The World and Everything in It: October 4, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. My name is Paul Owen and my wife is Shirley. Shirley and I serve the kingdom with mercy ships, helping to bring hope and healing to the world's forgotten poor. I've listened in least 15 different countries and ports. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is out of a job.

AUDIO: The office of Speaker of the House is hereby declared vacant.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Big vote in the House yesterday, and we’ll talk about what it means on today Washington Wednesday. Also today, world news on World Tour. And, when faith is tested by a high-risk pregnancy:

GILMORE: She wasn't certain how much longer my body would survive going through the process that was happening.

Also, WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney on the relationship of the soul to time.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, October 4th. 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: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Speaker battle » Upheaval in the House today after members ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a historic vote.

MCCARTHY: I believe I can continue to fight, maybe in a different manner. I will not run for speaker again. I’ll have the conference pick somebody else.

The tally was 216 to 210. It was the first time members have ever voted out a sitting speaker.

Conservative critics said he was too quick to cave to Democrats' demands.

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz led the charge to oust McCarthy from the speakership, saying he was only doing his job.

GAETZ: At times with a very small group of people, but dedicated people, because we have to send a shockwave through Washington DC.

They succeeded in doing that. But what comes next is anyone’s guess.

There is no heir apparent. And choosing a new speaker could be another messy ordeal.

Trump trial » A New York judge has imposed a limited gag order in Donald Trump's civil business fraud trial.

The move came after Trump recirculated a critical social media post about Engoron’s law clerk, Allison Greenfield.

The post included a photo of Greenfield posing for a picture with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Trump said it was “disgraceful” that Greenfield was working with the judge in the courtroom.

The former president again told reporters on Tuesday.

TRUMP: This case is a scam. There can’t be fraud when you’ve told institutions to do their own work.

Trump does plan to testify on his own behalf in the trial.

Hunter Biden » Meantime, Hunter Biden faced a judge in Delaware Tuesday pleading not guilty to three federal firearms charges.

His lawyers claim the Justice Department is caving to pressure from Republicans to prosecute the case.

But Attorney General Merrick Garland says Special Counsel David Weiss is being pressured by no one.

GARLAND: Mr. Weiss, has the authority to pursue this case he's the supervisor of this case. And at the end of the case, because he's now a special counsel, he will have to provide a report, which will explain his prosecutorial and investigative decisions. At that point the American people will see the reasons for the steps that have been taken.

The president’s son is accused of using drugs while purchasing a firearm and illegally possessing the gun as a drug user.

NYC Mayor to Latin America » New York City Mayor Eric Adams is traveling to Latin America to ask migrants to stop migrating to his city. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: The mayor of the self-proclaimed sanctuary city is planning a four-day trip to Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia this week.

He said he’ll deliver the message that “coming to New York doesn’t mean you’re going to stay in a five-star hotel.” And it doesn’t mean you will automatically be allowed to work.

The state of New York just approved work permits for nearly a half-million migrants, many of whom entered the country illegally.

Adams says his city has absorbed nearly 120,000 migrants over the past year costing his city almost $10 million dollars a day.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

DC crime / Cuellar » Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas returned to work on Tuesday after being carjacked the night before near the U.S. Capitol.

CUELLAR: I was just coming into my place. Three guys came out of nowhere and they pointed guns at me.

Cuellar said the masked gunmen demanded his car and that he simply responded, “sure” adding that he had to remain calm.

The Democratic lawmaker was unharmed.

Cuellar thanked police after they recovered his car.

Putin to NoKo » Vladimir Putin plans to travel to North Korea soon in another sign of growing ties between the two authoritarian governments. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Putin will likely fly into Pyongyang in the weeks ahead for his second meeting with Kim Jong Un in as many months.

Kim traveled to Russia last month.

US officials believe North Korea has agreed to supply arms to Russia.

Putin has recently visited occupied parts of Ukraine. But aside from that, this will be his first trip outside of Russia since the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest in March for war crimes.

For WORLD I’m Josh Schumacher.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: What’s behind McCarthy’s removal as Speaker on Washington Wednesday. Plus, holding fast during a high-risk pregnancy.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday, October 4th, 2023. 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.

STEVE WOMACK: On this vote. The yays are 216, the nays are 210. The resolution is adopted. The office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.

