Look, if you're going to be a physician, you're going to be an oncologist, like you're going to watch a lot of people die.

And the mission is not just about saving everybody, because we all know, nobody gets out alive.

I am going to be with you in this.

This is the theme of the biblical arc.

I am with you looking at you, looking at me and my gaze upon you with loving kindness,

even in the face of this horrible thing that is happening.

Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang, and the Good Faith podcast is a production of Redeeming Babel.

And it's where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world.

And joining me today is my friend, Dr. Kurt Thompson. Dr. Kirk Thompson. Kurt, welcome. Curtis, so great to be with you.

Thanks so much for the invitation. Always a pleasure. Well, Dr. Kurt Thompson, he's a psychiatrist that

has written a number of well-received books, including the soul of shame and the soul of desire.

And he's out with an excellent

new book that I have a chance to read and offer a testimonial for. It's called the deepest

place, suffering and the formation of hope. So, Kurt, you have written about so many other

topics connecting faith with aspects of mental health, desire,

shame. Why suffering now? What triggered your move into this topic?

Yeah. There's clearly a progression of the books that I've written from the first one on.

Each subsequent book has grown out of something

that came from the book that preceded it. And this is no different. And I think that in the in the

course of doing the work on the most recent book on desire and beauty, it became clear that if that is the world that we truly long for

and want to co-create with God as we anticipate his new heaven and earth coming, that in that

book there is a series of four questions that we explore, one of which Jesus putting to James and

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