Consider the Evidence - Dan Buttafuoco

My name is Dan Botticicico. I'm Christian. I'm a trial lawyer. I'm married for 46 years. I've got three lovely daughters. They're all grown and I have seven grandchildren and this is my story. Welcome to Faithly Stories, the podcast that brings you inspiring tales from conversations with church leaders as they navigate the peaks and valleys of their faith journeys through their ministry work and everyday life. Join us as we delve into their challenges, moments of encouragement and answered prayers. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. Learn more at Faithly.co. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired as we unveil the heart of faith through stories from the front lines of ministry on. The Faithly Stories podcast. Thank you so much, Dan, for joining me today. It is such an honor to have this conversation with you. And there's so much I want to ask you about from your experience as a trial attorney to your family, to your faith, to the historical bikeless society. But before we talk about any of that, I'd love to start from the beginning of your journey. How did your faith journey begin? Well, my earliest words that I remember are pins and prayers. My earliest memories in life, I grew up in a very religious Italian panacostal family and God was everywhere at all times present. And everything we did, everything we said, there was in a moment that we were somehow involved with God's. The good thing is that even though I sort of grew up a little bit in a like a legalistic kind of faith, there was a lot of love. So that was balanced out. They say something like your correction without love breeds resentment, right? Or correction without relationship breeds resentment. I always had a really great loving parents. In fact, they're still alive. And they encouraged me to get education because I was the only one. The first one in my family to get any real education. I have now three degrees. So that was a big deal. My father was a is a brilliant man, you know, just pure, you know, brain power. His whole family is actually really smart. And my mother's side is the practical, shorting wisdom, street smart type. And I like to say I got the best of both worlds. Your relationship with the Lord is very personal, right? And we all know that sometimes it doesn't start out so personal. Sometimes it's your family's faith. And then it's great foundation. I was really struck in your book by the way that you described Jesus. He said he was amazing to say he was all powerful, but you also said he was funny. It's a very personal relationship with the Lord. So I'm wondering, is there a moment? Is there a time of major faith or really personal? Well, there were a lot of moments like that in my life, you know, where God really spoke to me in very clear ways. You know, it went well, I was 17 in particular. I had a major experience with God, you know, which came at a good time because I was on the wrong road, on the wrong path, you know, side to feel a little bit full of myself and, you know, skipping grades and getting scholarships to school. And, you know, get accepted to West Point where a lot of really interesting things were happening. You know, the world was starting to open up for me. And, you know, it's sort of easy to get arrogant. You get, you know, sort of overconfident. I believe in confidence, but arrogance and pride are very dangerous because the Bible says God resists the proud against grace at humble. Now, as far as Jesus and God being funny, I think God ticks the box to the max in every subject, right? He's the most beautiful. He's the most funny. He's the most intelligent. He's the most wise. He's the most interesting. I mean, you just keep going. I'm going to spend eternity getting to know God and we're still not going to get to know him. We put a morning for to dent in it, you know? He's that vast and, and that interesting and that big. So, anything that you find interesting, beautiful, wonderful, can sort of be wrapped up in the idea of God, properly, all this stuff. Okay. So you were a teenager and the world was starting to open up to you. How did you choose to go into law? How did that happen? Well, it was interesting because I remember sitting around with a group of people who were my peers and some of them older, and we were all mildly affected by the church that we were in at the time, which was on their going revival. A lot of interesting things were happening in the early 70s with, you know, the charismatic renewal. And we saw some amazing miracles, we saw healings, we started to see, you know, got manifested a lot of ways, lives changed, great big. And we were sitting around and discussing, you know, what are futures we'd like? And these maybe 10 or 12 guys that I was friendly with. And we went around, you know, what do you want to be? One by one, they will pass the past, pass the past, pass the past, pass the cable around to me. I said, oh yeah. And they looked at me like I had two heads. And I said, I don't know why, but I feel like God wants me to be a lawyer. And I'm not sure why I came to that, or how I came to that conclusion. I'm not sure if it was because I do. I wanted to make money, you know, being real honest about it, being transparent. You know, I grew up poor, even though my parents were wonderful, I grew up at a housing project. We never had money. One of the reasons why education was prioritized, because it was seemed to be as a way out for me, my brother and my sister. And we all did very, very well. So that was probably part of it. And later on, God dealt with me about my love of money, as it