Sometimes I make decrees to my family. I'm not sure how it comes off. I think it's pretty

chill, but definitely as the dad, I am a decree issue. We're all just walking to a room.

Everybody's fine. They're doing their thing, reading a book, doing homework, whatever.

Responsible stuff. And I'll just walk in and be like, hey, family, listen up. We got

to do this and this and this. We need to be ready by this time. This is important. We

need to focus on this. Everybody got that. And they're like, yeah, sure. And then they

all deliver because they're a great family. My favorite people ever. And then every

now and then it occurs to me, huh, that was a decree again. Sometimes you do the dad decree

thing. And maybe that's fine. I mean, the head of a household. I'm a dad. It's, I gotta keep

things moving along. Maybe sometimes I get a little decree happy too. That's just something

for me to keep an eye on and try to always be perhaps a bit more self-aware about.

But let me tell you, somebody else who like decrees who probably never did have that self-awareness

moment and never did try to throttle it back. And that's Xerxes, King of Land, King of

Persia. That guy, he just issued decrees, rapid fire, kind of whatever he felt in the given

moment or more accurately, whatever the most recent advisor had told him to do by whispering

in his ear. But not just Xerxes who likes decrees, we get decrees from Persian kings all

over this chunk of the Old Testament. Second Chronicles ends with a decree of Cyrus. Ezra

begins with a decree of Cyrus. Then the decree of Cyrus gets lost. And then in Ezra

6, we get another decree. This one's from Darius saying we found the other decree. And

now here's an even more decree to go along with that. Looks like we get effectively a decree

from Arta Xerxes in the book of Nehemiah. And in Esther 1, we get a decree from Xerxes

right out of the gate. But it's not really his decree, is it? You remember that? He's

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