The World and Everything in It: May 9, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. My name is Jessica Gaby, and I live in Atlanta, Georgia with my wonderful husband Jason Gaby. I am a calligrapher and listen to The World and Everything In It everyday while I prepare for work. I like to discuss the podcast with dad Dan Strain, who also listens everyday. So hi dad, and surprise! I hope you enjoy today’s program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! King Charles was crowned in a distinctly Protestant ceremony on Saturday. How does that line up with his personal convictions?

AUDIO: I personally see, would much rather see it as Defender of Faith, not the faith, because it means just one particular interpretation of the faith.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also the state of Missouri seeks to use consumer-protection laws to protect people from transgender procedures.

Plus, what it takes to help foster parents endure.

BOYD: The best way for me to describe it is I was in the middle of a dark forest. And there were trees all around me, and I was on my knees. And I saw no way out.

And WORLD commentator Whitney Williams on possums and pardon.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, May 9th. 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: Time now for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Border » A Democratic border state governor is voicing frustration with the Biden administration with floodgates set to open wider Thursday at the southern border.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs:

KATIE HOBBS: For the past three years, the federal government has used Title 42 as a temporary solution to a permanent problem. On May 11th, that will come to an end.

She said that will put a heavier burden on local communities to manage the influx of migrants crossing the border.

Hobbs said she’s heard from Border Patrol officials in Arizona who struggle to keep staff and communities whose pleas for help have gone unanswered.

HOBBS: Now with Title 42 set to expire, I’m afraid these challenges will only get worse. And I’m afraid the federal government is unprepared to meet the demands of the expected influx.

She said the Biden administration has failed to deliver a workable plan to handle the expected surge with border traffic already at record highs.

The White House, meantime, once again looked to pin the blame on Republicans. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre:

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: They’re taking up a bill that would once again demonstrate that House Republicans are more interested in campaigning on immigration than actually solving it.

GOP leaders in the House are set to pass a border security plan which President Biden has vowed to veto if it arrives on his desk.

Migrant runover suspect » In the border town of Brownsville, Texas, the driver of an SUV that killed eight people when it slammed into a bus stop has been charged with manslaughter.

Police Chief Felix Sauceda:

FELIX SAUCEDA: Georg Alaverez is a Brownsvill local with an extensive rap sheet. He has been formally charged and arraigned with eight counts of manslaughter and 10 counts of assault with a deadly weapon.

Authorities believe Alvarez lost control of his Range Rover after running a red on Sunday. But they aren’t ruling out the possibility that it was an intentional act.

Officials are awaiting toxicology reports to determine whether Alvarez was driving under the influence.

Drones Ukraine » Russia’s latest attacks across northern Ukraine have killed at least three more civilians. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Ukraine's air defenses shot down 35 Iranian-made drones over Kyiv in Russia’s latest nighttime assault. But officials said Monday that wreckage from a drone struck a two-story apartment building. Other debris struck a car parked nearby, setting it on fire.

Russian hit nearly 130 targets across northern Ukraine with rockets, drones, and artillery.

The United States is expected to announce a new $1.2 billion dollar aid package today to further bolster Ukraine’s air defenses.

Debt limit » A government union is suing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen over the U.S. debt limit.

If the U.S. were to reach its borrowing limit, Yellen would be charged with deciding which bills to pay. And the Union says she doesn’t have to do that — only Congress does.

Yellen has said U.S. could start defaulting on its debt as early as June first.

President Biden is set to huddle with top lawmakers at the White House today to talk about raising the debt ceiling.

New airline cancellation rules » The White House wants airlines to pick up the tab for the extra costs to travelers when their flights are canceled for preventable reasons.

President Biden said later this year, his administration will push to make it mandatory …

JOE BIDEN: For all US airlines to compensate you with meals, hotels, taxis, ride shares or replan rebooking fees and cash miles and or travel vouchers.

The Department of Transportation has not yet finished drawing up the new rules, nor is it clear when it will.

Trade association and lobbying group Airlines for America says that airlines have no incentive to delay or cancel flights. And the rate of canceled flights is down slightly this year compared to last year.

