Stories about helpless feelings, depression and anxiety are commonplace now. I mention this in the very first chapter of the book Why Is This Happening?! with statistics about suicide and depression. There was a growing sense of hopelessness and despair prior to Covid 19 but it seemed to accelerate quickly once the pandemic hit. You are not alone. Various studies show that close to half of all people in the U.S. are regularly feeling periods of depression. That is not normal so let’s look at why that is. We want to help you understand why you can have hope in hopeless times, and you can have joy when many people are unhappy or depressed.

There are thousands of places you can go to online that offer a variety of vague, useless ideas on how to improve your outlook. They’re very predictable and include the usual ideas like “find someone you can talk to”, “seek help” and other vague ideas. What I’m going to give you here will not agree with what you are hearing around you, but it’s intended to be true help. It’s not an end-to-end solution yet, but in time I hope this site can get there.

If you’ve read my book, Why Is This Happening?!, you’ve been introduced to the idea that there is a single, objective truth that exists in the world. The source of that truth is the creator of the whole universe, who we typically refer to as God. You’ve probably seen a reference to god before with a small “g” because lots of people talk about God but there is only one true God so his name deserves to be capitalized. There is ample evidence that God is real and I review some of my personal favorite categories in the book. I also list a number of the books and websites in the last chapter.

This is such a big topic but stick with me and I’ll try to provide a relatively concise summary because I’m sure you’re anxious to find that hope. For now, let me abbreviate Why Is This Happening?! with a simple acronym, WITH. The general gist of WITH is that God created the universe and our world, and he sets the rules by which it operates. Some of those rules are absolute like the law of gravity. Others are God’s own preferences for how we think and act, but he gives us free will with which we can choose to live by his guidance or reject him. In WITH, I discuss the biblical concept of the wide path and the narrow path. The wide path refers to the path that the majority of people choose in life. That’s why it’s the wide path. The majority of people choose to create their own truth and not believe that God is real and that his word, the Bible, is the single objective truth I mentioned. The much smaller percentage of people who choose to believe in God and follow his guidance are on “the narrow path.”

When a society chooses to live as God wants us to, they are blessed by God. Throughout the Old Testament, there are stories about ancient countries being judged as an entire nation together. In other cases, they were blessed together – typically with periods of peace. These are verifiable stories where non-Biblical, secular historians have written historical accounts that align with the Bible.

The United States has been blessed for many years because it was founded as a Christian nation. Many people today dispute that because they want to obfuscate the truth and keep people from giving God any credit. Now we’re starting to get somewhere. If the Bible is true, which I’m absolutely convinced that it is, then it tells us that the majority of what we hear from our culture is actually lies. Some of that information is intentional, deceitful lies, but much of it is just ignorance of the true nature of the world we live in. It is therefore ignorant of the one, true God and his guiding principles. If you have some doubts about the Christian history of the United States, visit wvw.wallbuilders.com because they have plenty of evidence there.

Meanwhile, we’re making some great progress toward that hope you’re looking for. It may seem hard to believe but up until the early 1960’s, we used to have daily prayer to God in public schools in the United States and we had Bible teaching – in public schools. Every child in the U.S. grew up hearing about the one true God. They heard that God created us all, loves us all and will judge us all. Though people were guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution that they could practice whatever religion they wanted without interference from the federal government, the majority of citizens were Christians of some sort. As a result, the entire society benefited from the Christian morals shared by the majority of the people.

Children grew up in stable families where they felt safe, and they experienced the love of both a mother and father. Even recent studies continue to show that children who grow up in families with conservative values (typically based on Christian beliefs) are far less likely to experience depression.

Now you’re probably saying “Ya, I get it that society has changed dramatically, and we don’t care about doing what’s right or about each other the way we used to. Where’s the hope in that?” First we need to understand why we are feeling sad and depressed lately. It’s the natural result of a society that is running against the tide, rebelling against the rules that God laid out for us. Though our culture desperately wants to eliminate all semblance of consequences for everything, the reality is that there are consequences, even if you personally haven’t done much to deserve those consequences. We are experiencing national and world consequences that effect everyone regardless of their role.

Our society is breaking down worldwide as our culture tries to make up its own rules. Each time we decide that we can make up our own rules, like deciding that God created more than two sexes and we can redefine what we are, we experience additional consequences. That’s not going to intuitively make sense to many people today because our culture tells us over and over that there are no consequences for anything and that truth is relative.

You’re caught in the middle of this battle. You’ve been doing what the majority of society has been leading you to do, but it keeps pulling you further and further away from God. Even those who do believe in God as who he says he is will still experience the consequences of being surrounded by a larger group of people who are rebelling against God. It gets tiring!

