Do you know what John Wesley said 250 years ago about those early Methodists?

He said, our people die well.

Dear brother, we owe that to one another.

We owe it to our children and our grandchildren.

We owe it to this generation.

We might not win in the game of this life and this world. But we can live

well. By God's grace, we can die well. Welcome to the Good Faith podcast.

I'm your host, Curtis Chang.

And the Good Faith podcast is where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world. And an inescapable reality of the world,

probably at all times, not probably, certainly at all times, is the presence of suffering. And I think,

like I said, it's always been the case. But for somebody living through any particular moment in time,

like this moment in time, it can feel like there's a particular intense and high level of

suffering, especially when you read the news. You can think of the Ukraine, Gaza, and other countries.

Africa, where funding for life-saving medicines

has been cut and other suffering in our own country from the disruptive actions of this

current administration.

Now, this is not just happening in news events that we read about.

In your own personal lives, I'm sure you can identify some form of

particularly intense suffering. This could be family who are dealing with illnesses, the hard

aspects of aging. I'm especially feeling that in my own peer group of aging of their,

of parents especially, or our own emotional struggles.

In other words, suffering is ubiquitous in our world and, frankly, always has been.

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