The World and Everything in It - November 2, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Some people who lost their jobs during the economic shutdowns have discovered their entrepreneurial gifts.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference is underway. Today, a warning about what may come of it—from a physicist who worked for President Obama.

Plus the Classic Book of the Month for November: A Chance to Die.

And WORLD commentator Steve West takes a moment on the veranda.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, November 2nd. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

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

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Supreme Court hears arugments over Texas pro-life law » The black robed justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard hours of oral arguments Monday over a new pro-life law in Texas.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton touted his state’s efforts to protect the lives of the unborn.

PAXTON: This law does something that hasn’t been done like this in Texas before, which is to recognize that life is protected when the heartbeat is first detected.

And the law allows private citizens to sue abortionists that violate the law.

The Biden administration is suing to block the law. Solicitor General for the Justice Department, Elizabeth Prelogar characterized it this way:

PRELOGAR: A law that clearly violates this court’s precedence. It designed that law to thwart judicial review by offering bounties to the general public to carry out the state’s enforcement function.

The high court will decide whether to allow the Justice Department's case and separate case from an abortionist, to move forward.

The court is only reviewing how the Texas law was set up, not whether abortions should be legal. It will focus on whether a state may create a law that courts and the government cannot enforce.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh described one of the questions the court must answer. He said a “loophole” has “been used here”...

KAVANAUGH: … which is the private suits are enforced by state court clerks or judges. So the question becomes, should we extend the principle of Ex parte Young to, in essence, close that loophole?

While some were open to considering ways that abortionists can challenge the law, many were hesitant about the Justice Department’s case.

Biden vows to curb emissions at UN climate summit » President Biden addressed world leaders at a U.N. climate change summit in Glasgow, Scotland Monday.

Biden said the United States and other large developed nations bear much of the blame for climate change and he vowed to cut emissions.

BIDEN: We’re going to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by well over a gigaton by 2030.

Biden declared—quote—“We’ll demonstrate to the world the United States is not only back at the table, but hopefully leading by the power of our example.”

And the president used the summit to announce a plan to work with Congress to provide $3 billion dollars to developing countries to help them curb emissions.

And British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who hosted the summit, called on other world leaders to take action.

JOHNSON: We have the technology. We can find the finance and we must. The question for all of us today is whether we have the will.

But the leaders of some of the world’s top polluting countries were no-shows. Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping did not attend the conference.

Jen Psaki tests positive for COVID » White House press secretary Jen Psaki did not accompany President Biden on the trip. She announced that she has tested positive for COVID-19.

The 42-year-old Psaki said she was last in contact with President Biden on Tuesday, when she met him in the White House. She said they were more than 6 feet apart and wearing masks.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters …

PIERRE: The president was tested as well, a PCR test yesterday, and he tested negative.

Psaki had planned to travel with the president this week. But she scrapped the trip after learning that members of her household had tested positive.

Psaki, who is fully vaccinated, said she is only exhibiting mild symptoms.

Virginia voters set to elect next governor » Today’s the day in Virginia. Voters head to the polls — those who have not mailed in a ballot, anyway—to choose the state's next governor.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe has been locked in a tight race with Republican Glenn Youngkin.

Both candidates have been stumping right up till Election Day. Youngkin campaigned over the weekend in rural Gate City. And he noted that many analysts are watching this race as a possible bellwether ahead of next year’s national midterm elections.

YOUNGKIN: This is our chance to do what we do best: lead, lead. And the whole nation will stand up and say ‘thank you’ because they need hope too.

Governor McAuliffe meanwhile urged supporters in the town of Manassas to turn out the vote.

MCAULIFFE: We’ve done great on the early vote, bigger than people thought. We’re going to go into Election Day with a big lead in the early vote. But I need a big lead. I need it on Election Day.

McAuliffe served as governor from 2014 to 2018. Virginia does not allow governors to serve consecutive terms.

McAuliffe still held a slight edge in the polls as recently as a week ago. But an average of recent polls now shows Youngkin up by nearly 2 points.

Virginia was once a solidly purple state, but Republicans haven’t won a statewide race there since 2009.

