Hey everybody, it's Andy, welcome back to the North Point Community Church podcast.

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Well, in May of this year, the Surgeon General issued a warning to our nation

after signs that our nation was functionally past the COVID pandemic.

The US Surgeon General warned of another epidemic that nobody was talking about.

And he issued this Surgeon General's warning of the epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

And some of you may have recognized this or you've experienced this in your life and

so many that I know have found this new experience with isolation that it's not so much that

they're not around people. It's that they feel alone. And clearly, in recent days, social media,

technology, the sheltering in place that happened during the pandemic. They've all contributed.

But as it turns out, that was just pouring gas on a fire that was already sweeping across our nation.

Murthy and his 80-page report, which is a fascinating read, by the way, it probably will put

some of you to sleep. But it's a fascinating read because he cites all sorts of clinical research

that found that one in two adults, think about this, one in two adults in America,

battled feelings of loneliness prior to the 2020 pandemic before all of the sheltering in place,

before all the things that separated us from the people that were our support structures.

And while many of the people in these studies couldn't identify exactly what they were feeling,

...