The World and Everything In It — April 14, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Efforts to pack the Supreme Court gained steam with President Biden announcing a commission to “study” the issue.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Washington Wednesday.

Also, World Tour.

Plus the story of one young man’s faith in the face of devastating news.

And commentary on how we tend to cut ourselves a lot of slack.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, April 14th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Now the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Biden sets new 9/11 target date to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan » President Biden has decided to leave American troops in Afghanistan beyond the May 1st deadline. That was the timeline that the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban.

But the president still intends to withdraw American troops this year. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki …

PSAKI: The president has been consistent in his view that there’s not a military solution in Afghanistan, that we’ve been there for far too long. That has been his view for some time.

President Biden’s new goal is to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

And according to multiple reports, the pullout will not be conditions based. U.S. troops will depart regardless of the situation on the ground.

Those reports drew sharp criticism from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

MCCONNELL: A reckless pullback like this would abandon our Afghan regional and our NATO partners in a shared fight against terrorists that we have not yet won.

McConnell and some other top Republicans were also critical of former President Trump’s plans to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan this year.

Biden urges de-escalation on Russia-Ukraine border in call with Putin » President Biden urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to “de-escalate tensions” with Ukraine in a Tuesday phone call. That followed Russia’s military buildup on it’s border with Eastern Ukraine.

Jen Psaki told reporters …

PSAKI: President Biden also made clear that the United States will act firmly in defense of America’s interests in response to Russia’s actions, such as cyber intrusions and election interference.

Biden also proposed a summit in a third country “in the coming months” to discuss the full range of U.S.-Russia issues.

There is growing concern in the West about a surge of cease-fire violations in eastern Ukraine. Russian-baсked separatists have been locked in a conflict with Ukrainian forces since Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday also warned Russia about it’s troop buildup and pledged strong support for Ukraine. He said NATO allies are stepping up their naval presence in the Black Sea …

STOLTENBERG: And we are constantly looking into how we can continue to step up and provide more practical support to Ukraine to help them defend themselves.

Stoltenberg called Moscow’s troop buildup “unjustified, unexplained and deeply concerning.”

CDC, FDA investigating reports of blood clots tied to Johnson & Johnson vaccine » The CDC and Food and Drug Administration are investigating potentially dangerous blood clots in six women who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

In the meantime, they have recommended pausing use of the coronavirus vaccine.

President Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci noted on Tuesday that instances of clotting have been very rare.

FAUCI: They have been six out of the 6.85 million doses, which is less than one in a million. So remember, this is really out of an abundance of caution.

The reported complications appeared in women within two weeks of vaccination, and they also had low platelets in veins that drain blood from the brain.

White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zeints said any pause of the J&J vaccine will not significantly slow the U.S. vaccine rollout.

ZEINTS: The J&J vaccine makes up less than 5 percent of the more than 190 million recorded shots in arms in the United States to date.

The blood clots linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are similar to rare occurrences that sparked concerns over AstraZeneca’s shots in Europe. Both vaccines use a similar technology which is different from the mRNA technology in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

US agency says women can get abortion pill via telemedicine » Women seeking an abortion pill will not be required to visit a doctor’s office or clinic during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s the word from the FDA, which announced the policy change on Tuesday.

The change clears the way for women to get abortion pill prescriptions via telemedicine and receive them through the mail.

The FDA’s acting head, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said an agency review of recent studies—quoting here—“do not appear to show increases in serious safety concerns,” when women take the pill without first visiting a health facility.

But the reports the FDA relied on are unlikely to give the full picture of how many women experienced complications. Many women were hospitalized in the UK after a similar policy took effect there. They reported severe pain and bleeding during at-home abortions—sometimes because they waited past the recommended 10 weeks of pregnancy to take the pills.

US court lifts hold on Ohio’s Down syndrome abortion law » But also on Tuesday, a federal court lifted the hold on a pro-life law in Ohio that prohibits abortions based on a diagnosis of Down syndrome. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown has more.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed two earlier decisions blocking enforcement of the 2017 law.

Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses based their challenge to the law on a woman’s “absolute right” to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb.

The majority of the court said that in this particular case, Ohio’s “interests in passing the law” were not to protect all unborn life. Instead, it said the state’s purpose was to protect the Down syndrome community from “the stigma it suffers from the practice of Down-syndrome-selective abortions,” to protect women who suspect Down syndrome from coerced abortions and to protect the medical community from unethical doctors.

The 2017 law had been put on hold amid the legal challenge. It was one of several Ohio pro-life laws tied up in court.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: changes at the Supreme Court.

Plus, Whitney Williams goes fishing and reels in something unexpected.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 14th of April, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up: packing the Supreme Court.

President Biden on Friday fulfilled a campaign promise. He’s created a commission to study the issue of adding seats to the Supreme Court.

Many progressives want to add enough seats to wipe out the current conservative majority.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said expanding the Supreme Court is just one of the issues the panel will look into.

PSAKI: They will also be looking at the court’s role in the constitutional system, the length of service and turnover of justice on the court justices on the court, the membership and size of the court, and the court case election rules and practices.

She also noted that the panel of 36 members is bipartisan, with some conservative members serving on the commission.

REICHARD: Here now to help us understand what this panel will look like, what it will do, and what it means is Ilya Shapiro. He is a vice president at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank in Washington.

He’s also author of “Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court.” Ilya, good morning!

ILYA SHAPIRO, GUEST: Good morning to you.

REICHARD: Might you give a little background first. When’s the last time we saw a White House talk about having more than 9 justices on the Supreme Court?

SHAPIRO: You really have to go back to FDR in 1937, having been reelected, overwhelmingly, and the democrats had super majorities in the house in the Senate. But FDR was frustrated that a lot of his New Deal programs were being rejected by the Supreme Court. And so he thought that the so-called old men needed some help. And he proposed to add six justices, one for every member of the court over 70-and-a-half years old, which would conveniently give him a majority in support of his policies. This was hugely unpopular, including from President Roosevelt’s own vice president John Nance Garner, and eventually it was so unpopular that the Democrats lost 80 seats in the House and eight in the senate at the midterms. But really, that’s the last time it was seriously discussed. The court has been at nine members since 1869, so 150 years.

REICHARD: Well, the White House says this panel is “bipartisan.” But that word doesn’t necessarily mean balanced. So what exactly does it mean in this case?

SHAPIRO: Yeah, it’s, it’s, there’s three remarkable things about this commission. First, it’s big, there are 36 members on this commission, you know, I’m sure we’re all familiar with work meetings, if you have 36 people around a table, there has to be a pretty big table, first of all, but even if they each talk for a few minutes, that’s already hours right there. So I don’t know how they’re gonna manage this thing.
The second thing is that, you’re right, it is skewed to the left. by my count, the ratio is about three-to-one, progressives to non progressives. And the republicans are all pretty moderate – the danger is that they are being used as tokens kind of as to give a patent of legitimacy to whatever this commission might come up with, although there’s been some criticism from left wing activists as well, that you don’t have a lot of the the major advocates for significant or radical reforms.

And also, this is the third major thing to note – that it’s a heavily academic commission that is there to retire judges, three leading progressive legal activists and the rest, like 31 people, are full time academics, which is a big, big thing. It could mean that whatever report is produced could be dismissed as too theoretical, too academic. You know, thank you very much, but, you know, nothing to do with the real world. And so there’s a lot of kind of speculation about what President Biden’s purpose with this is, a lot of these blue ribbon Commission’s over in our history have just kind of been used to kick the can down the road and hope that whenever a report comes out, it can just be quietly shelved.

REICHARD: Well, Ilya, other than the academic and political leanings of the commission members, what more do you know about the people on this panel?

