Misery

The Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, quickly resulting in 38 states plus Wahsington D.C. jumping at the chance to increase tax revenue. Sports betting has since rocketed into an annual $7.5 billion industry. Men's Health surveyed 1,500 American men of whom placed bets in the last 12 months:

• 61% bet either daily or weekly
• 58% say sports betting has affected their mental health
• 44% say it's difficult to watch a game without feeling the urge to bet
• 20% say it’s destroying their life
• 20% spend 25% of their paycheck on sports betting
• Millennials bet more frequently than any other age group

According to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG), the US is experiencing the largest and fastest expansion of gambling in our nation’s history. According to the NCPG, "As sports betting becomes more and more accessible, the number of people who are likely to develop a gambling addiction will continue to increase.”

Addicted problem-gamblers inevitably face job and home loss, damaged relationships, suicidal thoughts, and legal issues. The average debt accrued is between $55,000 and $90,000. According to Timothy Fong, M.D., codirector of the UCLA gambling-studies program:

There’s a state of gambling withdrawal just like opiate withdrawal or alcohol withdrawal. When you’re not able to gamble or participate in gambling, your body and your brain react to it. It goes through sleeplessness, changes in appetite, sadness, depression, and anxiety.

Delusion and pride cause many gamblers to fall into the snare. Sports bettors specifically often have higher education and income levels. Many perceive the results of their gambling as being determined by their skills and knowledge rather than chance and luck, overestimating their ability to win. This is known as the delusion of expertise and can accelerate … the development of a gambling addiction.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the NCPG, notes that: “We call [gambling addiction] the hidden addiction. There are few, if any, outward physical signs, and it makes it a lot harder to track and detect.”

Is a trip to Las Vegas becoming a thing of the past? A recent survey finds 4 in 10 gamblers have never actually set foot in a casino. A spokesperson for Online Betting Guide said, “Habits are changing all the time. Online gaming sites are becoming more and more popular, and in-person equivalents are evolving to meet the new needs.”

The results also show that 43% of gamblers feel an in-person casino has too many barriers to entry. Meanwhile, 32% just feel more confident behind their screen, with just 16% having more courage in the flesh. Another 22% fear they’ll look out of place in an actual betting parlor.

London (49%), Las Vegas (31%), and Paris (12%) are among the locations where respondents would most like to gamble in person. It also emerged that 83 percent feel the Internet has fundamentally changed the way people play.

Playing the lottery (53%), betting on sports (52%), and buying scratchers (41%) are the most common ways people indulge in a bit of gambling. However, 4 in 10 prefer games that require an element of skill, such as predicting sports scores or playing poker. Another 16% like to leave it to pure chance, playing games such as roulette.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As online gambling infiltrates society (and the church), there are more opportunities for temptation, people can hide their gambling addiction by not leaving their home. How many secret addicted gamblers are there in our churches?

The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic.

The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions—related to stress, sadness, anger, worry, and physical pain—hit a record high in (2021).

Gallup asks people in this survey to rate their lives on a scale from zero to 10, with zero meaning you’re living your worst possible life and 10 meaning you’re living your best. Sixteen years ago, only 1.6 percent of people worldwide rated their life as a zero. As of (2021), the share of people reporting the worst possible lives has more than quadrupled.

Taylor Swift was quite the romantic when she burst on the scene in 2006. She sang about the ecstasies of young love and the heartbreak of it. But her mood has hardened as her star has risen. Her new album, Midnights, plays upon a string of negative emotions—anxiety, restlessness, exhaustion, and occasionally anger.

It turns out Swift is part of a larger trend. Researchers analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate,” rose sharply.

Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. Other researchers analyzed 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 in the United States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust, and sadness.

If misery levels keep rising, what can we expect in the future? According to the Global Peace Index, civic discontent—riots, strikes, anti-government demonstrations—increased by 244 percent from 2011 to 2019. We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The emotional health of the world is shattering.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The only hope for our sad, harsh, and divided world is Jesus, the Prince of peace (Isa. 9:6). “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10).

A small glimpse into what our heroic war veterans went through can be found in the seven-part Ken Burns documentary The War. It covers World War II from the perspective of the soldiers.

