American Thought Leaders - David Green and Bill High: How One Family Built a Billion-Dollar Company That Gives Away Half Its Profits

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

What happens when a business decides faith matters more than profit? Apparently, it flourishes.Hobby Lobby, founded by David and Barbara Green in Oklahoma City in 1972, is a private, family-owned corporation now with over a thousand arts-and-crafts stores nationwide. The stores are closed on Sundays, do not sell any Halloween-themed products, operate debt-free, and are run according to Biblical principles, emphasizing the value of faith and family life.David Green told me in our recent interview: “God blesses us when we do what we should do, rather than what’s maybe most profitable.”“When we closed on Sunday, we did less business. When we stopped selling Halloween, we did less business. I can name seven or eight different things that ... cost us, but it was the right thing to do,“ he said. ”So I think God is asking us to do the right thing and not what’s most profitable.”In 2012, the owners of Hobby Lobby sued the federal government for requiring company insurance plans to cover four specific contraceptives—two morning-after pills and two copper IUDs—that they argued could end life after conception. Facing daily fines of $1.3 million, the Green family filed a lawsuit that culminated in a 5–4 victory at the Supreme Court.In my interview with Green and his longtime friend and co-author of his many books, Bill High, we talk about their latest book “The Legacy Life.”How do we build a lasting, meaningful legacy? How do we become good stewards of our resources, time, and talents? How can families ensure their values are truly passed on to later generations—and not lost over time?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

It wasn't most profitable to sue the government, but at the same time I think God blesses us when we do what we should do rather than what's maybe more profitable. What happens when a business decides that faith matters more than profit? The government told me, you're going to do it, and if you don't do it, we're going to charge you $1.2 million a day. From fighting and winning, a landmark Supreme Court case on religious liberty, to giving away half of the company's profits, Hobby Lobby founder David Green has always been true to his values.

We opened our first store in 72 right here in Oklahoma City and it was only about 600 square feet. Now we've got over a thousand stores and we're thankful. He and Bill High, the CEO of Legacy Stone, are co-authors of a number of books, including most recently The Legacy Life. Every generation is responsible. They should own this vision, mission, values for the next generation. One of the things that I tell them is I want you to be more concerned about your money. marriage and your family and your children in Hobby Lobby. And that's why they work five days a week and not six and long hours.

And that's why we closed on Sunday. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Yanya Kellick. David Green, Bill Hi, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Good to be here. Good to be here. Let's start by talking about something that the Hobby Lobby managed to do at the Supreme Court. I mean, you set a precedent that a business could infuse its religious values into its functioning, into its operations. So tell me about how this all came about.

Well, it came about the Supreme Court, or the government told me with our insurance policy we would have to provide four prescriptions that we believe would take life, and that's something we couldn't do. And so that's where our family said, we just can't do that, even though the government said you're going to do it. And if you don't do it, we're going to charge you $1.2 million a day. Now that number comes from the number of employees we had. So we mathematically figured we're going to either do what the government tells us are going to pay $1.2 million a day. So that's when we had to make a decision that we had to sue the government, which we like

our government and that we love our country. But at the same time, they were asking us to do something we couldn't do. And so that's how the whole thing starts. started with us to get us to the Supreme Court. And that was, I think, 11 years ago. It's kind of an ongoing battle. Did you believe that it would end up on the side? It was even a very close decision.

Yes, it was a, we won by one, and we don't even know why we should win by one. We should have won by all of them. No one should ask someone to take life or give them a fine if they didn't. And that's what was happening us so we're very thankful that we did win the case and but during the time that we were taking it and even after that we have people that will not shop us because of our culture.

Our culture is one that doesn't please everybody. But we have found out in every area in life it seemed like or in our business where things look like it wouldn't work, it doesn't. For instance, closing on Sunday didn't work either. So when we closed on Sunday we did less business. When we stopped selling Halloween, we did less business. But I can name seven or eight different things that when we did it cost us. But it was the right thing to do.

