Venezuela Earthquakes, Reflecting Pool Vandalized & A Doctor's Fear — June 26, 2026

This is The Gospel Briefing. I'm Charles King. Today... a Venezuelan city sits under rubble, and a Houston neighborhood answers the phone. A missionary doctor with Ebola admits he was terrified. And the King of England announces he's not moving back into the palace. Headlines... Heartbeat... Hope. Let's get into it. [TRANSITION] We start in Venezuela. Two earthquakes. Both above magnitude seven. Seconds apart. Shallow, which means the ground didn't absorb the blow — buildings did. At least two hundred thirty-five people are dead. More than four thousand three hundred are injured. Rescuers are still pulling bodies and, occasionally, survivors from concrete in towns near the Colombian border. Seismologists say something unusual happened here. Two separate fault lines appear to have ruptured almost simultaneously in a region where several faults intersect. The earth, in effect, broke twice. And here's the part of this story that I keep coming back to. Almost immediately, in Houston — a city with one of the largest Venezuelan diaspora communities in the United States — neighbors started organizing. Donation drives. Wire transfers. Phone trees to check on grandmothers in Caracas and cousins in Mérida. You can learn something true about the human heart from that. When the ground gives way, people who left that ground twenty years ago still feel it move. Scripture has a phrase for this. Paul writes in First Corinthians 12, "If one member suffers, all suffer together." He was talking about the church, but the instinct runs deeper than that. We were made for one another. The body of Christ in Houston is wiring money to a body of Christ in Venezuela this morning, and that is not a small thing. That is the gospel walking around in work boots. Pray for Venezuela today. And if you know someone Venezuelan in your city... call them. They are not okay. And they should not have to ask. [TRANSITION] Next story. Washington. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — that long rectangle of water between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument — was vandalized this month. The National Park Service confirmed Thursday that someone took a sharp knife or a razor to the rubber liner at the bottom. They cut it. On purpose. The pool had just undergone a sixteen million dollar rehabilitation. Foam sealant. New liner. The works. And someone, for reasons we don't yet know, decided to slice it open. I'll be honest. When I first read this, my reaction was small. A pool. Some foam. Who cares. But sit with it for a second. That reflecting pool is where Martin Luther King Junior delivered "I Have a Dream." It's where veterans gather on Memorial Day. It is, in a real sense, a shared room of the American house. And someone walked in and took a knife to the floor. Proverbs 14:34 says, "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." The condition of the small things — the shared things, the things nobody owns but everyone uses — tells you something about the spiritual condition of a people. When citizens stop loving the commons, they start cutting them. This is a small story. But small stories are sometimes the honest ones. [TRANSITION] Third story, and this one is from Christianity Today. His name is Peter Stafford. He's a missionary doctor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In his village of Nyankunde, they don't call him Doctor Stafford. They call him Papa de Luke. Father of Luke. Luke is his son. Last year, Peter Stafford contracted Ebola while treating patients during the most recent outbreak. He survived. Barely. And in the interview Christianity Today published this week, Stafford says something that I think a lot of Christians need to hear. He says he trusted God completely. And he was still terrified to die. Both of those were true at the same time. We sometimes preach a Christianity where faith and fear can't coexist. Where if you're really trusting Jesus, your hands shouldn't shake. That is not what the Bible teaches. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus Himself — the sinless Son of God — sweat drops of blood and asked the Father if there was any other way. There was not. He went anyway. Psalm 56:3 puts it as plainly as it can be put. "When I am afraid, I put my trust in you." Notice the order. Fear first. Trust second. Faith is not the absence of fear. Faith is what you do with your fear. Peter Stafford recovered. He's back in the clinic. His son Luke still has a father. Pray for missionary doctors today. And let go of the idea that real faith never trembles. [TRANSITION] Quick briefs. The United Nations maritime agency has paused evacuations of ships through the Strait of Hormuz after an attack on a vessel this week. About twenty percent of the world's oil passes through that strait. Pray for the sailors. Pray for de-escalation. Psalm 107 reminds us it is God who stills the storm and quiets the waves of the sea. In Washington, the Supreme Court handed down rulings giving the Trump administration broader authority to set immigration policy. Christians will disagree about the policy. That's fair. But Romans 13 calls us to honor governing authority while Leviticus 19 calls us to love the foreigner among us. Both verses are in the same Bible. Hold them both. House Democrats are publicly fighting after socialist candidates won several New York primaries this week. Capitalism versus socialism is now an open argument inside the party. Scripture doesn't endorse an economic system. It does endorse honest weights, generous hearts, and the dignity of work. Any system that loses those loses the plot. And King Charles the Third announced he will not move back into Buckingham Palace after its renovation. He also became the first British monarch to publicly disclose the taxes he pays. A king downsizing. There's a sermon in there somewhere, but I'll let you find it. [TRANSITION] Today's verse is from Psalm 46, verses one and two. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea." The psalmist had never been to Venezuela. But he knew. He knew that one day the ground would shake under someone, and they would need to know where God was when it did. He is a very present help. Not a distant one. Thanks for listening to The Gospel Briefing. If today's episode helped you, send it to one person who needs steady ground this weekend. I'll see you Monday.