The World and Everything in It — September 9, 2020

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

We’re only eight weeks out from the U.S. presidential election and the pollsters are doing their thing. We’ll talk about how we might think through the data.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Washington Wednesday.

Also WORLD tour. 

Plus part four of the Hope Award for Effective Compassion. This time, a ministry in Atlanta.

And WORLD commentator Les Sillars on the love of grandparents.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, September 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: Up next, Kent Covington has today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Vaccine makers sign pledge not to rush a vaccine too quickly » The leaders of nine pharmaceutical companies racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine have signed an unprecedented pledge to help reassure the American public. 

The companies vowed Tuesday that they will not submit a vaccine for FDA approval before it’s proven to be safe and effective. 

The pledge came as Democrats have voiced concern that the Trump administration might try to rush the process to approve a vaccine before Election Day. 

BIDEN: If a president announced tomorrow that we have a vaccine, would you take it? Only if it was completely transparent and other experts in the country could look at it. Only if we knew all of what went into it, because so far nothing that he’s told us has been true.  

Presidential nominee Joe Biden heard there during a virtual campaign event Monday. 

The Trump administration fired back, accusing Biden and Democrats of recklessly sowing public fear of a coronavirus vaccine. 

And Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday that the FDA has already published guidance for exactly what it will require for vaccine approval.

AZAR: We will be transparent with the data. We will have a public advisory process for that. We will not compromise on the safety and efficacy of a vaccine even as we move under President Trump’s leadership to get one as quickly as possible. 

He also said the administration welcomes the drug companies’ decision to sign Tuesday’s pledge. 

The nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that he’s cautiously optimistic, based on data he’s seen that we’ll have a vaccine by the end of year. But he said it’s unlikely to happen before the November 3rd election. 

Entire command staff of Rochester P.D. retires amid protests » Rochester, New York Mayor Lovely Warren announced Tuesday that amid nightly police protests, top police leaders are leaving the department. 

WARREN: I do want to inform you that the entire Rochester Police Department command staff has announced their retirement. That includes the police chief. 

Protests began in Rochester over the city’s handling of the suffocation death of a black man. 

41-year-old Daniel Prude died several days after a run-in with police back in March, but a video of that encounter surfaced just days ago, sparking protests.

Officers found Prude running naked down the street, handcuffed him and put a hood over his head to stop him from spitting. They then held him down for about two minutes. During that time, he stopped breathing. He died a week later when doctors removed him from life support.

Prude had the drug PCP in his system, but the official cause of death was listed as “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.”

Mayor Warren said she did not ask outgoing Police Chief La’Ron Singletary for his resignation. 

She added that she believes he’s given his very best.

Wildfires continue to ravage California » New wildfires ravaged bone-dry California during a scorching Labor Day weekend and throughout the day Tuesday. 

The state’s largest utility had to turn off power to nearly 200,000 customers to try to prevent power lines and equipment from sparking more fires.

Governor Gavin Newsom said firefighters continue to fight new wildfires. 

NEWSOM: The Creek Fire being one of them. The Valley Fire now in San Diego, 3 percent contained, some 17,000 acres impacted so far. The El Dorado fire in and around San Bernardino county, 10 percent containment. 

California is heading into what traditionally is the teeth of the wildfire season. And already it has set a record with 2 million acres burned this year. 

Two of the three largest fires in state history are burning in the San Francisco Bay Area. More than 14,000 firefighters are battling those fires and about two dozen others around California.

House Democrats to investigate DeJoy » House Democrats said Tuesday they will investigate whether Postmaster General Louis DeJoy violated campaign finance laws at his former business. 

DeJoy is a longtime Republican supporter who has donated to President Trump’s campaign. And five people who worked for his former company, New Breed Logistics, reportedly say that either DeJoy or his aides urged them to write checks and attend fundraisers. 

The Washington Post reported that two former employees said DeJoy would later give bigger bonuses to reimburse them for the contributions.

It’s not illegal to encourage employees to contribute to candidates. But it is illegal to reimburse them as a way of getting around legal limits on campaign contributions. 

But DeJoy says that never happened. 

At a hearing last month, Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee pressed DeJoy on the accusation. 