So I think God is asking us to do the right thing and not what's most profitable. It wasn't most profitable to sue the government, but at the same time I think God blesses us when we do what we should do rather than what's maybe more profitable. This is a central theme in your new book, in fact. know, just basically living by values and infusing those values into the family and setting up structures which are kind of beyond anything I frankly ever imagined within the family to accomplish said things. One thing I noticed in the stores, let's talk about the stores for a moment. I visited a shop before this interview and I noticed two things. One is, it's Christmas

real early. Okay. And the other thing as I noticed was that there's fall decorations. They have the colors, but there really is no Halloween at all, which was kind of surprising. Yeah, one time we carried it, and we just felt like the Lord just led us, like he did on, we were open on Sundays, we just felt like the Lord was saying we shouldn't be selling Halloween. And so, yes, we were selling tens of millions of dollars, and now we do not sell Halloween. So those are some of the things that the, I know that the Lord just worked with our family that we should do some of these things, and definitely it has, you know, It changes the culture as far as the people that will and will not shop us.

But somehow another God has always blessed us because of our doing or trying to do the right thing. What is the issue with Halloween? How would you describe that? You know, when I was a kid and I came from a pastor's home, I was the first one out and the last one in. It was time to get candy, free candy, and we didn't have a lot of candy, so we took advantage of it. And I think it was more of something more for children, but now you go in and you see your competitors with ghost and skeletons and things like that. And it just doesn't look like something that we ought to be involved in. Yeah, even in our neighborhood, the front yards are decorated with graves.

And so it's like that's a celebration of death, something much darker. And so I think it was a good decision to turn away from a celebration that wasn't God honoring. It's turned from the innocence, even when I was a kid, you'd dress up in a paper bag because you wanted the candy, but now it's much more blood and gore. So you're writing this book together. Tell me a little bit, Bill, how you came to be working together on this. Dave and I have been doing work together for about 25 years, and it's just been an evolving thing but probably the biggest thing that we've done together is we've hosted leadership events.

So we bring in CEOs from around the country. In fact, in the next two days, we've got about 100 leaders from across the country who are coming in. And they're coming in to hear the Hobby Lobby story. How do they do this? How does this business work when it shouldn't? Not too many businesses close on Sundays, close at 8 if you're a retail business, and give away half of your profits and have it still work. So people want to come hear the story and they want to learn and they want to grow.

So it's been a fun journey to be able to work with David and the family over these years. Well, so you mentioned so many things that are all things we have to cover here. Okay, so first of all, the Hobby Lobby story. Not everyone watching will know it. David, perhaps you can give us a picture of where it started and how you got here. Yeah, it started with Barbara and I. Actually, a friend of mine, and we came together. We borrowed $600 from the bank in 1970, and so that's how we started making frames in our garage.

and we would have our kids. I had seven and nine. Martin, Steve, were seven and nine, and they would glue the frames together, and we gave them seven cents apiece. My wife worked the five years without pay at all. So that's how we started, it was just making frames in our garage. We opened our first store in 72 right here in Oklahoma City,

and it was only about 600 square feet. So that was our first store. So now we've got over a thousand stores, and God has blessed us, and we've worked real hard, And we have great, great people, and we're thankful for what God has done with our company. Along this trip, Bill came alongside us and helped our family with kind of a vision, mission, values, document that we have. And that's helped us a lot to know this family, this is our mission, this is our vision,

and this is our values. And Gen 1 and Gen 2 came together. He worked with us to come up with this document, and we have a hard copy of this is who we are. And I think that's helped our family because we meet once a year. January that says this is who we are this is the document we have a special Bible that everybody gets when they're 16 and older so right now we have I think at 51 in my family and I say I think because it keeps growing we keep adding pretty regularly I've got I think it's 14 24 great-grandkids and so God has blessed us with a big

