The World and Everything in It - August 17, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

The Taliban claim victory in Afghanistan after America retreats, leaving thousands in danger.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also public health and personal liberty are at loggerheads. We’ll talk more about vaccine mandates.

Plus, the first of a two-part story on organ donation. Today, a family in need of a heart.

And books for children that have deep meaning for adults, too.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, August 17th. 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 it’s time for the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Taliban takeover leads to chaos in Kabul » Chaos in Afghanistan.

AUDIO: [Sound of Kabul]

A tragic scene at the Kabul airport on Monday underscored the desperation of Afghans trying to flee the country after a Taliban takeover.

Thousands flooded onto the tarmac, trying to force their way onto American C-130s departing from Kabul.

AUDIO: [Sound of Kabul]

Some even grabbed onto the sides of the plane, holding on even as it departed. And as it took off into the sky, they plunged to their deaths.

At least seven people died in the chaos.

Hours later, President Biden addressed the crisis from the White House, telling Americans ...

BIDEN: I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.

For the current crisis, he blamed past administrations and the Afghan military for not standing up to the Taliban.

He said America went into Afghanistan with clear goals:

BIDEN: Get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that.

But Republicans note that the country is now back in the hands of the very same group that fostered al-Qaeda.

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell called it “a stain on the reputation” of the United States.

MCCONNELL: What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster.

Even some within the president’s own party say Biden made a historic mistake. Former secretary of state under President Obama, Leon Panetta told CNN…

PANETTA: You know, in a lot of ways, I think of John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. You know, it unfolded quickly. The president thought that everything would be fine and that was not the case. But President Kennedy took responsibility.

The Pentagon said it was deploying another 1,000 American troops to help secure the airport. President Biden says he remains committed to getting American citizens and U.S. allies safely out of Afghanistan.

Rescuers continue search for survivors in Haiti » In Haiti, rescuers are racing against time as they search for survivors of a powerful earthquake. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports.

AUDIO: [SOUND OF HAITI]

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: Workers used an excavator on Monday to move twisted piles of concrete and scrap metal—where a hotel once stood.

But hopes of finding anyone alive in the rubble are dimming.

The hotel was just one of many buildings that crumbled to the ground in the town of Les Cayes during Saturday’s 7.2 magnitude quake.

More than 1,400 people are dead. And tens of thousands of people are now homeless, many sleeping outside in soccer fields.

Adding insult to injury, tropical depression Grace on Monday dropped heavy rain on top of the already devastated country, triggering mudslides. That made it even tougher for rescuers to clear already impassable roads.

Haiti already was struggling with the pandemic, a presidential assassination, and a worsening wave of gang violence.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Grace cuts across Caribbean as Fred drenches southeastern U.S. » After dumping heavy rain on Haiti, tropical depression Grace continued to cut a westward path.

Stacy Stewart with the National Hurricane Center…

STEWART: Tropical storm warnings up for parts of Cuba. We also have a tropical storm watch up for Jamaica where you could see some of those winds.

From there, it could hit Cancun, Mexico on Thursday. And then it will likely spin over the Gulf of Mexico where it’s expected to gain strength before hitting the Gulf Coast of Northern Mexico and possibly South Texas as a tropical storm and maybe even a hurricane.

Meantime, in the southeastern United States, the remnants of what was Tropical Storm Fred are drenching the region.

Fred made landfall Monday afternoon in the Florida Panhandle around Apalachicola, packing winds of 65 miles per hour. The storm knocked out power to thousands of homes and businesses.

T-Mobile investigating hack of user data » T-Mobile says it is investigating a leak of its data after someone took to an online forum offering to sell the personal info of cellphone users. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown has that story.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: Company officials said Monday that it has confirmed there was unauthorized access to “some T-Mobile data.” They said they’re still determining the scope of the breach and who was affected, but they’re confident that they have now locked out the hacker.

Vice’s Motherboard reported that someone who posted in an underground forum was offering to sell personal data from more than 100 million people.

The report says the data includes Social Security numbers, phone numbers, names, physical addresses, and other information.

T-Mobile, which is based in Washington state, became one of the country’s largest cellphone service carriers after buying rival Sprint last year.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: vaccine mandates and personal liberty.

Plus, adult stories for children.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 17th of August, 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: vaccine mandates.

As the Delta variant spreads across the country, so are vaccine mandates. Businesses, cities, universities, hospitals and parts of the federal government are all beginning to require proof of the COVID-19 vaccine.

