Police in Benue confirmed his release and said security forces rescued him in an operation that also freed other captives. Seven other recent kidnapping victims were brought out alive, and officers arrested two suspects. The freed captives were taken to the University Hospital in Otukpo for medical checks. The diocese confirmed that Father Otache was safe.

Police have not released the identity of the kidnappers or said what they wanted. Some local sources said citizen vigilante groups helped in the search. No ransom has been confirmed by authorities.

The case is one of many. Benue lies in Nigeria's Middle Belt, where farming villages, many of them Christian, have suffered years of armed raids, killings and abductions. Travelers on country roads there know the risk. A priest in a clerical collar, a pastor on his way to a service, a farmer driving to market: any of them can be stopped, forced into the bush and held for money. This one came home. Others in that region have not.

Five days is a long time

Think about those five days. A man of God sat in captivity while his flock waited. His parishioners did not know whether he was alive. His family did not know whether he would be handed back or buried in a shallow grave. Seven other people were held with him or nearby, and each of them has a family too. Their names never reached the headlines, but heaven has them all.

Nigeria's Christians do not need our pity as much as they need to be remembered. Too many in comfortable places hear of a kidnapping and move on to the next thing on the screen. Scripture will not let a believer do that.

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)

Notice the words "as bound with them." That is not a polite nod. It means putting yourself in the cell. It means knowing that the body of Christ is one body, and that when a brother in Benue is dragged down a bush path, it is a member of your own family. The church in America should speak for the persecuted plainly, and its elected leaders should keep pressing Nigeria's government to protect its Christian citizens. The right to worship and to travel home from church without being seized is not a luxury. It is the first duty of any government that bears the sword.

What the captive knows

There is something a man learns in a place like that which comfortable men seldom learn. He learns that every earthly door can be locked from the outside, and that only one Door cannot. Paul wrote his letters from chains. Peter slept between soldiers the night before his trial. The gospel has never depended on the freedom of its servants, and it never will.

"Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all." (Psalm 34:19)

Understand that verse rightly. It does not say the righteous will have no afflictions. It says many. It says the Lord is present in them and is greater than them, and that in His time and His way He brings His own through. Sometimes that deliverance comes on a Sunday evening with police at the gate and a hospital bed waiting. Sometimes it comes on the far side of death, when the Lord wipes away every tear. In either case the promise holds.

And what of the men who took him? They too are sinners for whom Christ died. The gospel that comforts the captive also summons the captor. Justice must be done, and the law should deal firmly with those who sell human beings for ransom. But the cross is wide enough for the worst of men, and the Lord who freed His servant can also break the hard heart of a kidnapper.

My friend, you may never travel a road like the one in Ohimini. But you are traveling one. Every soul is on a road that ends before a holy God. The Lord Jesus came to open the prison door that no policeman can open, the one of sin and death, and He did it by laying down His own life and rising again on the third day. Whoever calls on His name is set free, and free indeed.

Question 1 would write a "fundamental right to reproductive freedom" into the Virginia constitution, language that opponents say would lock abortion into the state's founding charter. Question 2 would strike the constitutional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The pastors' letter opposes both. Its first signers numbered about 150 in late September, and the list has since grown past 200. Supporters of the letter put the combined congregations at roughly 90 churches and 50,000 people.

The letter did not come out of nowhere. Virginia's Catholic bishop in Arlington had already launched a vote-no campaign among his own flock, and the pastors say they could not sit on the sidelines while that work went on. Democratic state Sen. Creigh Deeds of the 11th District has taken the other side. He wrote publicly that the proposed amendments are important and urged Virginians to vote yes.

Abortion measures are on ballots in several other states this fall, and faith groups across the country are weighing in. But Virginia is a close and plain test. A constitutional amendment is not an ordinary law. Once it is written in, a legislature cannot undo it, and a future generation of voters would have to climb a long hill to reverse it.

What a constitution says about a child

Strip away the campaign language and the question in Question 1 is a very old one. What is the child in the womb? Is that child a person, or a possession? The word "freedom" sounds fine until you ask whose freedom, and at whose cost. A freedom that ends with another human being dead is not freedom. It is power, and it has been dressed up in a gentle word.

The Bible does not leave us guessing about this. Long before any ultrasound, the Word of God spoke of the unborn as known, formed, and attended by the Almighty.

"For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13)

Notice who does the work. Not the mother alone, and not the doctor, but God. He covered that child. He knit that life together before it drew its first breath. The law of man may call it tissue, but the Lord calls it His handiwork.

The prophet heard the same thing about his own beginning: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee" (Jeremiah 1:5). Before the first heartbeat, God knew him by name.

Marriage and the order God set

Question 2 touches the second ground the pastors are defending. Marriage was not invented by a legislature, and no ballot can improve on what God established in the garden: one man and one woman, joined for life. The church has said so for two thousand years. It says so now because the Creator's design does not change with the polls.

Pastors who speak up are sometimes told to keep to the pulpit. But a shepherd who sees the wolf and says nothing is no shepherd. These ministers are doing what citizens of any conviction do in a free country: they are telling their neighbors what they believe and why, and asking them to vote.

What a Christian owes his neighbor

Here is the part that matters most. The believer who votes no on Nov. 3 should do it with a gentle spirit. The woman facing a hard pregnancy is not an enemy. She is a person in trouble, and the church that tells her the child must live owes her a hand to help carry the load. Show up with meals, with a place to stay, with friendship that does not quit when the baby is born. That is how the gospel looks when it walks.

And remember what the gospel offers to the one who has already made the choice the law would protect. There is forgiveness with God. The blood of Christ was shed for just such sin, and no sinner is too far gone for it. The same grace that calls the nation to protect life calls every one of us to repent and believe.

Virginia will decide soon. Whatever the count says, the Word stands. Life is God's gift, marriage is God's design, and the truth does not need a majority to be true.

Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, wrote the opinion. Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, joined her. Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, dissented. She wrote that the groups had not clearly shown standing, in particular that a court order restoring the earlier limits would actually change how agents operate.

The suit challenges the Department of Homeland Security's January 2025 decision to rescind earlier guidance that restricted immigration arrests at "sensitive locations," churches among them. The groups argue the change chills worship and burdens their religious exercise. They bring claims under the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The ruling is narrow. The panel decided only that the groups may be heard. It said nothing about whether the claims will succeed. The case now goes back to U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, who must take up again the request for a preliminary injunction. The administration can still contest the claims on their merits, and it may seek further review of this decision.

Two truths the church has to hold together

Most Americans will read this as a fight over politics. I want to look at what the Bible says to the church while the lawyers do their work.

First, the government is not the enemy. The apostle Paul wrote to believers living under Rome, a far harder master than any American administration. He did not tell them to despise the magistrate.

"Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." (Romans 13:1)

A nation has the right to decide who crosses its borders and under what law. President Trump was elected to enforce those laws, and enforcing them is not a sin. Officers who carry out lawful orders deserve our respect for the office they hold. A church that cheers lawbreaking, or tells its people to hide from every officer, has stopped preaching Romans 13.

Second, the church is still the church. The sanctuary is not a government office or a political rally. It is where a sinner walks in on a Sunday morning with nothing to offer but his need. The doors of a house of God have always been open to the weary and the hunted, and a congregation ought to be free to gather and pray without wondering who is watching the parking lot.

The Lord said plainly how His people are to treat the foreigner among them: "But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." (Leviticus 19:34). That command was given to a nation with borders, courts, and laws of its own. God asked them to be both a people of law and a people of mercy, and He never made those two things enemies.

What the pew can do

Whatever Judge Friedrich decides, you do not have to wait on a courtroom to act like a Christian. Obey the laws of the land. Pray for the president, for the judges, and for the officers who work these hard assignments, because the Word of God tells us to. Feed the hungry who knock at your church door, and tell them the truth about Jesus Christ, who died for sinners of every tongue and nation.

Governments rise and fall. Court rulings are overturned and policies are rewritten with each new administration. The gospel does not change with any of it. Christ is still the only way to the Father. The church that keeps its doors open, its Bible open, and its conscience clear will outlast every argument now being made in Washington.

Pastor Samuel was killed on Sept. 20 in the Kantoma community. His wife gave his name at his funeral on Sept. 25. Four days after he fell, the killing spread to other villages. On Sept. 24, two Christians died at a mining site in Kworos Gangare village. They were Phillip Luka, 25, and Sunday John, 34. Two more were killed in Nghar village, and two in Rubung. In Gassa village three men died: Ishaya Pam Dung, 47, Barnabas Gyang Jack, 23, and Manasseh Luka Mushwer, 26. Community leader Rwang Tengwong gave those names and counts.

On Sept. 26 the gunmen came to Marit village. A resident, Luka Japson, said five Christians were shot at about 1 p.m. while working at a mining site, and two others were wounded. The five were buried on Sept. 30.

Joyce Ramnap, the Plateau State Commissioner for Information, confirmed the attacks. "We condemn these attacks," she said, and she asked residents to stay calm while efforts continue to stop the violence.

These deaths are part of a larger toll. Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List counted 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide between Oct. 1, 2024 and Sept. 30, 2025. Of those, 3,490 were Nigerians, about 72 percent. Nigeria ranks seventh on that list.

Men at their work, a shepherd at his post

Look again at who these men were. A pastor, shot while going about his ministry. Young men of 23, 25 and 26, killed at a mining site, where they were earning bread for their families. Nobody in this account was holding a weapon. They were working and praying. That is all the record shows, and it is enough to break a heart.

The world scrolls past a dozen names in a village it cannot find on a map. Heaven does not. The Lord who counted the sparrows has counted every one of these men, and he knows the widow at the graveside in Kantoma by name.

The Bible never promised the believer an easy road. It promised something stronger. Our Lord said of his own:

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)

Hear that plainly, my friend. It does not say the pastor's death was small. It says the kingdom is his, and it is his now. A bullet can end a sermon. It cannot end a soul that is hid with Christ. The widow may not have her husband at the table tonight, but she has a Savior who was himself murdered by wicked men and rose again on the third day. Death lost its final word at an empty tomb outside Jerusalem.

What a free people owes the suffering

Those of us who worship in safety carry a duty. We must not look away. Scripture says:

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)

Remembering is not idle. It means knowing the names. It means asking our elected leaders in Washington to keep the killing of Christians in Nigeria before the eyes of the government there, and to treat the protection of worshippers as a matter of simple justice. The first duty of any government, in Abuja or anywhere, is to guard the lives of its people. The Plateau commissioner has condemned these attacks. Condemnation is a beginning. The farmers and miners of Barkin Ladi need security in their fields.

And there is a word for the man who would wish evil on the killers. The gospel will not let a believer hate even these. Christ prayed for those who drove the nails. Justice belongs to God and to the lawful authorities, and it must come. But the same cross that comforts the grieving is open to the one who fired the rifle. That is the scandal and the glory of the gospel.

If you have never settled where you will stand when your own last day comes, settle it now. These Nigerian believers were ready because they trusted a Savior, not themselves. That Savior is not far from you.

The dead man is Jesús Alberto Puerta Pérez, who belonged to La Antorcha Encendida Church. He earned his living driving a motorcycle taxi. Religious-freedom advocates tracking the case say he went regularly into some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of the Caribbean port city to preach the gospel to men who carried guns.

The trouble began over that motorcycle. Sources told advocates that the gang members wanted to use his bike. Pastor Puerta had been warned that they meant to move drugs on it and had used it for crimes before. He refused. The advocates say the men may have hoped to tie him to a crime through the machine, and that when he said no, they beat him until he died.

Local authorities have named no suspects. Cartagena has seen a string of killings of evangelical pastors this year, among them a shooting in July. Colombia's gangs fight over drug routes and neighborhoods, and ministers who work among them often have nothing between them and the violence but their faith.

A man who would not lend his hands to evil

Look at what this man was asked to do. He was not asked to deny Christ. He was asked to hand over a set of keys. And he said no, knowing what those men were capable of. He had preached to them. He knew their names, I expect, and their mothers' names. He loved them enough to tell them the truth and loved God too much to help them do wrong.

That is a harder thing than it sounds. Most of us can stand firm when the whole world is watching. It is the small refusal, in a dark street, with nobody to applaud, that shows what a man is made of. Pastor Puerta's whole ministry was a refusal to leave lost men alone, and his last act was a refusal to join them.

The Lord told the church at Smyrna, a congregation that knew suffering well:

"Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." (Revelation 2:10)

Notice that the Lord does not promise the faithful an easy road. He promises a crown. The world sees a poor taxi driver dead in a Cartagena street. Heaven sees a servant who was faithful, and that is the only verdict that stands.

Why he went to them at all

Some will ask why a man would put himself in reach of killers. The answer is as old as the gospel. Christ did not wait for sinners to clean themselves up. He said of Himself:

"For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." (Luke 19:10)

A gang member is a lost man. So is a man in a fine house who has never bowed his knee. The ground at the cross is level, and every one of us stood on the same low spot. Those who laid hands on Pastor Puerta did a terrible and wicked thing, and justice belongs to the magistrate, whom God appointed to bear the sword against evildoers. I pray no one reads this and concludes they are beyond reach. The thief on the cross was not.

My friend, there are believers today, in Colombia, in Nigeria, in Sudan and elsewhere, who pay for the name of Jesus with their lives. Their stories rarely make the evening news. Yet the church was built on exactly such blood from the first century on, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against it.

Perhaps you have never been asked to give up so much as a motorcycle for your faith. Then ask yourself a plain question: what would you refuse to lend to sin, and what would it cost you? Pastor Puerta answered that in one hard moment. The Savior he served answered it first, on a hill outside Jerusalem, when He gave Himself for the very sort of men who would one day beat His servant down.

That Savior is alive. He forgives murderers and makes them new, and He receives His faithful ones home. Turn to Him today, while there is yet time.

Russian courts had convicted Hubbard of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine and handed down a sentence of nearly seven years. Hubbard has denied the charge, and his family has long disputed it. The State Department had formally designated him as wrongfully detained, and he was the last American Russia held under that designation.

President Trump said he asked Putin personally for Hubbard's freedom in a phone call the week before, and that Putin agreed. Trump said on social media that no "swap" was necessary. Hubbard is in poor health, and officials said he was flown to Texas for treatment at a military hospital. His aircraft landed at Lackland Air Force Base.

Mr. Witkoff thanked Mr. Putin for the gesture and called him a "humanitarian," a remark that drew criticism from lawmakers in both parties. Officials said as many as ten other Americans, some of them dual nationals, remain in Russian custody. The Kremlin and Washington also have trilateral talks with Ukraine planned in the coming days.

A man in a cell has a name

Four years is a long time to wait in a cell. Hubbard went in at seventy, an old man by any measure, and he came out at seventy-four. Somewhere in a Michigan home, a family set a place in their hearts every day for a man who was not at the table. Now a plane has set down on American soil, and a family can breathe.

The headlines will argue about the politics, and the politics matter. A president asked, and a prisoner walked free. A free nation owes its citizens that kind of effort, and it is right to honor the office that made the call. But I want you to see something older than any summit.

The Bible never lets the believer look away from the prisoner. It does not say, "Pity them from a distance." It says something harder and warmer.

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)

As bound with them. That is the measure. Not as a spectator reading a news ticker, but as one who feels the iron. The early church knew this because its own pastors sat in Roman dungeons. Today, in Nigeria, in North Korea, in Iran, and in places that never make the evening news, believers sit in cells because of the name they carry. Hubbard's name is known to us. Many are not.

The captive nobody can free but One

There is a second prison, my friend, and it holds more people than any penal system on earth. Scripture calls it the bondage of sin. A man may walk the streets, own a house, and hold a good job, and still be chained at the ankle to a habit, a bitterness, or a fear of dying. No envoy can negotiate that release. No sanction can be lifted to open that door.

Christ stood in the synagogue at Nazareth and read the promise of the prophet over Himself, that He had come to open the prison to them that are bound. He meant it. He went to a cross to pay what the captives owed, and He rose from the grave to prove the debt was settled.

"If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." (John 8:36)

Free indeed. Not freed on a technicality, not freed on a condition that might be revoked next month. Free because the One who holds the keys of death and hell has said so.

Think of what Hubbard's family felt when they heard the news. The relief did not come from a speech. It came from a fact: he is out. That is how the gospel arrives. It is not a mood or a method. It is an announcement that a Man died and rose, and that the door stands open to anyone who will come out.

So do two things. Remember the prisoners, the American ones still held in Russia and the believers jailed for their faith across the world. Pray for their release by name where you know them, and speak up where you can. And then, if you have never walked out of your own cell, come to Jesus Christ today. The gate is not locked from the inside. He opened it Himself.

The church preschool wants to take part in the state-funded program, which is meant to give families free preschool in the year before kindergarten. The school says it cannot do so without an exemption from a state rule requiring participating schools to admit any child who applies. That includes children of same-sex parents. The school holds that its faith shapes how it teaches and whom it can enroll as a matter of conscience, and it argues that the state is excluding it for being religious.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled for Colorado on Sept. 30, 2025. The Supreme Court then agreed to take the case.

The court has set aside an unusual amount of time. The Solicitor General filed a motion on Aug. 31 asking for part of the argument. The proposal gives 20 minutes to the preschool and its allies, 10 minutes to the United States, and 30 minutes to the state's side. A federal government that stands up for a church's right to run its own school is worth noting.