were. But I wanted to be successful. I wanted to make a difference. Well, so I think I know the answer to this already, Dan, but do you see God in your day to day as a lawyer? How does he show up? All the time, God shows up in the most powerful way in terms of helping people. And I'll give you the short sort of summary version of it is that God told me to focus less on being a hot shot trial. We are looking to make money and get big verdicts and to focus more on helping people. And he says, basically reminded me, which I sort of knew, but reminded me that law medicine, any profession really is ultimately its final analysis of ministry. It's a ministry to help people and to solve a problem. And that anyone who's ever been successful in history, it wasn't really trying to be rich necessarily. That may have been a subgirl, but their main goal was to solve a problem. And the examples I came to mind, Thomas Edison was looking to create an artificial like sauce. He was working to be a millionaire is looking maybe was underneath, but ultimately he was trying to invent a light bulb. Eli Whitney was trying to invent the cotton gin to get cotton production. You know, Steve Jobs was trying to make a affordable handheld computer, the iPhone. All of these people were ambitious, but they were ambitious in terms of trying to solve a problem. The money follows. It doesn't lead. So God sort of explained this to me. I knew in my spirit that I had the cart before the horse that I was trying to do stuff with me. It's trying to do stuff for the clients. And when I changed that sort of 25 years ago, my practice, my success rate, my happiness, my wealth, just exploded. You know, because all the sudden it became about what I would say, doing the right thing. Well, that's a umbrella phrase, but doing the right thing in whatever you're doing is always the best way to do it. So, Dan, you do the right thing. I try. And the Lord has, he taught you that lesson to do the right thing and to put that first, but you don't just do the right thing, Dan. What I noticed is that you do the right thing and you make sure people know that it's in Jesus now, right? Like on your website, and not every lawyer or professional puts their faith out there, but I mean, you're very clear about your faith that I would imagine in the conversations we have, there's not a sentence you utter without the word without, you know, the kingdom being a part of your thought process. And I'm just imagining that with your clients, that it's the same thing. Has that always been how you presented yourself to the world? Well, I was a very early in my career as a young lawyer, had the secretary who was a Catholic girl. He was Dolores. I remember she was a chain smoker. Is when you could smoke in buildings and a very good power legal and we had a great relationship. I went to a wedding and had a hard, hard cubicle was upstairs in what was my boss who later became my partner's office in Minneapolis. And I was downstairs. I started in the one room office in the basement without a window. And like sometimes we bring them down there and this is going to answer your question. She would talk to me after the client's left my office where she had a window by a cubicle and she could see that in the parking lot and she would sit to you. What exactly goes on in your office? So what are you talking about Dolores? She says, I see people jumping up and down in the parking lot, shouting and praising God or whatever they're doing. I don't even know what they're doing. She knows miles on their face. She knows what are you giving them? I'd love to share about your degrees and particular degree in theology, which I think could have a little bit later in life. I'm just curious. What drove you to do that? Well, my first degrees in psychology, which I got in the experimental program in Hofstra at University called New College, which was great. I mean, wonderful training classes were very small, 15, 20 people, 10 people in some cases. And then I went directly to tech pipeline, Hofstra law school and I graduated law in the 81 with a juror's doctor degree. When I got my master's degree, I did a part-time weekends at night. I got that 2000 and eight, right? So that's basically 17 years ago. And I did that as a result of that major trial, trial tribulation episode in my life where God had to deal with me. He said, talk about a God moment. You know, we all slip up. That's the beauty of the Christian faith, right? You get to slip up. You base up with the consequences, but God doesn't disown you. So I was going to a difficult time in my life. And as part of that process of me getting my act together and getting resented, I decided to go take some courses in apologetics and Christian apologetics with my wife's idea. My wife comes up with the greatest ideas. And then I go, Oh, that's a good one. So I signed up. I took one course, took a second course, took a third course, and they kept offering more and more courses. I was so into it. The professors were my age. I said, no, I'm going to get the degree. And so that's what happened. And what what I found out was that I really love Christian apologetics, which is the art and science of Christian persuasion to define this. That's also biblical. Talks, talk some new testament about being able to get an answer for what you believe. And from a trial, always point of view, it's all about defending the faith, making arguments for the trucefulness of the Bible, of the gospel, God, making talk about it. The Odyssey, defending God's goodness and light of the problem of evil. And I was shocked and literally astonished to find out that we have amazing material, what lawyers call arguments for the trucefulness of the faith. It's not a blind leap in the dark. Like we have a, it's like a lot, it's more like a mosaic. The Christian faith is like a mosaic. It's like you get little pieces of evidence. And you painstakingly put them together. That's why I'm just, you know, seek the Lord while you may be found, taste and see that the Lord is good. I mean, it's a common upon us to do the work of putting together all these little bit clues that God gives us. And when you do what you get is a picture of Jesus Christ. You don't have to have all the pictures, all the pieces to get the full pictures. