The World and Everything in It — February 14, 2020

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Good morning!

The Church of England apologized this week for saying that sex should be limited to male-female couples who are married.

We’ll talk with Trevin Wax about that.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Culture Friday

Also Megan reviews the new documentary about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

And Myrna Brown talks to singer-songwriter Matt Redman about why he started writing worship music.

BASHAM: It’s Friday, February 14th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Megan Basham.

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

BASHAM: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Senate votes to limit Trump’s war powers » The Senate voted Thursday to limit President Trump’s authority to launch military strikes against Iran.

AUDIO: The yeas are 55, the nays are 45. The joint resolution as amended is passed. 

Eight Republicans crossed the aisle to approve the measure. 

It states that Trump must win approval from Congress before ordering any further military action against Iran. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said “the Senate just sent a clear shot across the bow.” 

SCHUMER: A bipartisan majority of senators don’t want the president waging war without congressional approval. 

But Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, who wrote the measure, said it’s not about President Trump or even the presidency, but instead was an important reassertion of Congress’s power to declare war.

The Democratic-controlled House passed a separate, non-binding war powers resolution last month. 

But the votes are ultimately symbolic—as it would take a two-thirds majority in the House and in the GOP-run Senate to override a Trump veto.

House moves to revive ERA » Democratic lawmakers want to void the expiration date of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The original deadline for states to ratify the women’s rights measure was in 1982, but the House voted on Thursday to reopen the approval process. Speaker Nancy Pelosi…

PELOSI: It’s not just about women. The ERA will strengthen America, unleashing the full power of women. 

But opponents say it won’t give women any more rights than they already have and that it could be used to, among other things, remove legal protections for the unborn. 

Virginia lawmakers ratified the amendment last month, bringing the number of states that have approved it up to the required 38.

The resolution is unlikely to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Attorney General Barr: Trump’s tweets ‘make it impossible to do my job’ » Attorney General William Barr on Thursday suggested President Trump is causing problems at the Justice Department with his frequent public remarks about department business. He told ABC News… 

BARR: To have public statements and tweets made about the department, about people in the department or men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases make it impossible for me to do my job. 

Barr’s comments come amid a firestorm over this week’s reversal of the prosecutors’ recommended sentence in the Roger Stone case. Stone is a longtime associate of President Trump and after Trump’s public remarks about the case, Democrats accused Barr of doing the president’s bidding. Barr is scheduled to testify about the decision before the House Judiciary Committee on March 31st.

Trump fires back at former White House chief of staff John Kelly » Meantime, President Trump on Thursday lashed out against former White House chief of staff John Kelly. That after Kelly defended a former national security aide who offered key testimony in the impeachment inquiry. WORLD Radio’s Kristen Flavin reports. 

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: The president tweeted Thursday that—quote—“Like so many X’s, he misses the action & just can’t keep his mouth shut, which he actually has a military and legal obligation to do.” 

Those comments came after Kelly defended Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman. He was one of the officials who raised concerns about Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s president. 

Vindman was ousted last week from his position as a Ukraine specialist with the White House National Security Council.

John Kelly, a former Marine General, served as Trump’s chief of staff for 18 months until January of last year. 

He said Vindman was correct to raise concerns. According to a report by the Atlantic, he said “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order,’” And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”  

He said Vindman did exactly as he was taught. 

Reporting for WORLD Radio, I’m Kristen Flavin. 

COVINGTON: Evacuee from China tests positive for COVID-19 » U.S. officials on Thursday announced that an evacuee from China under quarantine in Texas has tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus. 

The patient, who had been flown to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio last week, is now in isolation at a hospital and was reported in stable condition. 

Globally, the virus has infected more than 60,000 people and it has killed more than 1,300.

Esper: U.S., Taliban have negotiated proposal for “7-day reduction in violence” » Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Thursday that “the United States and the Taliban have negotiated a proposal for a seven-day reduction in violence.” 

ESPER: I’m here today consulting with allies about this proposal, and we have had a series of productive bilateral and collective meetings about the path forward. 

Esper said he is hopeful that this will be the first step toward a larger peace deal.

He emphasized throughout their talks that the United States is committed to defeating ISIS and to ensuring no terrorist group again uses Afghanistan as a safe haven. 