The question before the justices is whether a state may open a public benefit to every provider except the one that holds to biblical convictions. In recent years the court has held that a government may not bar religious people from a public program simply because they are religious. Colorado says this case differs because it concerns a rule against discrimination. The preschool says the rule is being used to push its faith out of a program that other private schools may enter.

Who the schoolhouse door belongs to

Set the legal briefs aside for a moment, my friend, and look at the child. Somewhere in Colorado a four-year-old is learning to hold a crayon and say a first prayer. Her parents chose that room. They did not draft it into their lives. They chose it and paid taxes to a state that now says its help is for others.

Scripture never treats the raising of children as the state's job. It hands that task to the mother and father, and it places the child's soul above any program or budget line. Our Lord made this plain when His own disciples tried to shoo the little ones away.

"But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:14)

Notice what He was displeased about. He was not displeased with children, and He was not displeased with the crowd. He was displeased with the men who stood in the doorway. Whenever a government, however well-meaning, sets itself between a child and a teacher who brings that child to Christ, it takes up the disciples' old post at the door.

The Bible says the training of a child is a long work with a long reward.

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6)

That training does not wait until the first grade. It starts at the breakfast table and in the first classroom, and Christian parents have always known it. A state that offers free preschool to all but quietly strikes the church from the list has decided that faith is a private hobby and should stay out of the common life. The gospel will not agree to that. Christ is Lord of the whole of life, including the nursery.

The Democratic governor and the state officials who run this program are neighbors, and they deserve respect for their office and a fair hearing. Many of them care about children. But policy that tells a congregation to set aside its convictions as the price of a seat at the public table is policy that opposes the plain word of God. The right answer is to let every parent choose, and let the church that served its community for generations keep serving it.

On Nov. 3, while the country lines up at the polls, nine justices will listen to a question older than the republic: whether a man may bring his child to be taught about God without losing what every other citizen receives. Christians ought to follow it closely and take it to the Lord in their own homes.

The couple had been returning from a wake, where the pastor had taken part in a funeral service for a grieving family. Police said at least one man stepped out of another vehicle and fired at close range, from about a meter away. The shooting took place at about 1 a.m. in the Villas El Dorado neighborhood. The couple leave behind two children.

Municipal police detained a man at the scene or soon after and have held him as a suspect. His name has not been released, and no formal charges have been described publicly. Officials have announced no motive. Early information pointed to a robbery that turned deadly, but investigators have not confirmed that, and friends and relatives of the family are waiting for the findings of the state prosecutor.

Guanajuato has long been one of the most violent states in Mexico, with armed groups fighting over territory and fuel theft. Pastors and priests who serve the poor in such places often walk the same dark streets as everyone else, at all hours, because the sick and the grieving do not keep office hours.

A shepherd who was still on the job

Think about where this man had been. He had not been at a banquet or a rally. He had been sitting with a family that had lost someone, the oldest work a pastor does. He stood beside a grave and spoke of hope. Then he went home, and before he could reach his own door, death found him and the woman he loved.

I will not guess at the motive. That belongs to the investigators, and the man in custody is presumed innocent until a court says otherwise. But I can tell you what the gospel says about a day like this one, because a hurting world asks the same questions every time. Why them? Where was God? Is a life like that thrown away?

The answer of scripture is not cheap. It does not tell the children of that home that grief is small. Our Lord Himself stood at a grave and wept. But He did not leave the mourners there.

"Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints." (Psalm 116:15)

Precious. The Lord keeps account of every servant who falls, whether the world notices or not. No bullet in a dark street has ever slipped past His sight. The two who died in Irapuato are not forgotten by heaven, even if the news cycle moves on by tomorrow.

Every human life bears the image of God, from the womb to the last breath, and every murder is an assault upon that image. That is why a Christian cannot shrug at violence, whether it comes from a cartel, a robber, or a government. Justice matters. Those who keep the peace, in Mexico and in this country, carry a God-given duty to find the guilty, test the evidence honestly, and punish wrong. A nation that lets the shedding of innocent blood become routine is a nation in trouble.

Yet justice, as important as it is, cannot raise the dead. Only one man has ever done that, and He promised to do it for all who trust Him.

"I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." (John 11:25)

My friend, that is the hinge of everything. If this life is all there is, then a pastor and his wife shot down on their own street is only a tragedy and nothing more. But if Christ came out of the tomb on the third day, then death is a defeated enemy, and those who die in Him have only gone ahead. Their children will grieve, and they ought to be comforted in that grief by the people of God. Still, the grave does not have the last word over that family.

The same truth speaks to you. You may never face a gunman, but you will face death. Every one of us will. The question is whether you will meet it in your own strength, or in the strength of the One who walked out of the grave. He offers pardon freely to anyone who will turn from sin and trust Him, the shepherd and the thief alike. Do not put it off. The pastor in Irapuato did not know that Thursday morning was his last, and neither do you know your hour.

The order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the NIH director to build the new division. It aims research dollars at conditions the White House says have been neglected. Those include heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, endometriosis, fibroids, infertility, maternal health and menopause. The task force is to look at women's health from infancy through old age.

Mrs. Trump named five goals: research funding for conditions that hit women hardest, artificial intelligence to speed discovery, faster new therapies, breakthroughs at an affordable price, and an end to the silence around women's health. "This is a transformative moment for women in America," she said. The president credited her with the idea. "Who the hell wouldn't have a women's health division?" he said.

No total price tag has been set. NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said the amount is undetermined, but that "some new money will very likely be devoted to this." Alicia Jackson, who directs the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, said agencies would make several announcements this year, with figures such as $100 million and $200 million directed toward efforts affecting women. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in March and announced in September that she is cancer-free, was singled out by the president at the event.

The White House fact sheet points to related steps already taken: the FDA's move in November 2025 to begin removing boxed warnings from menopause hormone therapy, a Moms.gov site launched in May for new and expecting mothers, and a record $50 billion for rural health care in the Working Families Tax Cuts Act.

A Nation Looking After Its Mothers

Strip away the ribbons and the Rose Garden, and you find an old question. What is a woman worth to the nation that she lives in? A people can tell you what it believes by what it protects, and by whom it refuses to leave in the dark.

For a great many women the dark has been quiet and private. A woman with pain that no one will name. A mother in a rural county two hours from a hospital. A grandmother whose memory is slipping while the family argues over what to do. A wife who sits in a waiting room hearing the word "cancer." These are not statistics. Each is a person made, the Scripture says, in the image of God.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27)

That verse is the whole reason to care. Not politics, not a poll. Every woman, from the first moment of her life in the womb to her last breath, carries the stamp of her Maker. Her body is not a problem to be managed. It is a gift to be guarded. A government that sets research dollars toward her heart, her mother's illness, and her unborn child's chance to be born healthy is doing a thing that Christians ought to welcome and test by one standard: does it honor life at every stage?

That is the measure I would hold up. Maternal health is good, and a mother's care is also a child's care. The same Lord who numbers the hairs of her head knew the child in her before the world did. A health policy that treats two lives as precious, not one as a burden and one as a choice, stands on solid ground. Where the nation's law has said otherwise, the gospel has always said otherwise.

Still, my friend, here is a hard truth no task force can touch. The best research in the world will not heal the deepest sickness. Doctors can lengthen a life. They cannot save one. Every woman reading this, and every man, will one day lie down and not rise by medicine's power. That is not gloom. That is Scripture, and it is where the good news begins.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

Notice the word "whosoever." It does not ask whether you are rich or poor, well or ill, honored in the Rose Garden or forgotten in a back room. It reaches the woman with a diagnosis she is afraid to say aloud. It reaches the one who has been dismissed, told her suffering was nothing, sent home again. Christ was never too busy for such a woman. He stopped for the one who had bled twelve years and spent all she had on physicians, and He called her daughter.

So give honor where honor is due. Those in authority are owed respect by their office, and when a president turns the nation's attention toward the sick, it is right to say so. Pray that the money is wisely spent and that the work reaches the women who need it most. But do not put your whole hope in a division or a bureau. Put it in the One who made you, who bore your sins on a cross, and who rose again so that death would not have the last word.

Take care of your body. Get the exam you have been putting off. Then take care of your soul, which is the larger matter, and settle where you stand with God while there is still breath to do it.

The man was Patricio Alfredo Sánchez Molinari, pastor of the Perpetuo Socorro parish, a church named for Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Video of the service shows the cross coming down while he stood at the front of the sanctuary. Worshippers in the pews can be heard calling for an ambulance, and the broadcast cut off within moments.

Emergency crews reached the church and carried him to a local hospital. He was later confirmed dead from the blow. Church authorities issued a statement of condolence, and a memorial service was held Sunday, led by the archbishop of Guayaquil.

Neither the church nor local officials have said why the cross came loose from the wall. No explanation has been given about faulty fittings or structural damage, and the question of how it was mounted remains open. One local outlet has said the priest was preparing for a wedding ceremony, but that detail has not been confirmed elsewhere. The video has since spread across social media in several countries, and thousands of viewers have left comments.

The hour nobody marks on the calendar

I have thought about that sanctuary all week. A man rose that morning, put on his vestments, and walked to the front of a church he knew well. He had done it a thousand times. Nothing on that calendar said this would be the last.

My friend, that is the plain fact under every ordinary day. We plan the week. We plan the year. We do not plan the hour we leave. A falling beam, a stopped heart, a car on a wet road. The Bible never softened this, and neither should we.

It strikes hard that the cross itself came down. I will not make more of that than the facts allow. Nobody knows why it fell, and a grieving parish does not need a sermon built on speculation. A man has died. People loved him. Honor that, and speak gently.

But I will say this. The cross on that wall was never meant to be a decoration. It was a reminder of the hardest and kindest thing God ever did. The Son of God hung on a Roman cross, in public, for sinners who had not asked Him. He did not do it so we could feel comfortable. He did it because death was coming for every one of us and somebody had to beat it.

"So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." (Psalm 90:12)

Number your days. Not to frighten yourself, but to wake up. Wisdom begins when a man quits acting as though he has unlimited time. Some of you have put off the question of where you stand with God for years. You were busy. You meant to get to it. The people in that sanctuary on Saturday meant to get to many things too.

Here is the good news, and it is very good. Death is real, but it is not the last word. Jesus stood at a grave in Bethany, and He did not offer a philosophy. He said to a weeping sister:

"Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:" (John 11:25)

Notice the words: he that believeth in me. Not the one who is the most religious. Not the one with the longest record of good works. The one who trusts Him. A sinner can lay his whole weight on the finished work of Christ today, in the kitchen or the car or the hospital waiting room, and be made right with God.

The family and the congregation in Guayaquil are bearing a heavy loss, and they deserve our respect and our sympathy. The rest of us who watched or read about it have been handed a quiet question. If this were your last day, would you be ready to meet Him?

Do not leave that question for later. Later is not promised to anyone. Today is the day of repentance, and the Savior is near.

The president spoke while campaigning for Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), about two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. He described the money as meant to offset diesel costs during this harvest season. The U.S. Department of Agriculture put out its own announcement the same day.

The department said commodity-specific payment rates for Title I crops, such as wheat, corn, soybeans, and cotton, will be released in November. Payment methods for other eligible crops, including specialty crops, will be announced later. Payments will rest on a national average of losses, drawn from planted acres on file with the Farm Service Agency, federal cost-of-production estimates, and government projections for yields and prices.

Farmers will not have to carry crop insurance to take part. The department advised producers to prepare by setting up a Login.gov account linked to USDA. The program is modeled on the earlier Farmer Bridge Assistance program, which drew on $12 billion in Commodity Credit Corporation funds. Agriculture analysts have noted that the money will not arrive right away, and that exact per-acre figures have not been published.

That is the news. Behind it is a plain fact that every one of us eats three times a day without thinking about it: somebody got up before light, climbed into a machine, and burned expensive fuel to bring in a crop.

The man on the combine

A farmer does not set the price of diesel. He does not set the price of fertilizer, or the price of corn at the elevator either. He plants in the spring on a promise he cannot see, and he prays over the sky. Then in October he finds out what the year was worth. When fuel climbs and grain does not, he can work harder than ever and still end the season in the red.

It is right for a government to take notice of such a man. Honoring those who feed a nation is not charity to a special interest. It is common sense, and it is older than America. A country that loses its farmers will soon learn what hunger is. Whatever one thinks of how the dollars are figured, the instinct to stand with the people who bring in the harvest is a sound one, and the President and the Department of Agriculture deserve credit for acting while the combines are still running.

Who actually gives the harvest

But, my friend, no check from Washington ever made a kernel of corn. No program grew a head of wheat. The Bible says it plainly, and it said it long before there was a Treasury to write checks:

"While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." (Genesis 8:22)

God spoke that promise to Noah after the flood, and every autumn since, it has come true. The rain, the sun, the seed that dies in the ground and rises again, these are not ours. The psalmist wrote, "The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." (Psalm 24:1) A farmer knows this better than most. He works the land, but he cannot command it.

There is a danger in a good harvest and in a good relief program alike. It is the quiet notion that we have things in hand, that the bins are full because we were clever, or that the nation is secure because the budget is large. Jesus told of a rich man whose ground brought forth plentifully, who tore down his barns to build bigger ones and said to his soul, take thine ease. God called him a fool that very night. The trouble was never the full barn. It was the empty heart that thought the barn was the whole of life.

Nothing in the field can save a soul. Not the biggest yield, not the best price, not the finest policy. Bread feeds the body for a day. The bread of heaven, Jesus Christ, who gave His life on the cross and rose again on the third day, feeds the soul forever. He said, "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger." (John 6:35)

So let the farmer be honored, and let the work of those in authority on his behalf be weighed fairly. But let every man, woman, and child in the land look past the grain and the gauge and the ballot to the One who sends the seedtime and the harvest both. He has kept His word to Noah for thousands of years. He will keep it to you, if you will come to Him.

Justice Diana Kavedza delivered the ruling on October 19, 2026, and set sentencing for Friday, November 6. She said the convicted men and women must be brought to open court to hear it. One of the accused had pleaded guilty to all counts and was convicted on his own plea.

The judge found that the deaths came from the unlawful acts and omissions of those who built and kept up a regime of starvation in the forest. She rejected the defense claim that the victims, all under the age of 16, had chosen to fast themselves to death. Autopsies in the case showed that most of the dead had died of hunger.

Mackenzie's lawyer, Lawrence Obonyo, called the verdict "perplexing" and said the defense intends to appeal. Mackenzie also faces separate charges of manslaughter and terrorism, and he has pleaded not guilty to both. The case began in 2023, when investigators exhumed bodies from shallow graves across the forest, and the count of the dead climbed past four hundred.

What a shepherd owes the lambs

I will not dress this up. Children were starved in the name of God. They were told that hunger was holiness and that death was the road to heaven. A man who stood in a pulpit's place, with a Bible in his hand, led trusting families into the brush and let little ones waste away. A court has now said so, and the grieving have waited a long time to hear it.

Some will say this is what comes of religion. My friend, it is the opposite. It is what comes when a man puts himself in the place of Christ and bends the Word to his own purpose. The Lord saw this day coming and warned us plainly:

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." (Matthew 7:15)

Notice the sheep's clothing. The wolf does not arrive looking like a wolf. He comes with scripture on his tongue and a gentle word, and he sounds sure. Frightened and hungry people, who want badly to be right with God, are the ones most easily led off. Anyone who tells you to starve yourself, cut off your family, or hand over your children for the sake of heaven is not speaking for the Good Shepherd.

Jesus never asked a child to die for Him. He took the children up in His arms. When His disciples tried to turn them away, He said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14). And He spoke of those who harm them with a severity found almost nowhere else in His teaching: "it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6).

Justice is God's idea

Some believers feel uneasy when a court punishes a man who claimed to speak for the Lord. They should not. Scripture says the magistrate "beareth not the sword in vain" (Romans 13:4). A nation that weighs the evidence, hears the defense, and then names the crime for what it is has done a righteous thing. The defendants have the right to appeal, and that right should be honored. But the weight of the finding falls on the side of the children who cannot speak.

The sanctity of life does not begin late or end early. It covers the child in the womb, the child in the forest, and the old man in his last days. Every life is made in the image of God, and no preacher, however loud, has the right to spend it.

So here is the plain counsel for any man or woman listening. Test every voice against the written Word. Ask whether it leads you toward life or toward death, toward your family or away from it, toward the open Christ of the Gospels or toward a secret that only one man holds. The true Shepherd said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). He does not take life. He gave His own.

Kenya has 191 graves to remember, and 190 of them are small. The way to honor them is to hold fast to the Christ who loved them, and to refuse every voice that points another way.

Her sister Chisom said the attack came around 7 p.m. on the Kajiji-Shagari road in Shagari County, as a team of five was returning from field work. They had been working in Kajiji and, earlier, in Tambuwal County. Nwankwo was hit in the chest. Her body was brought home about four hours later, near 11 p.m.

Relatives said she worked with the Red Cross and with a development partner that supports the Sokoto State Ministry of Health. Her sister Victoria said she served in hard-to-reach villages, caring for mothers, children and the sick, and that she "chose to go where others refused to go." Chisom said the work was meant to help people hurt by a string of terrorist attacks in the state.

Who fired the shots is disputed. Suleiman Ayuba, a resident of the area, blamed "Muslim jihadists." The Sokoto State Red Cross Society called it a "bandit attack." Police said only that they were aware of the incident and that investigations were ongoing. Reports also mention a police inspector killed in the same violence, though that has not been confirmed. No arrests have been announced.

