The soccer president from the tiny island nation of Curaçao says divine intervention has brought his team to the World Cup and, in turn, to the United States and in front of President Trump.

The executive’s faith is also what has him confidently saying that everyone involved will lead with love, including the president.

‘President Trump will make sure that this will be a World Cup that will not be [forgotten].’

Gilbert Martina, president of the Curaçao Football Federation, humbly avoided bragging about his hard work that turned his nation’s soccer program around. Instead, he credited a long but fruitful “divine journey.”

In an interview with Blaze News, Martina spoke in detail about his many run-ins with divine intervention, including his trip to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in December.

There, at the World Cup draw, he sat just a few yards away from Trump and came to believe that Trump will act with love and grace to make it the biggest World Cup in history.

“We are all spiritual beings, and we have to take care of each other, and we have to globalize love,” Martina passionately decreed. “And football unites. That’s the slogan of FIFA. So I’m sure all stakeholders and even President Trump will make sure that this will be a World Cup that will not be [forgotten], ever, because it’s the biggest on this planet.”

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Divine intervention

The former insurance director and CEO of a medical center attributed most of his accomplishments to his divine journey with spirituality and faith. This starts with daily gratefulness, prayer, and meditation before preparing for what is ahead, Martina said.

Persistently pointing to this divine journey, he said he always believed his country would qualify for the World Cup. He offered no other explanation as to how such a small nation could unite in under a year for “a greater purpose.”

“With the universe, with God, with the cosmos, whatever name we want to give it,” his team started “co-creating beauty,” he explained. “Then the magic happens.”

Martina also said there were too many instances and overlapping themes to ignore. On the very day he got the job as president of Curaçao Football Federation in April 2025, he predicted to his wife that his team would make the World Cup.

“There is no coincidence,” Martina declared.

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ANGEL BATTA/AFP/Getty Images

Putting in the work

What the executive also explained — without giving himself the proper credit — was how he brought his country out of the Stone Age in terms of organization and formalities.

Before his election as president of Curaçao’s soccer federation, the tiny country of about 150,000 had a program that was in shambles. Hotels and travel were not organized, players were not paid on time, and soccer teams within the country were at odds.

“Too much distraction,” Martina said, expressing the stress of the job. “There’s so much things that we had to professionalize, and so that was the focus.”

He continued, “Because if they’re not focused [on qualifying] … you will have too much distraction.”

After Martina became president, Curaçao went undefeated in eight matches (five wins, three ties) and qualified for the World Cup. There, the team will share Group E with Germany, the Ivory Coast, and Ecuador, with its first game against Germany on June 14.

Message for others

Martina compared his approach to life, and to a successful nation, with a hummingbird.

“A hummingbird isn’t going to a garbage nest at KFC or Pizza Hut. A hummingbird always goes for the best nectar, the best flowers, because that’s the best of the best,” he said, mirroring advice he gives in his book, “Healthy Minds, Healthy Nation.”

Martina insisted that people should strive for the best, whether it is in performance, organization, or even nutrition.

“That’s a powerful message. … When we are able to convert that into our daily life, purpose, and intention, beautiful things happen.”

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​Fearless, World cup, Soccer, President trump, Football, United states, Curacao, Faith, Religion, Christianity, Sports 

It’s known as the Easterlin paradox.

Though rising wealth at early stages in the lives of individuals and countries fosters greater happiness, perpetually rising wealth does not make individuals or countries perpetually happier. At some point, economics Professor Richard Easterlin of the University of Pennsylvania and USC discovered, more wealth engenders less happiness.

Private capital mindfully allocated can both do well and do good.

This paradox may be best illustrated with U.S. data. Total U.S. household wealth exceeded $182 trillion at the end of 2025, up 466% from an inflation-adjusted $39 trillion in 1980. Yet in 1980, 82% of Americans described themselves as satisfied versus only 44% of Americans today — a decline of nearly half. Similarly, in 1980, only 20% of Americans described themselves as lonely. Today, it’s 40%.

Paradoxically, more American wealth has made Americans less happy and fostered an epidemic of loneliness. Why is this, and what can be done about it?

According to the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, happiness and life satisfaction are only partly material in nature. Work and basic housing, health care, and material attributes are important, of course — but no more so than family relationships and friendships, community engagement, and religious affiliations.

These factors are best promoted through nurturing homes, quality education, and supportive work environments. Character formation is essential for personal meaning and purpose.

Harvard scholars clearly derived much of their insight from Aristotle. In his “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle observed that multiple civic virtues were essential for eudaimonia (his term for flourishing or happiness). These include temperance, magnanimity, courage, generosity, modesty, proper ambition, sincerity, and justice.

Inculcating these virtues throughout society requires commonality of purpose, excellent education, strong families, and enlightened leadership.

One way wealthier people could foster greater happiness — their own and that of others — is to use a portion of their wealth to promote greater human flourishing.. The best way to do this is to invest in companies and funds that authentically support and multiply greater inclusivity, wholesome products and services, and higher civic virtue.

RELATED: Right-wing billionaires are barking up the wrong tree

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In short, private capital mindfully allocated can both do well and do good — that is to say, earn reasonable risk-adjusted returns while simultaneously resolving humanity’s material, educational, environmental, social, and inclusivity challenges.

