 Welcome to everyone in internet land. I am Jordan Burke, your host for tonight's webinar. We start a little bit early. Hopefully we're gonna get some people joining up here shortly. For all those who are tuning in, of course, if you've signed up through spiritualdirection.com, forward slash events where we hold all of our events, you will be receiving a copy of this. We'll have it ready for you as well at the end. So if you have to tune out early or if you've tuned in late or whatever the case may be, you will have access to this. We love these webinars, we love these topics, we love these authors. We wanna make sure that everything is available and ready at your fingertips for you to grow closer in union with Christ, that's our primary goal. So tonight's webinar is on something that I am incredibly, incredibly passionate about. I've talked about it for a long time in a lot of different ways. So when my boss said, hey, we're gonna have a book called Why All People Suffer, How a Loving God Uses Suffering to Perfect Us, would you like to host the webinar? I said, absolutely, no question. Please, please, please, please. And give me a copy of the book right away. So they did, and I've just been going through it, prayerfully reading through it. And my goodness, this is a, this one is a keeper. This one is one that I've recommended to a lot of people. If you follow me on Instagram, you have seen that. And I'm really excited to dive into it today. But before we do so, I should introduce the author, Dr. Paul Chalu. Paul Chalu was born in Maine in 1960 to Paul and Dolly Chalu, the oldest of six children. He grew up in Northern Virginia and attended public schools after graduating with a chemical engineering degree from the University of Virginia in 1982. Paul worked for over 30 years as an engineer, manager and strategist for IBM and Upstate New York. While there, he also served as a catechist for 15 years at the St. Columbia Parish in Hopewell Junction, New York. But, 2015, after earning a master's degree in religious education from Fordham University and retiring from IBM, Paul was accepted into the PhD program at the Catholic University of America to study catechesis with the goal of teaching future catechists. However, his plans changed dramatically when he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease just after moving to Washington, D.C. for his studies. His new neurologist after learning that Paul was studying theology asked him why people suffer. And he had no answer since it was not his intended field of study, but the question intrigued him enough to cause him to take up the subject and boy am I glad that he did. Five years later, having earned his PhD in moral theology, Dr. Chalu wrote why all people suffer for general audiences. As a follow on to his dissertation, the grace concealed in suffering, developing virtue and beatitude which he defended at CUA on March 5th, 2020. Dr. Chalu currently teaches theology as an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America and serves as a catechist at St. Agnes Parish in Arlington, Virginia. He's been married for over 30 years to his wife Sue and they have four adult children and three granddaughters. And that has to be quite the blessing. But Dr. Paul Chalu, thank you so much for being on this webinar tonight. Thank you for having me. We were talking a little bit before we started, before we went live on kind of my joy and ironically my joy in the topic of suffering and how excited I was as I mentioned in the intro. And I noted out of all the many things and all the many notes I took down and questions I wanted to ask you about. But in the preface of the book, you start off with an incredible hook. You kind of talk about your own suffering. But I thought that was a beautiful way to get people engaged, a ramp into this topic that is so, I hesitate to say divisive but I really do believe that it is divisive in a way for those who don't understand. And so I was wondering if you'd give us a little bit of information and kind of explain what you so eloquently put in the preface and kind of a shorter form so people here could be interested and hopefully pick up the book. Right, they won't take 25 minutes to do it. Right. So this past that I came on to do suffering, it was totally unexpected to me. I did not anticipate it one bit. But in retrospect, I looked back and my whole life was set up for doing this. In 2015, as you said in my bio, I went to Catholic to study Catechetics. And when I got there, I found out I had Parkinson's. I found out just briefly, right before I got there actually, the month I was moving. And I was already committed. I mean, there was no way I was gonna go back because I'd already quit my job and told my house and bought a new house and everything else. So I was committed. But the doctor told me in New York, so this is not a death sentence. You got five or 10 years of productivity left. And you know, I was pretty kind of scary because I was looking at a five year DPHD program to start with. Right. And I had no idea I was gonna do anything to suffer at the time. I got there and I, as I said, I look for a neurologist to help me with the symptoms. And the first thing she asked me was, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm gonna be studying theology at Catholic, just starting. She says, well, why do people suffer? And I looked at her and I said, are you kidding me? Yeah. It was the first thing