Hi, everyone. This is Curtis, and I am excited to tell you about a new feature of the GoodFaith podcast and it's called Campfire Stories.

Now, in a great campfire, everyone has the opportunity to share their stories. And so, in Campfire Stories, we want to hear from you.

We want to hear a story about what you are doing along the themes of the GoodFaith podcast, perhaps it's something about how you're living out your relationships with political polarization, how you are trying to reflect the image of God in your institution and organization, or what you're doing with your money or your vocation, anything that has been sparked by the themes that we've covered here in the GoodFaith podcast is fear game.

It doesn't matter if it's a big story, a small story, or something in between, as long as it's a story about what you are doing in your life.

We're not so much interested in hearing just thoughts. We want to hear stories of doing. So, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can just click on it and then supply us the basic outlines of your story of doing of living out the themes of GoodFaith podcast.

And we'll look at it and we may invite you to share that story on a GoodFaith blog, a social media, or perhaps even invite you to come on the GoodFaith show yourself and talk to me and share your story.

Like, how cool would that be? I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to talk with you. So, please consider joining the campfire by actually joining actively and sharing your story with others gathered around the campfire. Thanks.

Welcome to the GoodFaith podcast. I'm David French with Curtis Chang. And we thought when we were trying to figure out a topic for this week and what we should discuss, Curtis had this idea that we need to maybe be a little lighter than we've been in the past few weeks.

A few weeks because we've been dealing with a lot of really heavy stuff. And somehow in the discussion about that, what we actually ended up with is we need to talk about anxiety, despair, and weariness.

So, I don't know how this is lighter, but the reason for this listeners, the reason for this is that in the days since the Dobbs decision, it has been really interesting to me to sort of take the temperature of people I interact with on both the right and the left.

And if there is one thing, a word that comes to mind when I think about the people that I've been interacting with, and this is not just related to Dobbs, it's also related to the January 6 hearings that we, that became extremely explosive last weeks with some really, really for the first time in the whole January 6 hearing process, some substantially material new allegations that there are a minority of people.

There are a minority of people who are feeling energized, a minority of people are feeling energized, and a majority of people that I'm interacting with who feel overwhelmed, they are just feeling like I can't take another huge news of it.

I can't process all of this, and I don't feel like, I really feel like I don't know what the future holds, and especially when you throw on top of this political uncertainty, you also throw into it an awful lot of economic uncertainty, and owe the fact that a war is still happening in Eastern Europe, and it's just entered into this just incredibly bloody war of attrition.

That I understand Curtis why people are feeling overwhelmed, and so, you know, a couple of podcasts ago, you've caught a couple of podcasts, you've kind of interviewed me as the legal guy about these legal developments, so I'm going to switch it around, and I'm going to kind of interview you as the pastor guy on these feelings that we're going to, that are completely understandable about feeling incredibly overwhelmed.

So, let me just start with this, when you hear that someone is feeling overwhelmed, what are you hearing?

Well, first of all, let me just say that I hear that a lot, also, and in fact, hear that in my own household, that is a description that my kids often use for how they're feeling, like that I'm just feeling overwhelmed.

It's exactly that term, and so I've been paying really close attention because obviously it's close to my home, I share some of that feeling as well, and also folks in my church, in my work place, my colleagues, secular or Christian, I think that is a consistent theme, that precise feeling of overwhelmed.

And as I've been listening in more closely and asking more questions, it's become apparent to me that that feeling of overwhelmed actually, it's in response to what is happening in the world, but it actually encapsulates at least three distinct emotional and spiritual realities.

And that I believe it's important actually to diagnose and distinguish and separate out, there's these distinct emotional realities, and there may be more than these three, but these are the three that I pick up as what everybody is throwing into this one term feeling overwhelmed.

And the three are anxiety, despair, and wearingness, anxiety, despair, and wearingness, and they can all be in response to the same kind of kind of events in the world, but they're actually different.

So if I can just illustrate anxiety is the response to uncertainty.

Despair is the certainty that things are going to turn out bad, and wearingness is just the tiredness of going back and forth amidst it all.

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