Jury selection begins in Rittenhouse trial » In Kenosha, Wisconsin, court officials are sizing up potential jurors in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. The 18-year-old faces homicide charges related to protests that turned deadly in August of last year.

Jury selection started Monday, and Kenosha County Judge Bruce Schroeder acknowledged that finding impartial jurors won’t be easy. He said that’s partly due to media coverage of the case...

SCHROEDER: And it’s not just the media. It was mentioned by both political campaigns in the presidential campaign last year, in some instances very, very imprudently.

Once jurors are seated, they’ll have to decide whether Rittenhouse acted in self-defense when he shot three protesters, killing two of them.

The teen drove from his Illinois home to Kenosha with a semiautomatic rifle after protests broke out in the city over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse said he was going to protect a business in the area.

Last week, Judge Schroeder instructed lawyers not to call the protesters victims. Schroeder has routinely banned the term in his courtrooms because he said it biases the jury.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: pandemic entrepreneurship.

Plus, embracing death daily.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 2nd of November, 2021.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: changes in the workforce.

We’ve heard a lot about pressures on the labor market, with a shortage of workers, demands for higher wages, and the problem of rising prices. But, now, a potential positive trend: a burgeoning number of new businesses. WORLD senior correspondent Katie Gaultney reports on the surge in startups.

KATIE GAULTNEY, REPORTER: This beige, brick warehouse sits on a busy Dallas street. The 4,000-square-foot rectangle conceals a feast for the senses inside.

AUDIO: [Sound of a door opening, mixers]

The tantalizing smell of warm butter fills Color My Cookie’s headquarters. Ovens and coolers hum, mixers whir, and half a dozen cookie decorators deftly pipe royal icing onto giant trays of whimsical shortbreads. This hubbub of delicious activity has been a labor of love for husband-wife team Sam and Nancy Major.

MAJOR: Before we got married, he said he wanted to have boys and girls and a bakery.

Sam is a classically trained pastry chef. Nancy is a lawyer. The girls came, then the boys, and finally, in 2016, the couple bought a bakery. But what looked at first like a dream come true felt at times like a nightmare over the next four years.

MAJOR: There were definitely periods when one of us would work 24 hours a day. Like he would get in bed two in the morning and I would literally get out of bed and work until the kids woke up...

Then, the pandemic hit, and the bakery had to shutter.

MAJOR: That was a real low point for us and we had lots of financial commitments, including our four children. And we just had to kind of regroup.

They came up with a business that would give them back nights, weekends, and family time: shipping sets of paintable, iced shortbread cookies.

MAJOR: When you receive your cookie kit, you receive this palette-shaped cookie and a paintbrush, and then you wet your paintbrush to activate the edible color dots. And you can paint your cookie…

Customers love the product, and Nancy no longer has to spring out of bed in the middle of the night to fulfill bakery orders or fix a hiccup.

MAJORS: We have the capacity to be so much more flexible than we had when we were a custom bakery.

The Majors are part of an economic trend Scott Pearson’s had his eye on since the start of the COVID-19 era. Pearson is a business owner and professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

PEARSON: People have been rethinking their lives and some people have found opportunities in starting their own businesses, because they think that that's going to give them more of the lifestyle that they really want.

In 2020, U.S. entrepreneurs created 4.4 million new businesses. That’s nearly a 25 percent increase over the previous year.

PEARSON: Obviously you've had a lot of people put out of work, a lot of businesses that didn't survive during this time. And that's put a lot of people into situations where they have to find a new alternative.

The Majors represent an adaptation economists are seeing in the workforce: taking business online-only. Pearson said it’s not a coincidence that the Roaring 20s followed the Spanish Flu of 1918.

PEARSON: You're going to see a lot of older businesses that haven't adapted, that haven't changed, that haven't moved with the times that are going to be in decline, but you're going to see newer businesses taking on new leadership and growing faster than anything you've ever seen.

And early data indicate a particular surge in women- and minority-led startups. But, online or in-person, getting a startup off the ground is a grind.

