him.Act I. The Ghost of Christmas PastThe voice came from nowhere and everywhere, the way a church bell finds you three streets away.(inaudible) “George.”“George.”The King opened his eyes. The room was dark, but had not changed. The same heavy curtains and dying fire. Winter pressing against the windows. But this dark was different. Breath. Presence. “Who’s there?” His voice came out steadier than he felt. A king’s training. “Guards…”“They cannot hear you. Nor you them. We are between the ticks of the clock, you and I. In the space of memory.”“There’s no one here.”“There is,” the voice said, not unkindly. “Come. The night will not wait.”George sat up. His eyes adjusted. There was no figure in the room. Only shadow, and within the shadow, a deeper shadow. Not a person. Breath on the air.“What are you?”“I am what was. The road behind you. The roads behind that road. The choices made before you drew breath.”George felt his feet touch the cold floor, though he hadn’t moved. His hand reached for a robe that was not there, and he found himself in only his nightshirt, shivering slightly. A pale light gathered at the window. The glass, which should have been solid, yielded like water. He passed through it without feeling it pass, and then he was somewhere else entirely.London. But not his London.The streets were narrow and filthy. Choked with mud and offal and crowds that moved with dread. George had seen etchings of this time. He had read the history. But nothing had prepared him for the smell. Blood and smoke and fear. The smell coated his tongue.“Sixteen forty-nine,” the voice said. “The thirtieth of January.”The crowd pressed toward a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. George moved with them, unable to resist. A ghost among ghosts. A woman near him wept openly. Through the crowd, George saw him.King Charles I walked to the scaffold with the careful dignity of a man who had practiced this moment in his mind. His shirt was white. His hair, gray. His eyes found no one in the crowd, as if he had already departed for some place beyond their judgment.“He wore two shirts,” the voice said softly. “So that he would not shiver in the cold. He wanted to look dignified. Strong.”George’s throat tightened. He watched Charles kneel. He could not watch. He looked away.But he heard it. The blade found its mark. Then another sound, a moan rising from the crowd. Thousands of throats releasing something that had no name. Not triumph. Not grief. “Why do you show me this?” George whispered. “I know this story. Every king knows it.”The ghost looked at him but did not speak.Britain had torn itself apart in those years. Men who had been neighbors became enemies. Law vanished. Titles meant nothing. Thinkers had dreamed of a solution, a sovereign so absolute that chaos itself would bow before him. It was a dream born of blood. Control that would not last.Then, George and the ghost in a different London. Cleaner. Calmer. Wider streets, newer buildings. Dawn breaking over the Thames, the water in shades of rose and gold.“Sixteen eighty-eight,” the voice said. “Forty years after the axe.”George watched a procession move through the streets. Not a mob this time. Something orderly, almost festive. A parade. People lined the route, cheering. At the center of the procession rode a man George recognized from portraits: William of Orange. Beside him, Mary Stuart. Coming to claim a throne.“The Glorious Revolution,” George said. “They invited William. Parliament invited him.”The people would only consent to be ruled. They could not be forced to submit. Power in exchange for purpose. Authority for accountability. “The Crown survived,” the voice said, “but it did not survive unchanged. Not rule by order. By consent.”The parade thinned like fog. The morning light dimmed. The Thames lost its color. He felt the pull of his own bed, like a tide.George’s eyes flew open. He was back in his chambers. The candle on the table had blown out, though no window was open. George sat up and gripped the bedpost.Outside, the snow fell steady and silent.The clock struck one.Curtain.Act II. The Ghost of Christmas Present. The fire had burned to ash. The room was cold in a way it hadn’t been before, as if the servants had forgotten him entirely.George told himself it was a dream. It did not feel like a dream.He lit a candle. His hands were nearly steady now. He poured a brandy from the decanter on the sideboard and drank it standing. Then he poured another.The snow was heavier. It buried London beneath it. He watched it fall and told himself again it was a dream. The mind does strange things in the wee small hours. Fever, perhaps. Or the dinner.The brandy warmed him. The candle, bright. The clock ticked on.He set down the glass and turned toward the bed. The sheets would be cold now, but he would sleep. Then wake, and it would be Christmas morning, and none of this would have…“You might at least offer me one.”George spun. A woman sat in the chair by the dead fire. She had not been there a moment before. She was there now.