COOPER: Did you pay back several of your top executives by bonusing or rewarding them?
DEJOY: That’s an outrageous claim, sir, and I resent it.
COOPER: I’m just asking a question.
DEJOY: The answer is no. 

Monty Hagler, a spokesperson for DeJoy, told The Post that DeJoy was unaware that any workers felt pressure to make donations. Hagler also said DeJoy believes he has always complied with campaign fundraising laws and regulations.

Georgia investigating double voting in primary election » Georgia’s secretary of state said Tuesday that his office has identified cases of double voting in the June primary election. 

1.1 million Georgians voted by absentee ballot in this year’s primary—a record for the state. Another 150,000 voters requested an absentee ballot but ultimately decided to vote in person instead. 

But Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said a small portion of those voters decided to vote both by mail and in person. 

RAFFENSPERGER: In both June’s merged primary and August runoff, we have found roughly 1,000 cases of double-voting here in Georgia. Let me be clear, it is a felony to double-vote in Georgia and we prosecute.

Double voting is punishable by one to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. 

It was not immediately clear whether the outcome of any races may have been affected.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: analysis of the presidential polls.

Plus, Les Sillars on the blessings of grandparents.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD: It’s Wednesday the 9th of September, 2020. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: taking the pulse of the presidential campaign.

Pollsters started tracking the race to the White House months ago. But with less than eight weeks to go until Election Day, analysts are beginning to take those numbers much more seriously. And with new polls from across the country coming out almost daily, there’s plenty of data to pore over.

REICHARD: As of today, most of the polls show Democrat Joe Biden with a comfortable lead over President Trump. Comfortable, yet definitely not insurmountable: About 7 points nationally, but only around 3 points in an average of battleground states. And as veteran campaign watchers will tell you, political races can turn on a dime.

EICHER: There’s also that little issue of accuracy. In 2016, most polls predicted Hillary Clinton was headed for the White House. So, how seriously should we take the polls this time around?

REICHARD: Well, it’s Washington Wednesday. And joining us to talk about polling and polling data is Mark Caleb Smith. He’s director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University, a Christian college in Cedarville, Ohio. 

Professor, welcome back to the program!

MARK CALEB SMITH, GUEST: Oh, it’s always my pleasure to be with you.

REICHARD: I’d like to start by talking about how polls are taken. Back in the day pollsters used to call people on their landlines, usually during dinner! That’s changed, I presume? Gone online?

SMITH: To some degree they have. I mean, we have some issues with online polling because it isn’t necessarily as representative as we might like it. I have a feeling that in our conversation I’ll use that word “representative” quite a bit. But what we’re looking for is a poll that represents the population that it’s trying to survey. So, a representative sample is one that really looks like the demographics that we see in a population. 

So, if you’re looking at just a landline, for example, these days the kind of person that’s going to sit at home, answer a landline phone call, and take a poll is a certain kind of person. The kind of person that might do an online poll is a different kind of person. And so they have robopolls where you have a computer message that plays on a telephone. They have landline. They have cell phone. They have mixtures of these things. And so pollsters use a variety of methods. And, of course, all of those come with their own pluses and minuses.

REICHARD: Does the method of polling influence on the outcome? If a poll relies on calling landlines, for example, I would think that would skew the respondents to an older demographic.

SMITH: Well, the method has the potential to skew the sample one way or another. So, for example, if I’m relying on a landline phone survey, then the kind of person who’s most likely to be sitting at home will probably be an older voter who still has a landline and who’s still willing to answer the phone and take a survey from a relative stranger. And so that’s a certain kind of voter. That’s a certain kind of demographic that you’re getting. 

It doesn’t mean you can’t construct a survey based on that, but it’s limited in some ways. If you go online, for instance, we’re worried about who has access to the internet and who doesn’t have access. Is this really biased toward those who may have more or less financial means? It might be skewed that way.

REICHARD: We know the poll data have been notoriously unreliable in the last few elections. And not just in the United States. Why is that? Have pollsters made adjustments to improve accuracy?