U.S. officials say any eventual deal with the Taliban would include a pledge not to associate with terrorist groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: a couple on board the Diamond Princess talk about what it’s like to spend Valentine’s Day in quarantine.

Plus, Matt Redman on what really makes someone a worship leader.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MEGAN BASHAM: It’s Friday the 14th of February, 2020. Valentine’s Day!

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

NICK EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: a funny thing happened on the way to the honeymoon.

BASHAM: What a story! A romantic cruise turned into a medical quarantine—not exactly the way you plan your first Valentine’s Day!

EICHER: No! I imagine not. Texas newlyweds Tyler and Rachel Torres are among the 3,700 people quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess. This is the cruise ship that was scheduled to sail from Yokohama, Japan, January 20th and return February 4th. 

Scheduled is the key word here.

But no one was allowed to get off the ship because one of the passengers tested positive for the coronavirus. Since that time, more than 200 people on board the ship have come down with the virus.

BASHAM: Now, as we said, Tyler and Rachel were on their honeymoon. 

The good news is they’re getting a longer honeymoon. The bad news is it’s in much tighter quarters than they expected! 

I talked to them via Skype about what it’s been like. Here are excerpts of our conversation.

It’s hard to imagine a more pressure-filled situation. I mean, how are you guys doing physically?

TYLER: We’re doing alright. The first couple days were rough just because they didn’t have that many movies. The internet wasn’t all that good. And the water was a big issue. We didn’t have enough water. We were told to boil our own water with the kettle.

RACHEL: I’ve become a professional at boiling water. Apparently electric kettles are popular in Asia. We had never seen one. But it’s become something that we’re using pretty much daily now.

TYLER: Yeah. But now they’ve uploaded more movies than we know what to do with. Obviously I’ve been busy with Reddit. We’ve gotten lots of shoutouts from people. Chick-fil-A in Irving has been really nice and supplied one of the Bible studies— Rachel describes it better.

RACHEL: Yeah, it’s a Bible study for adults with special needs that we go to and… they do meal nights every other week, so Chick-fil-A is going to take care of that for them for a couple weeks. So that was awesome. It’s good to see some tangible results come out from all the interviews we’ve been doing and our situation. 

BASHAM: Right. I saw an article and this was talking about for missionaries and other people who are in areas that are really hard hit with the coronavirus, just talking about how they’re witnessing and you brought up the Bible study. So are people really nervous? Is that a conversation that’s going on much— where people are with their faith? What they’re thinking about eternity in this really scary situation?

RACHEL: Yeah, I would say that we’ve been trying to witness to the people kind of immediately next to us and across from us stateroom-wise. We don’t have a lot of contact with the rest of the boat just because of the quarantine being isolated to our rooms. But we’ve been trying to open the balcony door and let some fresh air in and then we open our door so that the fresh air can blow all the way through to everybody on the inside staterooms. And we’ve made a lot of friends just kind of immediately around us. We haven’t really gotten a lot of questions about our faith yet. But we’re hoping that just being positive lights in the interviews that we’ve been doing on television will hopefully help.

BASHAM: And how about for the two of you? Because I feel like I’m kind of a worrywart anyway, so when I’m put into a situation like that, I feel like suddenly that faith would be tested, going “OK, Lord, how am I going to not worry and fret my way through this?”

RACHEL: Yeah. Tyler is a lot calmer than I am. I struggled a lot the first couple days and made a lot of phone calls downstairs just trying to get information from anybody who would talk to me. And, obviously, nobody knew anything at that point yet. So, I think I worried a lot the first couple days. 

But since then, we have so many people back home praying for us and I think most of Dallas-Fort Worth is praying for us at this point. So, we’ve had a lot of people reach out just with love and prayers and our pastors back home have been really helpful, too. So, I don’t know. It’s a peace beyond understanding that I have right now, and I know Tyler has been really calm throughout this whole thing.

MEGAN BASHAM: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Culture Friday.

NICK EICHER: It was three weeks ago now that the Church of England issued a statement on doctrine related to marriage and sexuality.  

It’s known as a pastoral guidance, and what it said should not have come as a surprise to anyone. 