The killing comes in a year when Nigeria sits seventh on a list of the fifty hardest countries in which to follow Christ. Of the 4,849 Christians killed worldwide for their faith in the year ending Sept. 30, 2025, a count kept by a persecution watchdog, 3,490 were Nigerians. That is 72 percent, up from 3,100 the year before. In the northwest, an armed group called Lakurawa, tied to an al-Qaeda affiliate that began in Mali, has taken hold.

A woman who went where others would not

Whatever the final word from the investigators, one fact needs no inquiry. This young woman was not driving that road for money or glory. She was going toward the frightened, the sick and the displaced when other people were going the other way.

Think how rare that is. Most of us pick our service by how safe it is. We help where the road is paved and the lights are on. Lydia Nwankwo took the dark road at the end of a long day, with mothers and children waiting at the other end of it. Her sister said she chose to go where others refused. That is not a slogan. That is a life that looked like Jesus.

He did not stay in heaven and send advice. He came down into our sickness and our danger. He walked into the places respectable people avoided, and He touched the ones nobody would touch. And at the last He went to a cross, not because He was caught, but because He chose it.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

Now, I do not know what was in that gunman's heart, and I will not pretend to. The authorities have not said. But I know this: the world has always had two kinds of people on a dark road. There are those who take life, and those who give theirs away. Only one of those two is of God.

My friend, there are Christian families in Nigeria tonight who are burying a daughter, a pastor, a farmer. They are asking whether anyone sees. The Lord sees. He said that what is done for the least of His people is done for Him.

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 25:40)

Nothing she did on those back roads was wasted. No bandage, no cup of water, no hour spent beside a sick child was lost. It was done unto Him, and He keeps the books.

Two things follow for anyone reading this in safety. First, do not look away from the suffering of believers in Nigeria. Governments owe their people protection, and Americans can and should ask their leaders to press Abuja to provide it. Second, ask yourself plainly what you are doing with your own freedom. Are you going where others refuse to go? The gospel is not only a comfort for the dying. It is a summons for the living, to love with your hands and to count the cost, because the One who calls you has already paid His.

The attackers struck Tse-Biliji and Tse-Nyaku and nearby settlements in the Mbatian and Mbazum areas. Local sources said about 30 heavily armed men arrived on more than a dozen motorcycles and opened fire on homes and on people who ran for the bush. Six bodies had been recovered when the first accounts came out. A resident of Biliji said nine people were killed, though not every body had been found.

Later local accounts also put the number of dead at nine and warned that it could climb as searchers go through farmland and brush. Several injured villagers were taken for treatment. Others were still unaccounted for days later. Houses were burned in the raid, and families have left for safer ground.

Some Nigerian Christian outlets identify the dead as Christians and the attackers as Fulani militants. Officials have not confirmed the figures or the identity of the gunmen. The local government chairman and the state police spokesperson had not confirmed the numbers when the accounts were filed. The attackers have not been caught. Benue lies in Nigeria's Middle Belt, where farming communities, most of them Christian, have buried their dead after raid after raid for years. This attack came only two days after three people were killed at Omulonye, also in Benue, according to local accounts.

It is harvest season. The people of Tse-Biliji were working land their families have worked for generations. Now some of them are sleeping in other people's yards.

What a body count cannot hold

Numbers are how the world keeps score of a tragedy. Six, or nine, or twelve. The number moves from one account to the next, and people argue over it. My friend, the Lord did not need a recount. He knew every one of them by name before the first shot was fired.

There is a man in Ukum tonight who walked into the bush to look for his brother, and he has not found him. There is a mother who will not know, for some days yet, whether to mourn or to hope. Statistics do not touch that. Only God can.

The Savior told His followers plainly that this world would not love them. He did not promise them safe roads or quiet harvests. He promised something harder and better.

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)

Notice the word is "theirs," not "will be theirs someday." The kingdom belongs to the persecuted now. A man can lose his barn, his field, and his house, and still hold a deed that no gunman can burn. That is not a comfort the world understands. It is the comfort of the cross, where Christ Himself was cut down by men who thought the matter finished. Three days later, it was not finished.

The Scripture also tells us where the Lord stands toward the grieving.

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)

Nigh means near. He is not off in some far country while the villagers of Benue bury their own. He is standing in the dust with them.

The duty that falls to the rest of us

A believer in a comfortable country has a plain duty here, and it is not to feel bad for a day and move on. Pay attention, because those who do the killing count on being ignored. Speak up for the families, and press the officials God has set over the nations, ours included, to defend the lives of the innocent. Government holds the sword for exactly this purpose, to protect the harmless and to punish the one who kills them. It is right to ask that the sword be used for that.

Give to the relief of displaced families through honest hands. Remember that a brother in Benue is as much a member of the body of Christ as the man in the next pew.

And remember the other side of the matter. The man with the rifle is a sinner too, and Christ died for sinners of every tribe. The gospel does not excuse his crime, and it does not write him off. It calls him to repent, and it will call him for as long as he draws breath. Justice and mercy both belong to God, and He will not mix them up.

Those who died in Ukum on Oct. 9 are not forgotten in heaven. The hands that closed their eyes on earth were not the last hands to hold them. If they belonged to Christ, they are home now, and home is a place no raider can ever find.

The Rev. Manasseh Mbafe, secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Hong, confirmed the church's destruction and said eight Christian communities have been driven out completely. Another count puts the Oct. 8 raids at three mostly Christian villages, with at least one person killed and church buildings, homes and community facilities burned. The two figures have not been reconciled, and the Nigerian government and military have not confirmed either one.

Residents said shops and pharmacies were looted. Several villagers are still missing, and no one outside the region can yet say whether they were killed or taken captive. The number of abducted students is also unknown.

The violence has not stopped. Local officials in Hong said a night raid on Oct. 18 destroyed about half of the Christian community of Graha, and neighboring villages are bracing for more. In a separate case this month, villagers said an evangelist named David Barnabas was locked inside his own house and burned alive. Farther south, gunmen kidnapped a parish priest in Benue State on Oct. 13, and families near Kaduna lost five members to kidnappers on Oct. 6, a six-month-old baby among them.

Nigeria's military said it repelled one assault in Adamawa this month and killed six attackers. Church leaders say that is small comfort to a farmer who has lost his field, his house, and his place of worship in a single night.

What a burned church cannot burn

Think about what a church building is in a village like Hong. It is where the babies are dedicated and the dead are mourned. It is the only room in the community where every person, rich or poor, stands on the same floor. When raiders set it on fire, they are not just destroying timber and tin. They want to tell a people that they have no place here and no future.

But they have made a mistake as old as Pharaoh. The church was never the building. The Lord said so plainly, and He said it to people who knew what it was to be hunted.

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)

Notice the tense. He did not say theirs will be. He said theirs is. The family sleeping in a field tonight, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, holds a kingdom that no gunman can take, burn, or loot. That is not a pretty phrase. It is the hard promise of the Savior who was Himself driven from town to town and hung on a Roman cross.

My friend, we in America have a duty here, and it is not complicated. The Bible says to remember.

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yet in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)

As being yet in the body. Those villagers are not statistics. They are brothers and sisters, and they feel the heat of the fire. A man who reads of such things over his morning coffee and feels nothing has forgotten that he belongs to the same body.

Honest remembering has some practical shape. A free nation ought to speak plainly when believers are slaughtered for their faith, and it ought to use its influence, through those whom God has set in authority, to press for protection of the innocent. The Christian, for his part, can give to relief work he trusts, speak the names of the suffering in his own home, and refuse to let the news cycle move him on.

Understand, too, what the persecutors cannot do. They can take a roof. They cannot take the Lord's presence from a man who loves Him. History shows that the church has grown in the very soil where it was burned. The blood of the faithful has never ended the gospel. It has only carried it farther.

If you are a believer, hear the comfort in this: your Savior knows the smell of smoke and the sound of a mob. If you are not yet a believer, look at those who keep singing in the ashes and ask what they have that you do not. They have a Lord who died for sinners, rose on the third day, and offers eternal life to anyone who will turn from sin and trust Him. That offer stands for the gunman and the villager alike, and it stands today.

Four sheriffs from eastern Washington brought the lawsuit. The law set new standards for the office: a sheriff must be at least 25 years old, must have at least five years of law enforcement experience, and could not hold a prior felony or gross misdemeanor conviction. A sheriff who failed those standards, or whose state certification was revoked, could be removed.

Judge Schaller had already halted much of the law on April 29, the day before it was set to take effect. Her permanent ruling follows that temporary order. In her reasoning, the remedy for a disappointing elected official is the next election, not removal by the state.

The state has said it will appeal to defend the law. A formal written order was expected later this month, so the fight is not over. The case now heads toward a higher court.

Who holds the badge, and who holds the people

Now, a sheriff's badge is a small thing to look at. But behind it sits a very old question: who gets to say who rules over free people? In America, the answer has been the people themselves, at the ballot box. The judge has now said that answer cannot be quietly set aside by a board in the capital.

I will leave the lawyers to argue the fine points of the statute. What I want you to see is the principle underneath, and the Bible has spoken to it for three thousand years.

"When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn." (Proverbs 29:2)

Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say the people rejoice when government grows larger, or when power moves farther from their homes. It says they rejoice when righteous men hold authority. Character is the thing. A sheriff stands nearest to the widow whose door is kicked in and the farmer whose fence is cut. When such a man fears God, the whole county breathes easier.

Scripture also teaches us to honor the office. The apostle wrote:

"Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." (Romans 13:1)

That cuts two ways, my friend. Every officer, from sheriff to governor, holds his place under a Higher Authority. None of them made himself. And no earthly power may stand where only God stands, as lord of the conscience. A man who answers first to his Maker will hold an office honestly. A state that forgets there is a Maker will start to believe it can remove anyone who disagrees with it.

That is why the gospel matters even to a story about a courtroom in Thurston County. Laws can set the age of a sheriff and the length of his service. They cannot make him just. No board can write righteousness into a man. Only the new birth does that, when a sinner turns from himself and trusts the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for his sins and rose again.

Pray for your sheriff, whatever you think of his politics. Pray for the judge, and for the officials who will appeal. Then look to your own house. Are you answerable to God there? Rulers rise and fall, laws pass and are struck down, but the Word of the Lord stands. Seek Him while He may be found, and let your neighbors see a righteous man in authority over his own home.

In Missouri, Amendment 3 would repeal the abortion-rights amendment voters approved in 2024 and restore a ban on abortion, with exceptions for medical emergencies and for cases of rape and incest. The same measure would write a ban on gender transition procedures for minors into the state constitution. It also provides for parental consent when a minor seeks an abortion.

In Nevada, Question 6 would put a right to abortion into the state constitution, running from the start of pregnancy to fetal viability, and later when a provider judges that the mother's life or health requires it. Nevada voters have already said yes once. In 2024 the measure passed with 905,170 votes in favor, about 64 percent, to 501,232 against. Because Nevada requires two votes, this is the final one. If it passes, it becomes part of the constitution on Nov. 24. State law already allows abortion up to 24 weeks.

Idaho voters will consider a measure that would roll back the state's near-total abortion ban, and Virginia has its own measure to establish abortion rights. Pro-life leaders have called the Idaho, Nevada and Virginia proposals "barbaric abortion policy," and an Idaho pro-life organizer says he is preparing a campaign against his state's measure. Abortion-rights coalitions in Missouri have launched a campaign called "Stop the Ban" against Amendment 3.

What the ballot is really asking

Count the votes if you like, my friend. Tally the percentages and study the polls. But strip away the legal language and every one of these ballots asks one old question: whose is the life in the womb?

Nobody can say the child is not alive. The heart is beating within weeks. The child has a father's eyes or a mother's chin already written in the cells. The argument has never really been about whether there is a life. It has been about whether that life is worth protecting when it is inconvenient.

Scripture does not leave us guessing about how Heaven sees it.

"For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13)

Look at the verbs. God possessed. God covered. The child in the womb is not a clump of tissue waiting for a legal status. He is a person being knitted together by the hand of the Almighty, and the Lord keeps His own records of the work. The commandment given at Sinai was short enough for a child to memorize: "Thou shalt not kill." (Exodus 20:13)

Now, I know the hard cases. I will not pretend that a frightened girl, or a woman carrying a terrible burden, has an easy road. The church that stands only to point a finger has forgotten its Master. Meet that woman with a meal, a bed, a ride to the doctor, and a friend who will stay. A pro-life people must be a people who show up after the baby is born, too.

But compassion for the mother never requires us to call the child's death a right. Constitutions can be amended by a majority. The law of God cannot. A state may write abortion into its founding charter, as Nevada may do for good, and the child remains exactly what the Creator made him. A vote does not change what is in the womb. It only changes what a society is willing to look away from.

That is what makes these sixteen days weighty. Christians in these four states have a duty as citizens to vote with a conscience bound by the Word of God, to speak plainly to neighbors, and to do it without venom. The person on the other side of the yard sign is not your enemy. He is a soul for whom Christ died, and so is the child whose life hangs on the count.

The ballot will be counted on Nov. 3. Every life is counted by God long before that, and not one of them is a mistake.

The sermon was given in July 2024 outside Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, County Londonderry. The hospital sits inside one of the zones where the law bars what it calls influencing a person's decision about abortion services. Both sides in the case, and the judge, accepted that Mr. Johnston never mentioned abortion. He spoke of God's love and quoted a single verse of Scripture.

He was also convicted of failing to comply with a police direction to leave the zone. A district judge said Mr. Johnston had admitted his aim was to test the law. In the judge's words, he "tested the law, to the point where he broke the law."

His lawyers now argue that the conviction interferes far too heavily with his rights to free speech, freedom of religion and peaceful assembly under the European Convention on Human Rights. The appeal has been filed, and the case will go before a higher court.

Plain facts, then. An old man stood in a public place and spoke about God's love. He said nothing about any patient and nothing about any procedure. A court fined him anyway.

What the law cannot reach

Lawmakers who draw these zones say they want to protect vulnerable women from harassment. That is a fair concern, and no decent person wants a frightened woman shouted at on her way through a door. Harassment is already a crime, and it can be punished as one. But a law that fines a man for quoting the Bible within earshot of a hospital has gone well past harassment. It has decided that the gospel itself is a danger to be fenced off.

Look at what that means. The unborn child is a human life, knit together by God in the womb, and the zones exist precisely because the life inside a building is under threat. Yet the one message that speaks of God's love for the world is the message the law treats as the offense. A nation that cannot tolerate a sermon outside its hospital has a trouble no statute will fix.

My friend, this is not a new quarrel. Rulers have always been uneasy with a man who says the Lord Jesus Christ is above every court and every committee. The apostles were ordered to stop speaking in that name, and they answered that they ought to obey God rather than men. Christians honor those in authority, and they pay the fine and submit to the process. But they do not stop saying what is true. Mr. Johnston has chosen the lawful road of appeal, and that is the right road.

The verse itself

Set aside the courtroom for a moment and look at the words that landed a pastor in the dock. They are the best known in all the Bible, and they are for the mother in the hospital waiting room, the doctor in the corridor and the judge on the bench alike.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

Notice the word "whosoever." It shuts no one out. It does not ask who you are, what you have done or what you have chosen. It says God loved a lost world enough to give His Son, and that anyone who believes in Him will not perish. There is forgiveness for the woman who grieves a choice she made, and there is pardon for the man who pushed her toward it. There is even pardon for the sin of calling that verse a crime.

That is why the message cannot be silenced by a boundary painted on the pavement. It was spoken before any parliament sat, and it will be spoken after the last one has fallen. Law may restrain a preacher's feet for a season. It cannot restrain the Word, because, as Isaiah wrote, it shall not return void.

The court will decide whether a man may speak this verse near a hospital door. Every one of us must decide what to do with it. Believe it, and you have everlasting life.

The curfew covers Barkin Ladi, Bokkos and Mangu local government areas. It runs from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. "until further notice." Security forces were ordered to enforce it, and the state banned motorcycles throughout the affected areas. Residents were told to arrange their farming, trading and travel around the restricted hours.

The order followed the killing of Pastor Samuel Nandi, a native of Borno State. Gunmen shot him dead on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 20, as he traveled to a church service in Maraban Kantoma, Barkin Ladi. His son was shot as well and is being treated. A traditional ruler in nearby Dorowa Babuje gave those details.

A documenter with the International Committee on Nigeria, David Nanpet, counted 27 Christians killed between Sept. 13 and Sept. 20 across Barkin Ladi, Bokkos, Mangu, Riyom and Jos South. Nine died at Dungus Junction in Jos South when gunmen attacked passengers stepping out of a commercial vehicle. Five were killed in Gana-Ropp on Sept. 19. Two died in Ta-Hoss village in Riyom, and two more in Vodni village in Mangu. At a farmers' market in Mangu, three people were killed and seven wounded, one of them a seven-month-old baby.

Maj. Gen. Maxwell Dangana, commander of Operation Endurance Peace, toured affected communities on Sunday and promised stronger security. Nanpet said gunfire kept sounding around Maraban Kantoma, Rapwomol and Shurum after the pastor was killed. He also said residents of Darwat saw a drone circling their community at night, with an armored vehicle parked nearby.

What a curfew cannot reach

A curfew can keep a man off a road after dark. It cannot give a widow her husband back, or a father his boy. It cannot settle the question that sits in every Plateau farmhouse tonight: will the people who did this ever answer for it?