It's Washington Wednesday. And as you just heard big news from the nation's Capitol, Speaker McCarthy ousted by a solid block of Democrats and eight Republicans.

Joining us now to talk about it and what it might mean is Daniel Suhr, he is an attorney in Milwaukee, he served as a senior adviser to the Governor of his state, Scott Walker. He's also a contributor to world opinions.

Daniel, good morning.

DANIEL SUHR, GUEST: Good morning, guys. Great to be with you.

EICHER: Well, I sure expected fireworks yesterday, but not quite the solid wall of blue as the kind of the backdrop to eight red Roman candles going off. What did you think was going to happen?

SUHR: So initially, Nick, I was hopeful when I saw Lauren Boebert vote no for now, you know, on the one hand, Lauren's in a swing district in Colorado, and so she had a lot of political pressure, probably. But she has been as far to the right in the House Republican caucus as anybody. And so I was initially hopeful that folks like Ken Buck, like Nancy Mace, who are sort of in that far end of the party would nonetheless, stick by the deal that they already cut, right? They cut a deal to make McCarthy speaker in the first place, they just cut a deal on the continuing resolution. And so initially, I was I was hopeful this was just going to be a embarrassing stunt for one member or two members, but that we wouldn't see an actual choice to vacate the chair. That's not what happened.

REICHARD: Daniel, I'm curious, did anything stand out to you about the Republicans who did vote to remove McCarthy?

SUHR: Well, now the burden is on them, right? This is actually a pretty significant vote. It's never happened in the modern history of the house to vacate the chair like this. And these people, I think, now face intense ire hire within their own caucus, these are not going to be popular people at the next caucus meeting. And that is a responsibility that they have now to, I think, show the House and really the American people a way forward, that the House can do the job that that it's been elected to, which is to govern, which is to pass bills, which is to move legislation, which is to keep the government open, like the responsibility is on them now, to do these things under a speaker that they can support.

EICHER: You know, it's possibly time now to stop using the word unprecedented, because it seems like every time we use it, then precedent replaces old precedent. But maybe another label is appropriate like unexampled. Is there any example you can think of, to compare this to, in the history of tussling with, with House speakers?

SUHR: Honestly, Nick, not really. It's sort of amazing that we're at this point in our politics in the history of the whole House, it's been over a century, it's been over 11 decades, since there's been a successful motion to vacate the chair, 113 years, and it's really only been in the last few years that we see this constant, up and down roller coaster of leadership in the House, there certainly been leadership fights in the past where we can remember, you know, the end of Newt Gingrich's tenure, and the fight over who would replace him, and the the inside money being on the Appropriations Committee Chair, and instead, the House going a different direction. So there have been leadership fights, but they always happen at the start of the term, the start of the new Congress, and then they happen again, two years later. It's really only been in the last few years, people like Paul Ryan, coming to power. And now with this motion, that we've seen this incredible volatility within a two year term of Congress.

EICHER: Well, Daniel, you've been pretty tough on the eight Republicans who sent McCarthy into early retirement, but but they really did object to the deal with the Democrats. And what followed seemed a little predictable, didn't it? I mean, didn't they have to do what they did or risk losing all of their credibility?

SUHR: I don't think that's true, Nick, because the deal that was done with Democrats came after a vote on principle, and this happens all the time in the House. Conservatives for years have put forward The Republican Study Committee budget that casts a very conservative cut to the government balanced spending package, they get to vote their conscience, it fails. And then we all show up and do our real day job, which is governing. And the work of governing is hard. And it requires compromise. We don't have unified Republican control of all the branches. And so we have to make compromises. Those compromises aren't fun. They sometimes go against what we would hope for in an ideal world. But that's the job of governing, as long as we're going to keep the government open. Maybe if you're okay with living in a world where national parks aren't open and everything is shut down. Like that's not okay. And apparently, that's the world these eight are willing to live in. But I think the American people elect their representatives, expecting them to do the hard work of governing, and in fact, often praise them for doing the hard work of finding consensus and compromise.

REICHARD: So Patrick McHenry is President pro tem of the House…what does that portend for what’s next?

