Theology in the Raw - Stewarding Wealth and Success as a Christian with David Green, Founder of Hobby Lobby

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

David Green is the founder of Hobby Lobby and is a major financial supporter of Evangelical organizations in the United States and funded the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. He’s the author or co-author of several books, including the recently released The Legacy Life: Leading your family to Make a difference for Eternity, which he coauthored with Bill High. Bill was able to join us for the first several min, but then I think his internet cut out, so it ended up just being David and I talking shop. Preorder my upcoming book on Women in leadership: https://a.co/d/bRu0N8uCheck out the Exiles Conference in Minneapolis, April 30-May 2: https://www.theologyintheraw.com/exiles26Get your free resource from Voice of the Martyrs: vom.org/InTheRawSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Every time we've done these things, it's cost us. So I don't want people to know, well, if you do this, God's going to bless you. Well, he is, but maybe at a different level. Maybe in the bigger picture he's going to, but in the smaller picture, every time we closed on Sunday, we did less business, we made less money. When we sued the government, a lot of people were mad at us, they hated us. They weren't going to shop. So a lot of the things that we have done that we know the Bible has asked us to do has cost us. But I think in the bigger picture, he's more than made up for it.

Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Round. My guest today is David Green, who is the founder of Hobby Lobby and is a major financial supporter of evangelical organizations in the United States. And he also funded the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. I've never been, but I've always wanted to go. We talk a bit about that museum toward the end of this episode. David is the author of several books, including the recently released The Legacy Life, leading your family to make a difference for eternity. which he co-authored with Bill Hi. Bill was able to join us for the first several minutes, but then I think his internet cut out or a bomb hit his house or something. I don't know. Hopefully it's just the internet. So it ended up just being me and David a talking shop, which was loads of fun.

I think you will absolutely love hearing from David Green. So please welcome to the show for the first time, David Green and sort of Bill High, but mainly David Green. All right, David and Bill. Welcome to Theology. Duraa, very, very excited about this conversation. Thanks so much for taking the time to be a guest, first time guests on the show. David, well, let's start with you.

I just, for people that don't know your story, I mean, it is one of the most remarkable stories. I would say in both the business world and the Christian world. And I would love to see how those two stories intersect. David, you're the son of a preacher. So you come from a line of preachers, is that correct? Yes, yes. But that hasn't always shown when I was a kid. But anyway, it didn't show up too early.

But anyway, that's true. I married a PK, MK. Yeah. There's always, they seem to be working on their testimonies at a young age. And we're still working. I'm still working on it. So how did you go? go from borrowing $600 starting a business in your garage to now, you know, raising it up to

one of the most successful companies in America. I don't even know how much it's worth. I think it's in the billions. A thousand stores and I think every state or almost every state. Just from a just to just help me understand the business side of things. How did that go from the garage to where you are? Well, I would probably have to say that it was God's will for my life, I think, without him, blessing us, blessing us with a tremendous amount of great people. But by the way, we didn't go from borrowing $600 to over $8 billion in sales overnight. It's happened over a long period of time with a lot of difficulties, so it didn't happen.

Necessarily even easily, but at the same time, I think, I know. I don't think I know that God's will for our life was exactly what we're doing. But in that in that period of time, of course, there's been a lot of several different, very, very difficult times. And I think that's good for us to know that we can't do it without him. And I think with the Lord's help and he's guided us, he has a reason for a hobby lobby. And I think one of the reasons is because we know it's not ours. You know, sometimes I quote Psalms 25 and 1, is a 25 or 25. 24. 24 and 1. I can't he?

24. 24. 24. 24 and 1. Okay, but it says that he owns everything. So we don't own anything. Sometimes we think that, well, God gets 10% and by the way, as Christians, we only give about 3%.

But he owns everything. So he owns Hobby Lobby. Now, it's also important not to just say that like a lot of people will, like they'll say, you can't out give God. Well, that's not too hard to say. but to try to out-give God, that's something else. Or to say, no, I do not own anything.