That question belongs to government, and government has a plain duty. The apostle Paul wrote that the ruler "beareth not the sword in vain." Authority is given by God to protect the innocent and punish the wicked. When a governor sets a curfew and soldiers walk the roads, he is doing a part of that work, and he deserves our honor for the office he holds. But the sword must actually fall on the guilty, or the people stop believing it is there. Nigerian believers have buried their dead for years now, and too few of those killings have ended in a courtroom.

Think of Pastor Nandi. He was not on a battlefield. He was on a road to church, with his son beside him, going to open the Word and sing. Nobody can say that was a wasted Sunday. A man who dies on the way to worship has simply arrived early.

My friend, you may sit far from Plateau State, in a warm house with the doors unlocked. Do not turn the page. These are our brothers and sisters in the household of faith, and when one member suffers, the Bible says all the members suffer with it. Pray for them. Give where you can. Speak up when your own leaders can be moved to press for justice abroad.

Above all, remember where the believer's refuge is. It was never in a curfew order or a checkpoint, however needed those are. The psalmist knew trouble, and he wrote this:

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." (Psalm 46:1)

A very present help. Not a distant one. The God who stood with Stephen while stones flew stands with the farmer in Mangu and the mother in Riyom. He numbers every one of them. Not one of the 27 is lost to Him, and Jesus promised that those who die trusting Him will live again.

There is a word here for the man who has not yet made his peace with God, too. Death came to Plateau State this week without an appointment, and it comes to every house. The Lord Jesus said, "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul." The soul is what matters. Settle that question with Christ while you still have breath, and no gunman, no illness and no grave can take from you what He has secured.

The curfew will be lifted one day. The justice of God will not be.

Local sources and residents describe the attackers as Fulani militiamen. Others in the same communities call them bandits. Either way, the victims were families of the church, taken from their homes by men with guns.

The raid is one of a string of attacks on Christian communities in Kaduna State this month. On October 1, assailants killed a man at about one o'clock in the morning in the Babban Saura area of Chikun County, near Kaduna city, and took others away. The same day, attackers hit Ungwan Waziri village near Karji, killing one Christian and kidnapping several more.

On October 6, men broke into homes at Rahusa Estate in Chikun and seized five Christians and a six-month-old baby. Their captors demanded 350 million naira, about $263,000. In late September, raiders were said to have taken 22 people from three Christian villages in Kajuru, among them two infants of four months.

The state government says its security strategy is working. Governor Uba Sani's "Kaduna Peace Model" has been credited with freeing more than 500 captives and reopening markets, schools and farmland. Residents of the stricken villages say the abductions go on regardless. The casualty and ransom figures come from residents and local sources, not from police counts.

A baby, a pastor, and a price

Set the numbers aside a moment, my friend, and think of a house. A mother is asleep. Before dawn the door is kicked in. A pastor who has buried the dead and prayed over the sick is marched out into the dark. A six-month-old is carried off like a sack of grain, and a price is set on her head. That is not a statistic. That is a family, and every one of them was made in the image of God.

When a child can be traded for 350 million naira, something is deeply wrong, and no peace model can fix it until the guns are stopped and the guilty are brought to justice. Nigeria's leaders hold their office from God, and they are charged to protect the innocent. The sword is given them for that purpose. Honest men can see when the shepherd is not reaching the sheep, and honest men can say so, and they can pray that those in authority will act.

But the Christian is not left to despair. The people in those villages are not forgotten, and their Lord knows the name of every one taken. He did not stand far off from suffering. He was arrested by armed men Himself, bound, and led away in the night.

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)

Nigh. Not far off, not busy elsewhere. He is near to the mother who has not slept since the raid and near to the believer sitting in a bush camp waiting to learn whether the ransom will come. Those captives may be hungry, and they may be afraid, but they are not alone.

That nearness reaches us in comfortable places too. Scripture gives a plain command:

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)

As being yourselves also in the body. The church in Kaduna is not a distant cousin. It is the same body, and when one member is carried off in the night, every other member ought to feel the wound. Here in America we have our pews, our freedom and our quiet Sundays, and it is easy to forget that those things are a gift and not a guarantee.

So remember them. Speak of them. Give to those who carry relief into such places. Ask that governments at home and abroad count the safety of Christian villagers as a matter worth their attention. The world may measure these people in naira. Heaven measures them in the blood of Christ, and by that measure each one is beyond price.

The case rests on allegedly blasphemous material posted on a website registered in Qaiser's name. A trial court sentenced both brothers to death in 2018. The Lahore High Court's Rawalpindi Bench upheld both convictions in 2022. Qaiser was arrested in 2014 after he returned to Lahore. Amoon, now 46, was arrested the following year. That means one brother has spent roughly twelve years in custody and the other about eleven.

In its decision, the Supreme Court found that the digital and documentary evidence against Qaiser was sufficient to sustain his conviction. For Amoon, it found the prosecution had failed to establish his personal involvement. The circumstantial evidence against him, the justices ruled, was not enough. He is cleared.

Lawyers and rights groups reacted quickly. An American legal advocacy group called the ruling deeply troubling for religious freedom and urged international action. A British group that works for Pakistan's minorities said it welcomed Amoon's acquittal but called the decision on his brother deeply distressing. Pakistan's Human Rights Commission has warned for years that minorities there face systematic persecution. Pakistan ranks eighth on the latest list of the world's worst places to follow Christ.

Qaiser Ayub still has options in law, and his family and lawyers are expected to weigh them. For now, a man who has sat in a cell for over a decade has been told the sentence stands.

A Man's Life Weighed Against a Webpage

Think of what this means. A man's life is weighed against lines on a screen. The brother walks free, and the brother stays under sentence. Imagine the family in that courtroom, glad for one and grieving for the other, all in the same hour.

The reach of a law like this is plain. When a government sets a penalty of death on words, it claims a power that belongs to God alone. It is the Lord who judges the heart. No statute and no court can search a man's soul, and no human tribunal should take a life over what a person is said to believe or say about religion.

Scripture does not leave us guessing about our duty toward a man in this plight. The wise king of Israel wrote it down plainly:

"Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction." (Proverbs 31:8)

Many Christians in America will never see a Pakistani prison. That is no excuse for silence. The writer to the Hebrews says to "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3) Those words were meant for the comfortable as much as the chained. We are one body, and when one member is bound, all of it is wounded.

Speaking up is not hatred toward the Pakistani people. Many of them have no say in these laws either. It is plain witness that every life is made in the image of God and that no one should die for conscience. Our own leaders have the standing to press this matter with Islamabad, and citizens ought to ask them to do it.

Behind the headline stands the old gospel promise. Men may condemn, but they do not have the last word. The One who was Himself condemned by a court, wrongly and unto death, rose again on the third day. My friend, whatever any earthly judge decides, a believer in Christ belongs to a Savior who has already broken death's hold. That is why a man can stand in a cell for twelve years and still hold fast.

Remember Qaiser Ayub by name. Remember his brother, newly free, and the children and wife who wait. Then ask yourself honestly what you would want others to do if the bars were around you.

Military officials said President Trump approved the execution order on Oct. 2. A Pentagon spokesman said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended death by firing squad and that the President signed off. If the sentence is carried out, it will be the first execution by the U.S. military since 1961.

Hasan opened fire on Nov. 5, 2009, in a crowded soldier readiness center, killing 13 and wounding more than 30. A military jury convicted him in August 2013 and sentenced him to death. The case then sat for more than a decade.

A dispute arose this month over whether the public would see it. The Pentagon first said the execution would be livestreamed, which seemed to match Hegseth's earlier description of it as "public." On Oct. 15, President Trump said it "will not be streamed," reversing that plan. Hasan may still turn to the civilian federal courts, and appeals could delay the date. It is not yet clear whether he will pursue them.

What a nation owes the dead, and what God offers the guilty

Behind the schedules and the legal wrangling stand thirteen empty places at thirteen tables. Soldiers died, and one was an unborn child. Families have waited seventeen years for a day on a calendar. Whatever one thinks of the method or the cameras, no one should wave away their grief or call their wait a small thing.

Scripture is plain that civil government is not a decoration. It is an office God has placed in the world to restrain evil and protect the innocent.

"Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." (Romans 13:1)

The same chapter says the ruler "beareth not the sword in vain." A land that takes the murder of its soldiers lightly has forgotten what the sword is for. Those who hold that authority, from the President to the officer who carries out a lawful sentence, answer to God for how they use it. Honor is owed to the office, and a heavy duty comes with it.

But the courthouse is not the last court. A man sentenced on earth stands, like every one of us, before a Judge who cannot be rushed, bribed, or fooled. Nobody on that post will be there to hear the verdict that matters most.

Here the gospel says something the world finds hard to believe. The grace of God is not graded on a curve. The thief on the cross had nothing to offer but a dying breath and a plain request, and Jesus answered him that very day. You may feel that some crimes put a man beyond mercy. The Word of God does not say so.

"This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." (1 Timothy 1:15)

Paul wrote those words about himself. He had stood by while Christians were killed. He called himself the chief of sinners, and he did not say it to be polite. He said it because he knew what he had done and what Christ had done for him.

That cuts two ways. It means no killer is too far gone to be forgiven, if he comes to Christ in truth. It also means that you and I, who have never fired a weapon, are not excused by our cleaner record. "All have sinned," the apostle says. Pride is the one sin that keeps a man from the cross, and the respectable have as much of it as the criminal.

Justice and mercy are not enemies in the Bible. They meet at Calvary, where the penalty for sin was paid in full by the One who did not deserve it. A grieving family can ask for justice and ask for nothing less. A guilty man can come to the foot of the cross and find the debt already paid. Both are true, and neither cancels the other.

There are still more than two months on the calendar. Time is a gift, and it is shorter than any of us think. Whether a man's last day is set by a court or is hidden from him altogether, it will come. The question is whether he will meet it with his sins carried by Christ or still on his own back.

The case began when Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, sued the district last November. The suit followed a vote by the school board against displaying the posters. Judge Jones set a non-jury trial for next June to settle the case in full. Until then, the order stands.

The district says it will obey. School Board President Anthony Brown said after the hearing that the district will comply. He said administrators must now decide where the posters go, based on how many have been donated to the district. Brown has said before that he disagrees with the law.

Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 10 in late June 2025. Federal litigation over the law has gone back and forth since. A federal judge blocked some other Texas districts from posting the displays in August. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled that Texas may enforce the law, finding that it does not establish an official state religion. Other lawsuits are still pending, and the larger fight over the posters is not finished.

What hangs on a classroom wall

Some will treat this as a matter of paperwork and poster counts. It is more than that. A great many Americans know in their bones that a nation which forgets the law of God will soon forget the worth of a man. The Ten Commandments were not written to decorate a wall. They were spoken from a mountain, and they have shaped the conscience of this country from its first courthouse to its last schoolhouse.

It is no small thing that a Texas child may now look up from a desk and read, in plain words, that murder is wrong, that theft is wrong, that a man ought to honor his father and mother. Rules that old and that plain need no committee to improve them. Many have fought to keep that board bare. I would rather see it lettered with the commandments of the Lord.

Now I will say something the courthouse cannot say. A poster has no power to change a heart. A child can read every line on the wall and go home unchanged. The law was never given to make us righteous. It was given to show us we are not. That is why it must hang in the open, and why the gospel must follow it.

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." (Exodus 20:3)

Notice where the Lord begins. He does not begin with manners or with civic order. He begins with who sits on the throne. Every other commandment flows from that one. When a nation puts something else in God's place, whether money, pleasure, power, or self, the rest of the law starts to crumble. We see the cracks in the streets, in the broken homes, and in the children who have never once been told that they answer to someone higher than themselves.

You and I have broken that first commandment more times than we can count. The law holds up its mirror, and the picture is not pretty. That is the very mercy in it. A man must first see his sickness before he runs to the physician. The commandments say, "You cannot save yourself." Then Christ stands at the end of that road and says, "I have done it for you." He kept the law we broke. He bore the penalty we owed. He rose on the third day, and He offers pardon to any sinner who will come.

So let the Galveston classrooms be lettered with the law, and let no one be ashamed of it. But let every teacher, parent, and pastor remember the purpose. The law is a lamp, and the lamp is meant to lead somewhere.

"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." (Psalm 119:105)

Judges will argue this case again next June, and appeals may follow. Those matters belong to the courts, and the office of a judge deserves respect whichever way a ruling falls. The matter before your own soul is simpler and more urgent. God has spoken. His word is written plain. The only question left is whether you will hear it and come to the Savior it points to.

The attack began around 6 p.m. at the church in Jalalkhali village. The parish priest, Father Jithin Muthukattil, said the attackers arrived in vehicles carrying bricks and bamboo sticks, pelted stones, tore down makeshift gates and smashed the glass covers protecting statues, including a statue of Jesus. Men and women who tried to resist were beaten. Police arrived at about 7 p.m. and brought the scene under control.

The church was hosting a Santali Bible convention at its Divine Love Retreat Centre, a gathering announced in advance and scheduled to close on October 11. Church officials said the violence broke out after accusations of forced conversion were broadcast over loudspeakers. Church representatives denied the charge, and the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India called the claims false and meant to stir up hostility. A regional secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a Hindu nationalist group, separately alleged that conversions were taking place in several parts of the state. Church officials said they believe the mob was linked to that group.

Bishop Nirmol Vincent Gomes called it the worst violence his diocese has experienced. A police official said a complaint had been received and an investigation was under way. A diocesan official said no one had been arrested as of the latest coverage, on October 14.

What a mob cannot take from a church

Think about who was in that compound. Farm families, many of them from the Santali people, had come to sit under the Word of God for a few days. They brought no bricks and no bamboo. They brought Bibles and hymn books. And a crowd came for them in the dusk.

The charge shouted over the loudspeakers was a familiar one, and it is the oldest trick there is. Call a gathering of worshippers a crime, and the mob feels righteous. The Lord's own people have been treated that way since Stephen. The Pharisees did not hold stones in their hands for sport. They believed they were defending something. That is what makes a mob so dangerous: it is sure of itself.

A man can break a statue in a minute. He cannot break what the gospel puts in a believing heart. The faith those worshippers carried in was not in the plaster. It was in a living Savior who was himself beaten by a crowd that had been told a lie about him.

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)

Notice what our Lord says. He does not say, blessed are those who have an easy time. He says the kingdom belongs to those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. The injured men and women in Nadia are not forgotten by heaven. They are named in it.

And here is a hard word for the rest of us. Freedom to worship is not a small thing, and it is not safe by nature. Where it is protected by law and enforced by honest officers, it is a gift. Where the mob finds the police arriving an hour late and no arrests made, it is a gift withdrawn. Those who hold authority are charged with protecting the peaceable, and they will answer for how they did it. A nation that lets worshippers be beaten without consequence invites the next crowd.

Yet the believer does not answer a brick with a brick. The apostle writes to the Romans:

"Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not." (Romans 12:14)

That is not weakness, my friend. It takes more strength to forgive the man who struck you than to strike him back. The men who came with bamboo sticks are sinners for whom Christ died, just as you are and I am. The gospel that they tried to silence on Friday evening is the very gospel that can turn a persecutor into a preacher. It happened to Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road.

So Christians here at home ought to remember our brothers and sisters in Bengal. Remember the injured, and remember the pastor and the priest who must now go back to a damaged church and keep shepherding. Speak up where you can, and give where you are able. Above all, hold fast to the One who said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. Not bricks, not bamboo, not loudspeakers full of lies.

The church plans a grotto about 16 feet by 39 feet. It would hold a statue of the Virgin Mary, a small plaza, a walking path and a retaining wall. The city's zoning board granted a variance so the project could go forward. Neighbors Joel and Elizabeth Frederic sued. They raised concerns about traffic and parking if the site became a destination for pilgrims.

The Kentucky Supreme Court sided with the neighbors. It held that the zoning board exceeded its authority when it granted the variance, and the shrine plan stopped there. The church then asked the nation's highest court to step in under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law that protects houses of worship from burdensome local land rules.

The church raised two questions. The justices took only one: whether barring a religious institution from building a religious structure on its own land is a "substantial burden" on religious exercise. Kentucky's attorney general and 19 other Republican attorneys general had urged the Court to hear the case.

What a small stone grotto asks of the rest of us

Notice the size of this fight. It is not a cathedral or a stadium. It is a place for people to stand quietly and pray, on property the congregation already owns. The question before the nation's highest court is whether a government may say no to that.

Our country was settled by people who crossed an ocean so they could worship without a magistrate telling them how, or where. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Zoning boards and courts are not Congress, but the principle reaches them too. When a church is told it cannot build a prayer garden on its own ground, a free people ought to ask what has been lost. The neighbors' worries about parking deserve a fair hearing. But a parking concern is not a reason to treat worship as a nuisance to be managed.

Yet the deeper matter here is not a statute. Men and women build shrines, steeples and altars because the human heart cannot rest without God. Every generation has tried to silence that longing, by law or by ridicule, and none has managed it. The Lord Jesus told His disciples where worship finally lives.

"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." (John 4:24)

Mark that well, my friend. A stone grotto cannot save a soul, and neither can a grand church house. Truth does not depend on a building permit. The Samaritan woman argued with Jesus over which mountain was the right place to worship. He took the question away from the map and put it in the heart. Worship that pleases God is worship in truth, and truth has a name: Jesus Christ, crucified for sinners and risen from the grave.

