Sermon Tone Analysis

America Is Falling Apart at the Seams by David Brooks – Jan 14, 2022

In June a statistic floated across my desk that startled me.

In 2020, the number of miles Americans drove fell 13 percent because of the pandemic, but the number of traffic deaths rose 7 percent.

I couldn’t figure it out.

Why would Americans be driving so much more recklessly during the pandemic?

But then in the first half of 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, motor vehicle deaths were up 18.4 percent even over 2020.

Contributing factors, according to the agency, included driving under the influence, speeding and failure to wear a seatbelt.

Why are so many Americans driving irresponsibly?

While gloomy numbers like these were rattling around in my brain, a Substack article from Matthew Yglesias hit my inbox this week.

It was titled, “All Kinds of Bad Behavior Is on the Rise.”

Not only is reckless driving on the rise, Yglesias pointed out, but the number of altercations on airplanes has exploded, the murder rate is surging in cities, drug overdoses are increasing, Americans are drinking more, nurses say patients are getting more abusive, and so on and so on.

Yglesias is right.

Teachers are facing a rising tide of disruptive behavior.

The Wall Street Journal reported in December: “Schools have seen an increase in both minor incidents, like students talking in class, and more serious issues, such as fights and gun possession.

In Dallas, disruptive classroom incidents have tripled this year compared with prepandemic levels, school officials said.”

This month, the Institute for Family Studies published an essay called “The Drug Epidemic Just Keeps Getting Worse.”

The essay noted that drug deaths had risen almost continuously for more than 20 years, but “overdoses shot up especially during the pandemic.”

For much of this time the overdose crisis has been heavily concentrated among whites, but in 2020, the essay observed, “the Black rate exceeded the white rate for the first time.”

In October, CNN ran a story titled, “Hate Crime Reports in U.S. Surge to the Highest Level in 12 Years, F.B.I.

Says.”

The F.B.I. found that between 2019 and 2020 the number of attacks targeting Black people, for example, rose to 2,871 from

Ending

Stress has been called America’s number one disease.

If you hope I will give you information on how to live a stress free life, well, I can’t.

We all deal with stress.

Life is going to wear you out and it’s going to stress you out from time to time.

In fact, you don’t want a stress-free life.

Because the only people who are stress free, are those in the cemetery and none of us really want that.

I will you some ways to think about stress and make a plan to deal with it.

FIRST STEP:

1. Evaluate the specific source of my stress.

What is it exactly that is causing me to stress?

Evaluate the specific source of my stress.

I have people tell me all the time—Jim, I’m just stressed out.

And I will say—well, what are you stressed out about?

And they say—well, everything, you know.

And a lot of times we feel that way.

Sometimes we feel like we are stressed out about everything, but when we dig a little deeper, it’s not usually everything.

It’s usually this one particularly difficult person at work.

Or it’s one relationship that is not going the way you wanted.

Or it’s just one thing where you don’t have purpose and you can’t find fulfillment.

So what we have to do is we have to get behind the cloud of everything and find the specific.

So ask yourself, “What is it specifically that is causing you the stress?

You’ll find that somehow or another, when you name it, it lowers your stress level and now you can deal with it.

There are many areas of life that cause you stress:

Work related problems or deadlines.

Family change, new baby, adoption, sickness, parents.

Moving.

Debt.

Lack of purpose.

Disappointment.

When you identify the source of stress, you begin to move out of the cloud into the possibility of a path forward.

The longer you LINGER in the cloud, the more the weight of the stress will take over.

When you articulate your stress you will be able to pursue a path, seek resources, ask for help in overcoming the problem.

Now once you identify the stress point, you want to evaluate if its GOOD STRESS or BAD STRESS.

There’s something called EU-STRESS which is good stress.

Understand that there is good stress and there is bad stress.

Did you know that?

There is good stress.

In your notes, it’s called Eustress.

EU from the Latin meaning good, so good stress, Eustress.

Good stress is stuff that God allows in your life to grow you.

Or good stress, or good decisions that you make that are going to grow you.

We need this in our life.

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “No Pain, No Gain.”

Have you ever seen a cocoon?

Its where Caterpillars make a husk around themselves and this miracle of creation happens.

This little strange creature that slowly inches along your tree limbs and eats the leaves off of your trees, now becomes transformed into need to go through some stress to become butterfly.

And that butterfly will then go from flower to flower and pollenate flowers and crops.

You know when you see a butterfly struggling to get out of the cocoon, it is tempting to try to help it and ease its stress.

But they found if you do, the butterfly will die.

Why?

Because its through the process of that struggle that the blood gets pushed through that little body into the wings and starts flowing and giving it the ability to straighten the wings to begin to fly.

So you need to go through some stress to grow and fulfill your life.

We all face the problem of inertia.

People have all sorts of excuses for not doing.

But, I know that if you are not going, you are not growing.

If you don’t have enough good stress in your life, you are always going to fall into distress.

Which what bad stress is.

Bad stress is distress.

Bad stress is when something happens in your life as a result of doing something that is not aligned with your purpose.

So whenever we choose to do something that is not God’s will, there are consequences.

And these consequences are often distress.

It’s when we start drinking too much.

It leads to a break up.

It’s when we start holding onto bitterness and we don’t forgive and that leads to relationship failure.

And it’s when we engage in premarital sex and that leads to a pregnancy scare.

That’s distress with those moments in your life.

Now, understand, at those moments, you can through distress, just like He will grow you through eustress.

But it may be a longer or more painful process.

And, I’d prefer to avoid as much distress as I can and learn from other’s mistakes.

As I mentioned DISTRESS comes when you make bad decisions or become compromised.

It begins a cycle that often leads to even more difficulty.

It often occurs when our actions, decisions and lives do not align with our purpose.

I want to give you an acronym MAPS for you to use to examine your decisions.

MAPS for life

Morality

Affinity groups: family, friends, colleagues

Personality

Strengths