Both sides of my family came to America from different European countries. One side lived comfortably. One side was poor and had suffered trauma multiple times. Both worked hard and made a good life here. It's about you and your work. You and your persistence. If one door closes, you move ahead and make your next opportunity.
Pray with me
June 21, 2026
Heavenly Father,
Today we thank You for fathers. We thank You for the men who have carried burdens no one saw, fought battles no one knew about, and stood watch over their families through seasons of joy and seasons of struggle.
Lord, bless the fathers who feel strong, and bless the fathers who feel weary. Strengthen the hands that have worked long hours, the hearts that have carried heavy concerns, and the minds that have wrestled with difficult decisions. Remind them that their labor in love is never wasted and that every sacrifice made in faith is seen by You.
Give them wisdom to lead, courage to stand for truth, and humility to walk closely with You. Let them be men who love deeply, forgive quickly, and reflect the character of Christ in their homes. May their children rise up and call them blessed, not because they were perfect, but because they pointed others toward a perfect Savior.
For fathers carrying regret, bring grace. For fathers carrying grief, bring comfort. For fathers carrying responsibility, bring strength. For fathers carrying dreams for their families, bring hope.
Surround them with Your favor as with a shield. Establish the work of their hands. Bless their marriages, their children, their grandchildren, and the generations that will follow because of their faithfulness. Let their legacy be one of integrity, courage, kindness, and unwavering trust in You.
May they never forget that before they are fathers, they are sons of the Most High God, loved, chosen, and sustained by Your unfailing grace.
And when the road is difficult, remind them of Your promise: "Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go." (Joshua 1:9)
We ask that Your richest blessings rest upon every father today. Fill their hearts with peace, their homes with joy, and their lives with the unmistakable evidence of Your goodness.
In the mighty and precious name of Jesus Christ,
Amen.
Remember that time Elon Musk offered to write a check to UN World Food Programme to end world hunger, and his only requirement was that every dollar be accounted for and itemized for the public to see.
And then the UN rejected his offer?
Remember that? I do.
Next time you want to attack the man for “hoarding wealth” while people go hungry…Remember he literally tried to give it away and the UN wouldn’t take it.
A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.
His name is Qing Li.
He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.
The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.
Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.
He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.
Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.
The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.
The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.
Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.
Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.
Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.
The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.
The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.
When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.
Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.
This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.
A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.
The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.
Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.
They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.
The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.
After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.
What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.
But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.
The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.
Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.
Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.
@ClayTravis According to Democrats, asking for ID to protect elections is discriminatory. Asking for ID to enter the Obama Library? That’s just common sense. Amazing how standards change
DOCTOR Jill Biden left Joe Biden on the stage at the Obama presidential center and Joe appeared to have no idea what was going on. Why do they keep taking him to public events? It’s cruel.
The Stadium Wave Spell
I went to an American baseball game.
I understood the field.
I understood the ball.
I understood the hot dog man shouting meat into the sky.
Then the crowd began doing something I was not prepared for.
One section stood up.
Then sat down.
Then the next section stood up.
Then sat down.
Then the next.
Then the next.
A human wave moved around the stadium.
Thousands of people.
Perfect timing.
No conductor.
No whistle.
No visible commander.
Just civilians suddenly becoming one large organism with nachos.
I froze.
This was not cheering.
This was crowd sorcery.
The wave approached our section.
A child next to me yelled,
“Get ready!”
Get ready?
For what?
Impact?
Judgment?
Public choreography?
I stood too early.
Nobody else stood.
I sat down immediately.
A man behind me laughed.
“Almost, buddy.”
Almost?
I had failed the spell.
The wave came closer.
The child raised one hand like a battlefield captain.
“Not yet.”
I nodded.
“Understood.”
“Not yet.”
I gripped my seat.
“Now!”
I stood.
Too late.
The wave had already passed.
I was just a man standing alone with mustard on his sleeve.
The child looked disappointed.
That hurt more than losing a duel.
He said,
“You gotta feel it.”
Feel it.
America had hidden timing inside the crowd.
In Japan, if thousands of people move together, there is usually rehearsal, instruction, or a train station involved.
In America, a stadium full of strangers can become a dragon because someone in section 214 got bored.
The wave came again.
This time I watched.
Left side rising.
Middle rising.
My section approaching.
The child whispered,
“Wait…”
The crowd lifted.
“Wait…”
My soul left my body.
“NOW!”