Still, delays are more frequent and a few minutes longer, on average.

Blinken contempt » The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee says he’ll hold Secretary of State Tony Blinken in contempt of Congress. Blinken is resisting demands to hand over classified messages about the U-S withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Committee specifically wants a cable from 2021 from a so-called “dissent channel” within the State Department. The channel allows personnel to communicate with senior officials about their concerns.

The committee believes staffers used the dissent channel to air concerns about the U-S withdrawal from Afghanistan before it took place.

State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel:

VEDANT PATEL: We'll continue to do what we can and what we need to to protect it.

The Committee has given the State Department until Thursday to hand over the documents or assert a legal reason why it shouldn’t have to hand them over.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: The new moral landscape on display in King Charles’ Coronation. Plus, caring for foster families.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 9th of May, 2023.

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

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up first: the Christian coronation of King Charles III.

Great Britain’s monarchs for centuries have been crowned in a ceremony that is deeply Christian and deeply Protestant Christian.

But the United Kingdom’s new king has said that he’s by no means an orthodox Anglican. Here he is in a 1994 documentary explaining his concerns about the monarch’s title, Defender of the Faith.

CHARLES IN 1994 DOCUMENTARY: I personally see, would much rather see it as Defender of Faith, not the faith, because it means just one particular interpretation of the faith, which I think is sometimes something that causes a great deal of problems. It has done for hundreds of years. People have fought each other to the death over these things. Seems to me a peculiar waste of people's energy when we're all actually aiming for the same ultimate goal.

EICHER: Charles went on to say that the theologies of Islamic, Hindu, and Zoroastrian religions are of equal and vital importance.

That creates a clash: England’s religious tradition on the one hand and the modern pluralism of King Charles on the other. So how did that play out in the coronation this past weekend?

Joining us now to talk about it is Albert Mohler. He’s the President of Southern Seminary and Editor of World Opinions.

REICHARD: Good morning!

MOHLER: Mary, it’s good to be with you, as always.

REICHARD: You wrote an article for WORLD Opinions about the great moral shift that’s taken place between this coronation and the last one. Can you tell us a bit about that shift as it relates to Charles’s marriages?

MOHLER: Yeah, you know, it's amazing when you think about it, there's so little conversation about this, even as the coronation was taking place, because the British Royal Family the throne itself, it was thrown into an absolute crisis, just a little less than a century ago in 1936, with Edward the eighth, intending to marry, a woman often described as a twice divorced American, that so shook the monarchy, that Edward the eighth, had to abdicate the throne in favor of his younger brother who became King George the sixth, who was the father of Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, just a few years after taking the throne herself. And by the way, her father was a picture of just integrity and stability and rectitude as king and of course, great courage over against the Nazi threat. And all the turmoil of World War Two. Elizabeth soon after taking the throne, had to make a major decision on the question of royal marriage. And she basically denied her own sister the right to marry a man who had been divorced. And that again, was an earth shaking development. She refused royal assent, but now her son, now King Charles the third, who is himself divorce is, is crowned along with his Queen, who is the second wife also divorced after both of them were involved in an absolutely scandalous pattern of adultery. And nobody seems to have noticed now. So what was considered to be the threat to the very end of the monarchy less than a century ago is now unremarkable. And I think that demands some thought and attention.

REICHARD: Well, we played that clip from then Prince Charles nearly 30 years ago where he said he wanted to change the enthronement title from defender of the faith to defender of faith in a generic sense. Did that happen?

MOHLER: So that didn't happen. And it didn't happen, partly because it would require parliament to act on an ordinance that actually establishes those royal titles by law. And so that just didn't happen. The king ended up not only taking that throne title, but also declaring himself to be a Protestant Christian of necessity in the course of the ceremony on Saturday, but what was not the same, and where you did have a lot of, let's just say, interfaith intentional representation, was that the archbishop cooperated with the king, in bringing in in the coronation ceremony, representatives of quote ‘major world faiths.’ You also had something else people did not notice, and that is that a giant change from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second in 1953 and Charles III in 2023, was the very visible presence of female bishops. Not only would female bishops not have been imaginable when his mother was crowned, but frankly, a woman priest was not then imaginable.