SMITH: I mean, we have to be really careful when we talk about polls being unreliable. I’m not a pollster. I study surveys to some extent for my research. But a poll can be reliable but still be wrong. So, we have to establish that upfront. So, whenever you do a poll—even if it’s very well-done—it has what we call a margin of error attached to it. 

So, if it’s a 3 percent margin of error, for example, plus or minus 3 percent, then if it says the Republican in a race has 51 percent with a margin of error of 3, well, they’re saying that number could be 54, it could be 48, we feel pretty comfortable it’s somewhere in between that range. And so if the results happen and the Republican is somewhere within that range of 48 to 54, that’s a pretty accurate poll. We would say that captured the race really well. 

But for your sort of average consumer of the news, they might look at it and say, well, the Republican was polled at 51, they got 49 and they lost the contest in a close race. That means the polls were wrong. Well, they’re not really wrong. They’re just not as precise as we might like to think that they are.

So, now, granted, your question is more than that. We have polls that sort of bounce all over the place and that’s normal. What you’re talking about is really a systematic error, where we see an error that’s headed in one direction, like in 2016 in the United States. The polls consistently underreported President Trump’s support and they overestimated Hillary Clinton’s support. And because of that we ended up with some skewed—especially statewide—polls. And there are a good number of reasons for that. Pollsters have adjusted, I think. We’ll see whether their adjustments are accurate.

REICHARD: What are the major polls tracking the U.S. presidential election? Which of those, if any, do you recommend people keep an eye on?

SMITH: Right now, the polls are pretty consistent, as you said in your introduction, showing Vice President Biden with a strong lead nationally. It isn’t an insurmountable lead. It’s 7 points or so. Could change pretty dramatically over the space of a couple of months. But it’s a consistent lead. If you look at the polling throughout the entire campaign, it’s actually been pretty stable. He’s been ahead and it’s been a significant lead for several months now. In the middle of May, we saw the two campaigns come a little bit closer in polling. It was more like a 4, 5 point difference at that point. But now Biden is really consistently ahead.

I think, you know, when you look at polls, I think that it’s unwise, honestly, to look at one poll or to choose one poll or another poll and say, you know, I’m waiting for that Washington Post poll or I’m waiting for that Rasmussen poll. That’s really not the right way to go about it, because those polls are more or less accurate. Again, they’re going to have their own margin of error attached to them. And putting too much weight on a single poll will give you, I think, will mislead you.

The best approach is to take a variety of polls and then look at them over time. And then you sort of aggregate those and say, OK, based on these 10, 15, 20 different polls that come out regularly, what does the race show on average. So, if you look at sites like Real Clear Politics, for example, or if you look at FiveThirtyEight.com, they regularly have these sort of aggregated polling totals. And that, I think, is really the best way to get a clear handle on what’s happening in the race right now.

REICHARD: Let’s talk about where the polls stand now. We’re a little less than eight weeks from Election Day. Joe Biden still has a pretty comfortable lead in most of the national polls. In any normal year, we would be watching for the things that can typically change the direction of a campaign: the debates, for example, and the infamous October surprise.

But 2020 is not a normal year! Is it just too early to put much stock in what people are telling pollsters now?

SMITH: That’s a great question, because normally we would expect to see some variability in the numbers between now and election day. We would expect to see a fairly healthy number of undecided voters—say, between 10 and 15 percent. And we would track those to see how they break in one direction or another over the next couple of months. You said 2020 is not a normal year. That’s true, but if you look at how we’ve been polling and if you look at President Trump’s approval rating, for example, over the past several years, it’s stayed pretty consistent. The dynamics of this campaign have stayed pretty consistent and pretty durable in a way that’s almost unnerving, I think.

And so even though we’ve had a pandemic, even though we’ve had an economic downturn, I’m not sure those are going to be enough to radically change what we’re looking at in the electorate. We have a very polarized political system right now and I’m not sure even those events are even shaking large groups of voters one way or another. Also, if you look at undecideds, that’s a pretty small group right now. And so I’m not even sure that group will be large enough to shift the election by the time we get closer to the election itself.

REICHARD: Mark Caleb Smith is director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University, a Christian college in Cedarville, Ohio. Thanks for joining us today!

SMITH: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.