family and we love we love our family is there a single one or a couple of decisions doing the right thing instead of the easy thing or the right thing instead of the thing that will give you a lot of cash right in a moment sort of thing that were you know a tough decision but it worked out well there was one store that we had to leave after we'd been there five years we had 10 years left on the lease and and it was good when we signed it but the neighborhood went down and it seemed like that can happen over just a few years and it was a bad neighborhood and so we knew we needed we were putting people in the store in harm's way and so we knew we needed walk away from this. And we had a wholesale liquor company that would take our lease and take us

out of it. And I thought, no, we just can't do that. And so I thought, well, someone would say, well, God's going to bless you for that, but we paid 10 years on that lease. So that's one of the many that I could tell you where we did the right thing, but it didn't necessarily directly look like it was the right thing. And that's what we're supposed to do, I believe. We're supposed to do things because it's right, not because it's profitable. But over the years, blessed Hobby Lobby, even though we've made those kind of decisions like suing the government or closing on Sundays or not selling Halloween. So there's a lot of those type.

I just gave you one, of course, with this space that we had that we needed to get rid of it for 10 years, we didn't let someone take us out of that lease because we knew it was just the wrong thing to do. I saw a quote on the wall outside of this space here, something to the tune of that you don't want to make your decision making too complex. Where does that come from? Well, all of those I could talk for an hour on. One of them is just keep it simple and one of its close counts. I mean, we're not perfectionist because when you're running a store that's got literally millions of products that you could put in it, you've got to keep, how do you keep it simple? We run one store

a thousand times, basically. We tweak it a little there, but we try to run it. And one of the things that says ask the Lord for direction and another one says study, study, study, and too many choices are harmful to business. That's what's on the wall. But all of that together comes in with business in our ministry. About every place, all of those things comes into play. Too many choices are just harmful to life and to business. And so that's what we try to do is to eliminate the number of choices that we have. So tell me a little bit about this process, Bill of, you know, coming up with a family mission vision and why this is so important? Well, just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal actually published an article about how families

are actually working on this family side, family mission statements to keep the family together. Here in the U.S., I don't think we appreciate this idea that families really are meant to be generational in nature. And the idea of a family lasting 150 years, that's much more commonplace around the world, Switzerland, Japan, Italy, and you'll see companies that have been in business for a thousand years. And why not? If Hobby Lobby can keep going and maintain its culture, it's giving, all the people employed, it's good for the country, it's good for our culture as a whole. So that's the idea. But you've got to start with what's the family vision, mission, and values.

And certainly you hear about, you know, nobility and royal families and stuff like thinking like this. But you're saying, I think, this isn't just for people who have the means. This is actually something that could be helpful for everyone, right? This is every family. So our best examples are actually young families. No kids are getting ready to have kids. We see families that if they start on this process, they're going to keep their family together

and they won't split apart. And so that's the basic idea. Nobody wants to have a family that splits apart. It's the greatest grief that you'll have is when you have a kid who walks away from the family values that you were trying to teach. How do you actually kind of implement this in a family? Which, you know, presumably not everyone's like,

yes, of course, this is exactly what we need to do. I think most people will probably be like, oh, that sounds like a great idea, Jan, but, you know, we're not really into that. We're not really participating. How do you build this? It's really pretty simple. I mean, you don't have to be the Green family, you don't have to be Hobby Lobby.

We say that every family, if they just would start with defining your five family values, your three to five, their family values, God family people. We have five. But you just start with what are the five values? Sometimes we'll say what are the five words that describe you. So if you write down just those values and then you put them down on a piece of paper, put them at your dinner table, put them on the wall of your home and said, said, let's live by those values and you talk about them. If you just did that much, then you would have a good start on helping your family come

together. The Bible talks about this idea that these things should be on your heart and that you should talk about them when you get up, when you lay down, when you are walking by the way, and publish it on the doorposts of your house. That's what we do. And we just say that that's for every family. So just values if you just did that much. You can go further and you can have a vision statement and a mission statement.