SUHR: Yeah, so interestingly, under the House rules, if the chair becomes vacant, the former speaker in this case, Kevin McCarthy, is responsible for designating a successor to simply facilitate the work of the house in choosing a new speaker. So he doesn't have the formal powers and speakership. He's not invested with a position for any length of time, his job is really just to keep the House open, while the House does the hard work of picking a new speaker. So now, we presume the House Republicans will be going into a private caucus setting to try to work this out amongst themselves. And McHenry will certainly be one of the people at the table, along with other leaders in the House Republican caucus, to facilitate this process of getting to a point where there's a majority again, in support of a new speaker.

REICHARD: Ok, let’s talk now about who might follow McCarthy. Potential candidates might include Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who I should point out is receiving treatment for blood cancer right now. And Majority Whip Tom Emmer looks like he’s pulled out. Now on Monday, Gaetz said that a house speaker needs to connect the conservative and moderate wings of the conference. Daniel, does anybody stand out to you as being able to do what Gaetz implies McCarthy failed to do?

SUHR: Mary, the third name I'll add to the mix is Chip Roy of Texas. I think it's going to come down to those three. So Tom Emmer is the former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. That's the campaign arm of House Republicans. And so he's played an important role in electing a lot of the members of the caucus. He knows them. He knows their districts, he's raised money for them. Steve Scalise, obviously is a name known to many in the country because of his tragic assassination attempt, frankly, the shooting of House members at a baseball game a few years ago. And so there's a deep well of affection and goodwill for Leader Scalise coming out of that experience, but frankly, they're both perceived as being generally conservative, but not really conservative guys. They're still part of leadership. They're still part of speaker McCarthy's team. And so I don't expect them to approach the challenges of governing in a substantially different way. And if they choose one of them, it's really just putting Kevin McCarthy's scalp on a wall for Matt Gaetz, like we've accomplished very little in terms of shifting the Overton window. Chip Roy, on the other hand from Texas, is not part of the leadership team. He is definitely at a further point on the spectrum of House conservatism, and I think would reach substantively different decisions in terms of both policy and tactics from what you'd see from a McCarthy, a Scalise, or an Emmer.

EICHER: Daniel Suhr is an attorney and a contributor to WORLD Opinions. Thanks for joining us!

SUHR: Thanks for having me. Let's pray for our country.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: WORLD Tour with our reporter in Nigeria, Onize Ohikere.

SOUND: [Passengers boarding plane]

ONIZE OHIKERE, REPORTER: Libya - Italy flights — We start today in Libya’s capital of Tripoli where some two dozen passengers boarded a commercial flight to Italy—the first in nearly a decade.

The Libyan-run Medsky Airways sent the first aircraft that arrived in Rome on Saturday. The airline will operate roundtrip flights between both cities twice a week.

Italy and other European nations suspended flights from Libya in 2014. That’s after Libya devolved into unrest, following the ouster of longtime autocrat Muammar Gaddafi. An EU ban on Libyan aircrafts still remains in place.

AL-ZANAD: [Speaking Arabic]

Hamdi al-Zanad—the MedSky airlines director—says Libyans who wanted to travel to Italy previously had to go through Tunisia because of the suspension.

Malta has also resumed flight operations to Libya.

AUDIO: [Church singing]

Armenia protests — In Armenia’s capital of Yerevan, church members pray for the hundreds of thousands of people, who have now fled the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Bells across the country rang out on Sunday as Armenians in the majority Christian country observed a national day of prayer for Nagorno-Karabakh.

Nearly all of the 120,000 ethnic Armenians residing in the region have fled. That’s after neighboring Azerbaijan launched an offensive to regain control of the territory.

WOMAN: [Speaking Armenian]

This woman says that women, children, and the elderly fled in any vehicle they could find.

AUDIO: [Protesters singing]

In Brussels, several thousand Armenians waved flags and sang in the streets to protest the situation. Similar protests have continued in Armenia and also took place in France and Greece.

A United Nations mission arrived in the region on Sunday, the first there in about three decades.

SOUND: [Celebrations]

Maldives election — Next, supporters are celebrating on the streets of the Maldives after an unexpected victory.

Mohamed Muizzu won the Saturday runoff presidential election with more than 53 percent of the votes. Incumbent President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih emerged with 46 percent of the vote.

MUIZZU: [Speaking Dhivehi]

Muizzu unexpectedly stepped in as his party’s candidate after the Supreme Court prevented his party’s first choice and the country’s former president from running due to money laundering and corruption charges.