MARY REICHARD: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: WORLD Tour with Africa correspondent Onize Ohikere.

ONIZE OHIKERE, REPORTER: Flooding in Sudan—We start today here in Africa.

AUDIO: [TALKING, SPLASHING]

Sudan has declared a state of emergency after record floods hit the nation.

AUDIO: [SHOVELING]

Local residents shoveled dirt into bags and stacked them into waist-high walls to try to keep the water out of their homes.

Heavy seasonal rains have drenched the region, swelling the banks of the Nile River. It rose 75 feet at the end of August, its highest level in 100 years. The floods have killed almost 100 people, injured dozens, and damaged more than 100,000 homes.

The rainy season lasts until October, so more flooding could be on the way.

Mongolian parents protest new education requirements—Next, we go to China.

AUDIO: [CHANTING]

Students in the Chinese-controlled region of Inner Mongolia gathered last week to protest a new education policy.

The Chinese government recently unveiled new guidelines for schools in the region, removing the Mongolian language from many classrooms. Elementary students must now learn subjects like history, politics, language, and literature in Mandarin, the official state language.

Ethnic Mongolians view the changes as a threat to their cultural identity and fear it will lead to the disappearance of the Mongolian language. Many parents refused to send their children back to school in protest.

Government officials say adopting a national standardized curriculum will improve pathways to higher education. Beijing has implemented similar policies in other ethnic areas like Tibet.

Birmingham stabbing—Next, we go to Europe.

One man died and seven people were wounded in a series of stabbings in the United Kingdom over the weekend. The attacks took place early Sunday at several locations around Birmingham. One witness said the attacker walked up to people seemingly at random.

AUDIO: She screamed, screamed high. Looked around and he was stabbing her, still stabbing her.

Police have arrested a 27-year-old male suspect. They have not released a motive but have ruled out gang violence and terrorism.

Most guns are banned in the United Kingdom, but knife attacks have risen 6 percent in the last year. 

Woodland sound map—Finally, we end today in a birch forest in Scotland.

AUDIO: [BRANCHES CREAKING, BIRDS CHIRPING]

That’s the sound of a strong wind making the tree branches creak and crack. The recording is part of an online, interactive map created by users who submit sounds from around the world.

In May, organizers in the United Kingdom asked people to record sounds and submit them. The group compiled the submissions into an interactive map.

Some of the sounds already uploaded include nightingales in Slovakia… 

AUDIO: [SOUND OF NIGHTINGALES]

…and lemurs in Madagascar.

AUDIO: [SOUND OF LEMURS]

Users continue to upload new clips, so the map is always expanding. Musicians with the organization plan to use sounds from the map to compose original music.

That’s this week’s World Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere in Abuja, Nigeria.

NICK EICHER: We have seen quite a few first-evers in this year’s Major League Baseball season. Take the DH, for example, the designated hitter rule in the National League. That’s a first.

Here’s another. This came during a Washington Nationals game against the Braves in Atlanta: 

Home plate umpire Joe West ejected the Nationals’ general manager. That’s never happened before. Never to a GM. He’s the guy who makes trades and signs team contracts. And he was standing in a luxury box above left field, nowhere near the home plate ump.

AUDIO: You’re out. We’ll wait for you.
Wow, somebody’s getting kicked out. Somebody in the upper deck.
Call security.

Nats GM Mike Rizzo had been barking complaints all game long. And normally, umpires would never be able to hear the GM arguing balls and strikes. But with no fans in the stands, his gripes echoed all the way across the baseball diamond. And finally, Joe West had heard enough. 

After the game, West said of Rizzo: “I wouldn’t take that from a player. I wouldn’t take that from a manager. If it was Donald Trump, I’d eject him, too. But I’d still vote for him.”

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER: Today is Wednesday, September 9th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The Hope Award for Effective Compassion, part four.

Anna Johansen takes us to a ministry in Georgia working to reclaim lives from substance abuse.

ANNA JOHANSEN, REPORTER: The women who live at Gilgal come from all walks of life. 

CATER: They could be your sister, your mom, your cousin. 

