The World and Everything in It: July 24, 2026

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

A same-sex couple reportedly wanted a surrogate to abort a baby with a defect and sued when she refused.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today on Culture Friday, what happens when bringing a child into the world becomes a contract dispute. John Stonestreet will be along in a few minutes

Also today the acclaimed drama The Bear returns for a final season. We’ll have a review.

And later, singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur says faith is not about having all the answers.

ARTHUR: The narrator of that song isn’t a spiritual expert. He is a seeker seeking.

BROWN: It’s Friday, July 24th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

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

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

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iran » The U.S. military pounded Iranian targets for a 13th straight night, since Tehran broke the ceasefire agreement, attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

And President Trump now says frozen Iranian assets will pay for damages to commercial ships.

But Iran continues to talk tough, threatening retaliation against the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio:

RUBIO: I saw Araghchi, their foreign minister, who, who, uh, the other day say or something about their policy is an eye for an eye. The president's policy is a head for an eye. I mean, honestly, that's what it's gonna be. I mean, they will pay a very heavy price.

The U.S. Navy has once again blockaded Iran's ports as it continues to target assets Tehran has used to threaten the Strait of Hormuz.

Traffic through the strait has slowed to a trickle, and oil has again shot past $100 a barrel, the highest price in months.

And the fighting has spread, as the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen say they attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea.

Rubio/Lavrov meeting » Secretary Rubio also spoke to reporters after meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov.

They were in Manila for a gathering of Southeast Asian nations.

Rubio said their discussion centered largely on the war in Ukraine.

RUBIO: The United States, the president's been clear that we want, if we can, we are prepared to play a constructive role in bringing about an end to a senseless war. And we're ready to do that. And we of course expressed that and we've expressed it in other means. So we talked about other things as well, though.

He added that he does not see a deal to end the war coming together quickly.

Meanwhile:

ZELENSKYY: [Speaking Ukrainian]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters that he planned to meet with President Trump in a matter of days — likely on U.S. soil. No word yet from the White House on that.

NYC antisemitic attack » New York City police say a man attacked and stabbed two people on the city’s Upper West Side in separate incidents. Officials are calling at least one of those attacks antisemitic, and are looking into it as a possible hate crime.

One victim was Jewish, and witnesses say the attacker shouted "Allahu Akbar." But police say the two men were strangers, attacked at random blocks apart Thursday — and the other victim was Asian.

Both are expected to survive. Police have a 51-year-old suspect in custody, and indicated that mental health issues may have been a factor.

Unemployment claims down » The latest jobs report brings encouraging news, WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has more:

BENJAMIN EICHER: The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits this week is the lowest it’s been since 1969. The Labor Department reports that initial jobless claims came in at just 187,000, well below economists expectations. It’s also a significant drop from last week’s 209,000.

Additionally, Americans continuing their unemployment benefits fell to just below 1.8 million, also lower than expected.

This comes after the jobs report released earlier this month showed that hiring slowed as only 57,000 jobs were added in the month of June.

Many analysts feel the latest report points to a resilient “low hire, low fire” job market.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher

Ebola fastest-growing outbreak ever » Congo's Ebola outbreak is now spreading faster than any on record.

That's the word from the World Health Organization, as the outbreak outruns the workers trying to stop it. One reason, according to the agency's emergency director for Africa, is that they're fighting fear and rumors, not just the disease.

Marie Roseline Belizaire:

BELIZAIRE: The misinformation, uh, unfortunately have a higher speed, you know, than other real information, and we need to work more to engage the community.

The virus has killed more than a thousand people in just over two months, a toll the world's deadliest earlier outbreak took eight months to reach. Health officials count more than 2,500 infections, and about four in ten patients have died.

Treatment centers are full, and armed conflict is slowing the response.

The strain behind it, Bundibugyo, has no approved vaccine or treatment. Researchers are testing the first experimental treatments, but officials warn the peak of this outbreak may still be ahead.