In the episode "When Things Get Tough," the narrator quotes Pulitzer Prize winning Bill Maulden, a cartoonist and writer for Stars & Stripes. It is an analogy written for those who have never fought in a war on the miseries and hardships of the American soldier, in this case with scenes from the Italian Campaign:

Dig a hole in your backyard while it is raining. Sit in the hole while the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for 48 hours. So there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head. Or set your house on fire.

Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes, as you imagine big meteors streaking down beside you. If you repeat this performance every three days, for several months, you may begin to understand why an infantryman gets out of breath. But you still won't understand how he feels when things get tough.

Think of yourself as living in an apartment house. You live there under a landlord who has made your life miserable. He charges you exorbitant rent. When you can’t pay, he loans you money at a fearful rate of interest to get you even further into his debt. He barges into your apartment at all hours of the day and night, wrecks and dirties the place up, then charges you extra for not maintaining the premises. Your life is miserable.

Then comes Someone who says, “I’ve taken over this apartment house. I’ve purchased it. You can live here as long as you like, free. The rent is paid up. I am going to be living here with you, in the manager’s apartment.” What a joy! You are saved! You are delivered out of the clutches of the old landlord!

But what happens? You hardly have time to rejoice in your new-found freedom, when a knock comes at the door. And there he is—the old landlord! Mean, glowering, and demanding as ever. He has come for the rent, he says. What do you do? Do you pay him? Of course you don’t! Do you go out and pop him on the nose? No—he’s bigger than you are! You confidently tell him, “You’ll have to take that up with the new Landlord.” He may bellow, threaten, wheedle, and cajole. You just quietly tell him, “Take it up with the new Landlord.” If he comes back a dozen times, with all sorts of threats and arguments, waving legal-looking documents in your face, you simply tell him yet once again, “Take it up with the new Landlord.” ln the end, he has to. He knows it, too. He just hopes that he can bluff and threaten and deceive you into doubting that the new Landlord will really take care of things.

Writer Leah Muncy recalls one of her earliest memories is of her mother buying a lottery ticket at the supermarket. “When I was young, my mother was always talking about the ‘lotto.’ Around the kitchen table, she’d tell us what she’d do with the millions: buy a large farm with chickens, fly us to Mexico, solar-panel the roof.”

The odds of winning the multi-state Powerball jackpot are one-in-292-million. You have a greater chance of dying from a falling coconut, which is one in 250 million. Despite this, Americans spent $71.8 billion on lottery tickets in 2017. The bulk of this revenue was generated by the poorest Americans.

According to a study conducted by Cornell University, the lottery is most aggressively advertised in impoverished communities, particularly minority and rural white neighborhoods. This exploitation leads to the “desperation hypothesis”: those in the direst of financial circumstances turn to the lottery as “a hail-Mary strategy.” It is a source of hope for those in despair. A 2019 survey found that 75% of lottery players believe that they will win.

The study also found that people who made less than $30,000 a year were more likely to play the lottery for financial stability. One in three Americans with incomes below $25,000 believe that winning the lottery “represents the most practical way for them to accumulate several hundred thousand dollars.” This, in turn, only makes America’s poorest even poorer.

Muncy continues, “My mother estimates she’s spent $3,000 on lottery tickets in her lifetime. ‘You can’t win if you don’t play,’ she says. But I tell her, that you can’t win if you do play.” The lottery did not ever and will not ever provide her with a ranch, or solar panels, or vacations. This beacon of false hope can be seen at the top of every California lottery ticket, a sun shining above the chosen numbers. It is golden, radiant, looming. And it is blinding.

The Powerball Lotto is a legalized multi-state form of gambling in the United States that pays enormous jackpots to the very few who purchase winning tickets. Jack Whittaker won almost $315 million in 2002. Hardly a rags to riches story, Whittaker had plenty of money before his big win, having built a $100 million equipment company from scratch.

At first, things went well. Whittaker tithed on his winnings and was generous to a variety of charities. He reportedly gave a home, automobile and $40,000 in cash to the woman who sold him the ticket.

