Why globe trot?

Above my desk hangs a cross-stitched banner made by a refugee from Syria: “The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces.”

The banner captures why I do what I do, trotting the globe figuratively and literally. The sorrows of the world are real, multidimensional, and heartbreaking. Eternity—what Merriam-Webster calls “endless time”—also is real, where the old order of things passes away and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

Where we live right now is in the high reaches of the arc of that drama, the taut period between problem and resolution. For all its everyday frustrations and calamities, this between-time puts us at the pitch of excitement: The story is about to get good.

That reality grounds Christian journalists if they take time to reacquaint themselves with it every day, sometimes many times a day. Otherwise, we ride waves that usually end in chasms of cynicism. We will begin as idealists—with hope in certain institutions, causes, mentors, or political parties, or simple faith in the way society does things—and we will become incurable cynics as one after another lets us down. As a journalist for more than 25 years, I have watched such crashes, and fallen myself into chasms of discouragement.

This between-time puts us at the pitch of excitement: The story is about to get good.

Some inventions arise from such times, and Globe Trot began that way. I faced a ritual frustration: too many potential stories coming across my desk yet not enough hours in the day or fingers on my hands to report and write them. And I faced a persistent undercurrent of despair: Covering war and injustice led inevitably to sitting across from war victims, drinking tea with exiles, widows, and orphans. What, in the end, did an endless round of such news mean?

So one Monday morning in 2012 I typed up a summary of international news I called Globe Trot as a way to gain perspective. I sent it off to colleagues for feedback on whether it was worth doing. To my surprise, they quickly said it was.

Anyone can type a catalog of news in a wide-open field. What were my criteria? To begin, Psalm 24:1, which has opened the pages of WORLD since its beginnings: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.” God’s people have a front-row seat on the nations because He made and cares for them, broken and all.

Next, the work of Christ is redeeming “all things, whether on earth or in heaven,” as Paul writes in Colossians 1:20. This energizes our global engagement with the profound idea that men and women created in the image of God engage in works of eternal value in a trying present. As the Puritan Cotton Mather put it, “The very wheelbarrow is to be with respect looked upon.”

With that mandate Globe Trot launched six years ago, an email of news sent three times a week. A typical offering in August included the latest recorded speech of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, plus the sight of Yazidis returning to a shrine in Iraq they had managed to protect from Baghdadi’s clutches. Then there was a video clip of Syrian boys jumping—no, cannon-balling—off a newly installed bridge in Raqqa, once ISIS headquarters, recaptured from ISIS last year. In such daily fare, we begin to see the fallen state of the world, as well as acts of redemption that leave us relieved, even laughing.

I did not anticipate how Globe Trot readers would form a unique community—analysts and political aides, pilots and farmers, pastors and teachers, missionary doctors and one whole high-school history department. I didn’t foresee how it could spark conversations, and tips. I cannot respond to every comment, but I read them and take to heart especially corrections and better ideas. The discipline it requires—and able assistance currently from new WORLD reporter Charissa Crotts—makes me appreciate how such news can quicken us to the high drama that is the world we live in right now.

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