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. When it's half assembled, you sort of know what the picture is. And you just keep adding more and more pieces and more and more pieces. And the picture gets more and more complete. And I discovered that when I got my degree in apologetics, and it was just amazing. So then I decided I would like to write a book. Yeah, I'm going to ask you about your book, the end, which I had the pleasure of reading recently. I love historical anecdotes. I learned through your books at the early versions of the Bible. I'm reading legal. I didn't know that. And it's just really, it just paints, you paint such a beautiful tapestry of the history of the Bible. And you lay out the evidence. How long did it take you to research all of that and put it all together? Well, it sort of was part of my, my, my master's training, put that all together. So I just kept notes and I kept, you know, collecting different materials. And then I just had to weave it all together into, like you said, a tapestry. You know, one of the things that happened during this period of time is was, my daughter was going to college. And she actually went to the same college I went to. One of the professors said, Christian, she said, damn, but if you go and turns out I was in class, which is really interesting. I mean, my daughter is 25 years younger than me. We were married young, we had kids young. And so she was getting the same basic education that I had in college, but there was one professor in particular, which I know a lot of people can relate to this. That was very hostile to our faith. Well, I had been the middle of studying for my college edits degree. And these arguments were all fresh and new and at my fingertips. And my daughter would come back to me and she was possibly like, what is that? What are the disguise like tacking with us? There aren't classies ridiculing the fate. Turns out he was a fallen away Jesuit. You know, people have an axe to grind are really motivated, right? I don't know what his personal experience was. But the long the short of it was we answered every one of his objections with papers, with articles, with our own writings, with me helping her at the end of the semester. He gave her an A plus in the class and told her, I saw it. He wrote on the paper is you made me question some of my own atheism. So the point being that what you know what to say and you know what arguments to raise and I use arguments and again, the legal sense of pretty forced material and proofs of why we believe what we believe. We really rocked the sky dot on his heels. And he wasn't so sure all of a sudden in his own world view. And so the book came as a natural outgrowth to that. That is such a great story. You know, one of the things that I learned about the Lord in my life is that he was nothing and that even things that don't really seem connected in your history, he brings together for the good of those who love him. Okay. I think about my career mastery. It may seem very different from building faith technology, but I use everything that I work. And I think about their three degrees psychology, law, theology, and how all that comes together so beautifully to be an apologetic for the Lord. It's really cool. As you laid out the evidence, is there one piece of evidence that you found the most compelling? You know, it's interesting. I just wrote an article about this on four. Do we get it to Quora at some point? I do a lot of writing on Quora to answer questions. Quora is a platform which I really encourage people to go on and be heard, especially through a believer. You'll learn and you can also contribute. There's a lot of misunderstanding out there about God, about religion. People have been heard by religious people. And Quora allows everyone to speak. One of the questions that came up was about evidence toward Jesus and for God in the Bible. And the fact of the matter is there was no slam dunk single piece of evidence for the faith. And there are key pieces of evidence. And of course, one of the key pieces is the Bible, I believe. And I think it's supported by the evidence that the Bible was written by eyewitnesses to the light of Jesus Christ. And that that those eyewitnesses have written the gospels. And in the case of Luke, they were interviewed and recorded for all the posterity so that we have an accurate idea of who Jesus was. What he believed, what he taught, what he did, and also about the resurrection and some scientifically implausible is that there's a lot of evidence of the resurrection. The idea of eyewitness testimony is very compelling. And it's very compelling because we use it in Quora all the time. There is almost no case that does not involve eyewitness testimony in some way. You actually even need eyewitness testimony to authenticate a video. You can't even put the video into evidence without somebody saying, yeah, that I was there. That's a fair and accurate representation of what happened. Or, you