God owns everything. So I think our family has accepted that we own nothing. And so we see ourselves as stewards. And that's helped us in a giving because it's not ours. We're not giving something that's ours. We say, well, we earned it. We worked harder. You can say all sorts of things.

But we do not own Hobby Lobby. God owns it. We start there. And, of course, that helps us in our life. if serving him, just knowing that God owns Hobby Lobby. When you started to experience some early success, financial success, and you started making a bunch of money, like, were you, did you always have a spirit of generosity and humility and this, you know, God owns everything perspective? Or was that something you learned along the way? Were you tempted to just kind of, as the parable goes, you know, build bigger barns and get more stuff? What was, what was that early stages in your success? What do that look like?

Well, there's a lot of times that I say were pivotal in my life. As a preacher's son, I remember going to school, and people, it was like, I'm hiding that I'm a Christian, and someone would say, I didn't know you were a Christian, so I've walked this walk that is hopefully as closer to him and more like him, and more of what he wants me to be. So that's been our process. And I think the same thing in business. In 1975, when we had about 12 stores, I remember that we lost money and it looked like we were going to go out of business. and the bankers sent me a note they were going to foreclose on us.

And so that's where we were in 1975. They were threatening to do that. And so I find myself literally under my desk praying and asking God to forgive me for being arrogant because I'd always done well with the company I was with before, TGNY, made supervisors a young age. Then we were doing real well to build 12 stores. Everything's going good, going good, going good. And bang, it just closes down on us.

And that's one of the pivotal times in my life when I knew that it's not mine, it's God's. And forgive me, Lord, for not knowing that it's you that makes us, without you, I can do nothing. He gives me breath. He's my creator. So I tried to learn from that to have humility. I'm working towards that, as we always are. But that was a very pivotal time in my life to know that I can't do it without him. And I thank him every day for what he does for us in our business.

What are some distinctively Christian principles that you have integrated into how you run your business? Well, I hope there's a lot. I can think about, I think at one time the Lord just spoke to us about being open on Sunday that we, well, we're open on Sunday. It was the busiest day per hour of any day. And I know that he said to us that we shouldn't do that, that we needed our people in church. we were keeping them out of church because we were open. And I think that's real important. And there's a lot of other things like, for instance, knowing that it's not yours. That's a good start. It's not ours.

It's gods and everything's gods, not just ties, but everything belongs to God. And we're only stewards, whether we admit it or not, we're stewards. We're not owners. So I think that's been important to us. And then a lot of things that we do, like when the government sued us, that said that we're going to take the life of a child by performing abortions, things like this that's happened in our company, you know, not doing leases that we should do with a company that's a wholesale alcohol as an example.

But by the way, I tell everybody, every time we've done these things, it's cost us. There's never been a time that I didn't do the right thing that doesn't cost. I don't want people to know, well, if you do this, God's going to bless you. Well, he is, but maybe at a different level. Maybe in the bigger picture he's going to, but in the smaller picture, every time we closed on Sunday, we did less business, we made less money. When we sued the government, everybody was mad at. A lot of people were mad at us. They hated us.

They weren't going to shop. So a lot of the things that we have done that we know the Bible has asked us to do, that we know that the scriptures and the Lord encouraged us to do has cost us. but I think in the bigger picture, he's more than made up for it. Yeah, that's good. And the minimum wage, I just read that according to Forbes magazine, your minimum wage is 1850 an hour, which is well beyond, or at least a few dollars, I think, above the federal minimum wage. Was that a decision you made early on?

Is that something more recent? Yeah, Forbes is just a little bit behind because it's $20.15 now. So there was a time that we said, we need to take care of our people. I think the Lord spoke to me one time and said, I'm putting these people in your charge. In other words, I'm responsible for 50,000 employees. So we need to do everything we can to do and to encourage them to live for the Lord. But I think part of it is we care about them. So the minimum wage is only part of it.

