"A man spoke frantically into the phone: ""My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart!"" ""Is this her first child?"" the doctor asked. ""No!"" the man shouted. ""This is her husband!"" Any woman who has had a baby, or any husband who has been with his wife while delivering a baby, remembers how stressful those contractions can be. Perhaps that’s why Jesus compared the end times to a woman in travail of birth. It’s easy to get discouraged when we see how sinful our world has become and how far from God our society has fallen. But Jesus told us that like increasing birth contractions, so evil would increase in frequency and intensity just prior to his return. The Apostle Paul told us what to do as we see the evil increasing. He told us in Ephesians 5:16 that because the days are evil we have an even greater need to redeem the time. "