know, that camel was affixed to this corner at this spot and, you know, had this in view at this time and this place, you have to always have eyewitness evidence, even if you have a video or a photograph. And so I witness testimony is powerful. But what makes it more powerful? What makes it really compelling? It is the fact that these men will cross examining to death for their testimony. And if you've never been in court, and if you've never tried a case, you will not possibly appreciate the power of cross examination, you know, the founding father's gave us cross examination. Cross examination is so important to our system of justice. It's the right to confront witnesses and to test their stories. And just by questioning them, just by questioning them in a hostile way, without any threat of torture, you'd be surprised how effective cross examination is. Questioning them on the penalty of torture is even more compelling. I mean, these guys could have stopped the torture at any time by recanting their stories. And they all went to death, proclaiming they'd seen the risen Christ. Nobody would do that if it wasn't true. The disciples were there. They saw Jesus, they handled Jesus, they experienced Jesus, but not one time, but for three years, they were at the crucifixion. They saw and resurrected. They took for 40 days. And all of that is very compelling. Now, of course, people don't believe it because they say, well, people don't rise from the dead. But that's what's called an a priori bias. You, you're dismissing it, saying it didn't happen because it can happen. Well, let's look at the testimony. Let's look at the evidence. And the evidence is actually quite compelling. So yes, I witness testimony is huge. I think part of what I do is defending the Bible. I started the Bible, the historical Bible society for that reason to defend and, you know, analyze the scriptures and to explain where we got done, how we got done, I mean, that's all a big part of what I do. Well, sorry, I'm going to talk about that Bible because for you, it's not just evidence. You seem to have a love of the Bible that goes even deeper than that. Talk about how you started collecting the Bible. How did it begin? How did it evolve? How did it turn into the historical Bible society? Well, the Bible, I'm always been a part of my life. As I said earlier, my first words were probably scripture. The bottle mine is in the Bible is not personal, not one book. It's a library in sorts. We're in a library, right? The Bible is a collection of, you know, 66 different writings written by 40 different authors over 1500 years. So it's the collected wisdom of an entire civilization. It's basically foundational to all of Western civilization. So that alone gives it monumental importance. And then you start to think about the fact that the Bible is the best seller year after year, that societies and governments have been built on it. And then you start to crack it open and you realize who wrote it and the things they said, which are mind blowing. And you realize that they work and that they're great ideas for wisdom, that's a successful living. And then you start to realize, like, wow, this is got a supernatural quality to it. This is not something that, you know, just came up. People just small people came up with on their own. When when you read the Bible and you put it to work, when you test, that's why God is always saying, test it, test it, see, you know, try it, you know, see if it works. When you test the Bible, it always works. And so yes, why I got modeling historical by my side, because I love the Bible. And then taught me, let's history and part of lovely history being this place. I love antiques. I love museums. So if you could buy an antiques and Bible, what do you get? You get antibibos. I was at the World of Historia. This is many years ago. And at that time, I don't know if it's still there, but in the World of Historia, they had a rare bookstore in the lobby. Didn't look much different than this. There's a library and every book was hundreds of years old, that I was fascinated by that. So I bought an old Bible. I paid way too much. It was a rip off, but I brought home and I had this 1601 Bible. And then I started to realize you to get these things at auction much cheaper. And you know, I started to collect and I got it first edition King James, which is fascinating. It weighs probably 25 pounds. It's massive. It's beautiful. It's glorious book. It's just incredible. And I used to have it on my table and house, you know, one of the side boards. And people come in and what is this? And we get into these discussions. And I realized right away that this is something it's an artifact. First of all, it's super important. This very few of them complete in the world. And it would start a discussion about God, about the Bible. So then I started to get intentional about collecting various Bibles. And what I found out is that the English Bible was at one point considered with legal, the church didn't like the English Bible. And so I started to collect all those early pre King James, very early English Bibles by Tyndale, by Cobbadale, Erasmus was a major figure in the Greek New Testament. And I started to sort of fill in the blanks of the collection. And then eventually just realized it was too expensive to keep doing it and donated it all to my own charity called the Historical Bible Society. And it became a public charity at that point. Is our collection complete or are you still collecting? I still collect, you know, it's very hard now, being that I'm competing with billionaires in the Museum of the Bible, who are