Everybody has an opportunity to go from there to being promoted to a manager, supervisor, et cetera. So we see that as just a starting spot for our people. And we'll pay for over half of their insurance. And we have a lot of other things that's involved in a package when you come to work for Hobby Lobby. Okay. And why shouldn't we?

You know, we should care about our people. So, I mean, so not open on Sundays, you're losing, or you could be making a lot more money if you're open on Sundays, paying people more than maybe you need to. They might still have worked for you, even if you paid less. So, again, you could have made more money in that direction. And do you have a principle of, like, giving away a portion of your profit to charities, nonprofits and?

Yes, for probably the last 20 years, we've given 50% of our profits. So we have investments. We have Hobby Lobby. We have 50 Christian bookstores. So the combination of all of that profits, every year we give 50% of it away. 50%. Right. Not 5%.

50. At the time we started 25 years ago, 20, 25 years ago, the government would allow you to give away half and it comes off of your taxes. So we don't pay taxes on that 50%. And that's what they lay out. I think it's 60% now, but at the time it was 50, and that's where we got the 50 is from that. But we really started trying, because the Lord just talked to us one time about outgiven him, because I said you can't outgive God.

It's sort of like God caught me. Yeah, it's not hard to say. And I knew that he was challenging me. So we took that challenge. And so we started giving, we weren't given 50%. We started saying, we're going to give X amount, the largest we ever have given. We're going to give that this month. And then six months later, we're going to add that same amount.

And then six months, we're going to add that same amount. And another six months. And that's not doubling it. It's doubling that year, but it's not doubling it every year forever. So my son and I prayed about, how do we outgive God? So we didn't know we've never heard a message on it. So he said, we don't know how to out give God. So that's what we came up with.

So we saw that in seven, eight years, it's like 100% of ourselves. So this ain't going to work, but we're going to try. because you say you can't out give God, we're going to try. So that's been about 25 years ago, and we're actually ahead of that schedule by just giving half of what we make. So I think we got here by just testing God, because if we say you can't out give God, we need to see if that's right. And so we test him, and so far we haven't been able to do that.

So you're breaking all of the rules of how to run a successful business, right? I mean, from a non-Christian perspective, it's like people, do people, non-Christian business, successful business owners, do they look at you funny? Like, why are you doing this? Yeah, and you say, and some, we can say that we're going to make less money because we're not open on Sunday and we pay minimum wage, etc., etc., etc., and there's a lot of et cetera, et cetera, and there's because that is because we do make more money because there's something that we need to know, and that's God can bless you beyond anything. you can even think. And that's what's happened to Hobby Lobby. We've been blessed. We have no debt and we're very blessed, but mainly with the Lord and also a lot of great people. And Bill has been a real partner to us. In fact, the family, he's been real important by just coming up along us and saying, you need to have a sort of a constitution for the family that says, who are you and why do

you do what you do. So it's because of him that we came up with a mission, vision, and values. So our family has that which Bill has been real instrument of us coming together with that verbiage. Yeah. Yeah, Bill, let's go to you. Tell us a bit about you, your story, and how did you, you and David, meet? Do you guys go back a long way? Yeah, we go back a long way. We've been hosting leadership events, Preston, for about 25 years, at Hobby Lobby. And to some of your point, we'd have business leaders come in over the years, and they would come in and ask the question like, how does this thing work? You're closed on Sunday. You close at 8. You're giving away 50% of your profit. How does this work when it shouldn't?