AUDIO: [Sound of smoker running]

Across Dallas, more good smells. This time, coming from a home garage-turned-smokehouse.

STROUD: We cook in this chamber smoker. We use pecan only…

That’s Matt Stroud. He’s been a meat-smoking hobbyist for as long as he can remember, taught by his dad. When the pandemic hit, his full-time job as an oil and gas pipeline welder went up in—well, smoke.

STROUD: It basically went to a stop and with a snap of a finger, there were 3,500 welders and laborers that just lost their job.

Then a woman on a neighborhood Facebook group asked where she could find a smoked turkey. Matt’s wife, Trisha, a homeschooling mom of two, responded.

STROUD: And I was like, “Hey, we're going to smoke one for us in our family. I could put a couple on there.” Thirty-two orders later…

They made it a weekly thing, delivering smoked meats, sides, and homemade barbecue sauce in their neighborhood. There was a learning curve: filing for an LLC, along with all the regulations around food handling. They’re still fine-tuning their processes as they go, things like order intake and customer service. They call their meal delivery business Strouderosa. As with Color My Cookie, the loyal and enthusiastic fan base grew quickly.

STROUD: We run between 10 briskets and 15 briskets at a time, 72 racks of ribs. We can put about 400 pounds of chicken on there. And then pork butts, we get about 24 pork butts in there…

But, unlike Color My Cookie, Strouderosa can’t scale up—yet. It’s limited by the size of the small, detached garage that can only hold so many smokers and commercial fridges and freezers. They’re trying to find their own restaurant space to set up shop, but over and over, they’re coming up empty-handed.

STROUD: We can take a step forward and 10 steps back in a day. If you fight hard for a goal, it's going to happen, but man does life put you down in the middle of it, and it gets rough.

The Strouds are hopeful they can begin to make enough income from Strouderosa to keep Matt from having to return to the oilfield.

Scott Pearson says some experts will tell you 90 percent of new businesses fail within the first two years. But failures often pave the way for the best entrepreneurs. The key is learning to “fail fast.”

PEARSON: You have a lot of first-time entrepreneurs probably coming into the market at this point in time. And I think they need to hear it's okay to fail. It's okay to discover that you made mistakes. The key is not to dwell on that. The key is to pick up, dust yourself off, and move on to the next thing—and do that quickly.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Katie Gaultney in Dallas, Texas.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: debating climate change and what to do about it.

President Biden this week is taking part in the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

The White House says it’s looking to assert a leadership role in the global fight against climate change.

But some say that not all of the climate change science is as settled as many world leaders insist and that some of the proposals for attacking climate change don’t make economic sense.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: One of the scientists questioning those climate conclusions and proposals is Steve Koonin. He’s a physicist who served during the Obama administration at the U.S. Department of Energy. He is now a professor at New York University and author of the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters.

Professor, good morning!

STEVE KOONIN, GUEST: Good morning, Mary. Pleasure to be chatting with you.

REICHARD: I want to ask you about this week’s climate conference in a moment, but let’s start with the science.

What we hear from the White House—and many other places, to be fair—is that there is a scientific consensus that climate change is real and that we are on a dire trajectory. Speak to that if you would. Where do we see scientific consensus and where don't we see it?

KOONIN: I think everybody agrees that the globe has warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius since 1900. And I think everybody agrees that humans are exerting a growing warming influence on it. I think where there is disagreement among the scientists, at least as they talk to the public, is in just how warm it's going to get, and just what the impacts of that warming will be on extreme weather, on society, on ecosystems.

REICHARD: But the point many people make is that even if someone isn’t totally convinced by the evidence for climate change, the consequences of being wrong are too great not to take action. What do you say to that?

KOONIN: Well, this is the insurance argument, right, that we should buy insurance. First of all, you know, the globe has warmed 1.1 degrees, as I mentioned, in the 20th century. And during that time, the population of the globe increased by four times. It went from 2 billion to 8 billion. And we saw the greatest advance in human well being that we've ever seen. And so to think that another one and a half degrees, which is about what the UN says we will see, unless we take drastic action to think that another one and a half degrees is going to really derail things, I think just flies in the face of common sense.

