We humans are destined to live in troubled times. As novelist and screenwriter William Goldman puts it in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Goldman echoes the words of Jesus, who made this clear to His followers, “In this world, you will have tribulation.” Trouble is the norm, not the exception, and troubled hearts always tend toward paralysis and polarization.

In troubled states, one wants desperately either to despair and quit, or to do something. But what?