I'm sure you don't really need me to help you to recognize that we live in times of great turbulence and extremes. As Jesus was saying here we see the violence of war in various nations, not just Ukraine, but many countries throughout Africa and the Middle East, there is war. Escalating inflation brings suffering even to those who are comfortably off and misery to those who were already poor. We see destructive and dangerous weather extremes. The deadly pandemic has recently raged across the planet and still does rage in many countries. War mongering political leaders seem to have taken the stage with frayed tempers spoiling for a fight, stoking fires of conflict. Hunger threatens billions of people throughout the world. Not a great picture is it, of what's happening. And the thing to remember, of course, is that as Christians we are in no way immune to those things. I was reading through the Barnabas Fund  magazine and I'm not going to add to your despair by quoting all the different areas of problems that they face, but recognized in the magazine that that Christians in many of these places where there's conflict are not in any sense protected from those things. Gordon unwraps Luke 21 focusing on the suffering church.