basically buying up everything and driving up the prices. But it's pretty complete for what we do. And you've seen the collection. I was very moved by the collection. There's something about seeing the warrants and seeing and knowing they were written behind his and hundreds of years ago. And it's the same words, the same gospel. It's very stirring. Well, one of the books that we have, the New Testament in Greek is so important that we were contacted by a major Bible society in Germany. They want to digitize it in the spring. They come into my office and they get a digitized thing and put it online. It's a really important translation because for one or two words, that's how analyzing and sifted the New Testament is. One or two words, this particular manuscript is a thousand years old, is important to shed the meaning on one or two words. And that's telling because it shows you how much scholarship has gone into the Bible preserving it, reclaiming it. There are about 40 lines of the New Testament that are in dispute. And I'll tell you what, it's the most thoroughly analyzed sifted, critiqued, criticized, affirmed, debated, book in the entire world. Nothing comes close. Probably more brain power has gone into analyzing the Bible than any other topic in the history of the world. And it's fascinating. It's just for that reason. It's the only book ever been on the moon, the Bible. It's I didn't know that. Yeah, it's great. It's so many things about the Bible that just defy explanation going back to the Bible collection of the society. So you travel to churches and schools and other organizations and you bring your Bible collection. Tell us what that experience is like, because you're not just bringing the Bible. So you're bringing you and you're bringing your passion your love and your zeal for word. I have essentially two ministries, one ministry. Well, I look at every day as a ministry. My table is a ministry, you know, this is a ministry, core as a ministry. But my two basic ministries are in terms of categories of my law practice. I run that like in ministry because you're ministering to the clients they have a need. And we are bringing a solution like yesterday had a woman in my office of a pastor needs spine surgery had to raise that we had to work out paying for it. She's was a dead accident. There's a lawsuit going we're going to change our whole life to take two to three years. We're going to change our whole life. That's one ministry. The other ministry have is a generally the apologetic ministry, which falls basically with the historical Bible society. The idea of the historical Bible society is to do exactly what I've been saying, which is to blame the people where he got the bottle and why you believe the Bible is the word of God. I also go into churches that are on fire for God, they love God, they've got great outreach and a great ministry. And I'll get up there and with an invitation from the pastor, the leadership. And I'll say, how can he believe the Bible is the word of God? I'll get 100% hands up. And I'll say, how many people know why we believe that? And I'll get creptness with maybe two hands or three hands. I said, OK, we got some work to do yet because we don't know why we believe something. We won't believe it after a while or we can discard that if there's a challenge to it. That's what's been happening to the young people when they go to college, when they grow up in the youth group, they say, quote, unquote, say, it's followers of Jesus Christ, trying to live a good life. On the Sunday, go to college and this, they get presented with drugs and parties and sets and all this fun looking stuff. And then they're not sure if the Bible is true. And then they get challenged by their professors, yeah, why should I believe this? It's just restricting me, you know, white and we've all been there. Come on, we know what this is about, right? And it's very easy to just discard this because you don't know why you believe it. So what I'd like people to do, I'd like people to know why they believe what they believe and then people for fun, but to explain to a plumber, why he believes on the job or a cop to explain to another cop, why I represent a lot of tops, why he believes on the job for a housewife to explain to her neighbor, why they believe the Bible's the Word of God. And if every Christian to get into the why, which 100 years ago wasn't even an issue, we they all know you got to be able to explain to the people in your congregation, why we believe these things? If you wanted to take, if you want to raise up a generation of people who are really going to change the world, that is to get down and deep into their soul. They got to know that what they believe is the truth. Not because they want to believe it's not my truth. It's the objective truth. And the only way we can uphold onto that is objective truth is if we know why we believe it and what those reasons off the why we believe is the objective truth. That's what grounds people in a time of storm. And so that's what the historic Bible society does. I'll go into schools are actually going to a school in March and talking to high school kids. I'll go into a church. I'll go pretty much anywhere and explain to people how we got the Bible, why we believe it's true where it came from, what it consists of. And that's what I love to do. It's the why that is so long. I lost that. Thank you for sharing that. I think it's some of what you just listened to our conversation on the last 15 20 minutes and here you talk about the Bible. I think it would be easy for them to think that's where your God lives. Isn't the Bible? But