We give some examples in the book. The Green Family Mission Statement is to love God intimately and to live extravagant generosity. And that's a gathering point for the family. That's why they have the annual family celebration. So it really is pretty simple. It's just that we tend to not treat family as intentional as we do our business. our business or our careers. There's also, you know, there's kind of operational things here, you know, annual family

celebrations that you encourage people to have. There's a monthly family meeting. It's a bit like running a family like a business. Is that right? We have, our monthly meeting is one of giving, and the ones that give the money is the one that earned it. So we have to decide when you have 40 members of family, you know, who's part of that. So that's what we've decided, and different families may do it a different way,

but for me, I would rather have someone that's non-family that was a Christian than a family member that was not going to use the money in the right ways. But we do have enough people in our family that's part of the business that we come together once a month and we decide where we're going to give the monies that we give away. And one time, the way it got to 50% is like I said one time, I said, you can't out give God, and that's where I got in trouble. you know and that's where it all started you know because we at the time we were tithing and Barbara and I've always tied then we were given some monies from the companies but I said you know

the Bible said well it's so this was what I felt I felt that he was saying oh so easy to say you can't out give God you haven't really tried so I'd never heard a message on it I didn't know how to do it so Mark my oldest son and I came up with the same idea said you know what we're supposed to do I think we're supposed to give this amount and then a month later six months later we double it. Now, don't double it every six months, but add that same amount. So if you give a dollar, then $2, then $3 and $4. And so that's what we decided we were going to do. And we looked down the road and we said, you know, in about seven or eight years, that's about the total volume and it's not going to work, but at least we're going to try to out give God. And that was

25 years ago. And if you looked at how we started, we are ahead of that. So at some point, we said, you know, at the time we did it, the government would let you write off half of what you earned and so we said we're just going to give half so probably about 25 years we've been able to give half of our earnings to various ministries and so that's what we do once to month we bring the family together and here again out of 40 of us there's only about six of us that work here so we don't think it's our job to tell someone what God has for them so some of them are in ministries some of them do things totally outside the company but we all are on one page in terms of this is who God wants us to be every single one of us have a purpose of us have a

even though you're not part of Hobby Lobby, that's a purpose, but you have a purpose, you have everyone has a purpose, and we just want everybody to fulfill whatever God has for them. My mother and dad were just pastors of small churches, and they both had a purpose. I think about my mother's purpose was, I think, she witnessed to a lot of people. She had people come to know Christ, but I think one of her main purpose, one of her main purposes was raising six children to serve the Lord, and so those six children, and she She's going to receive reward for what she's done through the people that she has raised. So every one of us have a purpose and what is that purpose.

This idea of giving as a normal part, is that, you know, explain to me how that works in the context of the business and in the context of the family. And is it both, it's 50% for both or how does that, how does that? I think the family believes that whatever we earn we should tithe and that's what we do. We tied on whatever we earn. And so the business is, we came, the Bible says, in fact, it's in Psalm 24 and 1, it says God owns everything. You're not an owner of anything. I don't have a hard time telling people, you own nothing.

God owns everything. So we're all just stewards. We're not owners. We're stewards. The Bible says so. So we came to that decision that we're not owners, we're stewards. So we're here to steward what God has given. given us. So everybody that works here, which is six or seven of us, we get a salary.

I make less than I did 25 years ago when you look at cost of living. So it's not ours, but I should get paid for what I do. So if you work for Hobby Lobby, you get paid for whatever your responsibilities are. But everything else is not ours, it's gods. And so then what we want to do is we want to be good stewardship of what he's blessed us with, because it is not ours. We have accepted, that's a big deal for someone to accept. Well, I worked harder, I'm smarter, you know, whatever. No, no, no, no. Whatever you have, God has given you, and he owns it,

and you need to be a good steward's of it. And that's what we try to do with Hobby Lobby. It's not just about business people that have money to give. It's a matter that our time, everything belongs to God, our talent that he's given us. And so someone else's, what God has created them for may be totally different than mine, but he has created all of us to make a difference.