That is why believers can defend the right to build and still hold buildings loosely. We should speak up when the law is used to push faith out of public life, and we should do it with courtesy toward those who disagree. Honor the judges. Honor the neighbors. Make the case plainly and let the courts decide. The Scripture also reminds us what the church is.

"Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." (1 Peter 2:5)

A people made into living stones cannot be zoned out of existence. Governments may close a chapel, but they cannot close a prayer. In many lands today, Christians gather in homes and fields because no permit will ever come. Here, the courts still hear a congregation when it knocks. That is a gift, and it should not be taken for granted.

So watch this case. If you hold a pew in some small church, know that what is decided in Washington will reach your own town. And if you hold no pew at all, hear this: the God who is worshiped in spirit and in truth is not far from any one of you. He asks for no variance and no permit. He asks for a repentant heart, and He answers it with a Savior.

Police said the visitors entered the country on tourist visas. Nepali rules bar foreigners on tourist visas from taking part in religious education or promoting a religion. The arrests followed a complaint alleging that the group was involved in illegal religious teaching and training.

The Morang police chief, Kabit Katwal, said the group violated the terms of the visa. The 24 have since been held by the Department of Immigration in Kathmandu, and deportation proceedings are under consideration. The Nepali government has not yet laid out the full charges in public.

The college principal, Sarad KC, disputes the police account. He said the visitors were meeting with believers inside a local Bible college. He said they were not preaching in public or trying to win converts. Local Christian leaders and rights advocates have called the raid unwarranted. South Korea's Foreign Ministry said it is in close contact with Nepali authorities through its embassy and is providing consular help. Accounts differ on some details, including how long the group had planned to stay.

Those are the facts so far. Twenty-four people are in custody. No court has ruled, and the visa question is for the authorities to settle. But a deeper question sits under the visa paperwork, and it reaches well beyond Nepal.

What a closed door cannot lock out

A government can control a border. It can stamp a passport, write a rule and send a man home. Nepal has every right to enforce its immigration law, and a Christian is called to respect the authorities over him. But a government cannot control the one thing it was never given charge of, and that is what a man believes in his heart about God.

Think of the people in that room in Morang. They crossed a great distance to sit under the Word of God. Whatever the court decides about their visas, they came for a reason older than any visa. Men and women have always crossed oceans and mountains to hear the good news, and others have always crossed them to tell it.

The Lord Jesus told His disciples plainly what they would meet.

"Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." (2 Timothy 3:12)

Notice the word all. It does not say some, and it does not say only in faraway lands. It says all who will live godly in Christ. The believer in Nepal who holds a Bible class in a college building knows that. So does the believer in an American city who is told to take his faith out of public life. The pressure differs in degree, and the cost differs. The gospel is the same.

Here in America we have a First Amendment, and we should thank God for it. We should also guard it, because liberty that is not defended gets traded away a little at a time. The right to worship, to teach and to believe was bought dearly. Free people must not grow careless with it.

But the believer's hope was never in a charter. The Lord said to His own, "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul." That is the answer to every raid and every cell door. A man may lose his seat in a classroom, and he may lose his passport. If he belongs to Christ, he has not lost his Savior.

My friend, if you are a Christian at ease, remember those 24 tonight. Remember the brother in Nepal, the sister in Nigeria and the pastor behind a wall in China. They are not strangers. They are family. And if you do not yet know Christ, look at what these people were willing to risk to learn about Him. That kind of devotion is not foolishness. It comes from knowing the One who died for sinners and rose again on the third day.

Governments rise and fall. Borders shift. Visa rules are rewritten every few years. The Word of God stands, and the door Christ opens, no man can shut.

A Vatican medical bulletin said the operation lasted about 90 minutes and went well, with no complications. The pope woke normally and, after a short period of observation, was returned to his room on the hospital's 10th floor.

Oncologists had said before the surgery that the outlook would be excellent if the growth proved cancerous, because it was removed at an early stage. The Vatican has canceled all of the pope's public events through Oct. 20. It has not announced whether any further treatment will follow.

The pope was born Robert Prevost in Chicago and is the first American to hold the office. The news reached Washington and Rome on the same day, and it drew attention far beyond the faithful who follow him.

The word nobody wants to hear

I have never met the man, and I do not need to. I know what it is to sit across a desk from a physician who says a word you did not want. The room goes quiet. The clock on the wall gets loud. A man who was reading a chart a minute ago is suddenly looking at his own hands.

That moment comes to the powerful and to the plain alike. A pope in white and a night-shift worker in a hospital gown hear the same word in the same hush. Cancer does not check a title at the door. It does not care about a bank balance or a ballot or a crowd in a square.

That is not a cruel thing to say. It is an honest one. Scripture says it first and plainest.

"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away." (1 Peter 1:24)

Our age works hard to hide that verse. We build monuments to youth. We tuck the sick behind curtains and the dying behind closed doors. We talk about "wellness" as though a man could purchase his way out of the dust he came from. Then a bulletin comes out of a Rome hospital, and the whole illusion fits on a single page.

Good surgeons and a good God

Let me be plain about something. Thank God for surgeons. Thank God for the skill that finds a growth early and takes it out cleanly. Medicine is a mercy, and a Christian receives it with gratitude. When doctors say the outlook is good, rejoice, and rejoice without apology.

But a good report from the surgeon is not the same as a settled peace in the soul. A man can leave the operating room cancer-free and still not be ready to leave the world. The doctor can promise you years. He cannot promise you tomorrow. Only One holds that.

My friend, every one of us is living on borrowed breath. The healthy man at the construction site and the patient on the tenth floor stand at the same distance from eternity, which is one heartbeat. The only difference is that the patient has been reminded. You and I get the reminder free of charge today.

What stands when everything else shakes

So what holds? Not strength. Not office. Not a clean scan. What holds is a Savior who walked out of a borrowed tomb on the third day and said that death no longer owns the last word.

"Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." (John 11:25)

Notice what He does not say. He does not say, "I will give you a doctrine about the resurrection." He says, "I am" the resurrection. A Person. You do not hold a Person at arm's length and call it religion. You come to Him, empty-handed, and you trust Him with the one thing you cannot keep safe yourself.

That is the gospel at its simplest. Sin put every one of us under a sentence. Christ took the sentence on the cross, paid it in full, and rose to prove the payment was accepted. Nothing you have done is too heavy for that payment. Nothing you have achieved adds a penny to it.

A diagnosis, whether it lands on a pope or a plumber, is a loud knock on the door of the heart. Some men answer by hardening. Others answer by finally asking the question they put off for forty years: if this were my last month, am I ready to meet God?

Ask it now, while you can ask it quietly, in good light, with time to hear the answer. The Lord who stood at the grave of Lazarus is not far from any sickroom, and He has never turned away a sinner who came to Him in earnest.

The assault came two days after a separate attack in Omulonye, a community in the Ugboju District of Otukpo Local Government Area, about 9 p.m. on October 7. Three people died there, among them a four-year-old boy, according to community members. The child's uncle was also killed, and the boy's mother was seriously wounded, residents said. Taken together, the two attacks left twelve dead in less than a week.

Local accounts blame suspected armed herdsmen. Nigerian news outlets have described the attackers in those words, and no arrests had been announced when this was written. Benue sits in the country's Middle Belt, where farming villages have been raided again and again, and where residents say justice rarely follows. In July, young people in the state blocked a federal highway after eighteen people were killed in about a day and a half.

Some details are still disputed. Death counts and the faith of the victims differ from one account to the next, and officials have not yet issued a full tally for Tse-Biliji. What is not in dispute is that a child of four is in the ground this week, and that families in these villages are sleeping in fear.

What a four-year-old tells us

I want you to stop on that little boy. He had done nothing. He owned no land, held no office, argued with no one. He was four years old, and a man with a weapon came to his house in the evening.

Every culture that has ever lived has known that something is deeply wrong when the smallest are struck down. Scripture says the same. The God who made heaven and earth counts each of these lives as precious, from the child in the womb to the old man at the end of his days. A nation that forgets this will let the weak be taken, whether by a gunman in a village or by a law that calls the unborn a thing.

Government has a duty here, and the Bible names it plainly. Rulers do not carry the sword for nothing. Their first task is to protect the innocent and punish those who do evil. Nigerian leaders must answer for the villages left undefended. Our own leaders in Washington, who have spoken up for persecuted believers abroad, do right to keep pressing that cause. Honor is owed to every office, and so is the demand that it do its work.

But a law or a soldier cannot reach the widow sitting on the floor of a burned house tonight. For her, and for the mother whose son is gone, the gospel has something no government can give. Jesus did not tell the grieving to hide their sorrow. He called them blessed in it.

"Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." (Matthew 5:4)

That is not a cheap saying. It was spoken by the One who wept at a grave in Bethany and who then walked out of a tomb of His own. He knows the weight of a small coffin. And He did not merely sympathize from a distance. He gave His life on a cross for sinners, murderers among them, and rose again on the third day, so that death would not have the last word over those who trust Him.

The Psalmist wrote what these families now need to hear: "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)

My friend, you may sit far from Benue State, with a full table and a quiet street. Do not look away. Remember these believers aloud, give to those who care for them, and speak for them to the men who hold authority. And ask yourself the question the news cannot answer for you: if the call came tonight, would you be ready to meet the Lord who comforts the mourning? He is near, and the door is open today.

The sunken ship was a Guinea-Bissau-flagged freighter. The second vessel, flying the Maltese flag, stayed afloat, and all 15 of its crew reached safety. They were seven Ukrainians and eight Azerbaijanis. Some were hurt, but officials said none seriously.

Prime Minister Rumen Radev called the attacks "absolutely unacceptable" after an emergency meeting of Bulgaria's Security Council. He said Sofia does not yet have solid evidence to accuse any specific party. Russia's ambassador, Eleonora Mitrofanova, told Bulgarian officials she had no information from her Defense Ministry about attacks on commercial ships. She did not rule out a provocation by a third party. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemned the strikes.

It is the second such sinking in about a week. Drones sank another vessel inside Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone seven days earlier, and ten sailors were lost, nine Syrians and one Egyptian. Bulgaria has asked its partners for stronger surveillance of its waters and airspace. Rescue crews were still searching the water for the 11 missing men as of Tuesday night.

The cause and the responsible party have not been established. What is plain is the toll. Twenty-one men are lost or missing in a single week, and not one of them was a soldier. They were deckhands and engineers carrying cargo for wages, men with wives and children waiting on a dock somewhere.

The sea does not care who owns it, but God does

Sailors have always known a hard truth. The water gives no promises. A man on a ship is a long way from help. Now he must also fear a machine in the sky, sent by someone he will never see, for reasons that have nothing to do with him.

That is what war does. It takes the poor man's labor and makes it a target. Ordinary people pay the price while the powerful argue over maps.

The Bible speaks of the sea with respect, and it speaks of the men who work it.

"They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep." (Psalm 107:23-24)

Notice what the psalmist says. Even in the deep, the Lord is there. He is not absent from the Black Sea tonight. He knows the name of every man still in that cold water. He knows the names of the ones already gone. No sailor sinks out of His sight.

The same psalm goes on to say what a drowning man can do.

"Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses." (Psalm 107:28)

My friend, that verse is not for sailors only. Every one of us is in deep water sooner or later. A diagnosis, a funeral, a war on the evening news. When the ship goes down under you, the question is whether you know whom to call. Many of those men were praying in languages I cannot speak, and God understood every word.

The nations will keep trading accusations. Investigators will study wreckage. Leaders owe their people the truth about who fired these weapons, and honest men should demand it. Those in authority are charged with protecting the innocent, and the Scriptures hold them to that. But no inquiry will raise a drowned man, and no treaty will heal a widow's heart.

Only Christ does that. He walked on the sea, and the waves obeyed Him. He died for sinners and rose again, so that death would not have the last word over any man who trusts Him. That is the hope that holds when the water closes over. It holds for the sailor, and it holds for you.

Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God" (Matthew 5:9). Peace between nations will always be partial and fragile. Peace with God is complete, and it is offered today to every soul who turns from sin and believes the gospel.

Police detained Kamran Masih, a 40-year-old pharmacist and father of three, on the night of October 8 in Gharial Kalan village, Sheikhupura District. Local Muslims accused him of sharing a video they called blasphemous in WhatsApp groups. Police said a case was registered against him under Pakistan's blasphemy law, though it remained unclear which provisions were invoked. Those allegations are unproven and are for a court to decide.

The next day a crowd gathered outside his shop and home. Some in the crowd set both buildings on fire. Police later registered a separate complaint against five people accused of ransacking the house and clinic, and arrested them. Officials deployed a large force of police to guard the Christian homes that remained. No deaths or injuries have been confirmed. Human rights monitors who looked into the case urged that the accusation be left to the courts, and condemned the arson and threats that followed.

Families did not wait to see whether the police line would hold. They have seen what happens in this country when a blasphemy charge is spoken. In 2023 a mob in Jaranwala burned dozens of Christian homes and churches over a similar accusation. So the people of Gharial Kalan packed what they could carry and left their houses behind.

What a rumor can do to a neighborhood

Think about that for a moment. One accusation, not yet tried, and a man's livelihood is ash. His neighbors, who had nothing to do with any video, are refugees in their own country. That is what a law becomes when it hands a crowd the power to be judge, jury, and executioner. Men are not safe under such a law, and neither is the truth.

The Christian in Pakistan is often poor, often a minority of one in a village of thousands. He cannot buy protection. He cannot count on the court to move fast enough. When the shouting starts, his only real shelter is the one his Lord promised.

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." (Psalm 46:1)

Notice the word "present." Not distant, not arriving late. A very present help. The families walking out of that village at dusk are not walking out of His sight. The Lord who saw Israel's affliction in Egypt sees a pharmacist's burned shelves in Punjab. He knows the name of every mother who gathered her children and ran.

Mark also what the Christian is told to do when he is wronged. The Scripture does not tell him to burn a house in return. It says this:

"Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:21)

That is hard doctrine when your shop is in ashes. But it is the doctrine that built the Church out of blood in the first place. The mob has fire. The believer has something the mob can never touch: a Savior who was himself accused by a crowd, condemned without a fair hearing, and put to death, and who rose again on the third day. No arson can reach that.

Those of us who are safe

You and I sit in homes with locked doors and a police force that answers the telephone. That is a gift, and a gift carries a duty. The Bible says to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. Pray for Mr. Masih, that he gets an honest hearing and a just verdict. Pray for the families who fled, for the officers standing guard, and even for the men who lit the fire, that God would open their eyes before He must judge them.

Our own government is right to speak plainly when a nation lets its religious minorities be hunted by rumor. Religious liberty is not a luxury of the West. It is the God-given right of every man to answer to his Maker with a free conscience, and no mob or statute may take it away.

My friend, whatever fire you are standing near today, hear it: the Lord is not far from the burned-out and the driven-out. He draws closest to them. Turn to Him, and He will not turn you away.

The trouble began, residents said, when two young men from the neighboring Muslim town of Qalaat al-Madiq tried to intimidate a local shop owner and were driven off. They went home, gathered a crowd, and came back after dark. Syrian state television described the episode as a "brawl among young people" in which a shop was attacked. Officials said arrests were made and calm was restored.

Christian sources tell a harder story. A Greek Orthodox-linked source alleges that government security forces let the armed men pass through checkpoints. That claim comes from one side and has not been established. Two local Christian men were reportedly detained afterward, and a rights group said its contacts in the town reported both were released on Oct. 5.

This was not the first time. Violence hit Suqaylabiyah in March, after two young Muslim men from the same neighboring town were confronted for harassing Christian women, and dozens of men on motorcycles stormed in. Now a political party representing Syriac Christians has called for a Christian police force, saying earlier agreements were not kept. On Oct. 13, a Greek member of the European Parliament urged the European Union to act to protect the town's Christians.

What a frightened town is asking for

Strip away the politics and the request is plain. These families want to sleep at night. They want a shopkeeper to be able to tell a rude young man to leave without a mob answering at midnight. That is not a large thing to ask of any government, and every government on earth is charged with it. Scripture says that rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil, and that they bear not the sword in vain.

Honor belongs to those who hold authority, and prayer is owed them. But authority exists to protect the quiet and the peaceable, and the Christians of Suqaylabiyah have been the quiet and the peaceable for centuries. They are among the oldest believers in the world, living in a land where the gospel was carried in the first generation after the cross. When their doors are kicked in twice in one year, it is right for free nations to say so plainly, and right for American leaders to keep religious liberty near the front of any dealings with Damascus.

The answer to a mob is not another mob

Yet I would not have you stop at the headline, my friend. The man who throws a stone at a church is a sinner, and so is the man who cheers from his armchair. The same Bible that tells us to protect the weak tells us the human heart is the source of the trouble. Pride takes offense. Anger gathers a crowd. A crowd turns a bruised ego into a burning shop.

Our Lord knew about mobs. He was met by one in Gethsemane, with swords and staves, and He did not call down fire. He healed the servant's ear. That is not weakness. That is a strength the world cannot manufacture, and it is the very strength Syria's believers are asked to carry tonight.

"Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you." (Luke 6:28)

Notice that He did not say to pretend nothing happened. He did not say the shopkeeper was wrong to want his shop. He said to answer hatred with something the hater has never seen. Many a hard heart has been broken, not by argument, but by a neighbor who would not hit back and would not hate.