REICHARD: Those vaccine mandates are leading to frustrations and legal challenges. I told you about one of those legal challenges yesterday, but today, WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg reports on the deepening friction between public health and personal liberty.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Kaitlyn is a second year post-grad student. She’s studying to be a physician’s assistant at a school in New York. We’re only using her first name to protect her position in the program.

Kaitlyn says throughout the summer, her school asked about her vaccination status.

KAITLYN: We were constantly getting vaccination surveys and even in the surveys we had to put our name, so it wasn't even anonymous.

Kaitlyn held off on getting vaccinated. Then about a month ago, she got a call from her program director.

KAITLYN: So he was asking, like, I see that you're not vaccinated? You want to tell me why?

She explained.

KAITLYN: I was uncomfortable that it's not FDA approved. I’m a young woman. I don't know how it's gonna affect my fertility in the future… I have had COVID. And again, I just feel uncomfortable with it being developed so quickly and pushed out so quickly.

Then…

KAITLYN: He just casually slips in there, that well, you know, if you don't get vaccinated, then it's, it's probably going to affect your graduation.

The program director said that without the vaccine, Kaitlyn can’t fulfill the hospital hours required to graduate. But she says those rounds don’t start for another year. Another year she could go without the vaccine.

KAITLYN: That allows, one, more time for them to do studies… Also, they'll probably have to tweak and do different things now that the Delta variant is running rampant... So a year will allow them a lot more time to do that.

Across the country, students and employees are being put in similar conundrums. Vaccination or job? Vaccination or graduation? It’s even affecting less important decisions, like vaccination or eating at a restaurant?

Jonathan Emord says this is an unprecedented choice. He’s an attorney who specializes in health law claims.

EMORD: We really have no parallel as to the degree of government restriction on individual liberty that we now experience in our history.

That’s why a growing number of lawsuits are challenging vaccine mandates.

Students and professors have filed suits against a handful of schools. Some workers are also challenging employer vaccine mandates.

The lawsuits make a variety of arguments: the mandates violate religious beliefs under the First Amendment. They violate due process rights under the Fifth Amendment as well as the right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. And it’s illegal to require vaccines that are not fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Todd Zywicki is a law professor at George Mason University, a public college in Virginia. He’s suing his school, arguing he has natural immunity to COVID-19, and, therefore, he shouldn’t have to get vaccinated. The university won’t grant him an exemption.

ZYWICKI: The university is trying to essentially punish me for not undergoing this unnecessary medical procedure, unnecessary because I have natural immunity already.

If Zywicki doesn’t get the vaccine, he has to be tested regularly and wear a mask. And if he chooses not to disclose his vaccine status, his job could be at risk. And he won’t be eligible for merit pay increases.

ZYWICKI: I want to teach my students… And I would like to do this in person without and do my best for my students, without these handicaps, without being stigmatized by, by all this disparate treatment.

But some public health experts say when it comes to COVID-19, far-reaching vaccine mandates are necessary and legal. Lawrence Gostin directs the Center on Global Health Law at the World Health Organization.

GOSTIN: People have an absolute right to make whatever decision they want about their own bodies. But they do not have a right to expose other people to a potentially dangerous infectious disease.

Gostin says there has to be consequences for not complying with mandates … like losing a job.

GOSTIN: You can't simply say, well, it's my right to go into my job and infect others. That's not a right any of us have.

Still, other healthcare experts think that vaccine mandates could be more narrowly tailored to protect especially vulnerable populations.

Zach Jenkins is a clinical specialist in infectious diseases and a professor at Cedarville University.

JENKINS: So a good example might be someone who works in a long term care facility in and around, you know, patients that are immunocompromised and can't receive a vaccine themselves. Well, we know looking at all the data, those people are at incredibly high risk of fatality when associated with COVID-19. So that'd be a really good example of a place where it makes sense.

Jenkins worries that all-encompassing vaccine mandates are further eroding trust in public health institutions. Trust they can’t afford to lose more of.

JENKINS: So the more of these mandates and things like that rollout, I fear that people will think this is just kind of the long arm of these authorities, pushing down on people and can drive them away from what could be a solution.

Courts have only ruled on a couple of mandate challenges. And so far, they’ve sided with the mandates. Lawyer Jonathan Emord says the courts are wrongly relying on a 116-year-old Supreme Court decision.

It involved a man who didn’t want to get a small-pox vaccine. He argued the government was violating his due process and equal protection rights under the fifth and 14th amendments.

The high court ruled against him.

EMORD: It denied the true meaning of the 14th amendment in that it rendered the general public interest in public health superior to the individual rights of dissenting individuals…

Emord says those bringing lawsuits against today’s mandates will have to ask the courts to reinterpret that precedent.