Here’s what it said: Consistent with 2,000 years of Christian teaching the church’s stance remains that “for Christians, marriage, that is the lifelong union between a man and a woman … remains the proper context for sexual activity.”

The statement also said that any sex outside of that “falls short of God’s purpose for human beings.”

Again, nothing there that should have come as a surprise.

Yet there was surprise, even if feigned surprise.

BASHAM: Yeah, because these assertions caused major headlines across the United States and Europe. 

About a week later, leaders in the church apologized. 

While they didn’t retract their position, they did say they were very sorry that they had “jeopardized trust” and that they “recognize the division and hurt this has caused.”

We now welcome Trevin Wax to Culture Friday. Trevin is the Senior Vice President of Theology and Communications at Lifeway and author of This is Our Time: Everyday Myths in Light of the Gospel. 

Trevin, good morning.

TREVIN WAX, GUEST: Good morning, Megan. Good morning, Nick.

BASHAM: So Trevin, as we talk about things that shouldn’t surprise anyone, the way this has all played out with the Church of England should maybe top the list.

But you wrote an excellent article this week that I think offered something more productive than simply mourning what’s happening, though it did do that as well. 

You really examined the consequences of Christians acting embarrassed about Biblical truth, apparently to appear more respectable.

One of the things that really resonated to me was your comment, “The road of reluctance is the road to irrelevance.” 

Can you explain that a little further?

WAX: Well, I was commenting on this idea and this kind of posture and spirit that sometimes I hear from different church leaders or people in church who say, yes, I affirm what the Bible says about this. I affirm what the Christian church has taught about this, but it’s almost as if they’re reluctant in their affirmation. And they’ll even say, you know, I’m a reluctant traditionalist on this. 

And I want to gently press back on that mindset to say I don’t think that’s actually going to be attractive to people in the world. I think sometimes we assume that if we have a very unpopular stance that we win some sort of an audience with people when talking about our faith or what it is we believe we give them the impression that we are as uncomfortable with our own teaching as they might be. As if we ourselves are not really confident in the goodness and the beauty of what Jesus has told us.

EICHER: The other thing I liked about your piece was the positive vision. When you look at this issue through the lens of Christian history, I perceived the argument that the increasing strangeness of our beliefs is the opportunity. 

Why do you think that is?

WAX: Well, I think that’s been the way it has been for 2,000 years of church history. The places where Christianity has really exploded on the scene or that people in the Christian church, some of the heroes that we have of the faith were those that were in direct opposition—joyfully in opposition—to the prevailing teachings of their day. And it’s not just on sexuality, even though that obviously was one of the big things in the first century. 

It’s also on how Christianity turned upside down notions of strength and power. The Christian teaching about humans being made in the image of God. Turning the other cheek has not always been a popular command of Jesus and yet the people that have been most radically out of step with the prevailing norms of their culture, they were ones that kind of like a blazing streak across the sky. Same thing with Jesus’s teaching on riches and wealth and all sorts of things. And so I just want to—when you think about 100 years ago there were a lot of church leaders who were very concerned about Christianity’s respectability in a technological and scientific age.

But it’s the same kind of thing—the desire to appear respectable to the world. And I don’t think we actually win a hearing by apologizing for what we believe, rather than giving an apologetic, a defend the faith kind of moment for what we believe, why we believe it’s true, why we believe it’s beautiful and don’t just say what we believe but we really believe what we say.

BASHAM: Well, I’d like to turn now to another marriage-related topic, but one that made me a lot happier. And I think it’s a nice moment to talk about on Valentine’s Day. 

The Academy Awards took place last Sunday. And as we all might have expected, there was a lot of political posturing as those little gold men were handed out. 

But my favorite acceptance speech of the night involved none of that. It came from a man named Don Sylvester who won the Oscar for sound editing on the movie Ford Vs. Ferrari. Great movie, by the way, and the sound was indeed fantastic.

In his speech Sylvester said something that caused more than a few people in the famous Dolby Theatre to stop clapping. Let’s take a listen.

AUDIO: The real support comes from home, so I want to thank my wonderful wife of 34 years who gave up her editing career for me to pursue my career. But she raised our kids and she did a great job because neither one of them are politicians.