“A brandy,” the man said. “It’s cold, where we’re going.”The door to the King’s Dressing Room opened onto something that was not a room. George stood in the House of Commons.He knew this room, though he had never entered it as king. Convention forbade it, and he was nothing if not a man of convention. The galleries were full. The benches, packed. Candles blazed in their sconces, the air thick with sweat and wool and the peculiar smell of men who had been arguing for hours.A man stood at the center of the chamber, speaking.He was wigged but disheveled, his coat rumpled, his face flushed with conviction. His voice filled the room. Not shouting, but somehow reaching every corner, the way a bell fills a church.“...a great empire and small minds do not go together. If we truly understood what we are stewards of, if we felt the weight of it, we would approach every decision about America with humility. With our hearts lifted up. We have been handed something extraordinary. We should act like men who know it...”“Who is this man?” George asked, though he knew. He had read the speeches. He had dismissed them.“Edmund Burke,” the ghost said. “Member for Bristol. He is arguing against the war. He has been arguing against the war for two years. Asking Parliament to see the colonists as Englishmen defending the very liberties we claim to uphold. To understand that this fight cannot be won in any way that matters.”In the face of the American rebellion, Burke sought to address the British government’s missteps. He believed England should free the colonies to govern themselves. George watched Burke’s face. He spoke like a man trying to stop a carriage from going over a cliff, knowing he could not.“...our ancestors built this empire not by crushing other peoples but by raising them up. We grew great by increasing the wealth, the population, the happiness of those we governed. That was the old way. The honorable way. When did we decide to abandon it?”George looked at the benches. Some members listened. Many did not. Some whispered to each other. Some studied their papers. One man, near the back, had fallen asleep.“He speaks well,” George said. “He is wrong, but he speaks well.”“They will vote against him,” the ghost said. “They will vote to continue the war. To send more troops. More ships. More money. Some of them know he is right, but they will vote against him anyway. They would rather win the argument than be right.”George knew the war would be won. And Britain would win it.The chamber dissolved.Then…cold. A cold beyond anything George had known.He stood on the banks of a river, black water sliding past, chunks of ice spinning in the current. The snow had stopped, but the wind had not. It cut through his nightshirt as if he wore nothing at all.“Where is this?”“Pennsylvania. The Delaware River. Christmas Eve.”Across the river, George could see fires. An encampment. Rows of tents, though many sagged or had collapsed entirely. Figures moved between them, hunched against the cold.“The Continental Army,” the ghost said. “What remains of it.”They crossed the water without crossing it. One moment the riverbank, the next the camp itself. George walked among the soldiers, invisible, unheard. He had seen paintings of armies. He had reviewed his own troops, fine in their red coats and white breeches. This was something else.These men were ragged. Starving. Some had shoes. Most did not. He saw feet wrapped in cloth, in sacking, in what looked like the remnants of a coat. He saw blood in the snow where men had walked.“Nine thousand began the summer,” the ghost said. “Fewer than three thousand remain. The rest are dead, captured, or deserted. Those who stayed have not been paid in months. Their enlistments expire in six days. Most will leave. The officers know this. The men know this.”George stopped before a fire where a group of soldiers huddled. They were young. Boys, some of them. “They are beaten,” George said. “Look at them. They are finished.”The ghost said nothing.A commotion near the center of camp. George moved toward it and saw a man emerge from a tent, tall, broad-shouldered, his face drawn with exhaustion. He recognized the face from dispatches, from sketches his ministers had shown him.Washington.The general moved through the camp slowly, stopping to speak with soldiers. George could not hear the words, but he saw men straighten slightly as Washington passed. Not much. They were too cold, too tired for much. But something. A flicker.