The Joy of the Lord is Now in Very Short Supply

 We are among the most blessed nations to have ever existed.  Food everywhere.  Hot showers for everyone.  None need to worry about being dragged from their homes to be tortured and killed.  Concrete highways allow everyone to drive door to door anytime they want, anywhere they want.  

So how come Americans are so unhappy?  

Simple answer;  when we reject Jesus and fail to be thankful for the privilege of being an American with blessings at our fingertips and then focus on this brief life and have no hope for the future, it leads to depression.

When we reject God’s Word and start believing we are all victims in some way, it can lead to anxiety that our gender is wrong, our pronouns are wrong, our skin color is wrong, our income is wrong, our marriage is wrong, our kids are wrong.  “My life sucks!  Why me?!  I’m so depressed.  I need some pills!”

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We live in an age of growing mental illness. Those developments are particularly dangerous in a society suffering dramatic increases in mental disorders. Rates of depression and anxiety among Americans have risen dramatically since 2010, especially among the young, as have suicide rates. A study published in 2022 found that more than 20% of adults described their mental health as “fair” or “poor,” and about one-third of adult respondents said they feel anxious much of the time.

We live in an age of loneliness. Almost half of all Americans said they have three or fewer friends, according to a 2021 study by the Survey on American Life – in 1990 the figure was 27%. As rates of marriage and birth also decline, we are increasingly becoming a society of people with no one to talk to but themselves.

We live in an age of increasing political violence. Such action is still blessedly rare, but the left’s broad defense of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020 and the right’s less forceful but significant efforts to downplay the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol have helped legitimize political violence as a response when society fails to conform to people’s expectations. The two attempts on Trump’s life this summer, and the bizarre manner in which much of the media has shrugged them off, suggests a frightening normalization of the pursuit of one’s desires by any means necessary.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/12/14/a_cauldron_of_cultural_forces_threatening_our_body_politic.html