Today is the 20th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is wonderful to be here with you today. And here we are closing down another week. So that gives us the opportunity to reflect back over the week.

We're putting it to rest, letting it become part of history, but we reflect back

so that we become more and more self-aware of how our choices and our thoughts and our words

and our actions, they all add up to write the story of the week.

And we certainly imprint ourselves on the world and on all the people that are around us.

And so taking a moment just to look back

and weigh it all out and identify those places

where we've done well and where we also have need of improvement.

It's very, very important.

And so I'm grateful to be here going through that personal internal process right now like we should.

And in preparing to take this next step forward,

and the next step forward that leads us to the end of another week, leads us into a

brand new book again, one that we will read in its entirety again. This is the tenth of the

12 books of prophecy known as the minor prophets,

and this is the book of Haggiyai.

And as has been revealed, like many of these minor prophets,

we don't have a lot of information about who they were, where they came from.

We know that Haggai was among those who had returned from the Babylonian exile,

and were living in Jerusalem.

He was probably one of the first waves of exile to return,

and that is when the Persians, the Persian Empire, defeated Babylon,

and let the people go back to rebuild Jerusalem. We know that Aghii had access

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