REICHARD: Well, you've been thinking about these things for a long time as an anglophile. Is there anything else about the coronation that you think our listeners ought to know?

MOHLER: Well, I think we just need to recognize the entire history of Western civilization, certainly in the English speaking tradition is laid out there. You can't describe this without the language of the King James Bible. You can't you can't crown a king even in this very secular Britain without having an extended liturgy that is intensely Christian, and which repeats the Lordship of Jesus Christ over and over again and the authority of the king is derived by God. You know, it's doubtful very many Britons actually believe that beginning with the monarch, but it does say something worth our know think that they can't actually crown a king without acting as if they're all Christians.

REICHARD: Albert Mohler is Editor of WORLD Opinions and Author of The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church. And we will put a link to his World Opinions article in the transcript today. Thanks for joining us.

MOHLER: Great to join with you, Mary, as always.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Up next: a creative new approach to protecting children and adults from transgender procedures.

Back in April, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey invoked a state law called the Merchandising Practices Act.

That’s a Missouri law that protects consumers from unfair or deceptive businesses. It normally comes into play for cases involving scams or fraud. But now Bailey is using this anti-fraud law to regulate transgender medical interventions.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Under his emergency rule, individuals who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria would be required to attend therapy sessions for 18 months and be screened for other mental health issues before pursuing hormone injections or surgery.

Well, as you can imagine, the opposition was swift.

KSDK: A Saint Louis County judge has just granted a temporary restraining order preventing an emergency rule on transgender care from taking effect. The ACLU filed the lawsuit to block it. The restraining order is in effect until May 15th unless it's extended by the court.

Audio there from newschannel 5 in St. Louis. With a temporary restraining order in place, a St. Louis court is set to hear oral arguments later in June on the merits of the case.

What’s at stake if this rule goes through?

Joining us now to talk about it is Walt Heyer. He’s a man who at age 42 agreed to so-called sex reassignment surgery to live as a female. Eight years after that he de-transitioned having realized that the destructive surgery in no way resolved his distress.

Since then, he became an author and speaker drawing attention to the widespread reality of what he did and why he regrets it.

REICHARD: Good morning, Walt. It’s good to have you back.

WALT HAYER: Good morning.

REICHARD: Walt, when we spoke back in 2020, you said that a doctor diagnosed you with gender dysphoria at age 40 and you underwent sex reassignment surgery as a result. Can you tell us how your doctor came to that conclusion?

HEYER: Yeah, that's an excellent question. My doctor was the guy who wrote the standards of care, drafted him in 1979. He was the author of the standards of care that are in place today. So I think diagnosing gender dysphoria, to be polite, is medical malpractice, I have worked with 1000s of people and I know my own story quite well. And nobody has gender dysphoria. This is this is where this went off the rails. People are suffering from comorbid disorders, and not gender dysphoria. And so this whole thing about gender dysphoria is really nothing but a social contagion if they don't have the kids I've worked with as young as 10 years old men is older 73. And once we work with them, we find out that they never had gender dysphoria, but we can sit back and find out what caused them to begin to identify this way. And it has nothing to do with their gender has nothing to do with gender dysphoria. It has everything to do with being addicted to something on the internet. They were playing sort of dress up games, because it was popular with their friends. They changed the DSM in 2013, from identity disorder to dysphoria. And that was when this whole thing cracked open, and we begin to see this explosion, because when you have a diagnosis that tells you there's a disorder then the therapist is required to look for the disorder. The comorbid disorders are body dysmorphia, is it depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, are they do they on the autism scale? What what is going on this? So once you find these things out, and you realize they're more associated with some underlying disorder, you realize this is not gender dysphoria.

REICHARD: Okay so that’s kind of a sketch of diagnoses and what’s going wrong. Now you mentioned that what happened to you was medical malpractice. But here in my state of Missouri, the Attorney General is saying doctors like the one you had, they are committing something else, namely, consumer fraud. Does that sound like a stretch to you?