So I don't want to make it sound as though that you have to have money to have. purpose because that is what God has put in our hands but some maybe he's given someone else different talents and other things that that is their talent and what he's given them to do one of the things that keeps coming up actually on American thought leaders on the show is this idea that you know we've kind of forgotten about the family here and you alluded to this earlier earlier in our conversation and it what is the prescription from taking a family

that isn't, or do you have any insight into this that isn't there, you know, isn't necessarily looking to have lots of children, isn't necessarily, you know, kind of up for this whole thing. But see that something's not right and are looking, right, to get some inspiration. Well, certainly there are families that don't look good. I think that my only thought there is God still loves you and he cares for you and he wants to take you from wherever you are, He wants to take you to the best you can from where you are. But when I bring all of our co-managers in, so we bring everyone that's a co-manager.

So every manager has been here, and we talk to them. And one of the things that I tell them is I want you to be more concerned about your marriage and your family and your children than Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby is less important than your family. So we think we should put a lot of emphasis on family. Barbara and I have been married 65 years in about two weeks, two months. So we think that's important, and we think family is very important. So everybody, there was a particular time that I know that God said to you,

I'm putting these people in your charge. So I've got 50,000 people that he's put in my charge. So I want them to know that their family is more important. Their marriage is more important, and I really want them to spend time. And that's why they work five days a week and not six and long hours, and that's why we closed on Sunday is we think that the family is more important than the business. And by the way, because I think we do that, business is taken care of better than any other way that we would be. How many businesses work like this?

I mean, seriously? You're telling me, I mean, what you're telling me almost can sound fantastical to people. Yeah, I would say that it really boils down to what I would say is family, worldview. Chapter 4 of the book, we talk about what's gone wrong. Why are so many families experiencing alienations? Why do most family businesses fail by the third generation? What's our numbers like? 85% failure rate in generation three?

And why is that? And that's not the design, that's not what anybody wants. We prefer to put things in motion that last. But ultimately what's gone wrong really is this world view that we're just raising up individuals that go off and spread out all over the world kind of idea. And so this is sometimes how I illustrate it, this hyper individualism is fighting against the notion of family as a team. Family is supposed to be a team and it's supposed to grow and expand together so it has more

influence, it takes more territory. David and I really grew up that way, even though you're a little bit older than me, but as a family, man, we had to work together because if we didn't work together, man, sometimes we didn't have food on the table. So that idea of families, a team, is competing with this hyper individualistic state that we're in the world today. That's why we have so many families that are small families, countries that have one-child policies and the like that we could get into that really create this notion that I'm more

important than the team. Well, so this is actually something that I was thinking about as I went through the store. You know, there's starting to be a shift. There's been a lot of manufacturing, especially of products of the sort that would be found at Hobby Lobby was done in China. There's been starting to be a shift of these products to other places. And I'm wondering how that is happening here.

A little bit of a diversion. We'll go back to the major conversation, but it's something I think about a lot. Yeah, I think what's happening, Hobby Lobby has over 2,000 different vendors. So we have an awful lot of vendors from every country in the Far East. and in Europe, just a lot of different countries, a lot of which has come from China, but over the past several years, a lot of it's moved out. But some of it's hard to move out

because the cost in China is at a point where it might be still advantageous to buy from China because what we're trying to do, maybe we should try to affect our government. What we're trying to do is to earn as maximum amount of money as we can to tell more people about Jesus. So that's what we're doing. So our buyers are not confused.

They're out here buying the very, very best items that we need from whatever country, but a lot of it is moving out of China into various other countries that we would prefer, but we don't prefer it over spending more money for it. Let's talk about your involvement in the Museum of the Bible, which, by the way, is an amazing, amazing institution. I'd quite love going there. Yeah, my youngest son is chairman and has been from the very, beginning and he says that God tricked us into it because we had no idea that we were going to