a doctor asked me was why you suffer. And she said, well, the reason is that nobody knows why people suffered. Everybody asked. And so I'm a doctor. I don't know why people suffer. I just treat them, but we need an answer for that. So we go study it. She was pretty insistent and it got in my head and I started doing that. And some of the things that made me, you gotta be interested in it was that I realized that so many people leave the faith because of suffering. Right. And that was intriguing to me as a catechist is to bring them back. And so, when I started looking into it, it all the pieces fell together. And the part that people think about when they read the prefaces is my personal history. Well, I was born with congenital heart defect and open heart surgery twice before I was 17. Second time they peros my arm for six weeks. I got Celiac disease as a, I got Hepatitis C from a transfusion from that. Found out 25 years later, went through the interferon ribobarine process which got rid of the Hepatitis C but left me with Celiac disease and I lost 40 pounds in the last month of it. And that destroyed my intestines. So I was a nauseous for 15 years. And now here I am, this is Parkinson's. So needless to say you are incredibly familiar with suffering. And I think- Well, some verses of suffering. Right, right. And I think that shines through because you, I don't think that you would have been able to write something. This is just my opinion here, but as I'm reading through your book, I don't know if anyone would have been able to write what you wrote without having first experienced some level of suffering like you did. It's very personal to you. But then you go on to expand on suffering in a way that I've never seen before. So when I've talked about, I've been asked to give talks on suffering and I've experienced a fair bit myself, nothing compared to what you've gone through, of course, but I always have approached it in terms of, carrying your cross, right? This is a call to all Christians. God, where Jesus said, listen, you have to take up your cross and carry me. And if you look at stations of the cross, if you study the life of Jesus, we know that carrying your cross, there's nothing easy there. There's a tremendous amount of suffering involved in that. So you have that aspect of it, but I was so impressed with, as I was reading through this, the other aspect, which is you have, I'm not saying, I don't wanna use the word clinical because I don't wanna turn people off, but thorough. You're so thorough with your research and understanding of suffering. I mean, you quote everyone, you quote everything from saints to Stoics to scripture. There's a good bit of alliteration for you. But it was so good for my brain as I'm going through this, trying to better understand something that I feel like I understand, but I should say, rather, you gave me the tools, as I mentioned before, you gave me the tools to better explain suffering to other people. And I think that's one of the beautiful aspects of this book. So if someone's gonna read it, whether they're experiencing suffering themselves or they are close to someone who is suffering, it's going to serve them either way. Yeah, well, one of the things that I tried to do when I wrote this was try to make it true. Right. I didn't want to end up writing a theology that may be a heretic. Right, right. So I took great, we delayed the book 10 weeks because we got the premature to make sure that everything was good. Right. And I took great care as I was researching it to make sure everything lined up with all the church's teachings and everything else. And you can tell when something like this is true because it all fits, all the pieces fit. Right. Because if they don't fit, you know something's wrong. Right. You know, 40 years ago, there was a book in the same genre which was called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. And his inclusion was that God was not powerful. God was good, but God was not powerful enough to stop suffering. Right. And from my perspective, you look at that and you say that can't be right because God is all powerful. Right. And that's how, and so I needed to make it a case that transcended all the existential questions that fit with all the Catholic teaching of what who God is, who man is, how they relate to each other, what the purpose of life is, all that stuff is brought into this discussion. Right. And you did it in such a good way because you did speak about that book and I believe the author had lost his son which was the impetus for him writing that book. And you were very careful, I appreciated how careful you were to say, this is what he said and you correctly navigated the waters of, I don't agree with what he came up with at the end, here is my thoughts and here is what scripture says, here is what the saints say, here, all these different things. So it wasn't a, there's nothing argumentative about it. The entire book is very much just presenting the reader with the facts of the faith. And yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I agree with that. And I was trying to be careful about that because I respected, you know, he saw four million copies. Right, right. So he had an audience and he recognized the audience and that they had needs. And I was, I'm shooting for the same audience. So what I was trying to do was build from what he did and show where the gaps were. And the gaps are