Welcome to Politics by Faith. Thanks for spending some time here today. Full disclosure,

I'm filling in for a different podcast called The President's Daily Brief, hosted by Mike Baker.

He is off on a four-week camelback journey through the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian desert. I was like, I mean, we've all done that before. It's finally about time he's getting, I mean, I did that. I've done that like 10 times, like whatever. So he'll be gone for a while. So I'm filling in. It's a huge honor. It's one of the top podcasts in the country. And if it's going to be honest, that's going to take a lot of time and a lot of time I don't have. So I'm going to be going short on these podcasts for the next month. We've tried a different format, a bunch of different formats for the show over the last couple of years. We've done 45-minute episodes, five-minute shows. They've been like 10 to 15 minutes. So we're going to go like five minutes for a month

or so. If you are tuning in from the president's daily brief, you're like, who's this Mike Slater

guy? If you go back a couple weeks, kind of get a better taste of what we've been doing lately.

But the mission here is to take the news of the day, filter it through a biblical lens and some biblical truth

so that our anxiety goes down.

That's the goal.

We want our anxiety down because when your anxiety is up, you can't think clearly.

And we want to be fit and healthy and clear-eyed so we can fight another day. And we can't do that

when we're in fight or flight panic mode. That's what the enemy wants us to be. There's nothing

new under the sun. So anything that's going on today has biblical parallels and truths that we can

apply. And that's the mission of our podcast here.

One thing that crossed my mind today I wanted to share, obviously looking at the horrible fires in Los Angeles, and we've been covering it on the radio show a lot and taking many different angles.

One of the political, because it is political.

I've lived in California for 12 years, San Diego.

And I said for 12 years, there's a huge difference between a drought and a man-made water shortage. California does not have a drought any more than they've always had a drought because

it's a desert. What California has is a man-made water shortage. And they have intentionally,

purposefully, as we've detailed it many, many times, purposefully, intentionally failed to solve this

problem. It's a man-made water shortage. Similarly, wildfires are natural, but a citywide

inferno is man-made. It's a political failure. And hopefully one of the things that can come

from this fire are people realizing that the Democrats, at least in California,

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