I stood.
Perfect.
For one second, I was not foreign.
I was not confused.
I was not NyanChuu alone in a baseball stadium.
I was one hair on the back of a giant American beast.
Then I sat down.
The child nodded.
“Better.”
Better.
I had received promotion from the small commander.
The wave continued around the stadium.
People cheered.
Beer survived.
Nachos survived.
Somehow, democracy survived.
By the third wave, I was addicted.
I began judging other sections.
Too slow.
Too lazy.
Strong effort from the upper deck.
Excellent rise near left field.
This is how America gets you.
First you fear the ritual.
Then you join it.
Then you become disappointed in strangers who do not perform it correctly.
Conclusion:
The stadium wave is not entertainment.
It is a spell that turns thousands of seated Americans into one moving creature.
NyanChuu will return to the ballpark.
Next time, I will not wait for instructions.
I will feel the beast approaching, rise with the people, and never again shame my eight-year-old commander.
Your heart should breaking as you read this. Because you all need to realize something about Usha Vance Karoline Leavitt Jennifer Hegseth and Jeanette Rubio These four women right now are each carrying something that most people will never fully understand. Usha Vance pregnant with her fourth child baby boy coming in July and JD chose no formal leave. She is home. Alone. Counting the days. While her husband carries America. Karoline Leavitt who stood at the most powerful podium in America for 39 weeks pregnant never missed a single day. Came back to work four days after having baby Niko. And today holds baby Vivi knowing another briefing is always just around the corner. Jennifer Hegseth who holds seven children together every single time Pete boards that plane. Every deployment. Every trip. Every morning the kids ask where dad is. She answers. Alone. And Jeanette Rubio who has watched her husband cross three continents in one week away from her away from their children for a country that may never fully know her name.
Four women. Four completely different sacrifices. One identical truth. They never asked America to see them. They never posted about what it costs. They never once made it about themselves. They just held everything together. Quietly. Completely. So their husbands could hold America. And today we just need every American to stop for one moment. And say something these four women have waited too long to hear. Thank you. Not for your husbands. For you. For everything you carry that nobody films.
God cover Usha. Cover Karoline. Cover Jennifer. Cover Jeanette. And remind every one of them America sees you. Even on the days it forgets to say it. Make sure to repost this today. Because these women deserve to be seen.
As a general rule, anytime Barack Obama lectures the country or its people on their purported sins—with Khalil Gibran pop platitudes—he is seeking absolution for his own obsessions by projecting his own guilty desires onto others.
The latest? At the dedication of his narcissistic Obama Presidential Center in Chicago—a $850 million flak-tower, monolithic boondoggle mired in debt—Obama lectured us on the need to resist the allure off "money, attention, [and] fame."
Thus spoke the owner of four homes, three of them multimillion-dollar mansions, whose last inert year in office was spent closing book and Netflix deals that ensured he would become a multimillionaire the moment he left office, and on spec, jets private to sermonize to various audiences–often at $400,000 a shot—on their own false-consciousness shortcomings.
Plain-speaking, frugal Harry Truman in obscure retirement in Independence, Missouri Obama certainly is not.
Every month, Martín’s parents took a trip to visit Grandma and came back on the same train the next day. One day, Martín said to them:
"I'm a big boy now. Can I go visit Grandma by myself?"
His parents thought about it and finally said yes. They went with him to the train station. As the train got ready to leave, they hugged him, gave him lots of advice, and stood by the window. Martín replied:
"I know, I know! You’ve told me this a thousand times!"
Just before the train left, his dad leaned in close and whispered:
"If you feel scared or unsure, this is for you," and slipped something into Martín’s pocket.
Now Martín was on the train alone for the first time, just like he wanted. He looked out the window, watching the world go by. But soon, people started pushing past him. Some were loud, others got on and off quickly. The train conductor made a comment about him being alone. A woman looked at him with sad eyes.
Martín started to feel nervous. Each minute, he felt more scared and alone. He lowered his head and felt like crying. Then he remembered what his dad had put in his pocket. With shaky hands, he reached in and pulled out a small piece of paper.
It said:
"Son, I’m in the last car of the train."
That’s what life is like. We have to let our kids try new things and go out into the world. But as parents, we always want to be close — just in case they get scared or face something hard. As long as we’re alive, we’ll always be in the “last car,” watching over them, ready to help when they need us.
(Credit to the original author.)