EICHER: You know, I think that’s all we can do is listen to it because we’re a podcast, but you’ve gotta see the video really to get the full impact of this because it was wonderful. This woman was being praised by her husband and then behind her you see these glamorous actresses just—gasp—the dropped jaws. It was incredible to watch how shocked they were acting and that’s what it was. Like he had to recover with making a joke about politicians somehow not to get booed out of the place. That’s what it seemed to me as I watched it.

BASHAM: So, I shot off an off-hand comment about this as I was live-tweeting the Oscars, pointing out that it was a rather courageous, counter-cultural thing for Sylvester to say. Especially given the crowd he was speaking to. 

And I was a little surprised that, you know, given how many funny comments about the movies and speeches I made that evening, that tweet was actually my most-liked! (ha ha)

A few days later I saw that I wasn’t the only one who took note of Sylvester praising his homemaking wife.

EICHER: That’s right, a couple of news outlets wrote hand-wringing pieces about it, characterizing the moment as “uncomfortable.” 

And plenty of people on social media registered their disapproval with comments like, “Brava women heroes, sacrificing careers so white men can do what they want & not raise the kids,” and “That was so incredibly tone deaf.”

But one enterprising reporter at Salt Lake City’s daily paper tracked down Sylvester’s wife, Penny, and asked her what she thought of these reactions. 

She said, “I was paying someone to take care of my special-needs child and I realized they couldn’t do it as well as I could…To say that I don’t work is absolutely ludicrous, but what I did do is leave the entertainment industry.”

BASHAM: So, Trevin, what I saw on the stage last Sunday was a clear Proverbs 31 moment. Penny Shaw Sylvester’s husband was praising her at the city gate, so to speak.

Maybe an obvious question, but why do you think this should have caught people so off-guard? And I ask that admitting that it caught me a little off-guard, though for me it was in a wonderful way!

What do you think?

WAX: Well, if you kind of contrast that speech with one we heard from an actress at the Golden Globes just a few weeks ago, who literally was speaking of sacrificing a child on the altar of her career ambitions, I think you get a glimpse into the nature of Hollywood’s obsession and idolatry of a certain kind of success that is valued over other kinds of success.

But what this woman said is not really that she was sacrificing a career when she responded the way she did. She was actually choosing something else. She was choosing something that she sees as better. And she’s still working but she says, “I was leaving the entertainment industry.”

That’s not the same thing. But what it shows is that there’s a mindset in our society where if you choose to give your life to one thing rather than another, that one thing may look less valuable in the eyes of the world. And I think what her husband was trying to do was to lift up that choice to express gratitude for his own accomplishments but to do that in a way that was praising the decision she made, what she did, in order for that special-needs child to be raised in the way he or she was. So, it’s really a clash of cultures and expectations on a collision course there. And we always say, we don’t want to—you shouldn’t judge other people’s life choices, but it’s just fascinating how judgmental Hollywood can be of people’s life choices.

EICHER: Well, Trevin is Senior Vice President of Theology and Communications at Lifeway and author of This is Our Time: Everyday Myths in Light of the Gospel. 

Trevin, thanks so much.

WAX: Thank you!

NICK EICHER: Sarah Crawte is a young field reporter for Channel 9 news in Sydney, Australia. Last week she was recording a feature on snake safety. To demonstrate, she agreed to let a snake handler drape a 4-foot nonvenomous snake across her shoulder.

Everything was fine until the snake decided her microphone looked like a threat.

AUDIO: (scream) He just bit my microphone! Oh just stay still. That’s it, just keep the mic nice and still. It’s just cuz it’s right in front of his face.

And then he bit it again!

AUDIO: He’s biting my microphone, what do I do?! You’ll be alright. It’s just the mic that he’s seeing. But what if he sees my hand?!

But then like a true professional, she pulled herself  together, and delivered her report with that snake focused on that microphone, quite ready to attack again.

AUDIO: While they might not be everyone’s cup of tea, most of the time, snakes are more scared of you than you are of them.

But she told the Today Show that just as soon as the camera stopped rolling…

AUDIO: I said to the snake handler, get it off me!

That’s what we teach at World Journalism Institute: bravery and poise!

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER: Today is Friday, February 14th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: A Supreme Court Justice has his say.