Val Cater started Gilgal 14 years ago. She bought a couple of small, red brick houses at the end of a dead-end street on the southside of Atlanta and she started taking in homeless women trapped in substance abuse.

CATER: I’ve had women who didn’t complete third grade. And then I’ve had women with two master’s degrees. I’ve had military women. I’ve had women who were nurses. I’ve had women who were dancers who were prostitutes.

When she started the program, Cater didn’t have any specific guidebook to follow. She just wanted to set up a positive environment, a place where women could get back on their feet and learn how to cope with life challenges in a healthy way. 

Cater got a band of volunteers and staff together and started teaching Bible classes and Scripture memorization, job skills and resume writing, conflict resolution and anger management. Now, the ministry is a multi-phase year-long program. 

There are a lot of rules the women have to follow if they want to graduate. And Cater can be strict.

CATER: I need to for them to understand the rules. So we have a handbook, they have guidelines, they already know, smoking will put you out of the program.

But she also wants the women to just have fun.

CATER: I want the women to do what you and your friends do when you’re having fun. Listen, my girlfriends and I, we don’t get together and smoke crack. That’s not what we do when we hang out. Right? We might get together, talk about a book. And you challenge each other on things that they’ve read. And so I just want them, these are normal. This is like just normal stuff. Listen, they may have never known that normal. 

The women live together in the houses. They’re a small group, intentionally so, because the staff and volunteers want to spend a lot of one-on-one time with each of them. 

RACHEL: This is the phase one house.

Rachel is a house manager, and a graduate of the program. She’s talking quietly because there’s a class going on in the next room.

RACHEL: This is where all the cooking goes on in house. The clients, they have a chore list. There’s two in the kitchen at a time. They fix all meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

There’s a full kitchen, dining room, living room, and space for 13 women to live here.

RACHEL: This is where classes go on at, this where the arguments go on.

There are only four women living here now, but Rachel says they still get in each other’s way and step on each other’s toes sometimes. That’s part of normal life and learning how to handle conflict in a healthy way.

RACHEL: [STAIRS CREAKING] Watch your step, it’s steep.

Downstairs, there’s a room stocked with workout supplies.

RACHEL: We do work out down here. We got a treadmill over here.

Gilgal places a high priority on discipline and structure.

RACHEL: They wake up, they hit the floor 6:30 running. 7 o’clock they’re at the table ready for Proverbs, reading Proverbs. Everybody taking the verse, reading the verse, elaborating on the verse that you like the most. Then after that they come downstairs for praise and worship. From nine o’clock to two o’clock they’re in class dealing with anger or relapse prevention.

For the first 30 days they’re here, the women aren’t allowed to go outside by themselves. They have to turn in their phones, because those phones have all their contacts for their old lives…ex-boyfriends, drug dealers, former friends who weren’t a good influence. 

A lot of the women have been in and out of drug rehab multiple times. They’ve all seen their addictions wreck their lives.

JASMINE: For about 10 years, I have been battling with severe alcoholism.

Jasmine came to Gilgal almost a year ago.

JASMINE: Started losing jobs, started losing friends, my family, they started to disown me. I got in about three wrecks. I had attempted suicide for the last time in November of last year, and I just went berserk. And so luckily, the ambulance came and they took me to the hospital. And it took me to a detox center and they referred me here to Gilgal.

At first, she was apprehensive about the program.

JASMINE: They told me it was a 12 month program and no smoking cigarettes and I was a heavy chain smoker. So I’m like, am I really going to be able to do this? Because I’ve never been able to finish anything. And I wanted this to be my last stop.

It took her about three months to settle in, because it was so different than anything she’d ever experienced. The rules were hard.

JASMINE: You know, nobody in the kitchen if you’re not in the kitchen crew, no showers past this time, showers only at this time, you know, make sure you do this, make sure you do that. So it was a little overwhelming at first.

The other women helped her through it because they’d been in her shoes before. 

But there was another big learning curve for Jasmine: All the talk about God.

JASMINE: I did not know the Lord before I came here. And so it was you know, sitting in class and having sessions in Bible study, and I’m like, What are they talking about? And who is Jesus? 

But after a while, it started to sink in.