understandable because he was Jewish and he didn't have the Christian feeling about redemption suffering that we get. Sure. And that made it hard for him to make that extension. Sure. Well, and even to your point, I think there are so many, at least in my experience in the conversations that I've had of people, there's even in Catholic circles, there's such a misunderstanding of suffering. It's as I kind of mentioned before, it's almost a divisive topic. I mean, I remember the first time someone told me to offer it up and I don't want to jump too far ahead in your book into redemptive suffering because that's a little bit farther end, but I didn't understand what that meant, right? And for those who don't understand suffering and its graces, which I'd love to get into, but are told to offer it up, it's kind of a aggressive response. You know, I'm just looking for someone to say, oh man, I'm so sorry you're going through that instead of me hearing offering it up. But the reality of the situation is, as you know, offering it up offers so much more in terms of grace and virtue building than someone kind of capitulating to my sadness. Well, the way to think about offering it up is that what you're doing is recognizing that your suffering is helping somebody else. And by offering it up, you are recognizing that and you're trusting that somebody else is benefiting from that, even though you don't know. That's a leap of faith. Right. And when you're willing to, when you, there are four steps to suffering, four tasks of suffering. I don't know if you want to get into it right now. Yeah, please, please. So the four tasks of suffering are to bring you from sin to salvation are all about teaching love. The first one, the first task of suffering is, is to build virtue within you. And it works with simple feedback loops. If you drink too much, you feel sick. You don't do it again. You eat the wrong things. You feel, you feel sick. You don't do it again. You go out in the cold without a coat, you get cold. You credit a coat on. All those things teach you what you need to do for proper self-love. Even things like when you deal with somebody if you don't deal with them fairly and they get mad at you, that's teaching you how to treat people fairly. And that's how the virtues were built and that's what built the great societies of the antiquity, of antiquity, with just that level of suffering. And you don't need to believe in God to learn those lessons from suffering because you just react naturally. You try to avoid the suffering. Now the second task of suffering is to orient you to God. You're just doing good things. It's not enough. You got to be oriented toward God. And so if you go through the path that we just talked about and you start recognizing and you do it well enough and you start recognizing that all these things are goodness and there's something that's driving it and all that and you come to God. Some other people don't get that way though. Some people are like St. Paul who have to be thrown off the horse and blinded to see the light, right? So they have to, so they get some kind of suffering that they cannot solve on their own. And so they have to turn to God because there's nobody else to turn to. Now the third task of suffering is unleashing love of neighbor. And that one is you can learn to love and to be loved because of people in need. You can get empathetic with people when you see people suffering. Well, he does a natural thing for people and it's built into us. And then the fourth thing is redemptive suffering to suffer as God does. And that's when you recognize that your suffering is benefiting somebody else. And you're willing to do it because it's for the good of God and for the good of the other person. And that's what Jesus did, right? Jesus suffered not for his own sins, but for us. And so when you love as Jesus does, you will get glorified as Jesus does. And that's the salvation for it. So if you didn't have suffering, you wouldn't learn any of that stuff. You wouldn't even know when you were doing right from wrong, if you didn't have suffering, that was the result of that. Right. So suffering is a gift because it tells you what you need to do. It's God revealing himself to us. Right, right. And so for those taking notes, the first task, developing human virtues and proper self-love. The second task, reorienting the soul to God. Third task, unleashing love. And the fourth task, redeeming the sufferer. I love that breakdown. And then furthermore, you also broke down. So that's a breakdown of rethinking suffering, which I thought was an absolutely brilliant way to open the book, really showing people, okay, here's the deal. We have suffering that is undeniable. There is pain, there is hurt, there is sadness, there is sorrow. All of these things exist in the world. All of these things we're going to experience in our life, without a doubt it's gonna happen. Now, we need to rethink how we are currently handling those situations. What does that mean? And that's exactly what you just broke down. Those four tasks, as you call them, of rethinking suffering. But you also broke the book down into three sections and I was kind of curious if you would be able to kind of expand into why you did that specifically. Well, the first section of the book explains redefine suffering so that you understand what suffering is. And I needed to do that to get people on the baseline, to understand the