HEYER: I think any anytime the lawmakers can find a way to provide anybody or protect anybody from these reckless diagnosis, we're doing the right thing. And and I think they're creative in doing this. I think I'm proud of them for diving into this because what they've tried before, in many states hasn't work. And so I think it's quite brilliant. And every, every time somebody goes into, quote, gender clinic and is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, I think they're committing fraud, and they're sending them into medical treatments, that they do not need medical treatments that by the way, all these children and their treating will never be able to be parents, they won't be able to produce the boys sperm, or girls bear children. So this is sort of an abortion 2.0 By giving them hormone blockers that prevent them from being able to produce children.

REICHARD: Another thing that’s significant about this Missouri law is that it wouldn’t limit the ban to only children, but ban transgender procedures for people of all ages. Is this the best way to deal with the transgender issue, or is there a better approach you can think of?

HEYER: Well, I think it’s the best way right now. You know, I'm fortunate in working with people who contact me who have regret. And so they're willing to listen to what I have to say. But the people that are going into the clinics today oftentimes have been convinced that they're suffering and need hormone therapy, and so forth. So we have to approach it in a different way than I do from the people who are admitting that they have regrettable outcomes. So this is really a creative approach. I think it's an excellent and by the way, I had my surgery, as you mentioned it 42 I would have liked to have had that law in place to protect me.

REICHARD: Well you mention comorbidities and other underlying problems that are not uncovered prior to doing life-altering surgeries and alterations on a person’s body. What are some of the other underlying disorders have you found? You mentioned a few of them but what are some of the other ones. And what should doctors do about those things?

HEYER: Many of the individuals are just simply cross dressers. You know, in the old days, they called him transvestites. And if you were a transvestite, you know, you didn't get hormones, you didn't get surgery. So they, they had to get creative and give it a new name, which one time it was transsexual. Now it's transgender, they keep changing the names, to try to stay ahead of the lawmakers so that they can keep pumping hormones and giving people surgery who by the way, don't need them. And I've always said that, I will stop doing this when people stop writing me at my sex change. regret.com I've got over 10,000 emails in my inbox. Over 2 million people have come to my website, it's still a big problem. There's the regret is huge. And that's why these places that are putting things into place to protect people are so badly needed. And anything that lawmakers can do to prevent anyone from having access to these hormones and surgeries, is absolutely the best thing to do because the regrettable outcomes have been coming since 1979. That's the first time they were reported. And they're continuing to escalate, the more surgeries they do the more regrettable outcomes. And so yeah, I'm proud of them for diving into that.

REICHARD: Walt, anything else listeners should know about this situation in Missouri and then the much larger struggle over transgenderism in this country?

HEYER: Well, I’m celebrating what Missouri is doing. I think there's a huge problem with the way that our media has been pushing these ideas and getting people to think that they can change genders. By the way, not one person in the history of mankind has ever biologically changed your gender. The only thing we've done, these people who identify as transgender are just identifying as transgender or in a different gender. They haven't made a different gender in anyone yet.

REICHARD: Walt Heyer is an author and speaker who helps people who want to de-transition. You can find his work at sex-change-regret-dot-com. Walt, thank you for your time.

HEYER: Anytime. Thank you for having me on again.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Recently, a team of doctors in Boston performed a delicate brain surgery on a baby who was still in the womb.

The parents are Derek and Kenyatta Coleman. They live in Louisiana. They found out their baby had a problem when she was about 30 weeks along.

Ultrasound showed an abnormality of the blood vessels. Very rare condition. Very serious, too. The Coleman’s preborn little girl faced heart failure or brain damage, and of course the risk of dying.

KENYATTA COLEMAN: Derek and I are deeply rooted in our faith. You know, and, and we prayed hard for this.

Scans showed that the malformation was getting dangerously large. So the parents had to make a risky decision: risk putting off treatment until she was born or risk surgery right away.

Well, right away made the most sense. So doctors operated in-utero at the 34-week mark.

COLEMAN: You know, there was no doubt in our minds that God would perform a miracle and, and he did, on a public platform using a little girl before she was even born. You know, she made her mark on the world.

And she’s continuing to make her mark. It’s been 7 weeks since surgery and post-delivery brain scans show that baby Denver is doing great.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 9th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: supporting foster families.