“He knows it is over,” George said. “Look at his face. He knows his army is dying. The revolution may have only days left.” Washington stopped at a fire where several officers had gathered. He was speaking to them, his voice low. George strained to hear but caught only fragments—the Hessians... Christmas...George paid it no mind. The American troops were freezing to death for an idea. Suffering for nothing. Hessian mercenaries garrisoned Trenton, celebrating Christmas. Professional soldiers holding down a foreign population. The sooner this ended, the sooner they could go home. Washington had failed. America had failed. The rebellion was done.The camp faded. George stood again in his chambers. The candle had burned down by half. The brandy glass stood where he had left it. Outside, the snow continued to fall.The clock struck two o’clock.Curtain.Act III. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to ComeGeorge sat heavily on the edge of the bed. He was shaking, but not from the cold. The fire had somehow rekindled itself in his absence, burning steadily.The rebels were finished. He had seen it with his own eyes. Burke was a fool, and Washington was a fool. By spring, this would all be over, and the colonies would return to their proper place, and he would be proven right. He had been right all along.The shaking would not stop.Christmas morning. The birth of a child in poverty who had overthrown an empire.George thought about bloody footprints in the snow. A general’s face. Men who would not go home.He sat near the fire to warm himself. It was not enough. He lingered near its warmth. He might have dozed off.Then…the clock struck three.George did not see the ghost arrive. One moment, he was alone by the fire. The next, he was not.This ghost was different. The first had been a voice. The second, a man. This one was silence and form. It stood in the corner of the room, darker than the shadows around it, and it did not speak. It did not move. It waited.“I know why you have come,” George said. His voice sounded strange to him, thin and old. “You are the last of them. You will show me what is to be.”The ghost said nothing.“I am not afraid of you. I have seen your kind before, this night. I have seen the past and the present, and I am still king. I will still be king when you are gone.”The ghost raised one arm and pointed toward the window.The room dissolved.Again, George stood on the banks of the Delaware.Christmas Day. The same river. Black water. Grinding ice. But hours had passed. The fires of the American camp were cold. The tents, empty. The army, vanished.No. Not vanished.The men massed at river’s edge. Hundreds of men in the darkness, barely visible, moving with a strange and terrible quiet. No one spoke above a whisper. No torches lit. Only the sounds of feet on frozen ground, the creak of wooden boats dragged to the water, the low moan of wind across the river.A group of officers gathered near the boats. Washington stood at the center, his face unreadable in the darkness. Men fell in around him. A massive figure who must have weighed twenty stone, a young officer with a French accent, others whose names would mean nothing to him but would be carved in stone within a century.“The river is worse than we thought,” one officer said. “The ice is moving. McConkey’s Ferry is the only viable crossing point. Ewing’s men cannot cross at Trenton Ferry. Cadwalader is stuck at Bristol.”“We cross alone,” Washington said. “The Hessians at Trenton will not expect us. That is the only advantage we have, and it expires at dawn. We cross tonight, or we do not cross at all.”King George watched Washington’s face. He had seen that expression before on commanders who knew they were ordering men to die. But there was something else. Resolve. A man who has made his peace with failure and decided to act anyway.“The password for tonight,” Washington said. “Victory or Death.”The officers dispersed. The loading began.George had never seen boats like these. Long and shallow, forty feet or more, with high sides and flat bottoms. Cargo boats. Meant for iron ore and grain, not soldiers. They sat low in the water, and the men packed into them like cattle, shoulder to shoulder, muskets held upright to save space.At the front and rear of each boat stood men who were not soldiers. Sailors. Fishermen. They handled their poles with a confidence the soldiers lacked, pushing off from the shore, steering into the current.These were Marblehead men. Massachusetts fishermen. Men who had spent their lives on the Atlantic, who knew how to read water and weather. They had volunteered for this work because no one else could do it.The first boats pushed into the river.The ice came at the boats like a living thing, spinning and grinding. Chunks the size of carriages slamming against the wooden hulls. The fishermen fought it with poles and oars, pushing the