Hello, welcome back for season two of the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris

Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies to help you build stronger

relationships, deepen your faith, and just get the most out of your life. Thank you for

joining. Let's get started. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for joining. As you can tell by the title,

we have a pretty serious topic to discuss today

pertaining to everything that's going on in the world around us. But before we get into that,

I just wanted to share some good news pertaining to the Excel Stillmore podcast. We reached a pretty

cool milestone this week. We now have 4,000 listeners. That means that over the

course of a podcast's first 90 days, 4,000 unique listeners access the program. Obviously,

you're the one to thank for that. Thank you for tuning in, sharing the program with people, and really just buying into this journey. As you know, from the very beginning, this was about me working on things, implementing them, and then just seeing if, I don't know, maybe 10 other people might want to hear about that. And yet, over the last 14 months or so,

we've had so many people talk about how this program has given them encouragement, direction,

and a lot of hope for the future. And that's certainly the intent from the very beginning.

And speaking of hope, we probably need even more

of that now than we ever have before. You know where we are. We are maybe not even halfway

into this worldwide pandemic. It is affecting every nation on the planet. The most recent numbers from the John Hopkins website tell us that 1.1 million people have been infected,

and the numbers are expected to go up exponentially over the next two weeks.

60,000 people have died. Here in America, that number is about

300,000 cases, and so far 7,000 people have lost their life in this country. We are still, as I said,

several weeks away from the peak in terms of numbers, and we just had some information given to us from the White House last week suggesting that human loss of life in America could range between 100,000 and 240,000.

This is incredible, unprecedented, and in many ways simply terrifying.

Christians, even believers, like you and me, we're looking for direction here.

What's going on?

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