So that's been the kind of the common theme of these events that we've done over these years. Dave and I kid each other too, that we both grew up very poor. I think I grew up much poorer than he did. I ended up, by the grace of God, being able to go to college and ended up practicing law, 12 years, big law firm before I moved into the charitable foundation world. So we've had the opportunity to work with lots of families around the country, helped them with their charitable giving, but that ultimately morphed into working with families and much of the work that we do, today built around this idea of what is family, the purpose of family from a biblical perspective. You and I were talking a little bit offline about this, but God's desire really is that family be a team and not just raising up individuals and kick them out of the nest and say, go off and do your own thing. So that's some of the theme of this book is how do we keep family together as a team and not just this idea that you're going to go off and do your own thing. And what David just mentioned, One of the ways that we know that's true, the families that succeed from generation to

generation have a clear vision, mission, and value statement. Okay. Are you able to share what those are? It may look different for different families, I'm sure. Yeah, in the case of the Green family, their vision statement is going on the adventure of impacting our world for Christ. And then their mission statement is to love God intimately and to live, extravagant generosity. So that is combined, their value statement, pretty simple, three words,

God, family, people. And that, as David said, it's like the constitution for their family. They have an annual family celebration. David, you can probably talk about some of what that looks like. But the idea is that you want to convene the family and renew your commitment to the family vision, mission, the values. Some of this precedent goes to this idea that if you go to us, other parts of the world, you'll see families that have been continuing to do business, convening a family for a thousand years. And we don't appreciate that in our Western culture. Our deal is go build a business and then sell it and then go sit on the beach somewhere. The biblical idea is how we keep this family thing together from generation to generation. Tell me about your family,

Bill. Do you, how many kids? Married, four kids, got five grand. kids, three out of the four kids are married, been married almost 38 years. David's got me beat by quite a long ways. He's been married almost 65 years. And what do you got, David? 50 total across four generations. I have 18, 17 grandkids, and I think it's 26 great-grandkids. So anyway, there's over 50 of us now, starting with me, Barbara, and our three kids. So we got a big family, a lot of grandkids. And a lot of great grandkids. So it's neat. I think there's eight of them that are adopted.

So there's a lot adopted kids in our family. So that's neat. And so you have a yearly celebration. You come together, all the huge massive family you have all get together. Right. Do you have, I mean, it sounds like you get along well, but I'm sure you have the typical tensions and arguments and all these things. Is that true or is it all just peaches and cream?

No, no, it's not all peaches and cream. But the main thing is I think all of our family serves the Lord. So that's the main thing. But do we have different opinions and do we have different ideas of where that we might invest money for the sake of the Lord? Yeah, but overall, everybody that's 16 and older does this celebration, which we do once a year. And then we have monthly meetings where we decide where we're going to gift our money to. So there's monthly meeting. Everybody's 16 and older can be part of that.

And there's a lot of grandkids that are there. Great grandkids are still a little bit too young. But it's good to have a family that serves the Lord. So that's the main thing. We don't care what they do, what job they take, but we just want them to serve the Lord. Do a lot of them work for Hobby Lobby? There's only about, at a 50 of us,

I think there's only about seven or eight of us that works for Hobby Lobby. So there's a lot of them doing different things, and that's fine. It's not up to us to decide what God has for them. It's up, you know, we want them to find out what God has for their lives. And so a lot of them are doing different things. Across the world, countless Christians face persecution just for practicing their faith. Many are threatened, imprisoned, or separated from their families simply because they choose to follow Christ. Their courage and their commitment in the face of these challenges is both inspiring and humbling.

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And the best part, you can get a free copy of When Faith is Forbub. bit, it's totally free. Just go over and visit v.om.org forward slash in the raw. Okay, that's v.com.com. in the raw to claim your copy and experience these incredible stories for yourself. So don't miss out on this opportunity, be encouraged and inspired by the courage of believers worldwide. Can women be leaders in the church? Pastors, overseers, teachers, preachers and elders? This is a question that I have long been interested in, but haven't studied it out for myself. And as always the strength of our passion should match the depth of our study. So this is what I did. I spent over three years researching what the Bible says about women in leadership. And I wrote