First of all, we need to understand our situation, and you are now closer to that understanding. In other words, you need to know what game you’re playing in. If you try to play volleyball by using the rules of football, you’ll fail miserably, but we’ve been playing in the game of life with a new set of rules that the culture slowly evolved into and it’s not meshing well with the realities of the game we’re actually playing. To make it worse, an increasing majority of the players on the floor are forcing everyone to play by the new rules and making the situation worse! They are even yelling at, labeling, and coercing the players that are trying to play by the original set of rules. You can imagine the chaos that would create in a real game of volleyball with more and more of the players trying to play with football rules.

Reading the book, Why Is This Happening?! is the best way to understand the details of what is going on. There’s a link to buy it on the main page. It’s not something that can just be quickly explained in five minutes because it’s kind of involved, yet in the end it’s very simple.

Once you understand why we’re in the situation that we’re in, and how to recognize signs of it, you’ll be able to interpret the root causes behind every new bit of information that you come across. You’ll also be able to understand that what you’re hearing daily from our current culture is wrong. It’s forcing you to go against the tide of our world as it was created. More importantly, you’ll eventually be able to understand your value and purpose in life. Our world teaches us that we are just the lucky species that evolved and survived, and our whole life is a struggle against the forces that will eventually overwhelm us.

It will take a little while to get there, but our hope comes from knowing that our lives are aligned with God’s intention for our lives. Not just our individual lives, but our culture and our nation’s too. It’s like the example I give in the book. When our teeth are out of alignment, they can look bad, cause us pain, and do a poor job of chewing our food. Once the orthodontist realigns our teeth into the alignment they were intended for, they look better, they feel better, and they’re able to do their work (chewing food) much more efficiently.

Our lives and our culture are similar to this. When they are not in alignment with what God intended, they don’t look so great and they don’t work very well. In fact, the longer they are out of alignment, the more things go wrong.

I’ll get into this more in a future article talking about what our lives look like when out of alignment and what they look like in alignment. For now, here’s the important thing to know. If we want our lives to be easier, if we want them to be safer, if we also want them to be more predictable and we definitely want them to be happier, … they can be! Once we learn to align our individual lives and our society with the way they were originally intended to be aligned, we can realize all these things. There are many people who are able to go through their lives every day with a confidence that they can handle whatever comes their way. You can detect an inner peace in them that is hard to explain. It’s there because they know for certain who they are (a child of God) and they have aligned their life with God’s intent for their lives. Their lives are just easier and happier but the average person doesn’t know why. Unfortunately, our culture teaches the average person that the one thing that could make their lives as peaceful and happy (as the ones I mentioned) is the one thing that can NOT be the cause of the ultimate peace and happiness. That steals our hope.

The culture, and all those rebelling against God (the Rebels) absolutely can not allow the world to learn the truth – that the alignment of our lives with God’s truth is the source of this peace and happiness. The Rebels will tell you lie after lie after lie, and Hollywood and the Main Stream Media (MSM) will join right in – lying to you about what you need to be happy. Our universities and governments are singing the same tune and many of our local schools have joined in the same chorus.

It’s very difficult to understand and believe that most of what you are hearing from the culture all around you is not the truth, but understanding that is the key – the first step down the path to finding that peace and happiness for yourself. It means being counter-cultural and not following the vast majority of the culture. They are trying to get as many people as possible to join them on that wide path so they can feel better about their rebellion. The more people that join them in their rebellion, the better they feel because they feel more justified that they are on the right path. It’s hard to consider turning away from the path that many of your friends and family are on, but choose today to at least investigate for yourself, and think for yourself. Give this a try. Investigate it and see if it doesn’t all make sense once you.

Once your life is aligned with its original purpose, you’ll find that you can have hope that no one can take from you. Regardless of what you face on any given day, you’ll know that the God who created everything is the one who created you, that he loves you more than any person on earth ever will, and that he has a plan specifically for your life. What he has in store for you is far greater than what you can imagine at this point.

Let me give you an example that can put this in perspective. When we’re in junior high, peer pressure is so important to us that we’d do just about anything to make our friends happy and stay in good graces with them. Throughout high school, our friends may change, but we still feel a great deal of pressure to make decisions that our friends will applaud.

As strong as our desire is to please that specific group of friends, it doesn’t take too long for it to fade away after we graduate from high school. In fact, after we graduate, we lose track of many of those friends, and we’ll never see some of them ever again. Those very people (that we would have made bad decisions for) might be unimportant to us when we’re 25. For those of us who have lived longer, we might have even made decisions that have caused negative consequences for the rest of our lives – all for people who are completely unimportant to us now. But at the time we were 17, we didn’t care about our lives at 25 and didn’t have the capacity to project forward to that age and understand how much our lives would change.

The same is true for you now. If you do not have a personal relationship with God, you can’t imagine what it’s like to have that relationship with him. Once you do, hope will be inherent in you. It will be with you every day. You can have a deep joy in your heart every day!

Read the book if you haven’t already. Then keep coming back here so we can fill in more of the pixels. Let us know your thoughts along the way.

May God bless you.