having talked to you some of the times, you know, again, I'm not sure your guy is a living God that lives within you, but that is everywhere. So can you talk a little bit about that? Talk about your living God? How can you speak to you? Well, the Bible is basically revelation. There are many ways that we can know God. And God, we can't know all of God, because to know all of God will be to be God, right? And you can't know all of God. That's sort of the mystery of God, right? And we're going to spend eternity getting to know God more and more intimately, right? And that's going to be fun. And that's going to be cool. He has got the most interesting, beautiful, fabulous person that you can imagine. Did you can't even imagine anything greater or more interesting than God? The Bible is that aspect of God that he has chosen to reveal of itself to humanity, which has been recorded by people who had what I call closely cows of the third kind. And you're a little bit young, but do you remember that movie? Sure. I said, cows of the third kind. Those are the people that face the facing cowless risk. In that case, you know, what aliens, right? But there are people who have had closely cows of the third kind with God. Sometimes we have close account of the third kind with God. And those are those special moments where you know, God is really speaking to you. God speaks to his creation a lot of ways. He speaks through the beauty and wonder of creation. He speaks through art. He speaks through literature. He speaks through friends. He speaks through family. He speaks through the inner witness. He speaks to the conscience. He speaks through the Bible. As I said, he speaks importantly at times, he's spoken in the bottle to animals. He speaks through circumstances. And it's sort of cool how we met, right? Because that was one of those moments where I felt the prompting of God to go over to you, right? You know, before we were like to move to the day, we ran a day and he was so, you know, you sort of stood out and standing. I was sitting in the front table. I was scheduled to speak. And I think it was Adam Durso, who was a mutual friend of ours. Well, I mean, Sam said, you should go talk to that young lady over there. She's 30% young. Yes, yes, yes, very young. Very well-deserved. I saw a lot. Anyway, I saw you in the corner. And he said, yeah, she's got this thing called faithfully. And they used to be going hard on us. We were going with sat's people, but which by the way, that is amazing because you were right. You could take all of that and none of that is lost. It really is true. That's another truth that God waste nothing, right? Whether it's a band experience or a good experience or even one in between. So I saw you there. And I some compelled me to go over and talk to someone over to you. And for those listening and watching right away, I asked you almost immediately, you know, you know, where you live? Like the second question in you said Manhattan, I said, you're here for this hot ministries. And you practically burst into tears. And it turns out that you had a major God experience in the father's hot ministries without giving to personal. And it turns out that my cousins are the founders of that ministry, Mary and Carol. And I support them. And when we took a selfie, if you remember, and we said that to my cousin, and she responded, oh my God, I can't believe that you're with Alicia. Alicia's great. You know, she's a big part of who we are. And that was sort of strange. And that was one of those God moments, you know, some people don't see spirituality in that. But anybody who's attuned to God knows that that was that's what reason why we're here. In fact, we wouldn't be here if wasn't that moment, right? So that another breadcrumb, if you will. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I've been so blessed by this conversation. I know many others won't you? And I just love the way that when the Lord speaks, he just listen, he just listen, you're like, yeah, sure, sure, always. If I always listen, I did Jesus, I'd be perfect. You know, that's sort of the challenge of the Christian, right? To listen to God, what he's talking to you. And you know, Jesus said, my sheep know my voice, I have to ascertain the voice of God in my spirit. If I don't know that by now, then how much of a Christian could I really be? And so we see, we see that that part of the Christian is the decency that to the leading of the spirit and to hear that voice and to follow God. And yet, so many people think that being a Christian is following a list of do's and don'ts or adhering to a creed or going to a church and performing a ceremony. None of that makes you a Christian. None of that makes you a Christian, right? I think of a Bible study. I gave one this morning on Zoom to a bunch of Catholic guys. They are astonished to realize what's in the Bible. They've been churched their whole lives. They are only now becoming Christians. If that makes any sense. And the transformation is remarkable, frankly. Yeah. Also, you said, you know, you're no liar. You don't always listen to God, but you've listened to him once in a pretty good case. I tried the big stuff. Yeah. Well, so you told me recently about how the Lord told you to appreciate pastors. Well, pastors are a interesting because they, you know, they're a lot of responsibility. You know, Bible says they're the guardians of your soul. And people are not easy. You know, I have my my band of 12 14 guys. And just even then there's always conflict, you know, people of people. And to be a pastor and to be responsible for people's souls. And I didn't see this in