AOC leads in New Hampshire Democrat poll » Socialism keeps gaining ground inside the Democratic Party. A new poll shows a potential socialist White House contender leading in a battleground state. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: New Hampshire, home of the nation's first presidential primary. And a University of New Hampshire poll released this week asked Democratic voters there who they'd back in 2028.

Leading the pack: New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist.

She drew 22 percent, one point ahead of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Everyone else landed in single digits, including another Democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders …as well as California Governor Gavin Newsom and Senator Mark Kelly.

Ocasio-Cortez has not said whether she'll run for president.

But the result fits a broader leftward shift. Earlier this year, New York City voters elected democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor. And other socialist candidates have won Democratic primaries this year.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

I'm Kent Covington.

Coming up, a review of the critically acclaimed show The Bear. Plus, WORLD’s music critic Arsenio Orteza looks into the first installment of an interesting new trilogy.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday July 24th.

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

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good Morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning

BROWN: John, a WORLD Opinions piece this week reflects on a Canadian surrogacy case in which a couple allegedly sought to terminate a pregnancy because of a cleft lip and possible genetic concerns, and later sued the surrogate when she refused.

The piece argues that surrogacy does more than change the way children come into the world. It changes the way we think about them. She says contracts have a way of teaching us to think conditionally: I love you... if.

It made me think of something you've said before—that every technology carries with it “an anthropology.” Has reproductive technology trained us to think of children as things we produce rather than persons we receive?

STONESTREET: Certain reproductive technologies certainly have—not all of them have—but whenever technology goes beyond helping humans, assisting humans, to actually replacing humans in some degree, then that’s what takes place. Then you have to put a price tag on individuals, on people.

And when artificial reproductive technologies violate the sexual integrity of the way God designed children to come into the world, that’s what happens. It’s one thing to assist a couple to have a child. It’s another thing to replace the sexual act itself and to separate sex, marriage, and babies to the whole degree that it’s been separated throughout the history of the sexual revolution. Technology puts the final chapter to that book and leads to incredible consequences.

And we’re starting to see it. One of the things that’s really important to remember is this isn’t surrogacy gone wrong because there was a contract. This is exactly the process working out like it was designed to work out. In other words, you sign a contract hoping that the process will get you the product that you want, and when the process doesn’t get you the product that you want, then you get your money back. That’s the way commerce works, isn’t it?

And then we have to ask the question: Do we really want to take commerce and apply it to this most sacred of all things, which is one image bearer and another image bearer coming together before God, producing another image bearer? That’s about as sacred of an act that you can have this side of eternity.

And so, to compromise that, I think, has incredible consequences, and it does, without a doubt, turn children into a product. And products in our world have price tags.

Whenever I see stories like this, I think a lot about something that one of my seminary professors would say often, which is, whenever we put a price tag on something that, by definition, is priceless, you’re going to cheapen it immediately. There’s no way around it, and that’s really what we’ve got here in this story.

EICHER: John, there’s a remarkable New York Times profile this week. I don’t know whether you saw it. It was about the relationship author Laura Doyle, someone unfamiliar to me until I read the piece.

Twenty-five years ago, she had a book titled The Surrendered Wife. It was controversial almost everywhere, and now today, the Times is reporting that not only are evangelical and traditional women embracing it, but progressive women as well, even women who still consider themselves to be feminists. And the reporter throughout the piece just kept asking the same question: Why is this message suddenly resonating across such different groups?

And I think the thing that struck me wasn’t so much Laura Doyle herself—I knew nothing about her; I’m not exactly the target audience—but the tone of the reporter. She isn’t writing as someone who’s been persuaded. She’s writing as someone who’s puzzled. The evidence doesn’t fit the worldview she expected.

Is that often how cultural change really happens? Not because people are argued into a new philosophy, but because reality simply refuses to cooperate with the old one?

STONESTREET: Look, I don’t know Laura Doyle. I certainly don’t know the book. I do think that what’s happening right now is that you’ve got a group of individuals who have embraced this idea about marriage, about relationships, about being a man or a woman, and/or a woman, that have embraced a philosophy that treats all of these things as if they’re social constructs, as if these are things that should conform to our desires, conform to the kind of thing that I think I want.

