San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (aka Mr. Relevant) is headed to his first Super Bowl after leading his team to a 34-31 comeback win over the Detroit Lions in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday. The Niners were down by 17 points (24-7) at halftime, before going on a 17-point run in the third quarter and scoring 27 consecutive points in the second half.

The victory clinched the Niners a spot in Super Bowl LVIII, where they will face the Kansas City Chiefs at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada on Sunday, Feb. 11, at 6:30 p.m. ET.

A reported 56.6 million people watched the NFC Championship game, which means millions of people saw Purdy — who threw for 267 yards with one touchdown and one interception — glorify God after his victory.

“First of all, glory to God,” Purdy said in a postgame interview on Sunday.

Purdy has had a remarkable rise in the NFL – a story sports fanatics will likely be recounting for years to come.

Purdy was drafted into the NFL in 2022 — but he was chosen very last; Purdy was pick number 262 of 262 — a spot that traditionally earns the draftee the disreputable title “Mr. Irrelevant,” since most players drafted last go on to have unremarkable NFL careers. But not Brock Purdy.

Purdy began the 2022 NFL season as the Niners’ third string quarterback behind Trey Lance and Jimmy Garoppolo. After both Lance and Garoppolo were injured, Purdy took over as the team’s starting quarterback and went on to win all five of the regular season games he started.

Hymns have been called the poetry of the people, theologically rich songs written and sung to both worship the Lord and sometimes even soothe and allay the worries of those singing them.

When it comes to classic hymns of Church history we need to hold onto in trying times, it’s difficult to do any better than, “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah.”

Written by William Williams in 1745, the Welsh poet is credited with penning over 900 hymns, but none more revered than this robust selection that remains one of the most popular of the faith.

Because Williams never wrote an autobiography and often toiled away quietly under most everyone’s radar, little is known about him. Growing up on a farm in South Wales, we do know he attended a “Nonconformist church” — a congregation that parted ways with some doctrines of Anglicanism.

That may sound more dramatic than it really was — many popular denominations carried that label, including Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists, to name a few.

We also know Williams didn’t credit his childhood church with his conversion but rather a preacher and teacher named Howell Harris. Coming to church in Talgarth, Wales one Sunday, Williams heard Harris preaching in the neighboring cemetery.

He was deeply moved by the warning of the coming judgment.

Originally intending to become a physician, Williams entered the ministry.

Maine legislators were considering a radical bill that threatened parental rights by giving courts “temporary emergency jurisdiction” of minors who seek “transgender” medical interventions — against their parents’ wishes.

Thankfully, L.D. 1735, the so-called “Act to Safeguard Gender-affirming Health Care,” got skunked, failing in a Judiciary Committee vote of 12-0.

As previously reported by the Daily Citizen, the bill would have led to irreparable harm for vulnerable, confused children.

The Christian Civic League of Maine, a Focus on the Family-allied organization, was thankful to see the measure fail. The organization labeled the legislation “The Transgender Trafficking Bill” and stated:

“In Maine and now nationally, people are seeing what L.D. 1735 would have accomplished.

“It would have made us a sanctuary state for gender confusion, encouraged trafficking and allowed the state to deny parental rights.

“Maine people stood up and defeated the bill.”

CCL Maine thanked the legislators and Christian and conservative groups who opposed the measure and testified against it.

Opponents included the Catholic Diocese of Portland, Maine Right to Life, Concerned Women of Maine, and Students For Life, groups that “value and seek to protect life.”

More than 112,000 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — the highest ever recorded.

Experts almost uniformly blame the staggering death toll on fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50-times more powerful than heroine and 100-times more powerful than morphine.

Policymakers, on the other hand, can’t decide how to stop fentanyl from entering the country.

Background
The majority of fentanyl trafficked into the United States indisputably comes from Mexico, where the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generacion (JNG) cartels manufacture and traffic almost all the fentanyl Americans consume.

But the problem isn’t localized to Mexico. Chinese pharmaceutical and chemical companies willingly sell Sinaloa and JNG the ingredients to make fentanyl.

U.S. lawmakers need to collaborate with Chinese and Mexican law-enforcement to destroy the fentanyl supply chain, but these efforts have been slow-moving and hard to agree upon.

Stopping the Flow
Lawmakers and politicians most vociferously clash over whether border policy effects the quantity of fentanyl entering the U.S.

Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) agents seized 26,700 pounds of fentanyl at the Southwest land border in 2023, up 61% from the 10,500 pounds confiscated in 2021.