SHAPIRO: Yeah, I mean, I personally know a lot of them. They are kind of the leading constitutional lights, Supreme Court watchers in academia, both on the left and some on the right, although again, they’re not too many of those who are not progressives. Not too many of them have called for packing the court. So it’s not the sort of commission you wish you would establish if you really wanted an endorsement of expanding the court. And in fact, its co-Chairman, Bob Bauer, who is the Biden campaign’s counsel, was a White House Council under President Obama himself is on the record as being against court packing, as are several other progressive members of the Commission. So we’ll see what they come up with. I mean, I’m skeptical that they’ll be able to come up with something that’s both non-controversial or bipartisan and feasible, because even something like term limits, which has fairly broad support that would take a constitutional amendment to enact.

REICHARD: Well, we heard some Washington-speak from the White House press secretary a few minutes ago. But let’s be very very clear. Ilya, in plain English, what exactly is this commission charged with doing?

SHAPIRO: Well, you can read it from the White House statement. The Commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals. And that includes the court’s role in the constitutional system, the length of service and turnover of justices, the membership and size of the court, the courts case selection. So they’re really wanting to look at the court’s operation; does something need to be changed? The thing is really a parlor game among elite progressives more or less. Nobody really questions the court’s legitimacy outside of really the progressive elite in the sense that the court is a popular institution, much more popular than Congress or the presidency, pretty much any other government institution short of the military. And, you know, it’s unclear what’s broken, really, that needs to be fixed, other than the disappointment that a lot of folks on the left have that President Trump got to make three appointments?

REICHARD: And then just to clarify, this commission is only looking at the Supreme Court, correct? It’s not looking at adding more district court seats or anything like that?

SHAPIRO: Well, that’s that’s an open question, I suppose. It’s not charged with looking at the judiciary as a whole. I’m sure it wouldn’t be surprising if the commission to actually come up with something relatively less controversial, perhaps or feasible, would say that there need to be more district judges, you know, spread out over time. So it’s not just President Biden, appointing 100 new judges all at once or something like that. So you could see a recommendation like that. But the charge, the focus of the White House statement creating the commission is on the Supreme Court.

REICHARD: Well you’ve thought about these things for a long time now. What do you think will come of this?

SHAPIRO: A lot depends on what the Supreme Court itself does this June. Because if the purpose of creating a commission is to kick the can down the road until the time when the issue is less controversial, or fewer people are watching or what have you, then if the court this June doesn’t come out with too much that’s controversial or too many blockbusters, then the question is going to arise what what exactly do we need to reform? What’s wrong with it, it seems to be doing its job.

You know, the apocalypse was supposed to happen, according to a lot of progressives, once justice Kavanaugh was confirmed, and yet here we are, three years later, and that hasn’t exactly happened. But we’ll see what exactly the Supreme Court does. That’ll have an impact on it. And also, the timing, the charge of the commission is to come up with a report six months after its first hearing. Well, the first hearing hasn’t exactly been scheduled. If it’s scheduled for sometime this summer, then we’re looking at later the end of this year, beginning of next year. Who knows what the political discourse would look like at that time.

REICHARD: Anything else that you think the public ought to know about this commission?

SHAPIRO: In a certain sense, if the eventual report the commission comes up with is criticized both on the left and on the right, that might be a measure of some success. Often when you negotiate deals, if one side is completely happy, that means that must not be a very good deal. So if both sides get something or both sides are unhappy about something that could be a sense that the commission is really being realistic and, and not being as biased as its ideological ratio might set it out to be.

REICHARD: Ilya Shapiro is a vice president of the Cato Institute. Ilya, thanks so much!

SHAPIRO: Thank you.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour with our reporter in Africa. Here’s Onize Ohikere.

ONIZE OHIKERE, REPORTER: Violence wracks Northern Ireland—We start today in Europe.

AUDIO: SOUNDS OF RIOT

Northern Ireland is enduring it worst unrest in years. Frustration over Brexit has reignited long-simmering sectarian anger.

The violence began earlier this month when groups loyal to the United Kingdom threw rocks, fireworks, and Molatov cocktails at police. Last week, groups that support Irish unification clashed with officers in riot gear.