REICHARD: In a nutshell, what is President Biden’s plan for fighting climate change?

KOONIN: Well, the central part of it is to decarbonize the electrical system, the electrical grid, to eliminate all emissions from electrical generation by 2035. And then to electrify vehicles, take all the 280 million road vehicles and turn them into either electric vehicles or run them on biofuels. And then the third, not yet really worked out, is to replace a lot of our heating in homes and buildings with electricity, so that again, we will eliminate carbon emissions for the whole country by 2050.

REICHARD: Moving on now to the climate conference this week in Glasgow. What do you expect to come of that?

KOONIN: Not much, frankly. Look, the tensions and the challenges that climate negotiations face have been there for 20 years, and they have been evident to anybody who's taken the time to understand the situation. What we have is a developing world—most of the globe is developing—they need more energy in order to grow their economic activity, and improve their well being. And right now, fossil fuels are the most convenient and reliable way of getting that energy. We in the developed world—the U.S., the EU, Japan, Australia—have the luxury, if you like, of trying to decarbonize our energy systems, and it's not so easy.

The administration plans that I described would entail enormous transformation and additional cost. The people in the developing world, which account for most of the emissions now, they say, “Well, maybe oh, that's true. But right now, you know, I got this bear chasing after me. And I got to worry about it. I can worry about my cholesterol at some other time.”

REICHARD: Obvious in their absence from the Glasgow conference will be the leaders of Russia and China. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They are not attending the conference. And that speaks to this question of how much of the burden the United States tries to assume without the full cooperation of the world’s worst polluter, China, as well as Russia and other nations?

KOONIN: You know, even if the United States were to go to zero, tomorrow, it accounts for only 13 percent of global emissions. And its reduction would be negated within five or six years by the growth in the rest of the world. And so, you know, as we go about trying to implement the administration's programs, which will have an impact on ordinary people, people are going to start to ask, tell me again, why we're doing this. And we need to have a good answer. We have not had a good answer, really yet.

REICHARD: Steve, final question and I want to quote from your book: “It starts with the basic research findings, goes through the government reports and their summaries, and ends up in the media. Unfortunately, there are ample opportunities for misinformation, both unintentional and deliberate, as the science is packaged and simplified for non-experts.” Elaborate?

KOONIN: Well, you know, you can ask President Biden, John Kerry, Boris Johnson in the UK, have you really read the scientific reports? And of course, the answer is no, because you need to be a scientist to really read them in detail. And so what they're talking about is not at all the science in the official reports. Let me just give you one simple example. When the UN report came out in August, Secretary General of the UN Guterres said Code Red for humanity. While you can search all 30,949 pages of the report for phrases like “existential threat,” “climate catastrophe,” “climate disaster,” you don't find them at all. You do find the phrase “climate crisis” once in the report and that's not a scientific finding, but a way in which the U.S. media have simplified that coverage.

REICHARD: Professor Steve Koonin has been our guest. Thanks so much!

KOONIN: Great chatting with you, Mary.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, police in rural areas tend to come across all sorts of things lying in the middle of the road.

But Greene County, Missouri officials are perplexed by a great big object blocking traffic near the intersection of two roads: an abandoned mobile home.

Someone just left a trailer home in the middle of the road with the hitch propped up on blocks.

Investigators asked for leads on social media as to who the owner might be. Fellow Missourians had a field day with that.

REICHARD: One quipped: “When your parole officer says you can’t go within 100 yards of your home and you have to visit a friend.”

EICHER: Or this one: “This is what happens when the husband finds out the in-laws are coming to stay.”

REICHARD: Be nice! The holidays are almost here!

EICHER: Latest word is the sheriff has identified a person of interest and charges are likely.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 2nd. You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re so glad you are!

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Our Classic Book of the Month.

Author and missionary Elisabeth Elliot wrote 24 books during her lifetime, many of them bestsellers. Today, reviewer Emily Whitten talks with biographer Ellen Vaughn about one of Elliot’s lesser known books, titled, A Chance to Die. It’s a reflection on the life and faith of Amy Carmichael, a Christian missionary serving in India.

