Joel Belz: Keeping a Christ-like spirit

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, December 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Hey, good news about the news.

You may have heard about WORLD’s daily news, The Sift. It’s available online, as an email newsletter each morning, and as radio news around the country. Well, I want to tell you about one more way you can receive news updates during the day from WORLD: The Sift radio news, wherever you get your podcasts. Just search WORLD Radio The Sift—or click the link in today’s program transcript—and add The Sift to your podcast player. We update the news all day long, so whenever you check, you will hear the latest.

Kent Covington, Kristen Flavin, I’m in there from time to time, and, you, too, Mary.

REICHARD: Yes I am, doing news with our great breaking news team led by Lynde Langdon and Steve Kloosterman and reporters Josh Schumacher, Mary Muncy, and Lauren Canterberry. We’ve got a great team.

EICHER: We do and again another example of what we’re able to do with your support. We’ve had the ability to grow our news-reporting and news-gathering because you’ve made it possible. So make good use of The Sift and add it to your daily podcast lineup.

REICHARD: Of course, we’re in the middle of our December Grassroots Giving Drive at WNG.org/donate. However you value the work of WORLD, think about what it means to you in terms of dollars and cents. What does it mean to have Christian journalists sifting the news of the day, every day? Reporters out gathering stories, the kind of reports you hear right here or read about in WORLD Magazine? What’s it worth to have the brightest minds offering intelligent opinion online everyday?

If that all means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d make a gift to keep it all going. Just go to WNG.org/donate. Thank you!

EICHER: Talk about being here every day, that would describe our founder and friend Joel Belz. He has some thoughts now on how to keep a Christ-like spirit, no matter the news of the day.

JOEL BELZ, FOUNDER: In my 45 years of magazine publishing, this was a first-time request. Would I be willing, a long-time reader wondered, to moderate a disagreement? It was a family crisis, she said, brought on—unintentionally—by WORLD magazine itself.

Maybe it’s best to let this good friend–I’ll call her Jane Doe–tell it in her own words. Some years ago, after becoming a WORLD loyalist, she entered a gift subscription for her father. It was a hit.

But problems developed. She wrote, “So it seems that my dad would read the articles in WORLD and then go on and on with my mom about the ‘bad’ news regarding our current culture… His negative discussions led my mom to cancel his subscription to the magazine….”

All this came to a head recently when Jane had a visit from her parents. Her father happened to pick up one of Jane’s copies of WORLD. Things seem to have gone quickly from bad to worse. “The discussions turned heated,” Jane said, “and full of strife.”

Her request was simple: “How would you advise someone who tends to accentuate the negative aspects of our government and general news…? Yes, our world is a mess this side of heaven. I realize that a current events magazine will report on those messes because that’s a part of life.”

Jane then graciously asked if I might get in touch with her father. Might I be a voice of reason to him in this painful hassle?

That, of course, I was happy to try. I hope that every issue of WORLD provokes lively discussion among our readers and their contacts. Lively—but not angry!

We may not be equipped here at WORLD News Group to engage in marriage counseling. But we are quite equipped to remind all our subscribers of several wonderful Biblical and appropriate truths. We’ll start with the simple proverb that “a soft answer turns away wrath—but a harsh word stirs up anger.” Is there a country, a culture, an institution where that is not true? Is there a marriage?

A second staggering thought is that God himself is about the incredible task of remaking so many of his enemies into his friends. If that’s right at the core of God’s job description, why should it not be ours?

Now I’ve heard again from Jane. She reports that her family enjoyed a “lovely Thanksgiving meal, (mostly) free from world events, and filled with gratitude for God’s blessings on our family, our friends, and our world.”

I’m Joel Belz.

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