Lawmakers in Northern Ireland condemned the violence from both sides and called for calm. This, even as they acknowledged the disagreement over Brexit policies. Naomi Long is Northern Ireland’s Minister for Justice.

LONG: We have all been aware of the simmering tensions in parts of our community over the outworkings of Brexit for some months. Most of us including those who oppose Brexit have some sympathy for those people out there who feel betrayed.

Those in Northern Ireland who align with Britain are angry over border checks and trade restrictions that are part of the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. The rest of Ireland remains in the EU, which deepens the divide among the island’s opposing communities.

North Korea faces severe economic crisis—Next we go to Asia.

AUDIO: CLAPPING, CHEERING

Community leaders in North Korea’s Workers Party held their first conference since 2017 last week. They were enthusiastic, although their leader Kim Jong Un delivered a sobering message.

AUDIO: MAN SPEAKING KOREAN

Kim warned that the country is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1990s. That’s when a severe famine killed hundreds of thousands of people. He blamed the pandemic, U.S.-led sanctions, and last summer’s natural disasters for the problems.

Although it’s difficult to get reliable information about what’s happening in the isolated country, groups that monitor North Korea say they have not yet detected signs of a humanitarian crisis.

Volcano erupts on Caribbean island—Next to the Caribbean.

AUDIO: PEOPLE ON FERRY

Thousands of people living on the island of St. Vincent boarded boats last week to flee a volcano that suddenly rumbled to life.

La Soufriere is the highest peak in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Its eruption on Friday sent plumes of hot ash and smoke 20,000 feet into the air. More eruptions followed over the weekend, knocking out power to most of the island.

The ash that blanketed the surrounding communities looked like a layer of snow. It drifted as far as Barbados, about 100 miles away. But the government said it had no reports of death or injury.

La Soufriere last erupted in 1979. Geologists warn this year’s explosive phase could last for several weeks.

Archaeologists discover ancient city in Egypt—And finally, we end today here in Africa.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered the remains of the largest ancient city ever unearthed in the country. Famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass explained the find’s importance to reporters on Saturday.

AUDIO: This is really a large city that was lost. It was lost because we never thought that this city could be discovered.

Researchers found the site near Luxor, home of the legendary Valley of the Kings. They believe it dates back to the golden age of the pharaohs, about 3,000 years ago.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere in Abuja, Nigeria.

NICK EICHER, HOST: A brown bear in California picked the wrong house to trespass.

As the video from the security camera rolls along, you see a full-grown bear wandering into the house through an open sliding glass door. He then sniffed around the kitchen, no doubt picking up the scent of food.

But that’s when the owner’s two guard dogs sprang into action, chasing the bear out of the house.

But here there’s the thing: those two guard dogs are both about the size of a yorkie! A bit of a size disadvantage, but they weren’t intimidated.

AUDIO: BARKING

They not only chased him out of the house, but out of the yard.

You’ll be glad to know that the bear was unharmed.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, April 14th.

We’re so glad you’ve joined us today for WORLD Radio!

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the providence of God.

Every day last summer one of our World Journalism Institute students drove past a sign. It read, “TREY GOT HIS 1%—GOD IS GOOD.”

That made our student journalist wonder: Who’s Trey? And what’s that 1 percent about?

EICHER: As often happens in a small community, a question to a baseball mom led to a conversation in a store, which led to a conversation around a table—well, you get the picture. And eventually, she got to the bottom of the mystery. Here’s WORLD’s Julie Spencer with the story.

JULIE SPENCER, ASSOCIATE CORRESPONDENT: On a humid Tuesday last July, car after car pulled into the small parking lot of Parkview Baptist Church in El Dorado, Arkansas. Men and women, children and teenagers, walked into the sanctuary, filing into blue fabric-covered pews. A slideshow of prayer requests and Scripture played on two large screens as people prayed quietly in the pews. “Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases.”