And what they keep running into is gravity—that there’s something fixed in the universe about who we are, about the way that God created men and women to be, and certainly about marriage itself.

I think there’s a lot of examples of this, by the way. And again, I don’t know anything about this particular author or this particular book, but I’m struck, too, by what we’re seeing in terms of happiness studies, which is a new phenomenon recently. And I’ve got my quibbles about just the existence of happiness studies to begin with.

But the fact of the matter is, when you do the work and you say, “Who are the most happy people?” in terms of self-reporting, what tends to come back over and over is married religious women.

When you look at questions from having meaning in life, and even something as potentially selfish as sexual satisfaction, the group that tends to rate the highest are married, middle-aged, religious women, mostly with children.

And you think about that, and then you think about all the opinion pieces that decorate The New York Times, typically, or The Huffington Post or Slate Magazine or a number of these progressive publications, and they’re all these one-off stories about women who found meaning by leaving their husbands and their families, and women who hate their own children and are willing to say it out loud, and all kinds of things.

And you start to think, well, feminism maybe had something right. We need to have this vision of liberation that second- and third-wave feminism promised. What we’re seeing, second-, third-wave feminism has bearing fruit, and it’s not what all of these one-off opinion pieces say.

It’s more of the fact that if you believe that there are differences between men and women, and you live according to those differences—and even more than that, I think this piece isn’t really about submission or surrender, as she calls it, or anything like that, for women to husbands. It’s basically the fact that marriage is a mutual self-giving that should take place.

And we have thought about it as marriage is an institution, and all we should try to do is get what we want out of it. And so my husband should give me what I want. This should be a 50-50 arrangement. And the reality is, when you have a mutual serving that takes place of husbands to wives and wives to husbands, it all tends to work out better.

And now, of course, we can look at Holy Scripture and say, “Well, that makes sense, because Scripture is really clear that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church, and we treat each other as image bearers, and we see our serving of our husbands or wives in light of how we’re supposed to relate to God and how God has related to us.”

This is putting it in pretty highbrow stuff, but apparently this author—I don’t know what her religious background is—but it seems like she’s discovered these secrets not from Holy Scripture, but just by trial and error. And, of course, that’s what we mean when we say that the Bible and what it teaches is true.

It’s not just that it’s true for us, but that it’s actually true, and we’ll find it in Scripture, and we’ll find it in the real world.

And I think there’s more and more people finding the truth about who we are and about relationships and about marriage in the real world, and a lot of people, too, that are realizing that the lies that they have believed, that it’s not bringing the fruit that they were promised.

BROWN: This struck me because I spent more than a decade filing quarterly reports to the Federal Communications Commission in the 90’s…. to prove the TV station I worked for was following the strict children’s programming requirements handed down by the FCC…things like….how many hours per day was devoted to children’s programming.

At some point the FCC relaxed those rules, which brings us to where we are today. Forty-Seven House members wrote a letter to the FCC urgently asking for a review of the TV Parental guidelines. Why? Parents complaining of radical gender ideology indoctrination from the screen…backed up by a report from Concerned Women for America that shows four out of 10 G-rated series on Netflix contain LGBTQ+ content.

Glad lawmakers are paying attention, but seems to me the real power still belongs to parents. Control the clicker…or ditch the TV.

STONESTREET: Yeah, that’s the way it should work. That’s the idea, that it’s our job to parent our kids, and kids fundamentally belong to parents and not to the state. And, of course, that’s, I think, a very, very pointed debate happening right now in the American context.

Certainly when it comes to public education, the sheer lunacy of teachers transing kids without their parents knowing it, and things like that, and teaching kids certain things, and not letting parents actually know, not letting parents actually opt their children out of certain lessons because they put LGBTQ content, in particular, not just in a particular class, but they put it in every class, as if it has anything to do with history or math or anything else.