In the meantime, people worried about COVID-19 vaccines will have to make difficult choices. Ones that don’t always feel right.

Back in New York, Kaitlyn decided to get vaccinated. But she says her school put her in a position that will frustrate her for a long-time to come.

KAITLYN: It's really angering because it feels like I'm being pushed into a corner, where it's like, well, this is what you've worked for, this is what you've worked your butt off for your entire life. And in order to pursue it, you have to make a very rash decision for something that could physically, mentally, and emotionally impact you.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next: chaos in Afghanistan.

As we reported a short time ago, panic has gripped the capital city of Kabul as the Taliban seize control.

Many Afghans are desperate to escape the clutches of the Taliban, fearing oppressive rule … and brutal reprisals against those allied with the West.

But for many, there will be no escape.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: So how did we get here and what happens next?

Joining us once again to help answer those questions is Michael Rubin. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and he’s an expert in Middle Eastern culture and conflict. 

Good morning, sir.

MICHAEL RUBIN, GUEST: Good morning.

REICHARD: Well, we didn’t expect to be speaking with you again so soon. But the Taliban’s takeover has happened so quickly and took many by surprise. The last time you and I talked a week ago, you mentioned that we might see a civil war rather than total Taliban domination.

So let me just start with this question: What happened?!

RUBIN: Well, we still will see a civil war. Amrullah Saleh, who is the Vice President and was the deputy to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the former head of the Northern Alliance, has taken over the Panjshir Valley, which the Taliban doesn't control, and declared the first resistance. At the same time, I expect that all the neighbors of Afghanistan, with the exception of Pakistan, are now regrouping and will choose their respective proxy warlords to try to carve out a buffer. The thing to understand about the Taliban takeover is it's much more a result of momentum and political deals they cut than it is about actual fighting. And so the same trend can work in reverse. And indeed it did in October 2001, where the Taliban tend to lose cities as quickly as they get them. This really is the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.

REICHARD: Prior to the U.S. and NATO pullout, the Afghan military was doing the heavy lifting on the front lines. We had not lost an American serviceman in combat in Afghanistan since February 2020.
Was the situation in Afghanistan somewhat contained prior to the pullout? Or was a major Taliban offensive going to happen regardless of whether our military withdrew?

RUBIN: Well, there's two questions there. Really, when it comes to the Taliban offensive, remember that in Afghanistan, because of the topography, because of the weather, fighting is seasonal. The Taliban would fight from the spring to the fall, but once the mountains were snow covered and the passes blocked, then you would have relative calm. So a lot of Afghans are asking why didn't you time your withdrawal so that it would come in the fall before the Taliban could take over? That would give us time to regroup. The other issue with regard to what happened, really, is the Afghan army is able to fight. But what they lack are the logistics to get from point A to point B when that fighting does occur. In effect, we pulled the carpet out from underneath them. And then lastly, while the Americans might look at this as an even playing field, the Afghans don't because Pakistan fully supported the Taliban, and that's one of the reasons why so many Afghans decided to make their accommodation with the Taliban, because they figured they didn't have any patron, the Taliban did, and they saw the writing on the wall.

REICHARD: The Biden administration is taking a lot of heat for this military pullout right now. But it was the Trump administration that initially set this in motion and negotiated a pullout with the Taliban.
Is the pullout that we’ve seen any different from what President Trump wanted to do? And if so, how is it different?

RUBIN: Well, there's enough blame to go around here. Certainly President Trump was ill-advised to strike a deal with the Taliban that cut out the elected Afghan government to insist that the Afghan government, which again wasn't party to the deal, release Taliban prisoners and so forth. Ultimately, however, the reason why so many people are blaming Biden is while Biden will say his hands were tied by the February 29th 2020 deal, which Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad signed, the fact of the matter is the Taliban had violated that agreement consistently. And if Biden is so insistent that he has to follow the agreements that his predecessor had made, then why don't we have the Keystone XL pipeline? Why don't we have the border wall with Mexico? The fact of the matter is, this was a choice and all throughout Biden's campaign—as with Trump—he talked about forever wars. And this was based less on events on the ground. As you noted, there have been fewer casualties over the last five years in Afghanistan than in any small sized American city or county because of car accidents. The expense of our presence in Afghanistan wasn't much more than it is in Japan or Korea, where we also have a deterrence mission. President Biden and some of his aides will talk about how we spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, and it's all gone to naught. And they have a reason to complain—certainly the nation building aspect hasn't worked. But over the last five years or so, we found that golden formula, where with a minimal amount of U.S. forces, we could really amplify the local forces and have containment—not much different than what we have along the DMZ between South Korea and North Korea.