The Scriptures also promise that the Lord sees. The Psalmist wrote that the Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. Those who have lost windows and wares and sleep this month are not forgotten in heaven, whatever the officials in the capital decide.

And to those of us who live in safety, there is a word as well. Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. A believer in Ohio or Indiana cannot stop a mob in Hama. But he can know their names, speak up for them, and refuse to let a brother's suffering become a footnote.

The gospel is bigger than any border, and it is meant for the young man who led that crowd as surely as for the woman who was hurt. Christ died for mobs. He rose for them too. The door is open to every soul in Qalaat al-Madiq and every soul in Suqaylabiyah, and the Lord who keeps the fearful is the same Lord who forgives the angry.

The justices agreed on April 20 to take up the case, which names Lisa Roy, executive director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, as defendant. The plaintiffs are two church parishes, St. Mary in Littleton and St. Bernadette in Lakewood, along with parents whose children attend or will attend their schools.

Colorado's legislature created the universal program in 2022. It offers state funding to public, private, and faith-based providers. To take part, a provider must follow the state's nondiscrimination rules, including those covering sexual orientation and gender identity. The parishes say that would force them to act against their convictions on marriage, sexuality, and whom they may employ, so they were left out.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Colorado's policy on Sept. 30, 2025. The plaintiffs' attorneys point out that the state allows secular enrollment preferences, such as for low-income children and children with disabilities, while refusing a religious one.

One plaintiff family, the Sheleys, are parishioners at St. Mary. Five of their children attend the parish school now, and the youngest is expected to start preschool there in 2028. The U.S. solicitor general, more than 20 states, and 43 Republican members of Congress have urged the Court to rule against Colorado. The case is expected to clarify what makes a law "generally applicable" under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

Whose child is it?

Strip away the legal vocabulary and you find a very old question. Who has the first claim on a little child's soul and mind? Is it the state, or is it the mother and father?

The Bible does not leave that in doubt. God put the child in the home, and He put the instruction there too.

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6)

Notice who is told to do the training. Not a bureaucracy. A parent. A government may help a family, and a government may fund a school. But when it says, "Take our money, and set aside what you believe about God's design for men, women, and marriage," it has stopped helping. It has set a price on conscience.

The state of Colorado did not say these churches were poor teachers. It did not say the children were being neglected. It said, in effect, that a church whose faith is what it is cannot stand in the same line as everyone else. That is a policy, and it should be judged by the standard of Scripture and of the Constitution. By both standards it is a policy that punishes the faithful for being faithful.

I will say this plainly, and I will say it with grace toward those who hold office in Colorado. They carry a real responsibility, and many of them mean to serve children well. But good intentions do not make a law just. A rule that bars a church school because of its creed has moved from neutrality to hostility, however politely it is worded.

Think of what Christ did when the disciples tried to keep the children away. He was displeased with them.

"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:14)

Forbid them not. That is the whole of it. Whoever stands between a child and the teaching of Christ takes on a heavy thing, whether a state office does it or a family member.

My friend, whatever the nine justices decide, the work given to the Christian parent does not change. Teach your children the Word. Teach it at the table and on the road and at bedtime. Courts can protect the open door, and we should be thankful when they do. But the faith itself is handed down from one heart to the next, and no state program can give it or take it away.

On Saturday night, October 3, four people died in Riyom County. Residents said two were shot in Rim village and two more in Wereng village. The next day, Sunday, October 4, attackers entered Mangor village in Bokkos County and shot two Christians to death. A local youth leader said three others were wounded there.

By Tuesday, October 6, gunmen had struck Jol village in Riyom County, and residents said the assault was still going on when word reached the outside. Nigerian officials had not confirmed the casualty figures at the time of writing, and the exact number of dead from the Tuesday raid was not yet known.

These were farming people. Plateau State sits in Nigeria's Middle Belt, where Christian farming communities have buried their own for years. Local leaders say the killers come at night, often to villages with little protection, and leave before help arrives. Late September brought a wave of attacks on mining sites in the state that residents said killed at least 12 Christians. An advocacy group that tracks the killings has put the toll for Christians in Nigeria at more than 3,000 in the first eight months of this year. That is one group's count, and it should be weighed as such. But the pattern in village after village is plain enough.

Three days earlier than the Tuesday raid, on October 8, a separate band of suspected jihadists, which villagers named as Boko Haram or its offshoot, hit three mostly Christian villages in Adamawa State to the northeast, and a church building was burned. Two different regions. Two different bands. One kind of grief.

What a grieving village is owed

A government has one first duty, and the Bible says so in plain words: it does not bear the sword in vain. It is there to protect the innocent and restrain the wicked. When a farmer cannot sleep in his own bed without fearing the dark, something has failed. Our own government has rightly kept its eye on Nigeria, and President Trump has spoken more boldly for persecuted believers than any recent occupant of the White House. Those who hold authority in Abuja, and those who hold it in Washington, should be reminded that the safety of ordinary people is not a favor. It is their charge.

But I want to speak now of something that no army can deliver, and that those families need more than anything else tonight.

A man in Mangor village went out on a Sunday and did not come home. Somewhere a widow is sitting on a dirt floor with children who keep asking when their father will walk through the door. Statistics do not touch her. Neither do statements from capitals. What touches her is whether there is a God who sees, and whether He is near.

The Word of God answers that without hedging:

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)

Nigh. Not far off, not busy with other matters. Near to the broken heart. That is no small thing to a mother who has just lost her son to a bullet.

And the Lord Jesus did not pretend that His people would live untroubled. He told them plainly what faithfulness might cost, and He told them what waits on the far side of it. Believers in Plateau State did not stumble into suffering by accident. They are living out a verse that many of us in comfort only read.

My friend, every life is made in the image of God. That is why these killings are not merely a political problem or a security problem. They are an offense against heaven, and heaven keeps its own account. No murderer escapes it, and no martyr is forgotten by it.

The believer is given a hard calling in the face of such evil. He is not told to pretend it is nothing. He is told not to be conquered by it:

• Pray by name for the families in Rim, Wereng, Mangor and Jol.
• Speak up for them with your own voice and your own vote.
• Give where you can through honest relief work reaching the Middle Belt.

The Scripture says it this way: "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:21)

And the promise that holds up every one of those who died in Christ stands over this whole story like a lamp in a dark window:

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)

The gunmen took six lives in a weekend. They could not take the kingdom. That belongs to those who trusted Christ, and no night raid can reach it.

Pillay is 85 years old. The committee pointed to her early career defending Nelson Mandela and others who stood against apartheid, and to her later service as a judge in some of the key international court cases of this era. Officials said she was chosen from 287 nominations, 208 of them individuals and 79 of them organizations. The formal ceremony is set for December 10 in Oslo.

The committee tied the award to a time of rising conflict and growing political attacks on international law. It said the ability to settle disputes without force depends on the international rule of law, and that a legal system that holds war criminals to account is a precondition for peace.

The choice is not without controversy. Pillay led a United Nations commission that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza, a finding the Israeli government dismissed. President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both rejected that commission's conclusions, and the prize is widely expected to be read as a rebuke to them. Last year's award went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.

What kind of peace can a court write down?

Whatever one thinks of the commission, or of the committee in Oslo, no one can fault the longing behind this prize. Every decent man wants the shooting to stop. Every mother wants her son home from the war. Judges and courts have their place; the Bible says rulers do not bear the sword in vain, and those in authority are owed honor by their office.

But look closely at what a tribunal can do. It can name a crime. It can sentence a guilty man. It can warn the next tyrant that the world is watching. What it cannot do is reach into a man and take out the pride, the hatred and the greed that start wars in the first place. Treaties get signed in the morning and broken by supper. The trouble was never only in the capitals. It is in the human heart.

James asked the plain question long ago: from where do wars and fightings come? Not from a lack of paragraphs in a charter. They come from the lusts that war inside us. A law may restrain the hand, but it does not cleanse the heart. That is a work only God can do.

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." (John 14:27)

Notice the words "not as the world giveth." The world gives peace the way a man gives a bandage: after the wound, and only for a season. Christ gives it at the root. He spoke those words on the night before the cross, with soldiers already gathering in the garden. He did not promise His disciples a quiet world. He promised them a quiet heart in the middle of a noisy one, and He bought it with His own blood.

The prophet saw Him coming seven centuries ahead.

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6)

Notice where the government rests. It is not on a committee or a court. It is on His shoulder. Until He returns to rule, nations will keep gathering in halls to argue about justice and keep burying their dead. A Christian can pray for those who sit in judgment, honor them where they honor what is right, and still know that the final answer to war is not a verdict. It is a King.

The Lord Jesus said it Himself: "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." Peacemaking begins where reconciliation with God begins. A man at war with his Maker will never be fully at peace with his neighbor. A man forgiven at the cross has been handed the one thing the whole world is searching for.

So my friend, when the prizes are handed out and the speeches fade, ask yourself a simpler question than the diplomats do. Is there peace in your own house? Is there peace between you and God? The Prince of Peace has not changed His offer. He still stands at the door, and He still gives what no tribunal, no treaty and no medal in Oslo can give.

The arrest came on or about Sept. 28, when the pastor and a small group stood on the public walkway in front of the embassy to pray and to protest Beijing's treatment of religious minorities. The Secret Service, which guards foreign missions in the capital, removed him. In a public post on Oct. 4, he said Chinese diplomats had asked that the group be removed. "I was arrested by my own government," he wrote, responding to the demands of those diplomats.

The dispute did not begin that day. Days earlier, the group said, barricades had gone up along the embassy frontage, and they were told that anyone walking past them to pray would be arrested. The group maintains that the sidewalk is a public way, open to any citizen. A religious-liberty law group has agreed to represent the pastor in court. No ruling has been made, and the charge is only an accusation. The Secret Service has not been quoted in the coverage reviewed here.

So the facts stand plain. A man of God prayed. A government barrier stood between him and the sidewalk. He was taken away, and he now has a court date. Whether the law allows it is for a judge to decide, and the officers who made the arrest were doing the job they were handed. But a free people ought to ask a hard question. Who gets to decide where an American may kneel?

The oldest collision in the world

This is not a new thing. Long before there was an embassy row or a Secret Service, the rulers of Jerusalem hauled Peter and John before the council and told them to stop speaking in the name of Jesus. The apostles were not rebels by temper. They paid their taxes and honored the authorities over them. But when a command from men ran straight into a command from God, they did not stammer.

"Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)

Notice what Peter did not say. He did not say the council had no office. He did not call for a riot. He said, in effect, that there is a throne above every throne, and when the two disagree, the believer knows which way to turn. The same Peter was later jailed for it, and the church prayed all night.

The Christians the pastor went to pray for are the reason this matters. In China, house churches are raided, pastors are imprisoned, and children are barred from the worship of their parents. The prayer on that sidewalk was not a stunt. It was a plain act of remembering those who cannot stand on any sidewalk at all, because they are locked behind walls.

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)

It is a strange day when an American who tries to obey that verse finds a barricade across his path, put up at the wish of a foreign power that persecutes the very people he is praying for. Our nation was founded on the idea that a man's conscience answers to God first. The right to pray in public, to assemble peaceably, and to petition against wrong is not a gift from any ambassador. It was written into the First Amendment because the founders had seen what happens when a government decides which prayers are convenient.

None of this calls for bitterness toward the officers on the street or toward the diplomats behind the glass. They are men and women made in the image of God, and the gospel is meant for them as much as for anyone. Christ prayed for those who drove the nails. The believer's weapon is not rage. It is truth spoken plainly, a clean conscience, and a willingness to be inconvenienced for the sake of the name.

My friend, you may never stand in front of an embassy. But every one of us will one day stand before a higher court than any in Washington, and the question there will not be whether we kept the peace with every power on earth. It will be whether we knew the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for sinners and rose again on the third day. Fear of men is a snare. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and in that fear there is a freedom no barricade can fence off.

Pray for the prisoners in China. Pray for the pastor who will stand before a judge on Oct. 21. And ask yourself plainly whether you would pray where he prayed, if the price were a charge and a courtroom.

The captors have demanded 350 million naira, about $263,000, for the release of one family of three: a man, his wife and their small daughter. A pregnant woman was also taken. Local accounts differ on the exact hour of the raid and on how many were seized. Police had not confirmed the ransom demand, and no release had been announced as of this writing.

The kidnapping came days after another attack in the same state. On October 1, suspected Fulani gunmen struck Ungwan Waziri village in Chikun County, near Karji. Local sources said a Christian man was killed and several others were taken away. Kidnapping for ransom has grown into a steady trade across Kaduna and neighboring states, and Christian communities in the region have counted many losses to it in recent years.

For a family of ordinary means, 350 million naira is beyond reach. It is a sum that few in the country could raise in a week. The baby is the age when a child needs her mother's arms and her mother's milk. Somewhere tonight, a man and wife are counting hours in a place they did not choose, with an infant between them.

What a ransom note cannot reach

A kidnapper believes he holds everything. He holds the door, the road, the clock and the price. He thinks the matter is closed because the family has no money and no army. Nigerian believers know that picture well, and many of them have lived it.

But the Bible never tells us that a prison wall is where God's reach ends. Joseph was sold by his own brothers and carried to Egypt in a stranger's caravan. Daniel was marched off to Babylon as a captive. Paul wrote some of his greatest letters with a Roman guard chained to his wrist. None of them was forgotten, and none was out of God's sight.

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)

Read that slowly, my friend. It does not say the Lord is near the strong, or near those who feel brave. It says He is near the broken-hearted. A mother who cannot hold her baby tonight is not far from Him. She is exactly where He promised to be.

The Scripture also gives the church at home a job to do. "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them," says Hebrews 13:3. That is a command, and it reaches across oceans. Christians in America have a government that can speak plainly to Abuja, and a freedom to write, to call and to give that the captives do not have. Our leaders have been right to press Nigeria on the killing and kidnapping of believers, and they should keep pressing it. The Lord holds rulers to account for how they treat the helpless, and He will do the same with the men who hold this family.

The wicked do not get the last word, though they act as if they will. Christ stood before a rigged court and a Roman governor who claimed power over His life. He did not argue about a ransom. He went to the cross for the very men who held Him, and on the third day He rose, and the grave lost its claim on everyone who trusts Him. That is why Christians can grieve without despair. Death itself, the last jailer, has been beaten.

To those who hold the keys in Kaduna, hear this plainly: every child is made in the image of God. A six-month-old is not a bargaining chip. The One who formed her will ask about her, and no hidden camp and no border will keep the matter from Him. There is still time to turn, to open the door, and to send them home. Repentance is open to the kidnapper as it is to anyone. The gospel does not exclude him. It calls him to put down the weapon and bow.

And to the family waiting out the hours: you are not forgotten. Your name is known in heaven, and so is your baby's.

The Treasury Department backed the announcement with action. Its sanctions office issued a temporary general license allowing the sale, delivery and importation of Russian-origin diesel through April 7, 2027. Until now, such trade ran squarely into American sanctions imposed over Russia's war on Ukraine.

The reason is the pump. The fighting with Iran has disrupted oil supplies and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and diesel, the fuel that moves freight, farm equipment and school buses, has climbed sharply. The administration is seeking relief before voters go to the polls in the November midterm elections. The Kremlin said Mr. Putin also relayed Tehran's thinking on ending the Iran conflict during his call with the President.

The deal drew sharp reaction. Ukraine's government called it a gift to the Kremlin. Senate Democrats criticized the easing of sanctions. A former Treasury sanctions official said it showed the President putting the Iran conflict and its economic cost ahead of pressure on Moscow. Analysts also noted that the volume, while real, is small next to American demand.

Those are the facts, and the argument over them will go on in Washington. A President is charged with weighing hard things: a war abroad, an ally under fire, and a trucker in Ohio who cannot fill his tank. Whatever one thinks of the trade-offs, the man who holds that office deserves our honest prayers and a fair hearing.

What a gallon of diesel really means

My friend, behind every ton of fuel is a kitchen table. When diesel rises, the grocery truck costs more to run, the farmer's harvest costs more to bring in, and the widow on a fixed income finds the same dollar buys a little less bread. Nobody in a statehouse feels that first. The family feels it first.

Governments argue over barrels and licenses. They always have. But the Lord taught His disciples to bring the plainest need to the Father without embarrassment. He did not tell them to ask for a surplus or a fortune. He told them to ask for bread, and only for today's.

"Give us this day our daily bread." (Matthew 6:11)

Mark how small that request is, and how much it admits. It admits that the grain, the rain, the truck and the road are all gifts. It admits that no treaty, no pipeline and no president can finally guarantee the next meal. A nation can strike deals and still wake up hungry if God withholds His hand. A nation can also be fed in the leanest year if He opens it.

That is no reason to sit still. A man should work, a leader should plan, and a country should guard its own supply. But the Christian does his work with open hands. He knows that anxiety over prices will not add one gallon to the tank, and that the Father who feeds the sparrows has not lost track of His children.

Old David had lived long enough to know it.

"I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." (Psalm 37:25)

He did not say the righteous never see a hard season. He said they are not forsaken in it. There is a difference, and the whole Christian life is lived inside it.

There is a bigger bread than diesel can haul. Jesus said He Himself is the bread of life, and that whoever comes to Him will not hunger. A man can have a full tank and an empty soul. He can have cheap fuel and no peace. The cross and the empty tomb answer the hunger that no market can touch, and that answer is free to anyone who will take it.