At some point, you have to appeal when the state in the past has taken the prerogative of educating our kids as if our kids belong to them. Then you’ve got to actually have the state put a stop to it.

And this reflects a framing that Abraham Kuyper offered about society and how society should work, called sphere sovereignty: that God has created society with different spheres of authority. There’s the home, there’s the church, there’s the state. And whenever one particular sphere abdicates its responsibility, another sphere has to step in. And whenever a sphere starts to overstep its bounds into another sphere, then things begin to break down. And we’ve got both of those things happening.

I wish we could rely on parents to say no to their kids, just to get them off of smartphones and social media. The fact that we’re having this conversation about television right now, when really the main culprit, or a culprit, is social media, and we’re not even about to have that conversation.

When the UK tried to have the conversation about limiting—and I think Australia as well—limiting social media to teenagers, people just lost their minds. We’re nowhere close to having that conversation, unfortunately, and I wish we were, because that’s a much bigger thing.

We’re talking about television. It’s like, hey, the ’90s called; it wants its public policy back. We should have been doing this a long, long time ago. But better late than never.

And you’re right. At the end of the day, parents should not rely on the state to do the job that they need to do. But because the state has overstepped, we certainly need the state to step back. Or at least here, what we’re talking about is maybe not the state itself, but state-sponsored actors, and we need those actors to step back.

EICHER: So the Kuyperian principle here isn’t simply, “Parents should parent.” It’s also that when they don’t, there is a legitimate—but limited—role for the civil government. The danger is when that exception becomes the norm.

STONESTREET: It’s absolutely necessary when parents don’t do their job for the next thing to step in, and it should be as localized as possible.

Like if my kid disobeys, I should punish him. It should be my responsibility. But if Hunter’s going crazy, selling drugs and doing drive-by shootings and all kinds of crazy, now the police have to step in.

That doesn’t mean we’re ready to call in SEAL Team Six to take out my son. You can see how this all works out. When there’s a breakdown, it should continue to be as local as possible.

So the fact that we’re talking about the federal government—yes, the federal government’s already overstepped its bounds, and yes, parents have already abdicated their responsibility—but that’s precisely Kuyper’s point.

When either of those things happen, you might have a necessary next step, but it doesn’t mean things are healthy. It’s actually a sign that things aren’t functioning well.

And then you look at the church and you say, “Well, what’s the best thing that the church can do right now?” And the church can step in and help parents be parents. That’s as local as it gets, right there.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thanks!

STONESTREET: Thanks to both of you.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, July 24th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: one of television's most acclaimed dramas returns for its final season.

Four years ago, a show called The Bear captivated critics and audiences alike with its high-intensity drama about the challenges of opening an elite restaurant in downtown Chicago.

BROWN: In 2024, the series set a record for the most Emmy nominations for a comedy series. This summer, the show’s final season features a record-breaking storm that threatens to wash away all that the restaurant staff members have worked so hard to create.

Here’s WORLD reviewer Steve Limkeman.

STEVE LIMKEMAN: When it rains, it pours. The final season of The Bear unleashes a massive rainstorm upon the city of Chicago. That opens the floodgates to a host of obstacles as the restaurant staff realize that a busted water line is the least of their problems. On top of budget cuts and an impending sense of doom, the staff are blindsided by devastating news. World-class visionary Carmen Berzatto, better known as Carmy, is stepping down as head chef of the restaurant.

CARMY: This isn’t what I wanna do anymore. You know, this – this isn’t what makes me happy anymore.

Longtime fans of the show, on the other hand, will be quite satisfied with the overall focus of the final season. Since its critically acclaimed debut in 2022, The Bear has been driven by one animating principle: the relentless pursuit of perfection in a community that deeply cares for one another. For years, Carmy has been dedicated to the transformation of his family’s scrappy sandwich shop into a prestigious establishment.

CARMY: Look, we could do this. Right? We could take care of people. We could make it calm. We could make it delicious. We could play good music. We could make people happy.