floes aside, searching for channels in the darkness.The crossing was supposed to take three hours. It would take nine.Midway through, freezing rain began to fall.Men shivered so badly they could not hold their muskets. Soldiers vomited over the side from fear or sickness, or both. Washington stood in the prow of his boat, perfectly still, staring at the far shore as if to will it closer.The crossing went on, hour after hour. Boats reached the Jersey shore and unloaded their cargo of frozen men, then turned back for more. The ice grew worse as the night wore on, piling up at the landing site, forcing the boats to find new approaches.Midnight passed. One o’clock. Two.Men stamped their feet on the Jersey shore, trying to keep blood moving. There was no fire. There could be no fire. The enemy would see it. They stood in the darkness and the freezing rain and waited for the rest of the army to cross.Three o’clock. Four. The artillery still had not crossed. Henry Knox, the massive man George had seen with the officers, bellowed orders at the river’s edge. The boats seemed far too small to hold the cannons.The last boats crossed as the sky began to gray in the early morning. Nine hours. Nine hours in the boats. The ice. The freezing rain. And now a nine-mile march to Trenton, in the snow, in the dark, with men who had not slept and barely eaten and whose enlistments expired in six days.Victory or Death.The march was worse than the crossing.The men passed beyond exhaustion. Their bodies moved because their minds forgot how to stop. They marched in two columns on parallel roads, Sullivan along the river, Greene inland. Washington rode with Greene.The freezing rain stopped, but the ground was frozen iron. Men with rags on their feet left bloody prints with every step. George saw a soldier stumble and fall, and watched two others drag him upright and force him to keep moving. He saw another man simply stop, sit down in the snow, and close his eyes.The column marched on. The man who had sat down did not rise.Two soldiers would freeze to death on that march. Anyone who stopped was lost.The sun rose behind heavy clouds, gray and cold. They had missed their window. The plan called for an attack at dawn, in darkness. It was now well past seven.Washington called a halt at a farmhouse a mile from Trenton. Officers gathered. George stood among them, invisible, listening.“We’ve lost surprise,” an officer said. “It’s full daylight. They’ll see us coming.”“The Hessians have been harassed by militia for three days,” Washington said. “They are exhausted. They have been on high alert so long as to be meaningless. And it’s Christmas. No civilized army attacks on Christmas.”“Sir, with respect, we are not a civilized army. We are barely an army at all.”“Yes,” Washington said. “That is our advantage.”Trenton was a small town, a few hundred houses clustered along two main streets that converged at its center. The Hessians were fifteen hundred professional soldiers. Veterans of European wars. They quartered throughout the town, their cannons fixed at key intersections.Colonel Johann Rall commanded the garrison. Rall heard rumors. Loyalist spies had told him an attack was coming. A patrol had skirmished with American scouts just hours before.A servant approached with a note. A local Loyalist sent it. It warned of American movements.Rall glanced at the note, did not read it, and slipped it into his pocket. He had received a hundred such warnings. The Americans were beaten. Everyone knew. The rabble across the river was starving and freezing and would melt away by spring.The note was still in his pocket, unread, when he died three hours later.The attack came from two directions at once.Sullivan’s column struck from the south. Greene’s from the north. They drove into the town along the parallel main streets. The sound of musket fire shattered the morning quiet. Not volleys, a rolling crackle. Building and building as more Americans entered the town.The Hessians were professionals. Surprised. Half-dressed, but well-trained. They formed up in the streets and fought. They spilled from houses, grabbing weapons, falling into ranks with the muscle memory of a hundred drills. Their officers shouted commands in German. Drums beat the call to arms.But the Americans held the high ground, and they had artillery.Henry Knox’s guns. The same cannons that had crossed the river on boats too small to hold them opened fire from the head of King Street. Grapeshot tore through the Hessian formations. Men fell. The survivors tried to form up again. The American fire was relentless.Colonel Rall mounted his horse and rode into the chaos, sword raised, rallying his men. He organized a counterattack. Led a charge toward the American guns.A musket ball struck him in the side.He stayed mounted. Another