EMILY WHITTEN, REPORTER: If you haven’t heard of our author this month, Elisabeth Elliot, here’s the capsule version of her story: In 1956, Auca tribesmen—or more precisely, Waodani tribesmen—killed her first husband, Jim Elliot, and 4 other missionaries in Ecuador. That led to deep heartache, but Elliot also prayed for God to open doors to return.

Within two years, God answered by leading her, her young daughter, and another missionary to live with the violent Waodani tribe. Many in the tribe heard the gospel and stopped spearing innocent people. Some came to faith in Christ. Elliot later moved back to the U. S. and spent much of the rest of her life speaking and writing books.

The one we’re looking at today, our Classic Book of the Month, bears the cryptic title A Chance to Die. Elliot published it in 1987. By then she was a mature woman of faith reflecting on the significance of her “spiritual mother,” Amy Carmichael.

VAUGHN: Amy Carmichael was a young Irish Christian from a religious and supportive family. And when she was about 20, she felt a real calling from God to expand her life for people in need.

Author Ellen Vaughn discusses Carmichael and her connection to Elliot in her 2020 biography, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot.

VAUGHN: She ended up in India, and particularly had a lifelong ministry with what we would today call sex trafficking and horrible injustices and abuses to young girls and boys.

Vaughn says Elliot was attracted to Carmichael’s boldness, her grittiness, and her identification with indigenous people.

VAUGHN: But she was also very attracted to her writing style, to her poetry, and more importantly, the nature of suffering. That was a lifelong theme for Elizabeth, and Amy Carmichael really spoke to that theme.

Take the title, A Chance to Die. Elliot explains on p. 176 that the phrase comes from Carmichael’s letters. Carmichael knew that some back in England thought her work saving children seemed glorious. The reality, day by day, felt far from glorious. Taking care of formerly unwanted or abused children was often dirty, mundane, and heart-breaking work. To put their needs first, she had to constantly die to herself. So, when asked to describe missionary work, Carmichael wrote, it’s “a chance to die.”

Throughout the book, Elliot makes much of this counter-cultural calling:

VAUGHN: A lot of American Christianity is, it's gotten fused with the values of the culture in terms of comfort. And that is, I think, what Elizabeth Elliot and Amy Carmichael, of course, will be anxious to puncture—any illusion that Jesus calls us to our best life now, to a life of comfort and wealth and health.

Elliot includes a lot of Carmichael’s poetry in A Chance to Die. I’ll admit I did skim over some of it. But one poem stood out to Vaughn on the theme of suffering, so I asked her to read a bit. Here’s Vaughn.

VAUGHN: “Hast thou no scar? No hidden scar on foot or side or hand? I hear thy song is mighty in the land. I hear thee hailed like bright, ascendant star. Hast thou no scar?” And the poem goes on to say that the feet of Jesus are scarred and how can one purport to follow Jesus if one has no scars of one’s own?

Carmichael isn’t suggesting we seek out suffering. She simply means that real Christian life means taking up our cross and following Christ. The scars that come, whether physical or emotional, can draw us closer to God and make us more like Him.

Elliot highlights another aspect of Carmichael’s life in the first pages of A Chance to Die. Here’s Elliot in a clip from the documentary, Amy Carmichael: Mother to the Motherless.

ELLIOT: I love the story that the book opens with when she was just a little girl, and she stuffed her two little brothers through the skylight, and then climbed through the skylight herself. And then here they were sitting on this steeply slanted slate roof. When they looked down and there were their astonished parents looking up at them. She was a girl who was very uninhibited. And that to me spoke volumes about her courage.

In Elliot’s book, courage shows up again and again. Carmichael faces daily pressure to feed, clothe, and educate the hundreds of children at her mission outpost, the Dohnavur Fellowship. At times, British leaders pressure Carmichael not to rock the boat politically—to accept traditions like caste distinctions and temple prostitution. But in all these conflicts, she seeks to obey God rather than men.