Carmy has mentored and cared for his kitchen crew as if they were all a part of the beloved Berzatto family. Becoming part of the Bear clan feels like entering into a dysfunctional maelstrom, but the charismatic love that is shared between the Bears eventually overpowers outsiders’ apprehension. For new hires and new viewers alike, the Berzattos take a little getting used to.

STEVIE: Here’s one way to look at it. It’s really fun. Genuinely. It’s um… Claire?

CLAIRE: It’s a lot of people with very specific and unique personalities that feel things very strongly.

STEVIE: Feel things deeply. And experience life intensely.

Past seasons have felt a bit stretched thin at times, much like the courses that must be improvised this season as the restaurant runs low on supplies. But The Bear’s final run experiments with a new recipe for success, shaving minutes off of its episodes’ average run times to ensure that every second counts. The secret ingredient: nearly the whole season locks in on the chaotic intensity of the most important, most challenging day the restaurant has ever faced. Excellent editing amplifies the staff’s frenetic energy as they confront crises and race through prep to maximize efficiency. Every moment is packed with flavor as they pursue the coveted Michelin star that could save their business from financial ruin.

SYDNEY: Our game has to be the tightest it has ever been or we are not gonna make it. I want us to have each other’s backs and speak to each other cleanly, clearly, kindly, and watching our language.

ALL: Chef!

It’s important to note that profanity in The Bear is pervasive, especially whenever the heat rises in the kitchen. Though tempers flare, one of the consistent pleasures of the show is the characters’ initiative in taking responsibility for ruptured relationships as well as their desire to make amends. As ever, Carmy’s cousins provide comic relief as they desperately try to fix the restaurant's structural issues before they open for service in the evening.

RICHIE: Can you hear this? Over.

TED: I can’t hear that. I think I’m going off rope.

RICHIE: What rope? Over.

TED: I’m going Days of Thunder, Rich. I gotta do this. I’m going off rope, buddy.

RICHIE: No! Do not go off rope! That is a direct order! Do not go off rope.

Though Carmy’s disillusionment with his vocation is a bit distracting and disappointing, it hardly detracts from a pulse-pounding community-driven finale. None of the characters are particularly religious, but the series consistently reminds me of the small but vital roles we play in the body of Christ. The restaurant is filled with flawed human beings making an effort to cultivate the gifts and talents that they’ve been given. When they are encouraging and empowering one another, it is amazing to see what they are able to accomplish. As Carmy humbly says of another restaurant he once served:

CARMY: It’s a miracle these places exist.

That humility is evident in nearly all of the staff’s interactions, embedded in their core communications. Brief acknowledgements like “Heard” and “Understood” and the ever-present “Yes, Chef!” are exchanged in relational dynamics that are deeply rooted in mutual trust and respect. The only question remains whether the restaurant’s collaborative spirit can withstand the mounting pressures of their most trying moment.

SYDNEY: This is how we keep this place alive. This is how we operate moving forward and we can do this. This is The Bear.

ALL: Chef!

The Bear’s finale is stuffed with satisfying character arcs, tender moments between long-estranged family members, and the occasional miraculous deliverance from disaster, rendering viewers’ ultimate experience worthy of a star of its own.

I’m Steve Limkeman.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The spiritual turns taken by a perpetually fascinating musician.

In the mid-1990s, Peter Gabriel discovered the singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur and made him the first North American artist on Gabriel’s Real World label. A decade later, Arthur formed Lonely Astronaut Records and has since released most of his music on his own.

EICHER: WORLD’s music critic, Arsenio Orteza, says the new album wrestles with faith from a distinctively biblical perspective.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Joseph Arthur has never shied away from exploring spiritual matters in his music. Consider the best known of his early songs, “In the Sun.”

MUSIC: [“In the Sun” by Joseph Arthur]

Audiences heard “In the Sun” on the TV shows Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy and in the films Saved! and The Bourne Identity. It was also recorded by Peter Gabriel, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. It’s sung from the point of view of someone beginning to entertain doubts, but its refrain, “May God’s love be with you / always,” is sincere.

