All right. So I was setting up the show today, yesterday, obviously just terrible, terrible days.

And what kept coming into my mind was an old adventure novel that I used, that I love.

It was called Scaramouche. I was written by a famous adventure story writer named Raphael Sabatini, and it begins,

Scaramush begins with a very famous line describing the hero of the story.

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad, which Sabatini

ultimately had engraved on his tombstone.

He was born with the gift of laughter in a sense that the world is mad.

And that's the way we always like to begin the show with the gift of laughter in a sense that the

world is mad. I'd go further than that and say, we love to begin the show that way. I think we all

have a good time. Tom does the backgrounds and sometimes the backgrounds are funnier than what I'm saying, and it's just, it gets us into the mood for the show, and it really, it's fun, and we enjoy it, and it reminds us as something that's really important, which it reminds us of two things, which sound like they're in conflict, but they're actually two things that go together.

And one is that the world is not just mad. It's corrupt and

it's broken and it's full of grief and sin and evil. We are living, as C.S. Lewis said, in enemy

territory. And we are, all of us, struggling with what that means and waiting for the conqueror

to come back and reclaim his creation and reclaim us, his own

people. And that's one thing that we remember. And the other is what seems like a contradiction

in terms, but is not. And that is that life is very precious. It's very beautiful. And it is

very, very short, whether like Charlie Kirk, you are cut down at 31 or whether

you live to an old age, life goes by very, very quickly. And we are called, because life is so

beautiful and because it's so short, we are called by God, our creator, to live in joy, not in heaven, but here and now in this

conquered, ruined, broken world. And that's a hard thing. That's like one of my favorite

quotes from the Gospels, one of the least quoted quotes is Jesus saying, the reason I have

told you these things, the reason is so that my joy, the reason I have told you these things.

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