be involved in a museum but that's the way that it happened someone came to us and they wanted us to help them in Texas they had no money they had no space they had no they had nothing so for some reason God got us and started involved in buying some antiquities but then after a while we said I think we're supposed to be the one that puts this museum in and I say that we're the one We had a lot of people that come alongside us to help us with finance and put it together. So we really feel like God's word needs to be lifted up, and that's what we've tried to do in Washington, D.C., with the museum. So we're really proud of Steve and all of his crew that put together. We made more than our share of God helped us get through us, and we're really proud of what God has helped us

and with a lot of people helping us put together in Washington, D.C., because we believe that his word needs to be lifted up, and that's what we've tried to do in Washington, D.C., is lift his word up. And along with that, my older son is involved in getting all the languages translated, and now there's over 6,000 languages, and every year there's more and more of them translated. The Bible says, to preach the gospel every creature,

how do you do that without the gospel? So I think it's very, very important, and that's one of his main jobs. My older son is to work with a lot of other people to get all the different languages in every different... In the museum, you'll see a spot where these languages are completed, these we're working on, and these haven't been started yet. So you'll see that.

That's one of my main... I like that particular display more than any other because I see that we're moving in the right direction to see that everybody has God's word in their language. Something that I've noticed over the course of my life is that often institutions, when they start small with a really great idea, when they reach a certain scale,

they seem to go off the rails. It's almost as if the purpose of the institution becomes to perpetuate itself as opposed to live up to those ideas or enact those ideas. And I've seen this in all sorts of contexts, actually. It keeps being reinforced. I thought of this as a kid, still kind of very young.

And I'm finding myself wondering how it is that you here at Hobby Lobby accomplish preventing that from happening, or do you see it as an actual potential problem? No, I think it's a real problem. You think about some of our universities at Yale or Harvard that started out as Christian and they're about as far away as they can be.

And so we see that even in church organizations that all of a sudden they accept this and this, and it's just, it's not been. biblical. So what we do, we have five things that we give to and it's document. And every single one of them is God's word and man so. If those two things are not in part of it, we're not involved with it. Because I see a lot of money that's given in churches and in ministries that is nothing more than vapor. It's good. You know, curing cancer is good. Give to it. But we give to things that have two things and they have to have two things involved. And that's

God's Word in Man's So, and so we want to make sure that people are really, that's what the ministry's about. It's okay to feed people, but you need to feed them to tell them about Jesus. You need to give people clean water, and we do, but you need to tell them about Jesus. So everything we do in our document, this is what we give to, and we have five different things we give to. We think those five include everything that's in the Bible, you know. And so that's really important to us to really study to see what the purpose of that ministry is. It's about telling people about Jesus, them accept Him as their personal Savior, or did they get off the rails because you can get off the rails?

But God has given us because we think one of the things, one of the things you see out there on the sign, is ask God for direction, and I think you have to do that. And I think he's given us good direction. When you think about two ministries we've been involved with over 25 years, Every home for Christ and one hope gets children the gospel and we've given over a billion people the gospel and every home for Christ over a billion homes have got the gospel. So those are really solid God's word and man's so. So those are the two things that have to be involved for us to write a dollar check to anybody. Yeah, let me jump in here too because your question too just about you're really asking a governance question. How does a family govern itself?

How does a business, how do institutions govern themselves? There's a book out there called How the Great Philanthropists Failed. And they fail because they don't do some basic things. They don't define vision, mission values. But equally important, David referenced this idea. You've got to determine who are the next trustees, who are the next group of leaders. And you've got to have criteria for what those leaders look like. how you appoint them and then you also got to have provisions for how you remove them if

they fail to subscribe to that vision mission values. That's why most of these institutions go right. That's why most families go right is they don't actually have good governance systems. And again, that's what part two of the book is really about is how do you have good governance systems? You've got to have vision, mission values, you've got to have a code of conduct. And that's what Hobby Lobby is really built into its stewardship trust so they can govern for a long time. And again, in our Western kind of mindset, Hobby Lobby's been at this for a little more

than 50 years, and we think that's a long time. But you go to other parts of the world, business has been around for a thousand years. And you go into the Bible. There are stories of families in the Bible that are a couple thousand years. And so I think we just need to appreciate this idea that we need to think much longer term here in this country. One of the chapters, is chapter 11, and it's really about the story of the broken legacy, because certainly there'd be people who would watch and listen to this podcast, and they'd say, wow, I've got a messed up story, and how could my story, how can I ever put the toothpaste back in the tube? And that chapter is really a story of hope, because there are so many stories, even in the