TRAILER: We know exactly what’s going on here. This is the wrong black guy. He has to be destroyed. You really didn’t matter. What mattered is what they wanted. So you’d still like to serve on the Supreme Court? I’d rather die than withdraw from the process.

Late in the new documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words we see a bronze bust sitting high on a shelf in Thomas’s office. It’s of his greatest role model, his grandfather. And beneath the stern gaze are words Myers Anderson often said to Thomas: “Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him.”

Thomas’s journey from Gullah-Geechee-speaking poverty in rural Georgia to associate justice of the United States Supreme Court serves as a perfect model for the complexity, inconsistency, and idealism of the American experiment. Thomas and his wife, Virginia, spent more than 30 hours answering filmmaker Michael Pack’s questions. That makes the film more an in-depth, extended interview than a traditional documentary. The many mainstream outlets complaining it doesn’t include opposing views like those that made up the bulk of HBO’s recent Thomas film evidently failed to finish reading that title.

Christian viewers will find the Biblical principles that shaped Thomas’s life especially fascinating. Though his grandfather was largely illiterate, he drummed the Scripture he’d memorized into his grandsons’ brains. This fostered a ferocious work ethic in Thomas.

CLIP: I was supposed to go to school in the afternoon. My mother wasn’t there to make me go because she had to go to work. So I wandered the streets by myself. I was 6. 

Those not familiar with Thomas’s story will find no cliché idolizing of the United States’ virtues. Nor easy demonizing of its vices. On the one hand, the nuns who taught Thomas were very much on the side of oppressed blacks in the segregated South. He makes it clear he couldn’t have become the man he is without his parochial education. Yet it was the blithe bigotry of his white seminary classmates that drove him to abandon his plans for the priesthood. 

TRAILER: Some place in my life the road split off. I’d gone to seminary. I’d gone to all-white schools. I was never going to be a part of that world. I was never going to be white. The problem is I could never go back completely to the world I came from.

Thomas’ rage against the inequity and prejudice he encountered as a young man pushed him toward a new religion: Marxism.

TRAILER: We were supposed to be revolutionaries. We were kind of for anybody who was kind of in your face.

Still his grandfather’s wisdom was too deeply implanted to allow him to lose himself completely to campus radicalism. After a night of violent demonstrating, he found himself in church, repenting.

TRAILER: I saw what I had become, lashing out at every single thing. I asked God if you take anger out of my heart, I’ll never hate again. And that was the beginning of the slow return to where I started.

God answered that prayer. As a new father at Yale Law School, the young Democrat began to question more than just the methods of the far left. He saw black students being bused into areas that offered no better education but a lot more inconvenience and strife. He vowed his own son would never be a pawn in similar social engineering. With a wit we rarely get to see from Thomas, he defines this as, “have theory, add people.” Not interested in a life of comfortable tokenism, he also rejected corporate law and the “golden handcuffs” he believed came with it.

Once he made the decision to accept a position with Missouri’s Republican attorney general, there was no going back in Thomas’s ideological transformation. His deep affinity for the natural law the founders advocated overcame his distaste of their individual hypocrisy. Though he couldn’t know it then, it would eventually bring him face to face with a racism as fierce and personal as anything he experienced in Savannah. It even included cartoons depicting him wearing the KKK’s white robes and polishing the other justices’ shoes.

CLIP: Well, it’s stereotypes draped in sanctimony and self-congratulation. There’s different sets of rules for different kinds people. If you criticize a person who’s more liberal, you’re a racist, whereas you can do whatever to me and now Ben Carson. And that’s fine because you’re not really black because you’re not doing what we expect black people to do. 

If Thomas’ life were a novel, it would be a riveting one. That said, there are some drawbacks to Pack’s approach. When he asks Thomas about his first marriage, we see the face of the famously reticent judge close tight as the oyster shells his mother once shucked in a seafood cannery. If Pack pushes for any further insight, we never see it.

Still, given that Thomas was only 43 when he was appointed to the Supreme Court, there’s every likelihood that he’ll live to become the longest-serving justice in history. His is a uniquely American journey. A glimpse into the mind and making of such a towering figure is an opportunity not to be missed.