The vote has also morphed into a regional power play between India and China for the Maldives, which strategically rests in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Muizzu had accused the ruling party of allowing India free rein access to the country.

Muizzu—widely viewed as pro-China—vowed to remove Indian troops from the Maldives and balance the country’s trade partners. His party lost to Solih back in 2018 over frustration with growing Chinese debt.

AUDIO: [Church singing]

Iraq funeral — We close today in Iraq where Christians are still mourning at least 100 people who died at a wedding last week.

Mourners wept inside the packed Al-Tahera Syriac Catholic church where portraits of some of the dead lined the stairs.

Hundreds of wedding guests were inside the reception center in a small Christian community in the Nineveh Plains. Authorities said indoor fireworks started the fire that quickly engulfed the center built with highly combustible material.

More than 100 people also suffered burns, smoke inhalation, and crush wounds.

ISHO: [Speaking Arabic]

Revan Isho—the groom—said he grabbed his wife, who struggled to run because of her dress.

ISHO: [Speaking Arabic]

He adds here that his wife can’t speak after she lost ten relatives including her mother and brother.

They plan to move away from the area.

Iraqi authorities have arrested 14 people, including the venue’s owner and people who set off the fireworks.

That’s it for today’s WORLD Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere in Abuja, Nigeria.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Some people are blessed with longevity. 

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Check!

EICHER: Others with physical acumen. 

REICHARD: Check!

EICHER: Still others think it’s sensible to jump out of a perfectly functional aircraft.

REICHARD: Some people have it all!

EICHER: The sound’s from video shot by Charles Lane.

AUDIO: We’re gonna pull down, ready? How was that?!

How was that? It was A-OK for Dorothy Hoffner, unofficially the world’s oldest skydiver, bailing out of the plane, tethered to an instructor, 13-thousand-500-feet over north central Illinois.

SOUND: [Applause]

And softly to the ground. Cameras and microphones were there, and the question: How do you feel?

HOFFNER: Like I’m old.

Dorothy’s more about actions than words. And besides...

HOFFNER: Age is only a number, you know.

Perhaps you’re curious about that number: One hundred four!

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, October 4th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

Today on Concurrently: The News Coach Podcast, Kelsey Reed interviews Doug Shepherd, a church planter in Ukraine. And they talk about the challenges of church and family in a time of war. Here’s a preview of their conversation.

REED: And that pivots me towards this question about what the immediate changes were for your family and for family life in general and ministry, due to this invasion?

SHEPHERD: Everything just went crazy once the invasion happened. You have half the population saying, "I can't believe this is going on." My wife was in that group, like "What? I can't believe they would, what are they thinking?" And then they start bombing the cities, and so people start moving west. So it took people maybe three days to get here, the shelter can take so many, everyone opens up their home like good Christians. But we've got people living in our house who are massively traumatized. And as a parent, a lot of the parental work is calibrating the fallen world to where the age and stage of the child is, and having conversations that are appropriate, trying to fight against your parental instinct to prevent pain. You want them to deal with the painful world, but you want to calibrate it to what they can process. Well, when people that are massively traumatized and highly anxious move into the house, and the air raid alarm goes off, so when that happens, people that are guests in our house, fall on the floor, start wailing, the kids are saying we're gonna die. You can't pull your 11-year-old aside and go you know, "Let's, let's talk about it." You just have to get together with your wife and recalibrate, like "What are we supposed to do here?"

You can listen to the full episode in the Concurrently podcast feed … and we’ve included a link in today’s show notes.

REICHARD: Well, speaking of how trauma tests a person’s faith, pregnancy is an area of life that can be filled with pain and anguish. So what to do about difficult pregnancies?

Last month, three Tennessee women sued their state over its laws protecting babies from abortion. They said those laws forced them to continue traumatic pregnancies that put their health at risk.

Some doctors are making similar claims. Leilah Zahedi-Spung was a high-risk obstetrician in Chattanooga, Tennessee, until last winter. Sound here from KUSA 9News in Denver:

NEWS ANCHOR: But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, a Tennessee law made the care she provided illegal and forced her to send patients away or risk a felony charge.

LEILAH ZAHEDI-SPUNG: I couldn't do it. So now there's no one there. And that causes a lot of guilt.