Fortunately, a lot could be accomplished with relatively little. My research shows that all of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals could be achieved in under a decade if ultra-high-net-worth investors allocated no more than 1.6% of their total investable assets a year to verified impact investment strategies; the other 98.4% could continue to be spent or invested however they wish.

Replacing material-driven misery with abundant happiness is an idea whose time has come. If wealthy investors spent a little more effort understanding what their investments could do as opposed to only what financial returns they make, they would help co-create a world of optimal wealth, purpose, and fulfillment. And instead of being a partial cause of their growing discontent, successful investing could become an integral part of the cure.

Material abundance can directly foster rather than undermine human flourishing.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Wealth, Wealth creation, Money can’t buy happiness, Easterlin paradox, Household wealth, Human flourishing, Aristotle, Un, Opinion & analysis 

If you had to summarize what Christians believe in as few words as possible, you could do worse than “He is risen.”

In fact, the resurrection is so central to the faith that believers and nonbelievers alike often lose sight of it. In arguing over what Jesus said and what he meant by it and whether or not his moral prescriptions make sense in our “enlightened” 21st century, it’s easy to skip over the one simple, historical question at the heart of it all.

Even ex-evangelists like Ehrman accept that Paul genuinely believed he had an encounter with the risen Jesus.

Did the first-century Jewish leader known as Jesus of Nazareth, executed by Roman authorities in Judea circa A.D. 33, come back from the dead?

If he didn’t, Christianity is nothing more than a nice set of lessons and aphorisms. If he did, well, even the staunchest anti-Christian has some explaining to do.

He is risen. It’s such an embarrassingly outlandish claim, and so obscured by the mists of time, that it is easy to see why even some Christians are tempted to hedge and say it’s a metaphor.

But when you look at the evidence, the “it’s just a story” line gets harder to maintain.

Here are eight reasons why. Have a blessed Easter.

1. The tomb really was empty

If Jesus’ body were still in the grave, Christianity ends before it begins. The movement started in Jerusalem, within weeks of the crucifixion, under hostile scrutiny. Had the authorities been able to produce a body, they certainly would have.

Even the non-Christian historian Michael Grant acknowledged that historians, applying normal standards, cannot simply dismiss the empty tomb. The earliest counterclaim (first reported in the Gospel of Matthew) — that the disciples stole the body — concedes the point: The tomb was empty.

2. The first witnesses were the least credible

All four Gospels agree on an awkward detail: Women discovered the empty tomb first.

As even skeptical scholar Bart D. Ehrman has pointed out, this is not the kind of detail early Christians would be likely to invent in a culture where female testimony carried less weight. If you’re crafting a persuasive story, you don’t start here.

3. The disciples’ behavior doesn’t make sense otherwise

Before the Resurrection, Jesus’ followers were scattered, afraid, and in hiding. Afterward, they were publicly proclaiming that he had risen — at real personal cost, knowing it could mean persecution or even martyrdom.

New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders — hardly anyone’s idea of a biblical fundamentalist — wrote: “That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.”

4. The earliest testimony is too early to be legend

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul presents a creedal formula about Jesus’ death and Resurrection that predates the Gospels:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve (1 Corinthians 15:3-5, NIV).

New Testament scholar James D.G. Dunn dates this material to within just a few years of the crucifixion. That’s far too early for legend to develop, with no time for stories to evolve, circulate, and displace living eyewitnesses who could correct them.

5. There are multiple, overlapping eyewitness claims

We don’t just have one Resurrection story. We have multiple early accounts and traditions, including the four detailed narratives presented by the Gospels.

According to Richard Bauckham, the Gospels are best understood as closely tied to eyewitness testimony. Why? Because they read like accounts anchored to real people — named witnesses, stable core details, and traditions formed while eyewitnesses were still alive to check them.

6. Skeptics and enemies didn’t stay that way

Two of the most important early Christians weren’t early believers at all: James and Paul the apostle.

Even ex-evangelists like Ehrman accept that Paul genuinely believed he had an encounter with the risen Jesus. You can argue about what it was, but not that it didn’t happen.

7. It spread fast, in the place where it could most easily be disproved

Christianity didn’t grow slowly as a tale imported from some distant region. It took off in Jerusalem, the very place where Jesus had been publicly executed and buried — and the place where its radical claims could most readily be checked, challenged, and shut down.

New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado has shown how rapidly early devotion to the risen, divine Jesus emerged — far earlier than standard models of religious evolution would predict.

8. The “pagan copycat” theory falls apart under scrutiny

It’s common to argue that Christianity borrowed the resurrection from pagan myths — usually that of Mithras, deity of a Greco-Roman mystery cult.

But the parallels don’t hold. The confusion comes from the fact that Mithraic imagery includes themes of cosmic renewal and salvation tied to the famous bull-slaying scene — language that can sound, at a distance, like death and rebirth. In the actual myth, however, Mithras does not die and return to life; rather, killing the sacred bull creates new life and order. He is a conquering figure, not a dying and rising savior.

Scholar of religion Tryggve N.D. Mettinger — himself no Christian apologist — concluded that while some ancient myths involve dying and rising figures, none match the Jewish, historical, bodily resurrection claim of Christianity.

​Faith, Easter, The resurrection, Christianity, Jesus, Saint paul, Culture, Lifestyle, Christian apologetics, He is risen