Hey everybody, John Mark Comer here.

Welcome to the Teaching portion of Bridgetown Church Online.

I invite you to put away your phone

and turn your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians chapter four.

Week one of the shutdown,

my friends were all passing around an article

by Scott Baranato for the Harvard Business Review

entitled, That Discomfort Your Feeling is Grief.

The title alone put language to what I was feeling

in my body, that odd kind of mix of feeling down

and off center and irritable and scared

and low energy at the same time.

Oh yeah, like that feeling, that discomfort is grief.

But we Americans don't really know how to deal with grief.

We prefer to avoid it by our coping mechanism of choice,

digital distraction or hustle or obsessive working out

and dieting or that all-American favorite

what the philosopher Jung Chul-Han called

the Violence of Positivity.

And he's not the only pre-efficient thinker

to warn us about the shadow side of positivity.

I've been following the work of Dr. Kate Bowler

...