All of his philanthropy, however, was not enough to curb Whittaker's destructive behavior. Within a few years, he had been robbed, involved in sex scandals, bounced checks at casinos, and named in several lawsuits. The worst was still to come. He is reported to have given his teenage granddaughter a $4,000 a week allowance. Whittaker received his worst blow when the girl, perhaps the person he loved most in the world, was found dead from an apparent drug overdose. The cause of all his troubles, claims Whittaker, was the "Powerball curse."

If you win the Powerball jackpot, you may not be as lucky as you may think. Many winners befall the so-called curse of the lottery, with some squandering their fortunes and others meeting tragic ends.

"So many of them wind up unhappy or wind up broke. People have had terrible things happen,” said Don McNay a financial consultant to lottery winners and the author of Life Lessons from the Lottery. “People commit suicide. People run though their money. Easy comes, easy goes. They go through divorce or people die.”

“It’s just upheaval that they’re not ready for,” McNay told TIME on Tuesday. “It’s the curse of the lottery because it made their lives worse instead of improving them.”

About 70 percent of people who suddenly receive a windfall of cash will lose it within a few years, according to the National Endowment for Financial Education.

In the late eighties and early nineties, there were several hundred studies about happiness published each year; by 2014, there were over 10,000 per year. It was an exciting shift for psychology, one that the public immediately responded to. Major media outlets clamored to cover the new research. Soon, entrepreneurs began monetizing it, founding start-ups and programming apps to help ordinary people implement the field's findings. They were followed by a deluge of celebrities, personal coaches, and motivational speakers, all eager to share the gospel of happiness. According to Psychology Today, in 2000, the number of books published about happiness was a modest fifty. In 2008, that number had skyrocketed to 4,000. Of course, people have always been interested in the pursuit of happiness, but all that attention has made an impact: since the mid-2000s, the interest in happiness, as measured by Google searches, has tripled. "The shortcut to anything you want in your life," writes author Rhonda Byrne in her bestselling 2006 book The Secret, "is to BE and FEEL happy now!"

And yet, there is a major problem with the happiness frenzy: it has failed to deliver on its promise. Though the happiness industry continues to grow, as a society, we're more miserable than ever. Indeed, social scientists have uncovered a sad irony—chasing happiness actually makes people unhappy.

The answer to suffering cannot just be an abstract idea, because this isn't an abstract issue; it's a personal issue. It requires a personal response. It's not a bunch of words, it's the Word. It's not a tightly woven philosophical argument; it's a person. The person. The answer must be someone, not just something, because the issue involves someone—God, where are you?"

—Peter J. Kreeft, Ph.D., in an interview with Lee Strobel

O what a giant is man when he fights against himself, and what a dwarf when he needs or exercises his own assistance for himself. ... Man hath no center but misery; there, and only there, he is fixed, and sure to find himself.

Over 100 years ago, a tornado struck the prairies of Minnesota. Many were killed, hundreds were injured, and one small town was almost demolished. In the midst of the disaster, an elderly British surgeon and his two medically trained sons worked almost around the clock for days aiding the stricken, bandaging wounds, and setting broken limbs.

Their heroic work did not go unnoticed. Their excellence as physicians and their selflessness in the service of those in need created a following among the tornado victims. The doctor and his sons were offered financial backing to build a hospital, provided that they took charge.

The men agreed and in 1889 founded a clinic that soon attracted nationwide attention. Their little clinic grew.

The city was Rochester, Minnesota.

The elderly doctor’s name: William W. Mayo.

His sons: William J. and Charles Mayo.

Their clinic is called simply “The Mayo Clinic.” It now consists of over 500 physicians treating more than 200,000 people a year. It is known worldwide as one of the premier places of health, healing and excellence in medicine.

I’m sure if you asked the citizens of Minnesota about the Rochester tornado at the time, they would have said it was all about death and destruction, an unqualified disaster.

But, put in the perspective of better than a century, and in the hands of a creative God, the tornado was really about life, help, and healing.

A Christian man suffering with a complex and painful condition called Fibromyalgia, sent a letter to colleagues and friends offering ideas on what a suffer needs and doesn't need from those around him.

Living with chronic pain is like being in a room where a radio is playing at too high a volume, and it can't be turned down or off. It can very distracting and prevent me from focusing on conversations or tasks.