EICHER: Dr. Zahedi-Spung moved to take a job in Colorado and left behind high-risk patients, women with complicated pregnancies. Since this spring, WORLD’s life beat reporter Leah Savas has been in contact with one of those patients. And while the circumstances were difficult, this woman had a different view of her pregnancy complications.

LEAH SAVAS, REPORTER: It’s July 30th, 2022. Steve and Ashley Gillmore sit on the brown suede couch in their living room. Both have children on their laps: a wiggly little boy on Steve’s lap and a little girl with glasses on Ashley’s. Their three other daughters sit next to them—all posing for a family picture.

ASHLEY: Alright, everybody look at the camera and say, “Mom’s pregnant!”

DAUGHTERS: What? What?

With five kids, ages two to eleven, Steve and Ashley thought they were done after their youngest graduated from diapers. So all the baby stuff went to other pregnant moms, the crib, the stroller, car seat, clothes. Everything except for the high chair.

RELATIVE: Judah, did you hear what your mom said?

LILY: I told you you would have another baby!

DAUGHTER 2: Mommy’s pregnant! Mommy’s having another baby!

This is the story of that surprise pregnancy—how it challenged Ashley’s faith and the medical community’s commonly accepted view of how to handle a complicated pregnancy.

Ashley was 35 when she found out about the baby. At first, everything seemed normal. Until one night when Ashley was around 10 weeks.

ASHLEY: I woke up in the middle of the night just with massive bleeding and thought I for certain was having a miscarriage, like blood down to my ankles just drenched in blood.

Doctors diagnosed her with a subchorionic hemorrhage. That’s when the placenta partially detaches from the uterus, causing bleeding. It can heal on its own. But that was just the beginning of the bad news.

When Ashley was 14 weeks along, another test showed she had placenta accrete, a condition where the baby’s placenta grows too deeply into the uterine wall. That can cause life-threatening bleeding during delivery. Steve and Ashley left the appointment confused. They sat in their car in the parking lot and pulled out their phones.

ASHLEY: Anything you read about on accrete talks about mortality rates and how rare it is that a baby will survive and how dangerous it is for the mother and possibility that the mother won't survive. So we just felt like we were like spinning like what, where do we even go from here?

During one of many follow-up appointments, Ashley and Steve watched the baby moving around on the ultrasound screen.

SOUND: [Heartbeat]

The baby was 18 weeks along, apparently healthy despite the complications. The little heartbeat was strong. So what the doctor said to them next was jarring.

ASHLEY: The placenta has breached your uterine wall. And she said, from the ultrasound, we can't tell if it's already invading into your bladder. And she just tried to stress the concern that she wasn't certain how much longer my body would survive going through the process that was happening. She said it would be you know, it's illegal in our state, but we would deem it medically necessary, making an abortion legal for you. And I could tell you where to go to have that done today.

That doctor was Leilah Zahedi-Spung.  She later made headlines for moving out of the state because of Tennessee’s pro-life laws.

Ashley and Steve were scared. They felt numb. It seemed like she was telling them abortion was their only option. But they pushed back.

ASHLEY: How could we choose to abort our baby when we just have seen that he's healthy?

It would be a long six weeks ahead of them before the baby would be viable outside the womb. Still, Ashley and Steve said they wanted to try. Right after that appointment at the clinic, they headed for the hospital.

Hospital staff put Ashley on bedrest in the high-risk pregnancy unit.

MUSIC: [“Remembrance”]

Throughout the pregnancy, doctors said it wasn’t certain Ashley would have an emergency…but if she did, she likely wouldn’t survive. Ashley and Steve wondered what God could possibly be trying to do through this. But Ashley prayed that the Lord would change her perspective.

ASHLEY: Not to just keep continuing to question why are we doing this, but to look for ways to say, God put this in our life so that we could have the chance to tell this many more people how amazing he is and what his plan could be through all of this. 

And looking back, Ashley could see how God had used previous trials to prepare her for this one. Through the unexpected death of her mother-in-law in 2021, Ashley learned to trust God’s goodness even when you lose someone you love. It prepared her to trust God even if the baby died. Even if it meant she would die.