Clarissa Murphy sat with her son, Trey, on the front center pew. Fifteen years old and quiet like his dad, Trey wasn’t accustomed to all the attention. His picture was the top slide in the slideshow—all the people gathered in the room had come to pray for him.

TREY: I mean, I don’t like the center of attention, but at that point, maybe just at that point I realized that I had to, I had to go with it, ‘cause that’s how it was gonna be.

Sheryle Sandy, the pastor’s wife, organized the prayer meeting.

SHERYLE: We just needed to do something more than just ask people to pray. We needed to provide an opportunity for them to come together and pray. And we had no idea that it would grow, you know, like it did.

TIM: So, there was probably a hundred and fifty people?

TREY: There was a ton of people that came.

The Murphy family’s journey to that front pew began two weeks earlier with a routine physical. Tim, Trey’s dad, recalls the doctor’s reaction when Clarissa casually mentioned a knot on Trey’s collarbone:

TIM: He didn’t even finish the physical. He said, “You’re going straight to the hospital. We’re going to do bloodwork and an MRI.”

An MRI the following day revealed a tumor. Plans for a weekend baseball tournament were scrapped for a trip to Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock. Before a long day of tests culminating in a biopsy, a doctor sat down with Tim and Clarissa.

TIM: We didn’t know what we were going for. We thought, you know, consultation, or at that point, we weren’t really thinking cancer or anything like that. But that’s why, when he came in and examined him and looked at the MRIs, and we were just asking different, “normal” questions, I guess. And that’s when he said, “You do know what kind of doctor I am,” you know. And he said he was a bone tumor doctor, and so we knew it was pretty serious then.

The doctor told them he was certain—99% certain—the tumor on Trey’s collarbone was osteosarcoma—bone cancer.

CLARISSA: And that’s where, you know, we told Trey, you know, we were like he’s 99% sure that it is cancer. And Trey was like, “But I still have 1%.”

Doctors sent Trey home with his left arm in a sling, telling him to take it easy. Trey went home and mowed the lawn.

TREY: At first I was kinda worried, but I guess I just wasn’t worried much at all.

Trey’s grandmother had been the first to pray over him—then others came to pray. The highschool baseball team—30 boys sporting their purple and white team colors—circled around Trey in his front yard.

TIM: The guys came together, and we all prayed outside. And that was cool for me.

The family’s pastor, Mark Sandy, also came to pray with them.

MARK: Trey, he was just very even-keeled. When I went over there to visit with them and pray for them, I just felt like they weren’t letting that fear control everything around them.

Clarissa remembers praying alone in the pew the Sunday before the biopsy results.

CLARISSA: Just sitting in church that day I was just like, “It’s gonna be okay”—even if God did choose to take him.

Two days later, Clarissa and Trey sat on that front pew, surrounded by the one hundred fifty people who’d come to pray for their family. While the adults around him prayed for strength or peace in the valley of the shadow of death, Trey was confident that God had another path for him to walk. He clung to one verse throughout the week of waiting:

TIM: Faith of a mustard seed, what verse is that?

TREY: Matthew 17:20, I think.

The day after the big prayer meeting, Tim, Clarissa, and Trey drove back to Little Rock for the biopsy results. Trey asked to wait in the truck until just before the appointment.

Back in El Dorado, the church family awaited news. Clarissa texted Pastor Mark Sandy and his wife Sheryle.

SHERYLE: We were at home and Mark got it first and  I was just scared. I was just afraid it was gonna be bad news and I remember Mark just going, “What??!!!” And you just got real excited, and so it was just amazing. It was just a miracle.

Four different labs declared the tissue sample benign. When Clarissa thanked the doctor over and over, he finally told her, “Don’t thank me, thank Jesus!”

CLARISSA: It was just amazing. Trey told us, he said, “We’re gonna be walkin’ outta here cryin’ happy tears,” and I was like, “Okay, son.” But he sure showed me!

Clarissa sweetly summed up that day in her journal, “And we were all so, so happy. To God be the Glory.”

