If you were to take a moment and someone were to ask you to describe your life right now with the imagery of weather, would weather would you use to describe it? How would you express it? Dark and gloomy? Bright skies? Cloudy with a chance of rain? Or crazier… with a chance of meatballs?

In today’s culture, the weather of many peoples lives may be heavier and gloomier than we think. Some of the weather people are experiencing translates into stuff like:

• Nearly 25% of adults in the U.S. suffer from a diagnosable mental illness — with half of the entire US population projected to experience something in the mental health arena within our lifetime.
• Half of U.S. 18–35-year-olds (49%) expressed anxiety over important decisions and were afraid to fail.
• Over 3 in 10 (39%) said they often felt sad or depressed — 34% said they often felt lonely and isolated from others
• 60-80% of adult males and 40-50% of adult females use pornography regularly
• 24% of the U.S. (not just adults) meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder
• Nearly 10% of the population abuse prescription medications
• 130 people per day commit suicide — translating to 1 every 11 minutes (which by the way, is a 35% increase since 1999!!)
• 1 in 6 couples struggle with infertility, 1 in 6 miscarry — many of those couples never adequately grieve or thoroughly discuss those very real losses.
• Over 40% of marriages right now end in divorce
• 24 people per minute are victims of domestic violence by an intimate partner — In 22% of those cases (5-6 cases), children were witnesses
• And in 2020 – nearly 600,000 Americans were homeless. The majority which have several mental health concerns.

Paul tells us  in Romans 8:37 that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” And that that word there for more than conquerors is hypernukōmen, and it means “to keep on being conquerors to a greater degree”. Paul then tells us what our battle is against in verses 38-39: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

There is a very real battle waging for our hearts and minds. More often than not, the thing that holds us back, keeps us trapped, and causes us to doubt is our minds.