If you’ve been listening to WORLD’s Effective Compassion podcast, then you know that this week emphasizes caring for kids in crisis by way of foster care.

EICHER: Foster families are on the front lines of that work. But sometimes, it’s a lonely path. WORLD Correspondent Bonnie Pritchett talked with foster families and the people who come alongside to help care for kids from hard places.

AMANDA STOFFELS: Okay, well. Let's, why don't you go ride bikes in the front? Yes, everybody outside in the front yard riding bikes. 

KIDS: Yay!

BONNIE PRITCHETT, REPORTER: That’s one way to keep half a dozen siblings occupied.

Three of the bikers are Amanda and Dewey Stoffels’ biological kids. The three others are their foster children. Over 15 years the Stoffels have welcomed 25 foster children into their North Texas home, life, and often hectic daily routine.

Dewey gives a brief run-down.

DEWEY STOFFELS: You hear Amanda talking about going to the farm every day, and we've got the sheep. And we've got the kids, and then we got athletics, and then we've got you know, archery and we've got Taekwondo and and all of these different activities.

With help from Amanda’s parents’ shuttling kids and babysitting, the Stoffels can usually keep up. But sometimes their kids need more than a ride home from track practice.

AMANDA STOFFELS: Like next month, I have things for my Samantha that I have to be at. But we don't have school because schools shut down for spring break. And so I can't be in five different places and I can't bring all these kids and the people who can watch the foster kids are very limited because of all of the regulations.

Parents can only leave their foster children with state-certified caregivers. The Stoffels needed a respite provider.

AMANDA: Respite is where you are a certified foster family. But you So, you could be fostering, but you keep your home open for those families that need a foster family to watch the kids overnight for over 48 hours. Anything up to 48 hours is babysitting.

With regulations limiting who can help, some foster parents can feel trapped in their commitment. That’s what happened to Nick and Amanda Boyd. They’re foster parents near Houston. Their first placement – three young siblings – challenged their will, marriage, even their faith.

Amanda recalled her darkest moment.

AMANDA BOYD: The best way for me to describe it is I was in the middle of a dark forest. And there were trees all around me, and I was on my knees. And I saw no way out.

It took two years, but the Boyds finally made their way out of that dark place. They learned ways to raise kids who have come from hard backgrounds. The Boyds wound up adopting those three kids and four more.

Amanda drew from those experiences and founded Sanctuary, a foster and adoption care agency in Houston. Its mission is to help parents persevere when they feel like quitting.

BOYD: Because what foster families need is they need hope. They need support, and they need someone coming along beside them that says, “I'm here with you. Just lean on me. And I'm going to show you the way out.”

In addition to material support provided by volunteers, Sanctuary offers free office and in-home counseling, including 24/7 in-person crisis intervention.

BOYD: We've been to homes we've been to skating rinks we've been to the side of the road. We've been to McDonald's. We go wherever that they're having issues with kiddo.

Most agencies don’t provide that level of mental health care. And state support might not fully cover the need.

That’s where a different couple discovered a niche ministry opportunity. Here’s Vanessa Evermon.

VANESSA EVERMON: There's not a lot of organizations that offer financial assistance for counseling scholarships.

Vanessa and her husband Jeremy are volunteer directors of Greater Grace Ministries near Houston.

VANESSA EVERMON: And you may find a counselor that, that is really suitable for your child's needs. But they don't take your insurance.

Greater Grace offers families partial scholarships to help cover the cost. Families pay a portion as a buy-in.

The ministry also hosts an annual parents’ retreat with workshops, lectures and a welcome therapeutic side benefit. Jeremy Evermon explains.

JEREMY EVERMON: But when you can find people that are going through similar experiences as you are as a parent, then you definitely bond from that, but also feel encouraged by that.

Parents can expect family struggles when caring for children who have endured hardships. Shoring up their support before fostering or adopting is vital.

Toni Steere leads Legacy 685. It’s an adoption and foster care ministry of Houston’s First.

TONI STEERE Look around at your community, at the people who you can invite into the journey with you.