Bible, Father Abraham, well, Abraham kicked out a son, you know, and had all kinds of dysfunction and you go through this all throughout the scriptures there are these stories that seem to be very broken and yet God always redeems and restores. I don't know how or why or when. Sometimes it might take a generation but he does. That's God's theme and so we just want to give people hope that it's a good story. Even if it may not seem that way right now, you have a good story and if you'll be faithful today, God can set a right that way. which is broken. You know, you're just reminding me of one particular story

in the book, a pretty short one, but there's a pastor that was working in Africa somewhere and basically ended up leaving the area feeling like he was a complete failure, but then people came in later. 80 years later. And 80 years later noticed. There's a lot of Christian activity in these areas

and they figured out that it was this guy from 80 years prior. So the point is you could have a, profound impact without even realizing even if you immediately haven't. Well, David's mom and dad, they were pastors of small churches. And when they got done to the end of their life, did they say, wow, look at our big giant church? No.

But if you look what they set in motion with their six kids, they could have never imagined Hobby Lobby. Yeah, I talk about my mother because she died in the arms of my sister and she says, do you see them, do you see them? And she was seeing angels. And I think about my mother that had six children that served the Lord. There is nothing in this world she wanted. Now you're rich when you don't want anything. She wanted for nothing. She had a tremendous relationship with the Lord. And I would say a billionaire that didn't know the Lord would love to die the way my mother did. And so my mother was very, very wealthy. And so wealth is, how do you describe

it? In my opinion, it's someone like my mother that really wants nothing. And, and has a tremendous relationship with the Lord and their children serve the Lord. And I think that's what we all want. And that's not happening to all of us, but God still has a spot for us no matter where we are because that's what's important. So I'm not as concerned about the family running this thing

a hundred years from now, but I would like 100 years or 200 years if the Lord Terry's that the prophets of it tells people about Jesus. But what I do want is I want the family to be united behind God's word, and that's why we, put together the document that this is about God's Word, and that's where our unity hopefully

is behind God's Word. Hobby Lobby is just such an astonishing story. And I think the scale issue, I think you said it earlier at the beginning. You said you try to run a thousand stores individually. How did you frame it? Thank you. We try to run one store a thousand times. One store a thousand times. Sometimes I say I'm not smart enough to run a thousand stores, but I can try. We work all of us together to run one store. We have a few things, it's tweaks, but we pretty much run. Every one of the stores have that exact same encounter there, and they have the same items,

and so we try to do it a thousand times and make a few tweaks, and so that's what we would like to do. Well, as we finish up a final thought? You know, my final thought would be, I had someone, news people was talking to me the other day, and they kept asking him, what are you going to do next? What are you going to do next? What are you going to do next? And they asked it several times, and I always said the same thing. I want to tell more people about Jesus. What are you going to do next? I want to tell more people about Jesus. So that's what Hopi Lobby wants to do. There is good news out there, and that someone died for us and paid for our sins,

and I want to tell as many people as I can. And that's what we're about. That's what we're about. want to be about is we want to be bigger to tell more people about Christ. Why do we want to be bigger? Why do we add 50 stories a year? It's because we want to make more money to have more influence on more people to tell them the good news. And that's what we want to be and that's what we would like to be. Bill, a final thought?

I just want to reiterate that thought that this book that we've written really is this idea of it's a book of hope, this idea that you just never know what you're setting in emotion with your life. If you're faithful today, trust God, and he will take care of the rest, and that's really what the legacy life is about. Well, David Green, Bill High, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Thank you all for joining David Green, Bill High, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Yanya Kellick. Thank you.