So let the prices be watched, and let the leaders be held to account by their office and their conscience. But let the heart be settled somewhere deeper than the pump. Seek first the kingdom, the Master said, and the rest will be added. It is a promise worth more than any shipment, and it does not expire on a license date.

The dead man is Father Stanisław Zbojniewicz, 67, a priest for 40 years who served at the abbey's center for Christian formation as an assistant and sacristan. Five people were stabbed in all: three priests and two laypeople, a man and a woman. One of the wounded priests had been hearing confessions and stepped in to stop the attacker. He remained in serious but stable condition days later. Another wounded priest was treated and released the same day.

Police arrested a 31-year-old Ukrainian citizen, identified by prosecutors as Ihor M., at the scene. The knife came from the abbey kitchen, and the attack moved from there toward the church on the grounds. Prosecutors have charged him with murder, attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm. Psychiatric experts found he was suffering acute psychotic symptoms that keep him from taking part in court proceedings. On Sept. 26 a court ordered him held for three months in a secured hospital ward. Prosecutors have not established a motive or said how he came to be at the abbey.

Poland's President Karol Nawrocki called for a rapid and thorough investigation. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the suspect would face the full severity of Polish law. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack and called for the man to be held fully responsible. The local archbishop asked the faithful to pray for the dead, for the wounded, and for the attacker's conversion, and to refuse hatred.

On Sept. 26, one of the wounded priests stood at the altar and said the first Mass in the abbey since the attack. Speaking for himself and the two other injured priests, he said, "we forgive." He asked the congregation to pray for the attacker, who, he said, needs that prayer most of all. He warned against blaming Ukrainians as a people, because one man had done this. The funeral for Father Zbojniewicz was set for Sept. 29 in his home village of Grzeska.

What a wounded man said from the altar

Read those facts slowly. A man went about his plain duties in a house of prayer and was cut down before the morning service. Another was hearing confessions, and he ran toward the knife instead of away from it. I do not know a braver thing than that.

The world has two answers ready for such a day. One is rage, and rage is understandable. Blood on a church floor ought to stir anger, and the law should do its work. The magistrate does not bear the sword in vain, and Scripture says so. A man who kills must answer for it, whatever the state of his mind, and justice here belongs to the courts and the doctors.

The other answer is a shrug, as if evil were only an accident of brain chemistry. Neither answer is the gospel. A priest with a fresh wound stood up and said "we forgive." Those two words are hard to say, and he did not say them because the crime was small. He said them because he had been forgiven something far larger himself.

That is the whole of the Christian faith in a sentence. Every one of us stands guilty before a holy God, and Christ went to a cross for sinners who had not asked for Him. Forgiveness did not cost Him nothing. It cost Him everything, and He paid it so that murderers and liars and proud men could be made clean.

"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

Mark the words "while we were yet sinners." He did not wait for the attacker to repent, or for you to clean up your life. He came while we were still enemies. A man who has grasped that cannot hold a grudge for long, because he knows what he was spared.

The Lord also told us how evil is to be met.

"Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:21)

That is not weakness. The knife did its worst in that kitchen, and it did not silence the Mass. Within two days the doors were open and the Word was being spoken again. Evil had its hour, and it did not get the last word.

My friend, there is a man in a hospital ward in Poland who needs mercy more than he knows. There are families grieving a good man, and a village burying its priest. And there is you, wherever you sit reading this. The same Savior stands ready for every one of them. Do not put Him off. The morning may be quiet where you are, and nobody can promise that it will stay that way.

A Pentagon news release says the office will be charged with "driving department-wide policy, resource advocacy and action." It is meant to speak for military chaplains and for religious support to troops "at the highest level of the Department." A department memo says the office's director will also coordinate resources, including faith-based homeschool support for military families.

Officials said the office will not compel religious participation, favor one faith, or diminish the rights of personnel of any faith or none. No director has been named yet. Hegseth, who serves under President Trump, has also been hosting monthly Christian worship services at the Pentagon.

Critics objected quickly. Rachel Laser, who leads Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the move elevates Christianity to an even higher role in shaping U.S. military policy. The department answered that the office exists to protect the free exercise of every service member, which the First Amendment guarantees.

Why a soldier needs more than a uniform

Whatever one thinks of the org chart, the thing underneath it is old and plain. Men and women who wear the uniform carry something no budget line covers. A young soldier is a long way from his mother's kitchen. A sailor on a night watch thinks about what he has done and where he is going. A mother deployed overseas lies awake over a child's fever she cannot touch.

The chaplain has always stood in that gap. He walks the barracks, sits with the wounded, and kneels beside a bunk when a letter comes with bad news. For this reason I count it a good thing when a government stops treating that ministry as an embarrassment and starts treating it as part of the readiness of the force. A nation that sends its sons and daughters into harm's way owes them the freedom to pray and someone to pray with.

The Constitution forbids an established church. It does not forbid a believing people, and it does not tell the government to look away when a soldier asks for a Bible. Those who serve give up a great deal of liberty. They should not be asked to give up the liberty of conscience too.

The help that does not depend on rank

Still, no office, however well run, can do the work of the One the soldier is really looking for. Policy can protect a chaplain's access. It cannot forgive a sin or quiet a fear at three in the morning. A man can be well supplied, well trained, and well led, and still be lost.

The Lord spoke to a commander on the edge of a hard campaign. Joshua had a river to cross and enemies ahead of him, and God did not hand him a plan of battle first. He gave him a promise.

"Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest." (Joshua 1:9)

Notice where the courage comes from. It does not come from the strength of the man. It comes from the presence of God, who goes with him wherever he goes. That is as true in a trench in Eastern Europe as on a carrier deck in the Pacific. It is true in a hospital ward, a county jail, or a quiet house after the funeral.

The psalmist put it in a single sentence a soldier can carry in his pocket: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." (Psalm 46:1) The word is very present. He is not far off, waiting to be approached through channels.

That is the gospel's answer to the fear that every uniform covers. Christ came to those who could not save themselves, and He bore their sin on a cross so that the worst of men might be at peace with God. The soldier who trusts Him need not wonder what waits on the other side of the next mission.

My friend, whether you wear the uniform or only love someone who does, do not wait for an office to be opened or a chaplain to be assigned. The door to God stands open now, through Jesus Christ. Go in.

The council says only 11 formal complaints, called First Information Reports, were registered with police out of those 26 cases. Church leaders say that gap is a large part of their alarm. A crime that is never written down is a crime that is never answered.

The latest incidents came within 24 hours of each other. Believers say house-church gatherings were attacked in Barrackpore and in Khejuri, two separate parts of the state. In early September, the council says, a mob vandalized a Presbyterian house church in one district, and a pastor leading a prayer service in another was taken away by a crowd. The council also points to a church under construction at Sonarpur that was vandalized in the summer. The council wants impartial investigations, protection for congregations and families, and the withdrawal of criminal cases it says have been filed against pastors.

Those are the claims of the church leaders. Police have not confirmed the council's full tally, and the council itself says it is still pressing for investigations. Its leaders have asked for talks with the chief minister, and they have told the public they intend to continue peaceful rallies. Nobody in the council is calling for revenge. They are calling for the law to be applied to everyone alike.

Why a living room matters

Consider what a house church is. It is not a cathedral with a spire and a stone wall. It is a front room, a borrowed courtyard, a few dozen folding chairs. The people who meet there are often the poorest in their village. They sing softly, and they read from a Bible that has been passed hand to hand. That is exactly why these meetings are easy to attack, and exactly why they matter so much.

The Lord Jesus knew His people would often be small in number and short on protection. He did not promise them buildings. He promised something better.

"For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (Matthew 18:20)

Read that again slowly. Two or three. No permit, no steeple, no crowd to guard the door. Where a handful of the redeemed bow their heads in His name, the King of heaven is in the room. A broken window can be mended. A scattered prayer meeting can be gathered again. But no mob has ever found a way to throw Christ out of a house where He has been invited in.

The apostle Paul told his young friend Timothy plainly what to expect: "Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." (2 Timothy 3:12) The Bible never hid this from us. Still, to say that suffering is promised is not to say that it should be ignored. Those who live in safety are told to remember those who do not. A free people have a duty to speak when a sister in Barrackpore cannot.

What free nations owe the quiet believer

Religious liberty is not a gift from a government. It is a right that comes from God, and any government worth its name exists to protect it. That is the conviction on which this country was founded, and it is why American Christians watch the plight of believers abroad with more than idle curiosity. When a man is beaten for praying, the principle at stake is the same whether it happens in a village in Bengal or a town in Ohio.

The officials of West Bengal hold their authority from God, as every ruler does, and they will answer for how they use it. The first duty of that office is to protect the quiet and the peaceable. A pastor leading a prayer service is breaking no law. A widow who opens her home for Scripture reading is a danger to no one. They should be able to count on the police as surely as their neighbors do.

And to you, my friend, who may be tempted to think the gospel is a comfortable thing: look at what believers are willing to carry for it. Those families in Bengal keep gathering because they have found something worth more than ease. They have met the Savior who died for sinners and rose again, and no crowd with sticks can argue them out of that. If they can hold the line in a rented room, surely the rest of us can stand firm in a warm and well-lit sanctuary.

The gospel has always grown in small rooms. It began in an upper room in Jerusalem, and it will outlast every angry crowd that tries to silence it.

The occasion was a summit titled "Science: A New Golden Age." The White House said the money comes from government, industry, universities and philanthropy together. Of the total, $2.4 billion is in computing resources and technology support pledged by 11 industry partners. A separate $1 billion investment is aimed at computing infrastructure and workforce training in Georgia and other regions of the country.

The summit followed a report from Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. At the event the President presented the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. Michael Dell and Satya Nadella received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, according to the White House.

Supporters of the administration say the push is meant to keep American research and manufacturing ahead of foreign rivals and to train a new generation of skilled workers at home. The medals are the nation's highest honors for achievement in science and technology.

What a nation does with what it learns

Whatever one thinks of any single program, the scene is plain enough. The most powerful office in the world stood in a room full of people who know how to build things that were unimaginable a generation ago. Billions of dollars were pledged to computers, laboratories and training. Medals were hung around necks.

There is nothing wrong with learning. The man who studies the stars, or the cell, or the circuit, is looking at a world God made. It was the Lord who set the laws that every scientist spends a lifetime discovering. A nation that honors its inventors and trains its young people to work is doing something good, and a Christian can say so without apology.

But my friend, a country can know a great deal and still be lost. History is full of learned people who built marvelous things and could not tell right from wrong. A man can split the atom and not know why he is alive. He can map every gene and have no answer for his own guilty conscience. Knowledge tells us how a thing works. It does not tell us what a thing is for, and it cannot tell us what to do with a human life, born or unborn, old or sick.

The Bible puts the order of things plainly:

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction." (Proverbs 1:7)

The beginning, not the ending. Reverence for God is where real learning starts, because it settles the first question: whether there is a Maker to whom we answer. Take that away and the finest laboratory only multiplies our power without steadying our hands.

The psalmist knew the same thing as he looked up at the night sky. He did not say the heavens were an accident waiting to be explained. He wrote that "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." (Psalm 19:1) The more a researcher sees of the order of creation, the more reason he has to bow.

So let the laboratories be built, and let the young be trained. Let those in authority be honored for the good they try to do. But the soul of a nation is not kept by computing power. It is kept by a people who know that every discovery is borrowed from the Creator, and that every one of us will stand before Him someday.

You may be a person who has mastered your trade, your field, your small corner of the world. Ask yourself the question no medal can answer: do you know the One who made it all? The Son of God came into this world, died on a cross for sinners, and rose again on the third day. That is the knowledge that matters when the lights go out and the work is done. It is offered freely to the scientist and the plowman alike.

Under the program, the Treasury deposits $1,000 into an investment account for each eligible U.S. citizen child born from 2025 through the end of 2028. Parents may add up to $5,000 a year at first. The money is held in an account built on the individual retirement account model, and the child cannot withdraw it until age 18.

The Dells' original pledge was $6.25 billion. It was meant to fund accounts for at least 25 million children ten and younger who live in lower- and middle-income ZIP codes. Some details of how the Dell money fits with the government deposit have been described differently by the White House and by the donors, and the exact dollar figure announced this week has varied in public accounts.

The event comes as Mr. Trump faces falling approval numbers. Voters are worried about the price of gasoline and diesel, and about the Iran standoff, with the midterm elections less than a month away. Supporters of the program say it gives a child a financial start before he can walk. Critics say a fund this size cannot undo the pressure of rising prices on young families.

What a child is worth

I leave the arguments over the fine print to the accountants. Something else is going on in that Oval Office, and it deserves to be said plainly. The President of the United States, a Republican, stood before the cameras to say that a baby born in this country is worth an investment. Not a burden. Not an inconvenience. An investment.

That is not how much of our age talks. For fifty years we have been told that children are a cost. They are a cost to your career, your travel, your bank account, your peace. Some governments now pay people to avoid having them, and some pay to end them before they are born. A nation that keeps saying that will get exactly what it is asking for: empty cradles and empty schoolrooms.

The Bible takes the other view, and it takes it without apology.

"Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward." (Psalm 127:3)

Look at that word, reward. God does not call the child a risk to be managed. He calls the child a reward, and a heritage from His own hand. Every child, rich or poor, planned or surprised, carries that mark from the first heartbeat.

The Scripture also speaks of handing something down.

"A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children." (Proverbs 13:22)

A thousand dollars in an account is a good thing. A father who plans ahead is doing what the Proverb says. Honor goes to leaders who think of the child not yet grown, and to generous people who give to families they will never meet.

The inheritance that cannot be taxed

But hear me, my friend. A parent can leave a child a fortune and still leave him poor. The account matures at eighteen. The soul is older than that and lasts longer. Money can buy a house and cannot buy a conscience. It can pay for college and cannot teach a young man why he was made.

The richest inheritance a mother or father can give is a home where the Word of God is read aloud, where the Lord's Day is kept, and where a child sees his father kneel. A bank statement can be lost in a market crash. A child who knows Christ has a treasure that no recession, no inflation, and no election can touch.

So let the nation invest in its little ones. That is right and good. And let every parent who reads this do the greater thing. Teach them the name of the Savior before they learn the price of anything. Open the Book at the supper table. Pray over the cradle.

The children are a heritage from the Lord. Take care of what He has put in your hands, because He will ask what you did with it.

At noon, a group of survivors and bereaved families called the October Council led a nationwide minute of silence. Commemorations were held at the site of the Nova music festival near Re'im, where hundreds of young people were cut down while they danced. At Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where militants killed 64 residents and abducted 18, families gathered at dawn for a tribute.

The Jewish state held its official memorial earlier in the week, on Monday, October 5, following the Hebrew calendar. President Isaac Herzog spoke on Mount Herzl, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended the national ceremony in Jerusalem. "In Gaza, there will be no rule by Hamas," Netanyahu said.

The main evening gathering was set for 9:15 p.m. at Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, with about 50,000 people expected. It was organized by a group founded by survivors and bereaved relatives, and hosted by former hostage Eli Sharabi. Organizers called it a national, unifying and hopeful event. This is the first anniversary with all the surviving hostages home. Protesters also gathered at junctions and outside the homes of government ministers, and activists dyed the fountain at Dizengoff Square red, with an election only weeks away.

Israel's defense minister had placed the military on high alert before the anniversary. The Israeli military said this week it had killed two Hamas commanders, one of whom it said held former hostages in Gaza City.

What a nation does with its grief

Three years is long enough for the headlines to move on. It is not long enough for a mother to stop setting a place at the table. Grief does not keep the calendar the news keeps. It comes at 6:29 in the morning, in the exact minute the sirens sounded, and it sits down in the kitchen.

Look at what that country did Wednesday. It did not pretend. It stood still, said the names, and let the silence be silence. That is honest, and there is something right in it. Evil was done on that day, plain evil, aimed at men, women and children because of who they were. The Bible never asks us to call a massacre anything softer.

But a minute of silence can only carry a heart so far. At the end of it, a mourner still has to get up and live. Memorials honor the dead. They cannot mend the living. A father can stand in a field of candles and still walk home to a house that has no answer for him.

That is where the Word of God meets a man. Not with a speech, but with a Person.

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)

Notice the word nigh. It means near. God does not stand at the far end of the cemetery. He draws close to the broken, and the Scripture does not say He draws close to the strong, the composed, or the ones who have figured it all out. It says the broken. If your heart is in pieces tonight, whether from a war, a graveside, or a loss no camera will ever record, you are exactly the kind of person this verse was written for.

And He does more than sit nearby. The Psalmist says elsewhere that He "healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds" (Psalm 147:3). A wound that is bound up is a wound somebody has taken in hand. The Lord Jesus Christ, who was Himself betrayed, beaten and murdered by wicked men, knows what it is to be the victim of cruelty. He did not stay in the tomb. He rose, and because He rose, grief is not the last word over anyone who trusts Him.

Justice and mercy both belong to God

A nation has a duty to defend its people, and the Scripture honors the ruler who bears the sword against those who murder the innocent. Believers can pray for Israel's security and for the safe return of every captive without apology. At the same time, no army can reach the place where a bereaved heart actually aches. Only the Lord can.

So remember the dead. Say their names. Do not let the world teach you that October 7 was a long time ago. But do not stop at remembering. Bring the ache to the One who is near to the broken, and let Him do the binding up that no ceremony ever could.