a book about my conclusions. It's called From Genesis to Junia. And on a search for what the Bible really says about women in leadership. And in it, I thoroughly examine all the main passages and arguments on both sides of the debate and try to treat them as fairly as I know how. The book comes out in March, March 3rd, but you can pre-order it today, wherever books are sold. We might have lost a bill, but I'll just keep talking to you. Here's a question I have, because, I mean, you wrote the book, The Legacy of Life, passing on a legacy to, you know, your family, in your case, a very large family. here's my question. And I mean, I experience this tension on a minuscule level. Like I think like,

if I had any extra disposable income, I would love to just give that to my kids. You know, I got four kids, one's married, a daughter who's 20, a daughter is 18, my son's 16, and I just want to give them everything, you know, which isn't much, but it's more than they have. But then I think back, And both my wife and I come from very poor families. I was raised by a single mom who worked three jobs. I got a job at 13 years old, have worked most days of my life since. My wife was an MKPK, very poor, has been working. Same thing since she was 13 years old.

And it's like because we didn't have anything, we learned essential life lessons, okay, that we couldn't have learned if we just, you know, didn't have to work. now on the other end as a parent, all they want to do is give my kids everything. But I'm like, while that would be good, maybe, but could that rob them of the very opportunities to learn the life lessons that I had, we had learned the hard way? It's such a, it's such a tension. How have you wrestled with that tension? I think the best way to, to handle it is say, I'm not going to give you anything because I love you. You know, that's about the best way to I love you too much to mess you up. I love you too much. You have to understand in Hobby Lobby,

no one gets a penny in the family that doesn't earn it. And there's a group of us that decides who should make and how much they should make. My salary is determined by, there's five of us that's on a committee. They're all family members. You should make X. We get zero amount of the profit. We get X amount for what we do. Now, shouldn't we get paid for what we do? And why should we get more than what we should get paid for what we do. I mean, if God owns it, it's not ours. The profit's not ours. So that solves the problem there, that there's no money from Obie Lobby that you don't earn, period. Now, by the way, we have the same thing you have with your kids. We have money, so at certain ages that we will give our kids some money from us. It's a gift from us to you, but you know what

it'll do? It'll buy a car, a house payment on a house, but that's it. It's not like, they don't have to work. God has put us here, Adam and Eve, to work. We're here to work, and we don't want to take that away from our kids. And we want them to earn what they have and not someone, oh, I got this from my mom, my dad. But we think giving them a gift is okay. Now, everybody has to decide how much that gift is. Our gift is not something more than maybe having a down payment on a house.

And so we help them because we love you. but we love you too much to give you money where you don't have to work you still have to work to survive you cannot we're not going to give you something that you don't have to work I think you can ruin a kid that way I think if you love your kids you're going to let them work for what they get and and then they enjoy life much better if they've earned what they have yeah that's good that's really good um I you I'm not going to ask your age people can google it you you look at incredibly healthy. What have you done to keep your mind sharp and your body? I mean, I don't know how sharp my mind is, but I'm 84, and I ask God to take me while I'm working because I love to work.

And by the way, there's people that can take my place. So I tell all of my officers, if I need you, I don't need you. Which means if I need you, I don't need you. In other words, if you get in a car accident, I'm in trouble and the ministry's in trouble. So we're big enough that there ought to be someone that follows me that if I'm not here, we're just as well off. We've just had a couple officers leave us that we've had 40 years and we're very instrumental on building this company, but we're okay because there's someone that followed them. So I think that's the way that it ought to be. So I hope God gives me a few more years because I love what I'm doing. Yeah. Well, you know, I've been learning through reading books and different scientific studies and stuff that it's so important the older you,

I've turned 50 in January, so, you know, yeah, halfway there. But they say, you know, your body starts to get tight and sore. Your mind can slow down. And by reading and thinking and writing and thinking and challenging your mind is a good way to stay young. And same with your body. You've got to be moving around. You've got to be working, not just sitting around watching TV all day when you retire. So, yeah, it gets more of a challenge, too.

The older you get, it's harder to get out of bed and you can be less motivated. But yeah, that's great. Talk to me about the Museum of the Bible. I want to confess that I've wanted to go there so bad, have not been able to go. I haven't been to D.C. in years. When did that, what was the heart behind? Because I know you helped fund it significantly. Where did that come from?