baseline. But the big question everybody has is why am I suffering? Why is this my particular problem? And there's four types of evil, because suffering is your ability to detect evil. And there's four types of evil. Physical evil, which is environmental stuff. Natural evil, which is basically food chain, which is with living features. And then suffering of sin and suffering of punishment. And I needed to go through that in detail. And it was kind of like a four by four matrix, right? Because I got four tasks of suffering into four types of evil. And I was trying to figure out a good way to do that. I ended up with this way. And so I explained in each piece in the second section explains natural evil, physical evil, evil of sin and the evil of punishment. And I can tell people who are listening from reading this book and have gone through some suffering myself, being able to read this and read it in that particular framework and that four by four or however you want to describe it was really beneficial. And it really breaks it down in a way that is so understandable and relatable. And it helped me even understand, which is interesting because I thought that I understood my own suffering fairly well and the different instances that I've gone through. But this helped me go a little bit deeper or even helped me kind of solidify some of the thoughts that I had already had regarding what I had gone through or maybe just give me different wording along the same way. This book is so quotable. Again, I mentioned that to you before we started. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think you were thinking that I meant some of the same, you quote, Salviqi Dolores, John Paul II, Aquinas and the summa. But you have different parts in this book. I think I have highlighted more of your words than I've highlighted from the saints. You have a very skilled way of putting their writings into a very succinct manner. Is that something, I know this is a question more kind of the form of the book, but is that something that you found as you were going through the book that it was just easier to bring it down? Or what was, you know, maybe it was a movement of the Holy Spirit. What was kind of the process there? Well, I wrote this book at four o'clock in the morning every morning. I'm honest, to be honest. I woke up in the middle of the night every night for six months and said, I got to write this down. I got to write this down. It's just coming to me in the middle of the night. And if you've got Parkinson's disease, you also wake up in the middle of the night anyway, but I wrote 90% of the book between four and 7 a.m. Wow, wow, wow. And the quotes just came out. Right. And then at the end I looked at it and said, hey, that's pretty quotable. Yeah, so it sounds like there's a lot of Holy Spirit movement going on and I think that answers that. Well, I think if you read the preface that kind of comes out too. Right, right. These things can't happen without a whole lot of unexplainable things that just happened. People get thrown into the path that you don't, that for various reasons, just for five minutes, but it's enough to make a difference. Right, no, you're absolutely right. Right, no, yeah, that's, that one was one of the most striking things of this whole story that if it wasn't for that doctor, this book may not have existed. Have you had contact with her after all of this and kind of explained? Well, the last appointment I had with her before she passed me on to some other people because I was exceeding her capabilities, I think, my problems were, but she, I handed her my dissertation. So here's your answer. Yeah. I think we shocked. Well, and it's funny. So before you were telling me that your dissertation, so I had noted that in this book, you'll find that there are 538 citations total for 272 pages, meaning that there is a, we did rough math, that's roughly about two citations per page. So there's no lack of reference material for this entire book, which I don't want to, to scare people away. It's a beautiful thing because it, well, actually, would you be willing to give the breakdown that you gave me in terms of the citations that you used and the numbers? Yes, sir. So, so roughly speaking, there's 140 citations that are scriptural. So I'm pulling out scriptural stories to explain this stuff. So there's a hundred from the Catechism. There's 50 from John Paul II, mostly from Selvavici Dolores and 50 from Thomas Aquinas and a hundred from everybody else. Right. So, so 300, 340 of the 538 or, or, or three, four sources, which is incredible. Real sources. Right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, JP2 is the same. Right. So I want people to, I want people to hear that. So they know that as they're going through this, as I mentioned, there's no shortage of, of material that you can go back and reference. But also it should, God willing, spark an interest to dive deeper into these other, these other topics. So, well, it's the same topic, but these other writings of these saints and whatnot to help kind of mold and better understand the entirety of faith. Because you did, again, you did a great job of pulling it all together and addressing this topic of suffering. I, I would, I would be remiss if I didn't read some of my favorite quotes real quick because I know our audience and I know that we, we're going to get some questions and I'll go through a few very, very quickly here