ASHLEY: No matter what the outcome of all of this, the truth would still be that he's a good God. And whether it was all of us or whether it was just me and our baby did pass, or whether it was just my husband and kids, and they would have to be sustained through him.

After just a few days in the hospital, her bleeding slowed down. Doctors let her finish her bedrest at home. She surprised her kids when she came home earlier than expected. They ran to hug her when she walked through the front door.

SOUND: [Walking in Front Door]

JUDAH: Mom? Mommy!

OLIVIA: Mommy!

ASHLEY: Don’t knock me over.

DAUGHTERS: Momma!

For weeks, Ashley camped out on the soft brown couch in their living room. She went in for check-ins and steroid injections to help the baby’s lungs grow. The pregnancy continued past the 24-week mark. At that point, the baby was more likely to survive outside of the womb. But the invasive placenta wasn’t getting any better.

ASHLEY: We still wondered if how invasive into my bladder it was going to be. What it was going to do to any of my other organs was never really certain.

MUSIC [“A Kind of Light”]

Meanwhile, Ashley prepared for the possibility that she might not make it through this. She wrote notes to Steve, to their extended family. She wrote to her kids.

ASHLEY: Enjoy life to its fullest. Don't let little stuff tear you apart. But most of all, be bold in your faith. And don't let other people tell you who you need to be. Know that we are here—you without me—because of my love for my children. And it was just too big to allow someone to tell me that it wasn’t possible.

She kept the notes on her phone and didn’t tell anyone.

Then, one day short of 29 weeks, after more than ten weeks on bedrest, her water broke.

REICHARD: Tomorrow, part two of this story. Plus, a visit to the family’s home in Chattanooga.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, October 4th. 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. Up next, WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney says time is a difficult concept to understand, but it does point us toward living in light of eternity.

JANIE B. CHEANEY, COMMENTATOR: I used to complain that time was my enemy, especially when running late for an appointment. Now I have too much of it as the years stacked up behind me are pushing me forward faster and faster.

Time is measured in minutes, hours, and days, but it squeezes and expands like an accordion. When I was 6, Christmas took forever to arrive. At age 10, I couldn’t wait for school to start, and two days after it did I couldn’t wait for winter break. Time dragged when I was a mom stuck at home with toddlers, and flashes by today when shopping for my oldest granddaughter’s 17th birthday. Nieces and nephews I knew as babies now post Facebook pictures of their kids going off to college.

“They grow up so fast!” Every young mother hears this, but it’s hard to believe when a colicky newborn is waking her up four times a night. “The days are long, the years are short” makes no sense to a teenager who can’t wait to get out from under his parents’ thumb. But it’s true.

Time is just weird.

Augustine of Hippo ruminated at length about it in his Confessions, admitting he knew what time was so long as no one asked him to define it. Did time even exist? If so, where and how? Like travelers on a road, humans can only experience time moment by moment. But God sees the whole road. In the end, Augustine could settle the problem in his own mind by entrusting it to God’s mind; time could only be resolved by eternity.

Meanwhile, as C. S. Lewis observed, we’re “so little reconciled to time, that we are ever astonished by it. ‘How he’s grown!’ we exclaim. ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It’s as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.”

As the Preacher wrote in Ecclesiastes, “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Beauty has its time, but eternity haunts us. It’s as if we were destined to become, one day, eternal.

Perhaps we can understand time (and space) as the canvas on which God paints Creation. And if that’s the case, as eternal creatures, perhaps we’ll examine the whole cloth of time as God has woven each of us into it; marveling at the intricate patterns and mysterious providences and startling connections. Discovering what God has done from beginning to end will be a glory to look forward to, even better than Christmas.

Meanwhile, every moment weaves into the final cloth. Or, as R.C. Sproul used to say, “Right now counts forever.”

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Andy Stanley doubles down in response to a WORLD Opinions article. How does this play into the larger trend of evangelical compromise on Biblical doctrine? And, part two of our story about a high-risk pregnancy.

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 Lord said to Isaiah to set a watchman to announce what he sees. “Then he who saw cried out: “Upon a watchtower I stand, O Lord, continually by day, and at my post I am stationed whole nights. And behold, here come riders, horsemen in pairs!” And he answered, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the carved images of her gods he has shattered to the ground.” Isaiah chapter 21, verses 8 and 9.

Go now in grace and peace.

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