At the Frontier

Did you know The Salvation Army is in more than 130 countries around the world?

And in the United States, it's present in every zip code—working to meet human need.

The brand promise says the organization is Doing the Most Good. And you'll often hear that The Salvation Army is in a Fight for Good.

So what does that mean?

In this episode, The Salvation Army's national leaders—Commissioners Dave and Sharron Hudson—join in to share what it is to Do Good.

The Hudsons have dedicated more than 40 years of service to The Salvation Army as ordained ministers. They share what it means to do good, their motivations and lessons learned along the way.

Find show notes for this episode and more at caringmagazine.org/podcast.

Did you know: Joy is one of our six primary emotions, which are universally expressed around the world? And it's only positive one?

While some may conflate joy with childishness and think we're supposed to get more serious as we get older, research actually shows a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health.

Experts urge us to find calm by looking inward and muting the outside world, but what if we can access joy in the world around us?

In this episode, Ingrid Fetell Lee talks about joy—how to recognize it, where to find it and ways to create it.

Ingrid is the founder of The Aesthetics of Joy and empowers people to find more joy with design. She is the author of "Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness" and her TED talk, "Where Joy Hides and How to Find It" has been viewed more than 17 million times.

Ingrid is a former design director at IDEO and has led design programs for Target, American Express and the U.S. government, among others.

Find show notes for this episode and more at caringmagazine.org/podcast.

On any given night in America, more than 550,000 people are homeless.

To put that in perspective—that's more than 8 times the capacity of Gillette Stadium, home of the SuperBowl Champion New England Patriots. It's more than the number of people who live in all of Sacramento, California, or Tucson, Arizona.

That number includes men, women and children—each with a unique story.

And while the number of those who are experiencing homelessness has declined by some 100,000 people since 2007, there is still work to be done. And it's work The Salvation Army, for one, is committed to.

That's why we turn to people like Chris Christian.

Chris was homeless on the streets of Santa Barbara, California, for nearly 5 years. He and his wife slept in their van—and eventually a tent.

Chris was a lawyer for more than 20 years prior to that. But he was called to ministry—and he found it in the midst of homelessness.

Today on the show, Chris shares what it really means to be homeless, how it feels and what the hardest part about it is. He talks about his own crisis of faith in feeling abandoned—and how the stories of struggle and pain that we see reflected in so many biblical characters became his story.

He reveals insight and compassion for those without a place to call home and he lets us in on the way out of homelessness.

Find show notes for this episode and more at caringmagazine.org/podcast.

A weekly podcast from The Salvation Army's Caring Magazine dedicated to helping you do good right where you are.