because I want to ask you some other questions that I guarantee you people are going to ask whenever they start typing in the chat box. But in terms of suffering as an evil detector, you wrote, Joy is not an opposition to suffering. It is the outcome of successfully meeting its challenges and completing its tasks. You're talking about evil helping us or I'm sorry, suffering, helping us understand the evil in our lives. I, it's one of those quotes that I highlighted and I just had to sit on for quite some time. Following that, though, suffering in that same chapter, evil then is not opposed to good at all. Instead, it is a lack of good. So you're not just helping us understand suffering and its framework, but you're helping us understand the entire process of the world and how it works in a way. And I know that wasn't, I know that the intention of the book was to cover suffering but I thought it was a very powerful tool to do that. And I was, so I don't know, without getting too much into it because I want people to go out to buy the book, speaking of which, if you are going to, if you've been interested by why all people suffer, I think our producers have been popping it up on screen. You can see all my notes I've been taking here and my highlights. You can get it from Sophia Institute Press, why all people suffer from Sophia Institute Press. But in terms of questions that I know that people are going to ask, I think there's, I'm sure you're familiar with a lot of these but there are a couple of big ones. One of them that people have asked quite often is, how is suffering not a punishment from God? And you've covered a little bit but I was wondering if you cared to expand a bit more on that. Well, it's never, it's not, it can be a punishment from God but it's not necessarily, not usually a punishment from God. It's God directing us to what he wants to do. Right. And what he's doing is he's making evil the things that are threatening us, the things that are bad for us uncomfortable. And it's persistent. It doesn't stop. He's God is persistent and he's not, he doesn't just give up and say, okay, you can go do it now. Right. It doesn't hurt you anymore. It's going to stay, it's going to continue to hurt. So what he's doing is directing you and that's not punishment. Right. And God's punishment is not what people think of as punishment either. God's punishment is rebuilding, it's rebuilding goodness. So what he's doing is putting it back on the straight path so that you can get to the ultimate happiness which is communion with him. Right. So it's not about, it's to build up not to break down. Right. So that's, so people think that God is raffle and destroying them. They're not, they don't know God at all. I mean, that's why I use the story of the prodigal son. Using the prodigal son, the prodigal son, of course, if you don't give me 30 seconds to go through the story of it. But you have as much time as you want. But the prodigal son wanted to want to live his own life and wanted to leave his father and told his father, give me half my inheritance. And he did. And the son wouldn't waste it at all. He found himself in a strange land without any money, without any food. He's feeding the pigs and thinking my father's servants are treated better than this. Maybe I'll go back home and be a servant. And when he gets back, the father's been waiting for him. And when he gets back, the father runs to him and gives him a big hug and treats him like a king. And his brother is astounded. And he said, look, he was dead, but he sounds found. He's back. That's what we want. So that's what God wants. He wants his back. So that's what suffering is, is to bring us back. And suffering brought the prodigal son back, too, because he was suffering. He was starving. And he needed food. And that's what brought him back. So there's a perfect, perfect parable for this discussion. Right. It's one of my favorite parables as well. And it's one that I relate to personally. I was very much the prodigal son for quite some time. And in that level. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah. And you're right. I mean, there's there's a level of suffering. I call it hitting. I guess some saints would call it the dark night of the senses. But it is a. It's such a powerful parable. As you said, to kind of explain this conversation for those who are still kind of like, OK, I this is making sense. I'm not entirely sure how can suffering build virtue? And you do talk about that. Would you be willing to expand on that as well? Sure. So just think about about self love the way that that let's start with temperance. You know, if you eat too much, you feel sick. It's teaching you. And so you start eating less. When you eat less, you don't you don't feel sick. So you say, I got I got it. I eat this much. If you eat the wrong drinks, the wrong thing, same thing. If you if you if you if you mistreat somebody, they're going to be angry with you. And you and you and that's uncomfortable. And and you will continue to learn from that and you will learn how to deal with people by how they react to you. You cause them suffering. They'll they'll cause you suffering back. And those things will will will will will build virtue because and if you think about it, everything that you learn is because of these negative feedback loops if if you if you do something and it doesn't feel good, you don't do it anymore. Right. And if it does feel