VAUGHN: Amy broke precedent with many missionaries of her day because Amy Carmichael dressed as the Indian women dressed, she ate with them, she lived in the same settings they lived in. And what that is is incarnation. It's like Jesus who came and dwelt among us.

Vaughn says we see the same incarnational principle when Elliot went to live with the Waodani. And like Carmichael, Elliot found courage through dependence on God—out of years of seeking to do “anything” … if He would lead her. Here’s Elliot again.

ELLIOT: The more I read of Amy Carmichael’s works, the more I realized that this was a theme that went through everything she ever wrote. It was the power of the cross and the necessity for every missionary to put himself totally at God’s disposal.

In A Chance to Die, Elliot shows us the cost of that obedience. Carmichael spends the last part of her life bedridden, struggling to remain faithful despite debilitating pain. But we also see her fruitfulness. By the time of her death in 1951, Carmichael left behind nearly 40 books and a thriving ministry that continues to this day.

VAUGHN: I think one thing that Elizabeth Elliot really drew from Amy Carmichael was a fresh way of seeing some of the theological truths that she had known all her life.

Do you need a fresh vision of theological truth and faithful service to Christ? If so, I hope you might consider reading our Classic Book of the Month, A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot. I also highly recommend Ellen Vaughn’s Becoming Elisabeth Elliot. Both would make great gift options, together or on their own.

I’m Emily Whitten.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 2nd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Here’s WORLD commentator Steve West, how to describe this? Just taking a moment to observe.

REICHARD: The King of Whimsy.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: Today I awoke with a scratchy throat and late in the day told my wife I would take some hot tea on the veranda. We don’t actually have a veranda, but I liked the sound of that word. Besides, to call the square slab out back a piazza is a stretch; a patio, just too pedestrian.

She brightened at the thought that I would be drinking hot tea, as she knows I only like iced tea. She began to educate me on the finer things involving tea, showing me the cupboard with its many kinds of tea.

“I’ll just have this,” I said, reaching for the English Tea. I need to start somewhere. On the blue packaging it said “good anytime of the day.” I don’t believe it, yet I pull it from the shelf anyway.

“This is a big lemon slice, so we can share it,” she says. “If you like lemon in iced tea, you’ll probably like it in hot tea.”

I watch the teapot. The cat watches me. I try not to look at her. I know what is on her mind.

“I think I’ll have it without sugar,” I say bravely.

“You won’t like it,” she says. “Try some honey.”

The honey is reluctant. I tip the bottle up and squeeze. A drop appears, stretching slowly toward my waiting spoon. I fill two teaspoons, dive them under the tan-colored liquid, and stir. Turning towards my wife, I tell her I am going out on the veranda. To write, I say. Something will come to me.

She reminds me to put the honey back in the ziplock plastic bag, and I do, cautioning me that “if even a tiny corner is left unsealed, an ant will find it.” And I imagine a scout ant not believing his good fortune when he sniffs the honey-sweet smell wafting from that corner, the message he will bear for his queen. Yet not this time.

The cat is still watching me, trying to catch my eye. I see what she’s about. It’s all she ever thinks about.

Out on the veranda, the sun just dropped below a cloud, rooflines outlined against a graying sky. There’s a chill in the early November air. A single leaf just sashayed its way from twig to earth. The backyard is like a brilliantly trashed urban back alley, overflowing in color.

The second floor window opens, and my wife’s head pops out.

“Are you praying?” she asks.

“No,” I say, but maybe I should be, I think.

I crane my neck up to meet her smiling face. We talk.

The sky darkens. I think of all that lies in front of me this week and all that drags behind me, and I begin to feel the weight of things left undone and still to come.

Someone is blowing leaves, with no regard for their kaleidoscopic display. The cicadas have begun. The temperature drops. The gossamer hammock invites. So, here at dusk, I give in, and leaving tea, rock in its grip, held by a heavenward thread that will not break.

I’m Steve West.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Political strategy. Republicans are hoping to capitalize on Democrat missteps that have that party on the political ropes. We’ll tell you what Republican activists talked about at last weekend's conference.

And, alternative schooling. We’ll take you to a unique one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.

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.

Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

Go now in grace and peace.

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