What was your heart behind the Museum of the Bible? Well, someone came to us, and they wanted us to buy some, they wanted us to help them in Dallas to buy this big arena and put a museum together. And they didn't have any money. They didn't have a place. They didn't have any antiquities. They didn't have anything.

But somehow, some way, we ended up getting a few antiquities with no intent of building a museum, none whatsoever. So we bought a few antiquities. And then we bought a few more. Then we bought a few more. And we got to the point, we said, I think this is our job to put this museum. And so we, my younger son, Steve, was involved in putting it together, having a lot of people come beside us, help us, finance it, things of this nature. But we were, my son, Steve, was the CEO, the one that put together, the museum.

And we're real proud of what God has helped us put together with the help of a lot of people. Has it been around 10? It's been around about 10 years. To get the exact, I'd have to ask my son, Steve. So I'm at it. I don't know the details. So, and we can pass on this if you want. I heard this through reading some headlines that there were some controversies surrounding it.

Yeah, we had, we had different controversies. If you've never put it in together and you put the one together, you're going to not just do everything right. And we had some things that were maybe not for, for. real and so we've tried to correct all those things so if you want to say we made mistakes by doing it we say yes we have and we've tried to correct those and we would also say well you go you put one in and see if you can do it without any mistakes god bless you know but yeah we did but there's nothing that we that we made mistakes on that we think we haven't corrected you know so there's a lot to putting them using together the who owned this before and was it stolen all sorts of

of things comes in and to play when you're putting a museum together. But I don't know of any problem that we have today that we haven't corrected. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Yeah, I remember I did for my PhD research on the Dead Sea Scrolls and so I did a lot of reading on the history of the discovery. And, you know, once they were discovered back at, I think, 47, 48, you know, there were just kind of, you know, these interesting manuscripts or whatever, but then people found out how much money these are worth. And all of a sudden, there's a proliferation of all these densest scrolls everywhere, all these forgeries, you know, and now they're this huge problem with trying to sort out the legitimate ones from the authentic ones, which is not easy.

I mean, you can, people can get really good at forgeries. So we're going to have the Dead Sea Scrolls. of them in the museum real shortly. I don't know exactly when, but some of the dead scene scrolls will be the legitimate ones and will be there soon. So we have different things showing at different times at the museum, but we will have a portion of them. But because of light, they'll only let them show for a short time,

and then they're going to be hidden put away for like 40 years. So it's going to be a very treat for someone to see the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. not the facsimile, because I know there's a lot of facsimile pictures and stuff, but I've seen portions of the real ones. And it's, I mean, for, I guess some people might just be like, oh, whatever, you know, but as a Bible scholar, you as a, you know, student of the Bible, it's, it's awe-inspiring, you know, that these copies, the oldest copies of our Old Testament, they predate the New Testament. Right. And, and the, the, the Kumron community, that the scribes that worked on these.

I mean, you're looking at ancient history. And it's just, it's really inspiring. Yeah. So going back to the business. Okay. And I know you want to say as a Christian, and you should say, and it's the right answer, that God was involved in every fabric of the success of Hobby Lobby.

is there is there any just raw business leadership principles that you learned over the years that you would say this contributed obviously with God's help to the success like well I don't know much about business I don't even know really how to frame the question but what are some just for for young entrepreneurs starting a business like what are some key things they they need to do yeah well I may answer this not the way you wanted to answer it, but the only thing I know to do is I think God's word gives us the direction of how to live our life and how to run a business. There are his word, there's not a better way than his words.

And so to the best of our ability, that's what we want to do. And so I think because of that, by the way, I think God wants us to have hard time sometimes. We've had a lot of hard times. I can't just say it's all gone up the hill all the way, and we've gone from here to here. We'll do over $5 billion this year and sales, but I cannot say that. So we've had difficult times, but I think that's part of God's plans as for us to go to times where we just recognize we cannot do it without him. But I don't know a better way than to do it his way.