REICHARD: So let’s talk about what happens next. The Taliban seems to be striking a more moderate tone publicly, relatively speaking of course on issues like education and free press. Are you buying that? Do you think we’ll see a more moderate Taliban than 20 years ago?

RUBIN: No, I'm not buying that. First of all, there is a discrepancy between what their spokesmen are saying in Qatar, and some of the pronouncements which we actually see that are being made in the towns and cities in Afghanistan. At the same time, in Kandahar and Kabul and elsewhere, we're seeing the Taliban going house to house to try to arrest anyone who had worked with Americans. When it comes to Afghan Special Forces, they've been executing the Afghan Special Forces and raping their families. This isn't just a matter of the Special Immigrant Visas, which the Biden administration is still trying to process to fly up to 30,000 Afghans out of Afghanistan, if logistically that's still possible. But remember, for the last 18 months, we haven't done any visa interviews at our embassy in Kabul, the excuse for that was COVID. But you know, I mean, people can talk by Skype, people can talk by Zoom, you can physically hand in your papers in one room, and then get on a computer and do the interview in another. So all these Afghans who had gotten fully paid scholarships to study in the United States, no one's even thinking about them right now.

REICHARD: Michael Rubin with the American Enterprise Institute has been our guest. Thanks so much for your time and your insight!

RUBIN: Thank you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 17th. This is WORLD Radio and we’re glad you’ve joined us today.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a change of heart.

The United States has the highest-performing organ donation and transplant system in the world. Still, 17 people die each day waiting for a surgery that never happens.

REICHARD: The gift of an organ is also a gift of life. It’s no surprise that in some cases, relationships form between donor families and recipients.

Today the first part of a story about one heart, two families—and a connection that has brought hope out of grief.

Here’s WORLD Senior Correspondent Kim Henderson.

SOUND: HEART BEATING

KIM HENDERSON, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: A total of 3,552 patients had heart transplants in 2019. Dave Sullivan was one of them.

DAVE: Looking back now from a Christian perspective . . . I see that every step that happened, I can see where it was all orchestrated for a specific outcome . . . it's hard for me to understand that God loves me enough to work all this out for me.

His journey really starts back when he was 24.

DAVE: I had gained a lot of weight, retained a lot of fluid. Just felt lethargic, no energy, couldn't sleep, couldn't eat.

Dave went through a slate of doctors trying to find out what was wrong.

DAVE: And ultimately I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure . . . viral cardiomyopathy from some unknown virus, possibly a sinus infection . . .

But things weren’t dire. Yet. Medicine got his symptoms under control, and Dave was well enough to work full-time repairing pagers. Yeah—pagers. It was 20 something years ago.

He was also well enough to woo and win a bride, Michelle.

MICHELLE: I knew he had a heart problem when we got married, so I knew that something may come up in the future.

For 13 years Dave’s medicine worked—then it didn’t.

By that time, the couple had two daughters. A mortgage. A calendar filled with church responsibilities and PTA.

DAVE: One of the measurements of, of a human heart is how much . . . blood it pumps. And so a normal, you know, really good human heart has an ejection fraction of 55 to 70 . . . Mine was less than 10.

MICHELLE: It was my worst fear coming true. And it was just (pause: “Sorry.”) It was just a very hard time.

Doctors discovered Dave not only had a weak heart. He had a weak heart with electrical problems. They implanted a defibrillator/pacemaker combo that worked for five years. Sort of. Dave slept a lot. Couldn’t work. Michelle says it was tough.

MICHELLE: Financially, it was a struggle. Emotionally, it was a struggle . . . It was very overwhelming trying to maintain everything that, you know, your husband normally does—the yard, the vehicles, the everything, because he wasn't able to do all these things.

At nearly every doctor’s appointment, the issue of a transplant came up. But in 2017 the discussions centered on what they called a “bridge to transplant therapy”—a left ventricular assist device—or L-VAD. It’s half inside, half outside the body with a motor that pumps blood. Dave got one, and they quickly learned to keep batteries charged, lines unkinked, and dressings sterile.

MICHELLE: That was one of the most stressful parts of my entire life . . . honestly, I was preparing everyday to lose my husband . . . When it would have an alarm, and he would have an issue, it was super scary. Yeah. I basically turned from a wife to a caregiver for that two years.

Dave couldn’t be alone at any time. Someone trained for the LVAD had to be ready to jump in at any second. Family members took classes in case Michelle got sick or needed a break. Even their pastor and his wife signed up for training.

Life went on, but Dave always knew he’d need a new heart. He just didn’t know when.