good, you do it more. Now, you can be fooled by that to some degree. But but in the end, suffering is a very good indicator of good and bad. Right. Well, we're about at the 30 minute mark. Would you be willing? We have some questions that have come in in the chat box and to kind of close this out. Would you want to answer some of those questions? Sure. Fantastic. Fantastic. Our producer is going to pop one up on the screen here. I have an atheist friend who always asked me if God exists and he is good. Why do innocent children have to suffer horribly? What would you tell her? Well, innocent children. I mean, it's like like the one that. Rabbi Kushner, son. Right. They're going to go to heaven anyway. They're martyrs. They're here for you. They're here to to to teach the people around them to love better, to love more, more fully. And everybody, everybody has made perfectly for their role in in this life, even the even the severely disabled, even the people that are or are suffering, suffering from the moment of their birth. And there's a discussion of typhax in the book, which is a very, very virulent disease where the people, where the children never lived past the age of five and they go through blindness and everything else on the way there because there's a fatty buildup in their brain that just destroys their brain. So they go through all kinds of suffering for their whole life and they die by the age of five. Now, those kids are or martyrs. They have done nothing wrong and they're fulfilling their role. It's for their parents and the people around them that see that. And the parents will say, I don't want to, I didn't want to learn from that, but you know, you learn to love very, very fundamentally from that. Right. Because you were loving somebody not because they're going to be successful or because they're a children of God that were candid to you to take care of. And if you think about that, you got them for five years to teach you or to teach you what you need to know about love and you remember them and you'll be reunited with them if you've learned the lessons. Right. And that's the way I would answer it. And the other thing I would tell them is that all natural evil, which is this is the form of natural evil, teaches us about mortality too. Is there something bigger than us that we're not all powerful? Right. And that's another like message that we all need to have too. That's why everybody dies. Yep, that's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. Yeah, there's so much to be said about understanding the redemptive quality of suffering in such a broad context in the sense that I was thinking as you're explaining this in the beauty of learning love and all that and kind of reflecting on my own story where if it wasn't for the suffering that I went through personally I would not have come back to the church. Right, so there's just so many steps involved to this that when you embrace suffering as we should, it can change lives, not just your own but the lives of those around you especially in the case of the death of an innocent child. So the next question we have here. Do you believe and will you please speak on how our sufferings can be a calling to surrender to God's will? Well, suffering is to be heeded. Suffering is telling you what God wants from you and it is to be heeded. So yes, it is to be calling to surrender to God's will from that perspective. Right. I mean, everybody suffers for a reason. You know, I gave an example in an interview recently about somebody who was really rich and it was keeping them from focusing on faith in anything else. So it was taken away from them. That was a great grace. They didn't recognize that it's a grace but it was a great grace because they had to spend on something other than their money. And people who are successful find, you know, rely on themselves that way. And they think it's, and they don't realize it's all a gift. Right. Hmm. All right. Next question, please producer. How do you find ways to thank God or be grateful during moments of severe suffering? Well, I can tell you that those problems quite often. And, you know, usually what I'm thinking about is God, please help me through this. And giving the strength to get through this interview or through through mass sometimes, just that simple kind of thing. And it's about, it's just a matter of keeping perspective of what's going on. Right. Because if you think about, you know, if you're thinking that God's treating you wrongly, then you will have a hard time doing that, being thankful and grateful. But if you recognize that it's all for the good, and Catherine from Sienna had a quote in there saying that, you know, all those people that feel that they're being just used to recognize that everything from God is, everything is from God, it's all toward the greater goal of salvation. Right. And that's, if you keep that in mind when you're suffering, you've got to recognize, you can start thinking about, why am I suffering? You know, is it to show other people that, that in my case, you know, for credibility for the whole book and everything else. Right, right. You know, and so I think about those kinds of things when I'm suffering. Right. It reminds me of a uniformity with God's will by St. Alfonso Liguria, one of the doctors of the church, and he basically breaks down that everything is either willed or permitted, one of the two, willed or permitted. So when you look at