my practice. I give advice, which I know is solid and my clients are their own worst enemies. They don't take my advice and then they expect to get a result. Doesn't work that way. And it's the same way with the pastor, you know, the pastor is trying his best to help people. And a lot of times, especially in this culture, they shouldn't go their own way. He's kind of got to reel them back in. And they can resentful and they can't back in the other shop. As a result, pastors are discouraged and unappreciated. And some cases, many cases quitting the ministry. Some cases suicidal. We've seen that pastors taking them their own lives, you know, becoming depressed and, you know, sort of discouraged over the state of of their plots and the and the ministries. And they're on your attack constantly, right? Dan that they do and Dan that they don't, right? I've seen people fight with pastors because over a waffle iron or the color of the carpet and divide over how to have communion, whether it should be Italian bread or should be mozzarella like who cares, right? You know, and people get hung up, they major in the minors. And sadly, some pastors also do that. But really, you got to look at the big picture. And so pastors have to try to get every person that's under their responsibility to be able to look inside and see Christ. And that's not an easy job, you know, and it's getting harder and harder. 100 years ago, the pastor was one of the sky in the room and most respected guy in the room. And now in days that they're not respected at all. And not even by the wrong side. And so I've been really reaching out the pastors to try to encourage them and to try to strengthen them to try to unite them, right? We'll show them without you dying. That's Christians. So one of the ways to try to do this is by putting them together, right? You put on a pastors appreciation for a couple of years now, right? Tell me a little bit about that. I want to say, God woke me up in the middle of the night and said, you got to have a Christmas party for pastness. And originally, I thought it was going to be about my law firm because I need a lot of business from pastors, okay? So pastors have been very good to me. Well, I woke up in the middle and I was going to have a party for pastness. And then as we started to get into it, we started to pray about it. We said, we're not going to make this about the office. We're going to make this all about them. We're going to just law should be a sponsor. They'll not have any else who I am. I don't know the past is no, neither all my friends. It's not going to be about glorifying the office. When I get a talk about all the wonderful successes and the great vurgatory God, the great results, the case will be one. We're going to talk about what they do and how important they are and how that we're with them that we're behind them, that we're supporting them, that we appreciate that for what they're doing. And they problems just like everybody else, you know, they have kids they got to contact with and, you know, family members that, you know, give them a hard time. So we really sort of got behind these past us. Two of my daughters are married to pastors kids. And so we just decided to bless the past and you show up. You've seen me guys. It's pretty cool, right? I saw a big number of pastors advance because of what I'm trying to do officially and it was the first one I went to, right? But I saw them get blessed in a very practical, right loving way. You have pastor, you know, they're gonna talk, which was positive. Oh, you get it. It's $10,000 again. I'm talking about it, even $10,000 check to give it to a pastor that a special project is heard. I think that I'm seeing that happen at a pastor's gallery before you keep away ancient texts to pastors that you work harder. It's just how I really was was blown away. Do you have cancer? Yeah, as God allows us, we're gonna do it every year, God willing. And, you know, it's, it's really been also an exercise in humility because we're deferring to the pastors. We're letting them have their day, you know, and everything, as you know, was top shelf. We had a leaky castle. We had, you know, a menu was off the charts, right? We had first-rate band music. We had a classical pianist to greet them. We had butler service. We had the whole nine yards. It was a spectacular event to top shelf speakers. You know, I said a few words, but I'm not the main event at all. My son was the MC. He didn't even speak that much. It was pastor focused, pastor driven, pastor blessed, you know, blessed pastors and basically elevate what they're doing and also to try to do that. The thing this year was unity. One Lord, one face, one whole. Yeah, that's such an important message. And I was in the room. They thought love, they thought somebody, they thought bless, I don't think kind of them will miss the end of this year. They were loved, then they are, they meant. I feel like we've just scratched the service of your story, Dan. But I think we need to leave it over today. I have feeling there are more conversations coming along with me and you talking about it. Thank you. Thank you so much for going with me today. Share your experience and your wisdom. I don't know like machine. Amen. Where to do it? It's a one via glass thing. Try to help on people. And this is just another way to do it. Thank you, sir. Thank you for tuning into the Faithly Stories podcast. We pray this episode gave you the encouragement you needed to continue on your journey. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff, and volunteers. 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