TIM: You know miracles happen all the time, but you don’t see them like that. And so, to see it was incredible. Terrible experience, but an amazing experience to see how God can work.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Julie Spencer in El Dorado, Arkansas.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, April 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, got some news for you. Wanted to let you know our team is in the thick of a website makeover, and you’ll see it very soon.

The goal, as our marketing team says, is a site design that matches our journalism: clear, refined, and intuitive. So look for a new look coming to wng.org.

REICHARD: When? When? When? Do we have a day and time?

EICHER: All I can say is it’s coming in April. The team has literally been working night and day, tweaking this, rearranging that—basically spraying for bugs. There’s no one more eager to flip the switch than our web team. We just wanted you to know it’s coming this month. Could be anytime in the next few weeks.

REICHARD: I’ve been looking at the work they’ve been doing, and it’s impressive. Good job.

Up next on The World and Everything in It, Commentator Whitney Williams now on our tendency to condemn others and give ourselves a pass.

WILLIAMS: Keep that line real tight.

JAKE: Those fish are crazy, Daddy. They bite.

WHITNEY WILLIAMS, COMMENTATOR: Back in March, on a warm Monday evening, my husband, our three little boys, and I tromped through a cold, North Texas creek in search of white bass. The “sandbass,” as we call them in these here parts, had recently swum upstream from the lake to spawn. And, in spite of our herd-of-water-buffalo-like entrance, they couldn’t resist our minnows. After catching two dinners worth, my husband called it a night and we slowly waded back toward the bridge where we’d parked our minivan. I trailed behind my crew, thinking on the beauty of God’s creation and the brain-eating amoeba that might be entering my bloodstream thanks to a filet knife that had embedded itself into my foot a week prior.

SOUND: SPLASHING, WALKING

Squeals of delight suddenly jogged me from my thoughts: “Look Mom, a trampoline!” one of my boys yelled as he and his two brothers hopped up and down on a dingy, waterlogged mattress they’d just discovered underneath the shallow water.

AUDIO: It’s a mattress! It’s an old mattress…

My first thought was “nasty!”

My second thought was judgmental: “What kind of low-class, trashy person dumps a mattress in a creek? Surely a Christian wouldn’t do such a thing.”

God immediately knocked my pride down a notch.

“Whitney Williams: Did you or did you not once smash a stranger’s mailbox with a metal pole in an effort to impress a teenage crush?”

“Guilty,” I responded in my head, once again repenting of my teenage stupidity.

How quickly I had raised myself above another.

And don’t we do that so often—measure our holiness by another’s sinfulness? “At least I never had an abortion.” “At least I don’t watch porn.” “I could never cheat on my spouse!” We puff with pride while those we judge beat their breasts.

At the same time, we don’t witness. We don’t welcome foster children into our homes. We gossip. We watch questionable TV shows. We lust. We lie. We aren’t generous with our money. We’re vain. We’re racist, prideful, grumpy, ungrateful, easily angered, we harbor unforgiveness, we decide we can’t afford to tithe, we idolize politicians, we don’t respect our husbands, we look at our phones more than our children, we envy our friend’s home or job, we don’t spend time in the Word. We don’t volunteer at church, but simply consume. We stir up trouble on social media. We’re impatient. Gluttons. Worriers. We’re ugly. We’re sinful.

For the measuring stick lies not with our fellow man, but with Jesus, and next to Him, Romans 3:23 confirms, we all look like mattress dumpers, or worse yet, their discarded, water-logged, waste.

“Nasty!” says Satan, in an attempt to remind God of our sinfulness and betrayal. “No, not nasty,” God responds, thanks to Christ’s redemptive work on our behalf. “That’s my treasure.”

I’m Whitney Williams.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: COVID fatalities. How many people have died from the virus? We’ll dig into several different measures to try to figure the number.

And, we’ll find out why this year’s flu season never materialized.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery: “Go, and from now on, sin no more.”

Go now in grace and peace.

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