MEGAN BASHAM: Today is Friday, February 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Megan Basham.

NICK EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Last month the music industry celebrated its biggest night: The GRAMMY Awards. WORLD Radio’s Myrna Brown talked to an award-winning singer/songwriter about his unlikely path to that stage.

SONG: HYMN OF SURRENDER

MYRNA BROWN, REPORTER: Matt Redman was a teenager when he started writing songs.

REDMAN: I didn’t write them because I was making a CD. I didn’t write them because I wanted to lead them. I was writing these songs because I needed to.

The second of five children, Redman was born in a quaint little village, just a train’s ride from London. 

REDMAN: I was 7 years old and came home from school one day and my mum and my grandparents were there and I could see they had some bad news. And I found out my dad had passed away. That he actually had taken his own life. So that was a lot to process at that moment.

Three years later, Redman attended an evangelistic crusade in London. It was his first time hearing the gospel.

REDMAN: You know I heard some things about God before and I know I’d prayed, but something about the way that he talked about the gospel, just connected with me. And so I became a Christian that night. 10 years old. 

By that time, Redman’s mother had remarried. But the relationship became abusive. Redman says that season of his life solidified his relationship with Christ.  

REDMAN: I think sometimes when you go through hardship or something painful or confusing, you choose two roads. One is the path of distrust and bitterness and walking away from God. But by the grace of God, I chose the other path. 

While down that path of trusting God, he discovered songwriting. He says he found peace and joy in his lyrics and melodies. 

REDMAN: I wasn’t thinking, Oh, I’m going to be a worship leader. I was just thinking this helps me so I’ve got to keep doing this. And then I realized after a while, you could actually help other people as well. 

SONG: THE HEART OF WORSHIP

In 1999 Redman released a song that challenged perspectives on worship. He says the conversation began with his pastor in England. 

REDMAN: He felt like we’d lost our way a little. Oh, I like this worship leader. I don’t like that one. I like this song. I don’t like that one. So, he told people the next few weeks at church, when you arrive, there’s not going to be a sound system or a band. It’s just going to be us with our hearts and our voices and our Bibles.  

Out of that experience, Redman wrote the song, The Heart of Worship from his bedroom. 

REDMAN: The song is literally saying what happened. When the music fades, all is stripped away and I simply come longing just to bring something that’s of worth that will bless your heart…  

The Heart Of Worship became an international anthem. Then in 2011 the husband and father of five co-wrote another song, this time from the pews of a little 100-year-old English chapel. 

REDMAN: So, we’d had a long day of songwriting. It was 1:30 in the morning and I was desperate to go home. And he said, I’ve just got this one little melody thing I want to play you.  And as soon as he said it, I was like, that’s bless the Lord. And I wasn’t even going to put it on the album because I didn’t think it was finished, which is quite hilarious. 

In 2012, the song 10,000 Reasons won Redman two GRAMMY awards. But the 45-year-old California resident says his greatest joy comes from knowing how God still uses it.  

REDMAN: There was this group of prisoners in Bali who were on death row from drug trafficking offenses that they committed nine years before. But since then, they had become Christians and by all accounts they were transforming the lives of other people there in the prison. But the authorities decided they still had to face the penalty. And as they were facing the firing squad, they were singing this song. 

SONG: 10,000 REASONS 

REDMAN: People call someone like me a worship leader from strumming a guitar and singing, but that’s really a worship leader, isn’t it? 

Reporting for WORLD Radio, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER: It takes the efforts of a lot of people to put this program together every weekday. We want to thank Myrna Brown, Paul Butler, Janie B. Cheaney, Kent Covington, Kristen Flavin, Katie Gaultney, Kim Henderson, Anna Johansen, Leigh Jones, Jill Nelson, Trillia Newbell, Onize Ohikere, Mary Reichard, Sarah Schweinsberg, and Cal Thomas.

MEGAN BASHAM: The guys who stay up late to get the program to you early are Johnny Franklin and Carl Peetz. Our managing editor is J.C. Derrick and Marvin Olasky is editor-in-chief. 

Of course, without you, none of this happens. Your support really makes a difference. Thank you. 

I hope you’ll worship and fellowship at church this weekend, and we’ll meet you  back here on Monday.

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