Sunday, January 17, 2016

It's Not All About Me

Our minister, Charles Anderson, is preaching a sermon series, A JOY FOR ALL SEASONS.
He says that "God intended joy to be as organic to your life as bone and muscle.."  To address the issue of what went wrong, he references a study cited in the Journal of American Medical Association indicating "that in the 20th century, people who lived in each generation were three times more likely to experience depression than folks in the generation before them.  To put it another way, depression is about 10 times more common in our day than it was in the 1960s even though we are a lot richer and more educated, but we are richer, smarter, sad people. The average onset of depression in the 1960s was 29-1/2.  Today it is 14-1/2".  He goes on to quote Martin Seligman, a psychologist, as saying that we have replaced church, faith, and community with self.   We all know that depression is a complicated issue that affects a lot of folks. I do agree that finding joy in life is beyond "it's all about me".  I have posted previously about the good that exercise and activity can do for depression.
I also think that taking the focus away from ourselves to others is medicine as well.  I know when I do something for someone else, I get the bigger blessing.

Resource:  You can find Rev. Anderson's sermon at theu.org