And he has a way. I think there's a lot of things that we've learned. Not that we've done it right all the time, because we haven't. We've done it wrong, and we've learned from it. It's just like antiquities. We've bought fake antiquities, you know, and we found out they were fake. And so the same thing we've done with the museum, we've done in business. We've made plenty of mistakes.

But hopefully we learn from those mistakes and we're stronger because of them. Yeah, yeah. I'm curious, how did you find out that there were fake antiquities? Did you have some expert come and look at them and they said, hey, these are not real? No, my son, who is in charge of that knows more about that question you're asking me, but I know that we knew that that was supposed to be for real, little pieces of it, but it wasn't. you know, so that's part of, oh, that's only one of the problems we had in putting the museum together. But that's, that's, I say, good luck to you.

You go put one in. I mean, you'll probably do better than us and make less mistakes. But anyway, it's not something you just, it's just like Hobby Lobby. I can write a book on all the mistakes, but I don't know that I can sell it or not. So you just make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them. And the same thing, of course, when we put the museum in, we made a lot of mistakes. but we're real proud of what God has given us at the end. It's a world-class Bible museum.

There's nothing like it in the world. So I think you'll enjoy it if you can ever make it there. Yeah, I travel quite a bit. I speak at lots of different churches and conferences and stuff. And I rarely get out to D.C. I don't think I've been there in several years. But yeah, it's something ever since I heard about the opening of it, something I've always wanted to go see.

in fact i think i first heard about it you and i have been in the same room together um you wouldn't have remembered it but uh um with uh Gabe lions you you probably know Gabe lions right some of his gatherings so i've been part of those for for a long time um but uh i think yeah i think it was shortly after the museum started um that heard about it through one of those gatherings so um so okay you made some mistakes with your business what what are some, as you look back, what are some key mistakes you say you made that you learned from and made you a better person, made the business a better business from learning from your mistakes? Oh, I could go on forever there. A lot of them would not be, you know, we have 50 Christian bookstores.

At one time, we had 12 furniture stores. Well, maybe we shouldn't have had 12 furniture stores, as an example. So we maybe went off into too many directions. And so that would be one of of the things that maybe we shouldn't have done. And so, of course, smaller mistakes every day just in terms of buying. Like, for instance, we had at one time 11,000 different Christmas items, and now we have seven doing more business. So sometimes you have buyers that they, and we have the best buyers in a world, but sometimes you just see this and you like everything. And so you buy 11,000 items for your Christmas department, and now we have seven. So I can take that times about 100 where we've just, as buyers, we just go crazy instead of saying, no, no, no, I'm going to try to find out what the customer wants, and I'm going to try to keep it to a minimum.

Sometimes I tell people as an example, I would say, you know, if you have seven different sizes of one colored ribbon, how many choices do you have? If you have seven different sizes of one color ribbon, how many choices? You can buy these two, these two, these three, these four. You know how many choices you have? Huh. You know, I found out because I asked Siri. I think she's really smart. I don't know if you've ever talked to her.

But she told me that there's 720 different choices. Oh, my. So I said, you know, that's interesting. I buy ribbon, so I want to know how many ribbon choices I have. So I said, we have at least 40 colors and 20 different types of fabrics and at least 12 different sizes. And I ask her, how many different choices do I have? I've got a ribbon bar, and I want to know how many choices she's. has to be the ribbon buyer.

And you know what she told me? A whole bunch. Really? Probably, probably, I'm just explaining to you about the retail business. Probably there's millions. Well, you can take that with the Santa Claus or a snowman. There's a thousands, literally thousands. So that's the difficult of putting together a hobby lobby or any retail stores is what do I buy.

and how do I get the customer if they want a Christmas tree? I've got the right size and the right item. So those are the decisions that we have to make. So too many buying choices can be overwhelming for the customer and is actually not helpful. I have in the warehouse I have letters that are in two-foot letters, and one of them that says too many choices are harmful to business. But you know what?

