A recent headline from the Associated Press reads: "Sad, self-absorbed shoppers spend more." The report goes on to describe a study that shows "people’s spending judgment goes out the window when they’re down, especially if they’re a bit self-absorbed." That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with life in the adult world, and especially with the things people tend to do when they're "blue." Spending, or rather, I believe, the anticipation and acquistion of something new, is just one of a variety of experiences like eating, partying, daydreaming, drinking, and many others that are "self-medications."
But is there any credible study that demonstrates people actually improving their moods or emotional life, long-term, by such activities? If anything has been proven again and again, the opposite is true. Momentary relief from sadness or stress by self-indulgent means is always a path to greater problems. Why then do intelligent people, who presumably know this when it comes to other people's lives, plunge ahead into poor choices when dealing with their own problems?
Again, the answer should be obvious to anyone with understanding of the human experience. By nature, I can be coldly objective about other people's feelings, and dispense wise counsel about the choices they should or should not make. But my own feelings are things I feel, things I am hit in the gut with. If relief or avoidance of discomfort in the realm of emotions is comparable to relief of physical pain, I'm going to tend toward a preference of a quick solution. I don't try to just "tough it out" with a throbbing headache, and various negative emotions feel just as painful; and an immediate "pain-killer" can look very attractive if it is believed to offer a positive emotional uplift, if even just for awhile.
Human beings don't "do suffering" easily. And the history of such suffering suggests that the burdens of the soul are far greater than afflictions of the body. We can go through a lot of deprivation and loss, and still live a more-or-less "normal" human life, if we at the same time have a resource for the soul that gives hope, comfort and some assurance that all this fits into some larger scheme of things. And this is what faith is all about, at least in the subjective experience of faith as a strength for the inner man.
And this again points out the weakness of self-medicating methods that primarily soothe the body, not the soul. They're all very short-term, and tend to be addictive, delivering less results with repeated use. By contrast, faith's strength and comfort for the soul is a "long-lasting" pain reliever that no drug can equal.
If there's a problem here, it's the fact that "just believing" has a kind of placebo effect in giving relief to the soul, even if such belief is not wholly based on truth. So people may think they find comfort in the promise of their chosen faith, when in fact they may be trusting in something contrary to the only authoritative source of truth we have: the unchanging Word of God. Only God's promises give real hope, though false hopes may feel just as real for those who hold them.
Trusting in God's promises in Christ doesn't remove all the various stressors of modern life, much less all the hazards of living in a fallen world. But faith in the God Who is, the God who has spoken, the God who acts in human history to save, not only comforts the troubled soul, but delivers the soul from much greater harm that befalls so many who seek a false comfort, finding instead only further pain.
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