JASMINE: Within the classes and being surrounded with Christian women and the volunteers that come that actually break it down for you to understand, it helped a lot. It created this desire for me to want to know who God was and what he has done for my life and I look back at it now, and it’s like, you know, even though I’ve turned my back on God or didn’t know him or you know, didn’t acknowledge him, he still had his hands on me. 

Jasmine still has a little way to go before she graduates, but she’s doing well. Tomorrow, she’s heading off to a job interview, so Val Cater does a final check in. 

CATER: Hey listen, I do believe in you and I know that tomorrow is gonna be a slam dunk. 

Jasmine has a young son she wants to be able to support. This job interview is the next step towards that goal. She’s grateful for the opportunity and the radical transformation in her life so far.

JASMINE: I mean, there’s a whole lot of other rehabs or recovery centers but God knew what it was that I needed. And he directed me here.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen in Atlanta, Georgia.

MARY REICHARD: Today is Wednesday, September 9th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. This Sunday, September 13, is Grandparents Day. WORLD commentator Les Sillars happens to be, despite his youthful character and appearance—who writes these things??—a grandfather.

Hey, man, I am too and I look the part.

LES SILLARS, COMMENTATOR: Wednesday evenings are Grandpa Story Time at our house. We send out the Zoom invitation by email.

KYRA: Gampa, read ‘nother store peas?

This is Kyra.

KYRA: Hi Gampa!

She’s 2. Also in on the calls with me and Grandma are Kai and Zaria, who are 5 and 3. They like to show us things.

KAI: A whale shark and a hammer shark…

That’s Kai with his shark puzzle. And here’s Zaria. Sometimes she and Kai have discussions.

ZARIA: Kai put it back! KAI: There’s a crown and…

On this night I had a special treat for the kids.

LES: See those little symbols? Yeah, so whenever those show up in the text, Grandma is gonna make the sound effect. OK? 

JENNIFER: Grandma’s gonna try…

It worked great.

LES: Hello, little girl, he said with a laugh. 

JENNIFER: Hahaha! 

LES: As his empty stomach gurgled. 

JENNIFER: Grrrr! 

LES: Little Red Riding Hood stopped in surprise. 

JENNIFER: Oh, my!

The batteries in this book died some years ago. But I think Grandma is even better than the book.

LES: Who might you be, and where are you going, asked the wolf with a laugh.

Jennifer: Ar, ar, ar, ar! …

It’s a great, great blessing to have grandchildren. But it’s also a somewhat daunting responsibility. Make the commands of the Lord known to your children, and to your children’s children, says Moses to the Israelites. Teach your children the ways of Life. And then your grandchildren will see Christ both in their parents and in you.

But it’s also possible to over-spiritualize this task. Sometimes Christian grandparents won’t read their grandkids anything but Bible stories. Of course, read the Bible stories. But our grandchildren also need to see how the joy of the Lord spills over into a deep and palpable affection for our families.

An otherwise obscure passage in Whittaker Chambers’ famous autobiography, Witness, has stuck with me. Chambers was an American who spied for the Soviets in the 1930s but then abandoned Communism to become a Quaker and a staunch conservative. He had a troubled family life growing up. But his grandfather, a difficult and sometimes nasty person, was—quote—“The only member of the family who blanketed us in a completely natural, warm, animal affection.” End quote. 

Chambers and his brother would romp all over him. Then—quote—“he would rumple our hair and say in a tone of lingering love: ‘Grandpa surely does love his little jack rabbits.’ It was unqualified: Grandpa simply did love his little jack rabbits.” End quote. 

Sometimes it takes courage to love well. But hey, that’s what grandparents are for.

LES: And as she took off her cloak and hugged Grandma, Little Red Riding Hood said, Grandma, what a brave heart you have, and Grandma said, the better to love you with, my dear. 

JENNIFER: Yeah! That’s a good story…

I’m Les Sillars.

NICK EICHER: Tomorrow: More families than ever are choosing to homeschool. We’ll tell you how that trend has affected private Christian schools.

And, we’ll introduce you to our last Hope Award finalist.

That and more tomorrow. 

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD: 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.

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. (Romans 12:9)

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.