it from that framework too, you understand, okay, here's the deal. God is either willing this for some reason, and that is always for my own good, or it's being permitted for some reason, which is also for your own good. Right. Well, it's not always for your good. Sometimes it's for the good of somebody else. Right, right, right, yes. And if he comes through, you're good when you recognize that's redemptive. Yes, yes. If you were participating in God's plan for somebody else's salvation, and be thankful for that, that's redeeming. Good, good, that's a great qualification. Well, let's do a few more questions here. Alone in my prayer closet, I am overcome by the suffering of others, and I weep. How does this help them? Overcome by the suffering of others, and I weep. Well, you're showing solidarity with them, and that's good for you. And that's a building in your soul. How did it help them? It helps them just to recognize that you're suffering with them, and you're showing solidarity with them, and people need that. See, one of the things that, let me give you a good example. My mother is very ill, and she's, and it's very hard to see her in this condition. She's in a nursing home, and she can't move anything into her body at this point, and she's in pain all the time, and she can't communicate. And it's really hard to sit there and watch that, but you do, because you're sharing in their suffering, and because you're being there is good for that makes them feel better, makes you feel worse, but makes them feel better, and you're sharing in that suffering. That's redemptive for both of you. I like that a lot. And speaking of which, I will keep you both in my prayers. I need to say that before we get to the end, because we are coming to the end here, but we have time for a few more. God created us in His image and likeness, yet in our human bodies they reach a point in old age where the body gives out, and there is pain and suffering. Why did God plan humanity this way? I give you two reasons. One reason is that God wants us to recognize that there's something better than this life. And so it lets us go, let go. And it makes you realize that there's something else bigger than us. See, life on earth is a trial to test. It's a period of time that we decide whether we want to love God or not. And so old age is for everybody is breakdown and pain and suffering. And what it's teaching us is that we're mortal. There's something bigger than us, and that we need to reconcile with God. And let me tell you, if you have a terminal disease, that is a blessing. And let me tell you why it's a blessing, because it allows you to reconcile. If you told you that six months to live, you have six months to reconcile with God and with all your neighbors and to create your legacy, do everything you wanna do. Get hit by a bus, you don't get that. And people don't think of it as a blessing, but when I was told you got Parkinson's and you got five or 10 years of functionality left, that's not something that makes you feel good about, but it also is a warning that you got five or 10 years to do something and do something with it. I'm six years into that, so. Well, let's skip the next one. What's that? Sorry, producer's flashing me hand signals. Go ahead and give me, yeah. If your suffering stems from sin, like guilt and immense remorse, can that suffering still be offered up or should it just be accepted as something you deserve or both? Well, if you suffer for your own sin, you're recognizing that God is doing that to show you that that's something you should avoid. Right. And so you should be remorseful and heat it by... And there's two things that you gotta do. The first thing is you have to fix what you've broken. Right. The second thing you need to do is to be a witness to it, to let people know that this is what happened and why it was bad and why, because you're a messenger of God when you suffer. God has given you a message about what he wants and what he doesn't want, and you should tell everybody else that too. You know, sufferers aren't sinners and whiners, they're messengers. And we need to think about it that way. Well, that is something that I'm going to, I wrote down, I'm gonna have to meditate on quite a bit. Suffers are messengers. I can't think of a better way to end this. Thank you so much, Dr. Paul Chaloux. This is, or Dr. Paul Chaloux is the author of Why All People Suffer. And you can see all my notes and stuff. It's worth getting a fresh highlighter when you read it because you're gonna be highlighting quite a few things if you're anything like me and dog-earing all the pages. You can pick that up from Sophia Institute Press, SophiaInstitutePress.com where you can get some of the best, in my opinion, the best books on all things, Catholic faith, all different topics. Dr. Paul Chaloux, where can people find your work? Do you have anywhere that you'd like to send them in particular website or anything? Well, you can see some of my stuff on PaulChaloux.com. Perfect. And finally, how can we pray for you? Everyone watching this, everyone, you know, kind of who is gonna get the recording, all of that. Just do your normal prayers. Oh my God, you got it. Thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate this conversation. I'm sure that many other people did. And again, just thank you. Welcome. Have a great night. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. And yeah, I guess that's it.