Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller.

In 1947, W.H. Auden published the poem, The Age of Anxiety.

It was a long poem that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and it opens with a

sentence that could be written today. Now is the age of anxiety. He wrote that in the aftermath of World War II.

The promises of the Enlightenment and rationalism had all fallen flat on their face. Rather than ushering

in an era of endless peace,

the age of science and reason and machines became a midwife to nuclear weapons, rail guns,

and concentration camps. Out and wrote, we would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather

die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions

die. If post-war Europe felt anxiety, we can understand why. Cities were leveled. Between 70 and 85 million people

died. I don't think those of us who live on land untouched by war for well over a century can conceive the carnage,

the charnel house that was World War II.

And yet, I sometimes think that we somehow experience more anxiety than they did.

Because now is the age of anxiety, though for a very different, far less violent reason.

We don't fear war on our shores. We don't fear hunger. Most of us don't fear sleeping without shelter.

All of these things set us apart from most humans throughout most of history. In the past,

humans who did feel anxiety, they felt anxiety over those things, food, clothing,

shelter, life, and war.

Perhaps the most famous passage in the Bible about anxiety and worry discusses precisely

these topics.

...