To fill in all the details of this sort of medical history, it takes both Dave and Michelle—and sometimes time-stamped photos from their phones. The timeline includes Dave getting an infection about a year after he got the LVAD. While he was in the hospital for that, Dave’s alarms started going off. He was crashing.

MICHELLE: They took us into the little room and told us that he was bleeding out. They didn't know where. They didn't know what was going on. They were squeezing blood as fast as they could. Um, they had him on a vent already.

It was bad. Michelle thought she’d lost him. But some 14 pints of blood later, surgeons had Dave stabilized.

DAVE: It was a very unique situation because the spleen had perforated for an unknown reason. And so the LVAD was just pumping blood throughout my body and my abdomen filled up with blood, and it basically had lost—if you put it into a mechanical perspective—it lost prime. It was like a hole in the pipe, and the pump was just pumping.

That incident put Dave near the top of the list for a transplant, and he wouldn’t be able to leave the hospital until he got one. Michelle stayed by his side. She only went home twice for the better part of six months.

All the while, the Sullivans didn’t just pray for a heart. They prayed for the donor.

MICHELLE: I prayed for their salvation. I prayed that if they didn't know Jesus, that they would before they died. I prayed for their relationship with their family. I prayed for their family to be okay with whatever decision that person had made to be an organ donor. I prayed for peace for that family.

SOUND: PHONE

On a Wednesday, 3 o’clock in the morning, the phone rang in Dave’s hospital room.

DAVE: She said, “Mr. Sullivan . . . we believe we have found you a suitable organ, and we would like to know if you would like to proceed with accepting it?”

That was two years ago, and the heart that now beats in Dave’s chest once belonged to a 25-year-old named Jordan.

Only a small percentage of organ recipients ever get to meet their donor’s families. Dave wrote a letter, it went through all the channels, and a year later he got a response. One thing led to another, until the Sullivans made plans to meet Jordan’s family face to face.

We’ll hear what that was like tomorrow. 

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in Mt. Moriah, Mississippi.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 17th. 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. The truth doesn’t need complicated language. Some good evidence of that now from WORLD commentator Steve West.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR:

In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of-
The cow jumping over the moon.

Parents, how many times have you read the words of Goodnight Moon to children interested in deferring bedtime? I read it hundreds of times. Yet I suspect that book as well as some other children’s books have meant as much to you as to your children. That’s because their authors wrote true, adult stories using child-size words. They’re writing not for children but for themselves. They capture a child-like wonder in a few, musical words.

Take the author of Babar, Laurent de Brunhoff. A couple years ago, he completed his final book in the series.

“I like to make the elephant alive,” de Brunhoff told an interviewer. “The elephant is a very appealing animal with its big ears and trunk, even when it is not dressed up like a human.” De Brunhoff has been writing and drawing elephants since 1945, infected by an elephantine passion nurtured by his own father, who wrote the first Babar book in 1931. He is not trying to relate to children, to speak down to them. He’s addressing his love of elephants to them much as he would to adults, but with fewer and simpler words.

Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, wrote her books out of her own love of nature, a love nurtured by time spent among the giant live oaks, high dunes, and sea grass of Cumberland Island, Georgia.

Whenever I read the simple lines of Goodnight Moon, I’m comforted by the pleasing cadence, the sense of security conveyed by the particular, familiar things in the child's room, and the presence of the grandmotherly bunny waiting for the child to sleep. In Goodnight Moon, particular things matter immensely, things we pass over in everyday adult life. Things like "two little kittens, and a pair of mittens, and a little toy house, and a young mouse, and a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush."

Yet another book, I Love You Forever, deals with the weighty topics of familial love and mortality. In it, over the recurring chorus of, "I love you forever, I like you for always, as long as I'm living my baby you'll be," the child grows and the parents age until, near the end of life, the child becomes the parent in a sense, the caregiver, and sings, "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my Mommy you'll be." That one made both me and my son cry.

Robert Munsch wrote the book after he and his wife had two stillborn babies. He later said, “For a long time I had it in my head and I couldn’t even sing it because every time I tried to sing it I cried. It was very strange having a song in my head that I couldn’t sing.”

You can't read I Love You Forever without a tear in your eye or a catch in your throat. But whatever you feel washes up on the shores of deep, abiding, family love.

Stories for adults with child-sized words.

I’m Steve West.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: devastation in Haiti. We’ll find out how rescue and recovery are going after Saturday’s earthquake.

Plus, part two of Kim Henderson’s story on organ donation: tomorrow, the gift of a heart.

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.

The Apostle Peter wrote to the early Christians: Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Go now in grace and peace.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.