I’m a millennial, and my generation keeps hearing, in one way or another, that we aren’t doing as well as the generations before us. We don’t have it together. We don’t have the house or the savings, and retirement looks bleak. The numbers back some of this up. In the US, the typical first-time homebuyer is now 40, a record high. In the 1980s they were in their late twenties. Add worries about the environment, the government and the state of the world, and things look even harder for the people coming after us.
It’s easy to despair, and honestly, I don’t see much on the horizon that’s going to fix it. So how do we respond? How do we think about the wealth gap, and about our own bank accounts?
I’ll confess I’ve been reading about “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). I want to take that in every day, because these are unsettling times.
I don’t have all the answers. One thing that has helped me is pointing my worry somewhere else. There’s something about serving. Researchers even have a name for it. Allan Luks surveyed thousands of volunteers and found many described a “helper’s high” from helping others. It puts things in perspective, especially when we do it together.
Paul warned that people “comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise” (2 Corinthians 10:12). When we spend more time helping each other than measuring ourselves against each other, the anxiety about where we are in life and how we stack up starts to matter less. And when we look to Jesus, there really is peace.
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