The 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 as I think any Christian trying to make sense of the world, a question that should NAGOS is,

why are there poor people? Why are they extremely poor people like the homeless?

I bike three times a week on a trail near my home called the Lascados Creek Trail.

In the past years, there's been a proliferation of homeless encampments and whenever I bike past these

encampments that are made of plastic coverings and shopping carts and it I'm

reminded of this quote from a book that we will be discussing today, but the

epigraph to this book has a quote from Leo Tolstoy. And the quote is,

we imagine that their sufferings are one thing

and our life another.

And I think what Tolstile saying is that

is when we look at people who seem to be suffering,

it can be very tempting to view them as completely other,

have their life as completely alien to us.

And as a result, when I am writing my bike past those encampments,

I'm struggling with the sense of this is like an alien experience,

almost alien people.

And I struggle then to humanize these people who are living in these tents,

to recognize them as fellow humans made in the image of God,

because I don't understand their experience. It seems so alien to us.

And that's just a basic human reality. If you is very difficult to humanize another, if you don't know why this other person

...