The tension between faith and doubt running through Arthur’s songs makes them feel uncommonly alive. In an industry known for preferring its musical loose ends neatly tied up, Arthur’s dangle like live electrical wires. Artistically speaking, Arthur doesn’t put safety first. That mindset may explain why he embarked on his latest project, an ambitious trilogy titled You’re Not a Ghost Anymore.

ARTHUR: This is definitely a hard way to do it. It's not easy. Why do you always choose the difficult things? But somehow art is like that. Maybe life is like that too.

Arthur’s life has definitely been like that. In 2020 he publicly questioned a one-size-fits-all approach regarding the COVID vaccine and incurred cancel-culture-like repercussions. His longtime manager dropped him. His booking agent dropped him. A band that he'd newly formed quit en masse. And New West Records declined to release Arthur Buck 2, his second album with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. Arthur doesn’t care to debate such issues anymore. More important to him now is the faith he had to lean on during his cancelled period.

MUSIC: [“I Wanna Know You” by Joseph Arthur]

Faith, by the way, is the subtitle of the first and so-far only installment of the You’re Not a Ghost Anymore trilogy, and “I Wanna Know You” is its opening track. Arthur based its lyrics on a conversation he had with someone about the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice, and the song embodies the back-and-forth nature of the exchange.

ARTHUR: That middle-eight part, “The heart of man needs a sacrifice, but that's not God's law or his voice, condemning yourself for what you think is wrong or right, but God is love. That's his only choice.” So, yeah, the narrator of that song isn't like a—isn’t like a spiritual expert. He’s—he is a seeker seeking.

Arthur himself remains a seeker in some ways too. He believes that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, but he’s a fan of the mystical self-help author Eckhart Tolle as well. And he still has questions, for instance, about Christ’s hypostatic union. Still, many of the songs on You’re Not a Ghost Anymore: Faith come from a place of a growing confidence in biblical revelation. Titles such as “Bear Your Own Cross” and “In the Shadow of the Cross” make that obvious. And several other songs take their inspiration from scripture directly.

MUSIC: [ “No Weapon” by Joseph Arthur]

I asked Arthur how Christianity came to win out over the other forms of spirituality he’s studied.

ARTHUR: Like the whole idea of “O.K., I can repent and I can start again” and the idea that Jesus is forgiving and the devil is the accuser, this is just—makes pragmatic sense. And just the idea of forgiveness being incredibly important too, like, to forgive everyone and everything, and that once you forgive, then you can be forgiven, and then you can come into the kingdom of heaven.

One thing Arthur isn’t likely to add to God’s kingdom is insipid praise choruses. He’s more interested in songs that afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

ARTHUR: There’s no balance of light and dark. I like the sort of—the grittiness it takes to get to a place of belief and faith.

That grittiness, like irritants in an oyster, is central to Arthur’s music. But instead of mere pearls, Arthur’s aiming for the pearl of great price.

MUSIC: [“Count It All Joy” by Joseph Arthur]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Now it’s time to name the crew who helped with this week’s programs:

Jenny Rough, David Bahnsen, Abby Johnson, Lauren Canterberry, Jessica Eturralde, Cal Thomas, Hunter Baker, Mary Muncy, Albert Mohler, Lauren Smyth, Chelsea Boes, Liz Lykins, Daniel Suhr, Steve Limkeman, Arsenio Orteza, John Stonestreet and Josh Goniea.

Thanks also to our breaking news crew: Kent Covington, Steve Kloosterman, Travis Kircher, Daniel Devine, and Christina Grube.

And thanks to the guys who are up late so your program is ready early: Tech producers Benj Eicher and Carl Peetz.

Harrison Watters is Washington producer, Kristen Flavin is features editor, Emma Eicher is assistant producer, Lindsay Mast is Producer. I’m Executive Producer Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

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 Paul writes of his thorn in the flesh:

“Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” —2 Corinthians 12:8–10

It’s the end of the week and Sunday’s coming! Meet your brothers and sisters in Christ in church! And Lord willing, we’ll meet you back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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