The facts are simple. In January 2021, Grand emailed about a dozen friends and invited them to his home to pray together. No one had yet gathered. According to Grand's lawyers, a city official then called him and said he could not hold any religious gathering in his house without first getting a special-use permit. Grand applied for the permit and later withdrew the application. He moved to University Heights in 2017.

Grand says the pressure did not stop there. He alleges that officials told police to watch his house, urged neighbors to complain about visitors, and held back his certificate of occupancy and a tax abatement. The city disputes his account. In September 2022 he sued the city and its then-mayor, claiming his civil rights were violated.

A federal district court ruled for the city, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling. Neither court decided whether the city had trampled the First Amendment. They held that Grand's claims were not "ripe," meaning he first had to finish the city's own permit process. The question before the justices is whether a citizen who says his religious freedom has been injured must first walk through a local land-use process before any court will hear him.

A permit to pray

Think about what that asks of a man. A city official says the front room of your house is no place for prayer without a license. You are told the way to a federal courtroom runs through the very office that gave the order. Many Americans, whatever their faith, will find that hard to square with the plain words of the First Amendment, which forbids Congress from making any law "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.

Grand's lawyers say the city did not ask for permits when neighbors gathered for card games, book clubs, or ball games. If that is so, the question is not zoning at all. It is whether the state may treat a prayer meeting as a lesser thing than a dinner party. This is where a good deal of modern policy has drifted: religion is welcome as a private feeling, but suspect the moment two or three agree to meet around it.

The early church knew about that suspicion. Its first congregations had no sanctuary and no building permit. They met in houses. The apostle wrote of the church that was in the house of Aquila and Priscilla, and of Philemon's house. The gospel went across the Roman world from living rooms and upper rooms, and no magistrate's stamp was ever on it.

"For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (Matthew 18:20)

Notice what the Lord set as the condition. He did not say a zoning board, a seating capacity, or a certificate. He said two or three, and His name. A promise that small and that large cannot be licensed by any city hall, and no ordinance can add to it or take from it.

What a Christian owes his neighbor

Christians ought to stand with Daniel Grand, though he does not pray as they do. A government strong enough to forbid his minyan today is strong enough to forbid a Bible study in a Texas kitchen tomorrow. The freedom to gather and pray at home is the same freedom for all, and it is worth guarding for the man next door.

Officials in University Heights are also neighbors, and they should be treated with the courtesy Scripture asks of us toward every man. The city has its day in court, and the justices will weigh both sides. Our quarrel is with the idea that a man must ask leave before he calls on God, not with any person.

Whatever the Court decides, my friend, remember where the real freedom lies. The Lord Jesus said of Himself that the Spirit would make worshipers who worship in spirit and in truth. A cell, a courtroom, or a permit office cannot close the door between a believing heart and the Father. Pray openly where the law allows, pray quietly where it does not, and teach your children that the One who hears is never zoned out of any house.

The argument is weeks away. The question will outlast the ruling: will a free people keep the right to bow their heads in their own homes without asking anyone's leave? Gather your family tonight, open the Book, and use the liberty while it is yours.

The new Amendment 3 came out of the Republican-led legislature as House Joint Resolution 73. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins certified it for the general election. If voters say yes, it would repeal Article I, Section 36 of the Missouri Constitution, the "Right to Reproductive Freedom" language adopted in 2024. Abortion would be prohibited except in cases of medical emergency, fetal anomaly, rape or incest. For rape or incest, the abortion would have to take place within 12 weeks, and the crime would have to be reported to law enforcement at least 48 hours beforehand. The measure also bars public money from paying for abortions and prohibits gender transition procedures for minors.

The wording voters will read has been fought over in court. The ACLU of Missouri sued, calling the original summary misleading. A Cole County judge found that the summary written by lawmakers failed to tell voters the measure would repeal an amendment voters had already adopted, and it was rewritten. The Western District Court of Appeals later rewrote it again, finding the lower court's version did not adequately explain the measure's effects. Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said she disagreed with that ruling. Because the numbering repeats, a "yes" this year means the opposite of a "yes" in 2024.

Opponents have organized a campaign called Stop the Ban Missouri, which has raised nearly $2 million. The 2024 amendment passed by a margin of roughly 100,000 votes, even as President Trump carried the state by double digits.

What a ballot cannot settle

Notice what is being argued over: a number, a summary, a few lines of legal wording. Beneath all of it sits one question that no judge can rewrite. What is the child in the womb?

The Bible does not leave that question hanging. David wrote of his own beginning, and he did not speak of tissue or potential. He spoke of a person made by God.

"I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." (Psalm 139:14)

Fearfully and wonderfully made. That is not the language of an accident. It is the language of a workman who knows exactly what he is building. And the Lord told the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee" (Jeremiah 1:5). God knew Jeremiah before there was a Jeremiah anyone else could see. If He knew him then, my friend, He knows every child now.

This is why the sanctity of life cannot be a matter of fashion. A constitution can be amended. A ballot can be reworded. The worth of a human being was fixed before either one was written, because it rests on the Maker and not on the majority. Policies that treat the unborn as disposable run against that plain teaching, and a Christian is right to say so, plainly and without apology.

Grace for the wounded

But hear this part, too. Behind every statistic on this question is a real woman, often frightened, sometimes alone, sometimes carrying a burden she never chose. The same Scriptures that guard the unborn also say that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted. A believer who speaks for the child and then walks away from the mother has only done half the work. Open the church door. Help with the rent, the diapers, the long nights. Stand beside her.

And there are those who carry grief over a choice already made. The gospel has no category for a sin too large for the cross. Christ did not die for the tidy. He died for the guilty, and the offer of pardon stands open to the one who comes.

Missouri will cast its votes in a few weeks, and the outcome will matter for thousands of lives. Christians should pray, speak, give and vote as conscience under God directs. But the deepest work is not done at the polls. It is done where a person is told the truth: that every life is known to God, and that there is mercy for every sinner who turns to Him.

Under Washington law, a shelter that takes in a minor must ordinarily tell the parents within 72 hours, unless it suspects abuse or neglect. Since 2023, a shelter may instead notify the state when the child is seeking or receiving what the statute calls "gender-affirming" treatment. A group of parents, including a parent whose child had run away before, sued Governor Bob Ferguson, a Democrat. The Ninth Circuit ruled against them, finding they had no standing to bring the case.

That is the only question the Supreme Court will take up for now. It is not asking yet whether the law is right or wrong. It is asking whether a mother or father may even walk into a courtroom and object when a state law shoves them out of the decisions that govern their own child. Lawyers for the parents say the law is aimed squarely at them, and that being told you have no standing to challenge a law written about you is a strange kind of justice.

The case sits beside other matters the justices will weigh this term, among them a Colorado preschool dispute involving Catholic parishes. Together they show how much of today's legal fighting is over one old question: who has the first claim on a child, the family or the state?

Whose child is it?

Set the briefs aside for a moment and think about the father who lies awake because his fifteen-year-old did not come home. He calls the police. He calls friends. He drives the streets. Meanwhile, under this Washington policy, the building where his son or daughter sleeps may be allowed to tell the state something the father is never told. That is not a small procedural matter. It is a door closed in a parent's face at the very hour he needs it open.

I do not doubt that some homes are broken, and that some children run from real danger. Where there is abuse, the law already provides for that, and rightly. But a policy built on the idea that parents are presumed to be the threat has the matter backward. The mother and father are, in the great run of homes, the ones who love that child most and will sacrifice the longest.

Scripture does not leave this to guesswork. God placed children in families before He ever raised up a government. He charged fathers and mothers with their raising, and He did not hand that charge to a shelter, an agency, or a statehouse.

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6)

Notice who is addressed. Not the bureaucrat. The parent. And notice what the promise rests on: a long, patient, daily work that cannot be done by someone who is kept in the dark.

The deeper trouble is not a legal one

A confused child does not need to be hidden from the people who bore him. He needs somebody to tell him the truth in love: that he was made on purpose, that God does not make mistakes, and that his body is not an enemy to be corrected. The Lord Jesus said of the little ones that their angels always behold the face of the Father, and He warned in the strongest words against anyone who would cause one of them to stumble. That warning is not for parents alone. It stands over every institution that handles other people's children.

And my friend, if you are a parent whose child has wandered, hear this. The Father in heaven knows what it is to wait at the gate. The Lord told of a son who left home and wasted everything, and of a father who saw him while he was yet a great way off and ran to meet him. That father never stopped watching the road. You must not either.

Whatever the Court decides about standing, it will not settle the real matter. Laws can open a courtroom door or shut it. Only the gospel can mend a household. The one who made the family still stands ready to forgive the failing father, to hold the grieving mother, and to bring home the child who is lost. He asks only that we come to Him as we are.

Honor the justices, who bear a heavy duty, and pray that they weigh it soberly. But put your deepest trust where it belongs, in the Word that does not change when the courts and the legislatures do.

"Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward." (Psalm 127:3)

On Saturday, Oct. 3, assailants struck two villages in Riyom County and killed four Christians, sources in the area said. On Sunday, Oct. 4, gunmen attacked Angwan Tsarki village in Bokkos County. They killed two Christians and wounded three others. A resident of the area said the raid was part of an ongoing series of attacks on Christians there. A youth leader said a separate attack the same day in Mangor village also left two Christians dead.

The weekend followed what local sources described as at least twelve Christians killed over three days at the end of September in Barkin Ladi County. Death tolls in such attacks often rise as families search the bush and the wounded are counted, and the figures above were still being confirmed.

The killings fit a pattern that has held for years. Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List counted 4,849 Christians killed worldwide for their faith between Oct. 1, 2024, and Sept. 30, 2025. Of those, 3,490, or 72 percent, were Nigerians. Plateau State sits on the fault line between the largely Muslim north and the largely Christian south, and its farming villages have been hit again and again. Survivors describe raids at dusk or after dark, houses burned, and families scattering into the fields. Many return to bury their dead and find no one has been arrested.

What a grave in the farmland tells us

Numbers can go cold on the page. Eight people is eight sons, fathers, mothers, daughters. Somebody planted a crop that will now be harvested by someone else. Somebody was sitting at a table on a Saturday evening and did not expect it to be the last one.

The believers in Riyom and Bokkos did not choose to stand on the front line of anything. They chose to plant maize, raise children, and gather on Sundays to sing. That is all. And for that, in this world, they bleed. Our Lord told us it would be so. He did not say it softly.

"If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you." (John 15:18)

Here is the thing I want you to see, my friend. Christ did not promise His people safety in this life. He promised them Himself. A government has the duty to bear the sword against evildoers, and Nigeria's leaders owe these villagers real protection. The Word of God says so plainly. Praise is due to those in Washington who have pressed the Nigerian government to answer for the bloodshed, and the pressure ought to continue. But the human heart behind the gun is a matter no treaty reaches. Only the gospel reaches it.

Every life in those villages, from the child in the womb to the grandfather in his last years, is made in the image of God. That is why the shedding of innocent blood cries out. Scripture says Abel's blood cried from the ground, and the Lord heard it. He hears the cry from Plateau State this very week. No grave in that red soil goes unseen by Him.

And what of the one who pulled the trigger? He too is a soul for whom Christ died. That is hard to say with fresh graves in the picture, and I do not say it to excuse a single act. Justice must be done, and the guilty answer for what they did. But the same gospel that comforts the grieving widow also calls the killer to repent. Paul himself once breathed out threatening and slaughter against the church, and the risen Christ stopped him on the road. Nobody is beyond the reach of that mercy, and nobody is beyond its judgment if he spurns it.

The believers of Plateau State know something many in comfortable lands have forgotten. They know this world is not home. They bury their dead with weeping, and yet they sing, because they know Who holds the keys of death and hell.

"Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." (Revelation 2:10)

That promise belongs to every one of those eight, if they trusted Christ. It belongs to you, too, if you will come to Him. A crown of life is not earned by a good record. It is given to the one who leans his whole weight on the Savior who died and rose again.

The world will scroll past this story by supper. Heaven will not. Remember these believers, speak for them where you have a voice, and settle your own account with God while the day of grace lasts.

The warrants, initially kept confidential, have been made public to highlight the severity of the charges and to pressure the Taliban leadership to account for their actions. This legal action is rooted in the persistent reports of systemic oppression and violence against women and girls in Afghanistan, particularly following the Taliban's resurgence in power.

As the world watches, the ICC's move serves as a reminder of the global commitment to justice and the protection of human rights. It comes after numerous reports from human rights organizations detailing the Taliban's oppressive measures, including restrictions on women's education and employment, and other forms of Taliban gender persecution.

The room had gone quiet before anyone understood why. A stillness, as if the air itself held its breath, waiting for something to break. Then, the news of the ICC's decision swept through, a whisper that grew into a roar. In that moment, the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes came to life:

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)

One finds oneself at a crossroads, each holding a piece of the map. The ICC's actions are a call, not just to justice, but to our own hearts. How do we respond to the cries of the persecuted? What does it mean to be a voice for those who cannot speak? These questions linger, like a melody just out of reach, urging us to listen deeper.

In the face of such suffering, our response must be more than words. It must be love and truth, woven into action. The persecution in Afghanistan is a stark reminder of the world's brokenness, yet it is also an opportunity for the Church to rise in solidarity. In the quiet of our hearts, let us reflect on the small, tangible acts of support we can offer: advocating for policies that protect the vulnerable, supporting organizations that work on the ground, and most importantly, lifting up the situation in prayer. These are not small gestures; they are the very hands and feet of Christ in a hurting world.

As we turn to God, seeking His guidance on how to stand firm in the face of injustice, let this be a moment where we are drawn closer to His heart for the persecuted. Let our prayers be a balm for a world in need of healing, and may we find the courage to act, to speak, to love with the strength He provides.

The book's release has reignited discussions on the balance between civil rights and religious freedoms, a topic that remains a contentious issue in American politics. Alito's perspective is particularly noteworthy given his position on the highest court, where decisions on such matters have far-reaching implications. The Justice's remarks come at a time when the nation is grappling with the broader consequences of redefining marriage, not only in terms of legal rights but also in the realm of religious expression, further complicating the religious liberty debate.

Religious Liberty: A Sacred Trust

We often yearn for the comfort of acceptance, don't we? Yet, here we stand, faced with a challenge that cuts to the core of our convictions. The legalization of same-sex marriage, hailed by many as a beacon of equality, casts a long shadow over those who hold fast to a biblical definition of marriage. This isn't just a clash of rights — it's a collision of worlds: the right to marry and the right to religious freedom, each demanding its due in the public square, and at the heart of the ongoing religious liberty debate.

"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." (Galatians 5:1)

Scripture beckons us to stand firm in the liberty bestowed by Christ, a liberty that transcends the whims of societal approval and anchors us in the unyielding truth of divine command. The Apostle Paul's exhortation to the Galatians reverberates through time, reminding us that genuine freedom isn't found in the fleeting applause of the world, but in the enduring strength of God's word.

Choosing Faith Over Approval

In a world that often prizes acceptance over truth, walking the path of biblical principles can feel like traversing a solitary road. Yet, this is the road we are called to walk. The contrast is stark: we long for a manageable God, but we find a holy one who demands our unwavering devotion. Navigating these turbulent waters requires grace and conviction, as we hold fast to Scripture even when it clashes with the tide of popular opinion.

Justice Alito's reflections resonate with many who fear that the expansion of certain civil rights may encroach upon religious freedoms. This isn't merely a legal skirmish; it strikes at the heart of living out one's faith in the public arena. As we ponder these challenges, let us also recall the words of our Lord, calling us to be salt and light in a world yearning for the gospel's truth.

The invitation is clear and kind: turn, repent, and embrace the truth that liberates. In doing so, we discover not only the courage to stand firm in our beliefs but also the grace to extend love to those who may stand in opposition. It is this delicate balance of truth and grace that will guide us through the complexities of our times, offering a path forward in the midst of a world that is ever shifting, especially within the context of the religious liberty debate.

As the justices delved into the arguments, the complexities of the case became apparent. The plaintiffs argue that fossil fuel companies should be liable for the detrimental effects of climate change, including increased wildfires and invasive species like killer beetles. The oil companies, however, contend that such matters fall under federal jurisdiction, not local or state courts. This legal quandary has stumped the court, revealing the intricate balance between environmental stewardship and economic interests, particularly in the context of climate change liability.

"And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." (Genesis 2:15) The ancient words speak to us across the millennia, calling us to a duty that is both profound and simple: care for the earth. This isn't just a legal battle; it's a spiritual one. The courtroom may echo with arguments, but the heart of the matter is whispered in the quiet of our souls.

Who will take responsibility for the care of our planet? How do we balance industrial progress with the preservation of creation? Can we afford to ignore the cries of a wounded earth? The answer is as plain as the dirt beneath our feet: we must act.

The case before the Supreme Court is not just a legal matter; it is a moral and spiritual challenge. It demands more than deliberation; it demands introspection. As we look at the world around us, we must ask ourselves what kind of stewards we have been. Have we honored the trust given to us, or have we squandered it in pursuit of convenience and profit? The question of climate change liability looms large in this reflection.

In this moment of reflection, we are called to do more than ponder. We must act. Reduce waste. Plant a tree. Support sustainable practices. Every action, no matter how small, is a step toward fulfilling our God-given duty to "dress and keep" the earth. Write it down. Make the call. Begin with one simple act.