It's harmful to life too. And then one of the things I say, ask the Lord for directions and study, study, study. So I've got about four different things that I put out on the wall of, and I think it's not just about Hobby Lobby, but it's about ministry. It's about life. Too many choices are harmful to business and a harmful to life, harmful to. You know, there's 1.8 million different 501-3 Cs in the United States.

So which ones do you want to give to? There's 1.8 million of them. Oh, my word. Wow. 1.8. What are, what are some of your favorite kinds of organizations, charities, ministries, to give to? Hopefully most of them boils down to two things. God's Word. And I've told you the three places that were involved with God's Word, you know, getting everything translated, getting it on the YouTube, getting it on your phone, which there's over 2,000 language in the museum. Those are

the God's Word. Mansoe is telling people about Jesus. So there's a couple ministries we got involved when we started giving a little heavily, and one of them is called One Hope, and that's giving children the gospel. And we've been able to give over 1.5 billion, not million billion children in the gospel.

And then we've also, with every home for Christ, we've been able to go into more than a billion homes with the gospel. So the two things that really excite us, there's only two things that's eternal. that's God's Word man. So those other the two things that really excite us that we want to be involved in, and God has allowed us to do that. Love it, love it.

People running nonprofits will listen to right now. They're already filling out the application for it. Yeah, I, when I was 19 years old, became a Christian, and I hated to study anything, hated to read a book. I was an athlete. this one to be outside on the ball field, but almost overnight when I got saved, I prayed James 1-5 that says if anybody lacks wisdom, praying God will give it plentifully, some paraphrase.

And I was like, all right, God, I need wisdom because I don't like to read or study and, you know, woke up the next day and I was still not smart. Didn't have any wisdom. But I almost overnight experienced an uncontrollable design. desire to want to study God's word. It was weird. It was weird. I just want to sit in a room and read the Bible all day long. And that took me through 12 years of undergrad, post-grad, post-graduate work and never look back. I love that. I love that you have that passion. One more thing. And then I'll let you go. With your heart for wanting to pass on a legacy to your family, we already talked

about, you know, Bill talked about, you know, passing on a vision. What are some other things you would want to tell, yeah, fathers, grandparents who are wanting to do the same thing with their kids? Well, I think the main thing for us is to be able to, the Bible says in the multitude of counsel, their safety. So we do things as a family and come together as a council. Barbara and I could have run this company and decided on the giving because we owned 85%. But we put all of our voting into 1%. So 1% runs the company, 1% of the ownership. So there's seven of us.

So we want to do things as a multitude of council. And I'm talking about good counsel. If someone isn't good counsel, we'd rather be a non-family than a family member. So we just want to carry this on. When I'm not here, we want this to carry on. with our family forever. You know, it's not something that we've built to sell and sit on the beach, so to speak. It's something that we want to continue to tell people about Jesus.

And so we want that to just continue to go. So how we've set it up, I think, is very important that a family member can come on, be part of the board, but they have to also believe in a certain document that we put together, that you believe that it's only through Christ that we accept Jesus, that we get eternal life, things of this nature. And so hopefully we've set it up to where that it passed me, it's going to be doing the same thing as it does now, that the control of this company is within a board,

and we hope and believe that it will continue on even when I pass. And that's why we wrote the book, the life, the legacy of life. Legacy life. The legacy life has to do. more about when you're not here than when you're here. What's going to happen when you're not here? And that's, we want the same thing to continue to happen in our family. That's what we tell people about Jesus. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Well, David, unfortunately, Bill dropped off. I hope he's

okay. I hope it's just the internet and not some meteor meteor hit his house or something. So, David, thank you so much for taking a time. Really appreciate it again. Yeah, the book is the legacy of life would invite people to go check it out. Thanks for being on the algebra draw. Thank you. Appreciate it.