I can look fine, even when pain has me close to tears. Because my symptoms aren't (usually) visible, I'm nervous about what others believe about my health. When you say, "But you look fine to me," I wonder if that means you don't believe I don't feel fine.

Chronic pain is variable. I can't predict how I am going to feel when I wake up—I can't even be sure from minute to minute. As you can imagine, this is one of the most frustrating aspects of chronic pain.

Disability-related depression is common, and I proactively manage it. Sometimes it feels as if my life was hit by a tornado when I wasn't looking. Sometimes I feel grief and sadness for what I can no longer do. Sometimes I forget how strong I am and how much I still have to offer you, my family, friends, and the world. I'm not giving up on me, and I hope you won't either.

I know you want to help by telling me other people's success. Aunt Gertrude's bracelet or your boss's chiropractor are probably terrific. But in all likelihood if you've heard of or tried it, so have I. I have an excellent team of doctors.

When I mention my pain or chronic illness, please don't "skip" over it or look away. We don't have to discuss my health constantly, but I can't ignore it all the time either. Bear with me, accept me as I am, and try to understand my situation. Please grant me the same respect and faith as I make my way down this road I didn't choose but must travel.

In the book The Life of Christ this is how Frederick Farrar describes crucifixion.

A death by crucifixion seems to include all that pain and death can have of the horrible and ghastly—dizziness, cramps, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, shame, publicity of shame, long continuance of torment, horror of anticipation, mortification of intended wounds—all intensified just up to the point at which they can be endured at all, but all stopping just short of the point which would give to the sufferer the relief of unconsciousness.

The unnatural position made every movement painful…and while each variety of misery went on gradually increasing, there was added to them the intolerable pang of burning and raging thirst. One thing is clear. The 1st century executions were not like the modern ones, for they did not seek a quick painless death nor the preservation of any measure of dignity for the criminal. On the contrary, they sought an agonizing torture that completely humiliated him. It is important that we understand this, for it helps us realize the agony of Christ's death.

In her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs wrote these words about her years of slavery: "Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations."

Harriet was born in 1813 in North Carolina. For the first six years of her life, she lived in a comfortable home with her parents and brother, not realizing she was a slave. But when her mother died, Harriet learned she wasn't free.

At age 15, her new master, Dr. James Norcom, pursued and harassed Harriet, while Norcom's wife oppressed her. Seeking to protect herself, Harriet turned to a white, unmarried lawyer and bore him two children.

Norcom retaliated by sending Harriet to a plantation to work as a field hand. Not wanting her children to become plantation slaves, she ran away before they could join her there. With the help of sympathetic neighbors, both black and white, she made her way to her grandmother's home. For the next seven years Harriet lived in a tiny cubbyhole under the front porch roof. The confined space was nine feet by seven feet, with a sloping ceiling only three feet high at one end. She shared her hiding place with rats and mice.

During this time Harriet wrote to Norcom, asking him to sell her the children. He refused. However, the children's father did buy the boy and girl, allowing them to stay with Harriet's grandmother. Hiding even from her children, Harriet would squint through a peephole, hoping to catch a glimpse of them playing outside.

In 1842, Harriet escaped to the North, and two years later her children joined her. Still, she was in danger of being returned to slavery by Dr. Norcom and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Complete liberation did not come until Harriet was forty years old, when her employer bought her freedom for $300.

Harriet Jacobs knew about slavery, fear, and brutality. She experienced the pain of a family torn apart, the indignity of being sold as property, and the uncertainty of living at the whim of someone else. Harriet wrote about her life experiences, and in 1861, the year the Civil War began, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published.

Harriet concluded her book with these words: "Reader, my story ends with freedom."

Ernest Hemingway, born in 1899, was the epitome of the twentieth-century man. At age 25 he sipped champagne in Paris, and later had well-publicized game hunts in Africa and hunted grizzly bears in America's northwest. At the age of sixty-one, after having it all—; wine, women, song, a distinguished literary career, Sunday afternoon bullfights in Spain; —Hemingway chose to end his life, leaving a note saying, "Life is one [expletive] thing after another."

Ecclesiastes says this is what seeking after ultimate meaning through pleasure is like. The writer wants us to wake up to this fact before we're sixty-one years old and realize too late that our lives have had no meaning and fulfillment.