ball hit him. He slumped, slid from his horse, and his men caught him and dragged him into a church.The Hessian resistance collapsed.It was over in forty-five minutes.The Hessians laid down their arms. American soldiers, the same ragged, starving men on the riverbank the night before, herded prisoners into buildings. Washington rode slowly through the town. He returned salutes to men who had not believed they would survive the night.Nine hundred Hessians captured. Twenty-two killed, eighty-four wounded. Stores of food and weapons and ammunition seized. Everything an army needed to survive.American casualties: two frozen on the march. A handful wounded. None killed in battle.King George saw the bodies in the street. The prisoners being marched away, the American flag raised over the town. He looked at Washington, still mounted, still silent, looking back toward the river as if already calculating the next impossible thing.Then, the scene shifts. George sees the same army that had crossed the Delaware, now larger. Reinforced. Men re-enlist. New recruits arrive. The thing that had been dying somehow came back to life.More battles. Princeton, eight days later, another American victory. The British withdraw from New Jersey. The war that should have ended in the winter of 1776 ground on through 1777, 1778, 1779. America refused to die.“Stop,” George said. “I do not wish to see any more.”The ghost lowered its arm. The battles faded. The years folded in on themselves like paper. George stood again in his chambers, alone.The fire had become embers. The candle, a stub of wax. Outside, the snow had stopped. The first gray light of Christmas morning crept across London.He walked to the window. The London snow was white and perfect, a silent shroud. He saw his own reflection in the glass; he didn’t see a King. He had been fighting an army, but Washington was leading a haunting. He could not kill an idea that was willing to freeze to death: an army of bloody footprints in the snow, of no pay and empty bellies, shivering in ice-covered boats on Christmas Day.Curtain.Act IV. King George’s RedemptionHe was shaking.He told himself it was a dream. Again and again, as if repetition could make it true. But he was there. The gunpowder. The cold of the Delaware. Washington’s face in the prow of that boat, staring at the far shore.He dressed. Attended Christmas services in the chapel. Spoke to no one. He smiled when required, nodded when expected, returned to his chambers as soon as custom allowed.The dispatches took weeks to arrive.He waited. Every time a messenger arrived, his hands trembled until he saw the seal. When the news finally came of the impossible victory, it matched what he had seen. He read the dispatch three times. Then he locked it in the drawer with the others and sat very still for a long while. He told no one what he had dreamed.The war goes on. Seven years pass. But George cannot escape what he saw. The dispatches kept coming. Princeton. Saratoga. France enters the war. Yorktown.His certainty that Britain would stamp out this American rebellion eroded, year by year. He distrusts his own mind. Did he see the future? Was it just a dream? How did he see the future? Then, redemption. December 23, 1783. Annapolis. The war is over. Then, America shocks him again.Washington resigns his commission.The American people loved him. He was a star. He didn’t have to give up power. He could be king. The night before the ceremony, they threw him a party. Washington “danced in every set, so that the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him, or as it has since been handsomely expressed, get a touch of him.”Instead of claiming fame and power, Washington gave it back to the people. America would owe allegiance to no king, and George Washington believed in America.The very thing King George III believed impossible, that a man could choose to be less than he could be, for the sake of an idea larger than himself.There it was. King George’s redemption. He understood, at last, what he was fighting. Not a rebellion. Something new. An idea. Of Washington choosing to give power back to the people, King George said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”Curtain. Lights.Act V. FinThis story is real. Freezing soldiers. Bloody footprints in the snow. Washington’s resignation. King George’s redemption.The ghosts? They were the only ones who knew how to tell him the truth. The greatest act of power is letting go. My best wishes are with you and yours this Christmas. Two days from now, we celebrate a child born in poverty who overthrew an empire.May God bless you and keep you;May God smile on you and be gracious to you;May God look on you with favor and give you peace.God bless us, every one. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