And we're asking you to join us, would you pray for us? Would you license alongside us as respite care providers? Would you get babysitter certified with our agency so that we have more than enough babysitters. You're inviting them into that process, even as you don't know what you're asking for. 

Ashley and Dave Pflug had two biological daughters when they felt called to foster. They partnered with the faith-based agency 1 Hope in San Antonio.

ASHLEY PFLUG: We don’t have any family nearby. But, you know, our church body has become our family. And, um, our agency has really filled in a huge gap. When they come to visit, they are in prayer with us. And they offer in home tutoring, they coordinate volunteers to help the kids with academics.

Friends of the Pflugs invited themselves into the process. Two people from their church small group became state-certified babysitters.

ASHLEY: They came around us. And it was right when we started this, they said we want to be on this journey with you. And here's how we can help.

Not everyone is called to foster or adopt. But Toni Steere of Legacy 685 believes every Christian can help those who are.

STEERE: Okay, if not everybody can do everything, but everybody should do something. Then what's my something? Everybody's got something they can give. And every church has a group of somebodies that can bring their somethings to the altar as a gift to those who most need it.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Bonnie Pritchett in Houston, Texas.

REICHARD: This was a companion piece to the full episode of Effective Compassion from WORLD Radio. You can find it today in the Effective Compassion podcast feed.

That’s available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for “Effective Compassion,” or check out today’s transcript. We’ll supply a link.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 9th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: a surprising lesson on church discipline. Here’s WORLD commentator Whitney Williams to rattle your cage a bit.

WHITNEY WILLIAMS, COMMENTATOR: I don’t think my husband and I will ever forget the sermon that followed our eldest son’s baptism. Here’s our pastor, Rodney Hobbs, speaking last March.

RODNEY HOBBS: We’ve finally made it to First Corinthians chapter five and uh, this is how the chapter starts, can I just read verse one to you? It starts like this: It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans: For a man has his father’s wife.”

Let that yuck sink in, and then imagine you’ve invited your entire family to join you for church that morning–parents, in-laws, grandparents, little cousins, plus your son’s two school teachers. That was us.

Hobbs acknowledged the tension.

HOBBS: If you are new with us today, we are so glad that you’re here. (audience laughing) I am so thankful that you’re here today. And you couldn’t have picked a weirder day to be here.

To make matters even more awkward for my husband and me, our newly dunked nine-year-old sat right in between us with his two six-year-old brothers flanking us on either side. But the main topic of our pastor’s sermon wasn’t the particulars of this man’s sin. The message was about another touchy subject: church discipline.

“Oh great,” I thought, because sadly, we’re all familiar with the ugliness of church discipline done wrong. But as our pastor so graciously reminded us, the end goal of church discipline is not shame and derision. It’s restoration and redemption. Or in other words, I thought later, it’s to provoke a sinner out of his captivity.

The illustration played out even further that afternoon, when my son leapt from our minivan to check on a box trap he’d baited with a fish carcass earlier that morning. 

SON: I caught one, I caught one! I caught a possum! 

He'd caught a possum. He ran and told his grandparents and great grandparents, who were just arriving in our driveway from church.

So our entire family hobbled out back, past our junky shed and through some overgrown underbrush to get a good look at the animal before my son let it go. Turns out, they didn’t have to hurry, because when my son propped open the cage door, the possum didn’t budge, as caged possums have a tendency to do, or not do, rather …

G-DAD: Just reach in there and pull on his tail. 

SON: No. Give me a stick, I need a stick.

My son beat on the back of the cage with a stick to encourage the possum toward freedom.

SON: There he goes.

As we walked back toward the house a few minutes later, I decided to make the experience a teachable moment: “That’s kinda like what Jesus did for you,” I told my son. “He set you free.”

My nine-year-old retorted: “Yeah, but He didn’t beat on my cage with a stick and scare me out.”

‘Not literally,’ I thought. ‘But I pray He does, if it ever gets to that point, spiritually. … I love you THAT much.’

I’m Whitney Williams.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: on Washington Wednesday we’ll talk about what’s really at stake in the debt ceiling crisis. And, Christian education in Eastern Europe, Albania, to be exact. 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 Bible says: Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 1 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 4 through 7.

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.