Guilt

Why is it that depression rates are higher in Utah than any other state? Why is it that we who profess to have the most access to a life of happiness, live unhappily and unfulfilled and depressed? Why is it that a person can do everything they're "supposed to" and still not find peace? I would say the number one reason is guilt. It is never feeling like we've done enough, because there's always more to do. We could always read more, pray more, go to the temple more, give more of our time, do more compassionate service, visit teach more, home teach more, say more in class, read the lessons more, have family home evening more...There is built-in institutional guilt. It is the motivator used by many leaders to get us to do the "right thing". Why not follow Christ's example and use love instead? Why do leaders think that the best way to get us to visit teach or home teach is to guilt us into it and make us feel like we are single-handedly responsible for another person's eventual destination to be hell. Why not just love us and credit us with the things we are able to accomplish? We've all seen the lists of what a Mormon woman is "supposed" to do. I, for one can't sew and rarely bake. Will this keep me from achieving what i want to with my life? That's the other thing that can keep us from happiness, the idea that we aren't really supposed to be happy, we're supposed to suffer here, so that we can be happy "there"... My brother has a theory to which i subscribe that the point of this life is to find happiness and our ability to experience happiness in the next life is predicated on our ability to find it here. That makes this whole guilt thing even more ironic, because it's keeping us from finding what we ultimately want to find and are willing to give up now. (if that made any sense). My goal is to feel no guilt. I believe God would never use guilt as a motivator, He would never put that on us. The thing i've learned about the use of guilt as a motivator is that i'm not going to change the establishment, so I must change myself and find the happiness God has promised me if I do my best. I have to be able to listen to someone's use of guilt to try to get me to perform a task or change a behavior and not let it in. I know I should read my scriptures every day, not to be able to check it off of a list, but because i really do feel better when i do that, but i've chosen not to feel guilty when i don't get to it and to feel satisfied when i do. What a difference it has made in my life. It is no coincidence that Utah is the only state with a depression rate higher than 10%. At the same time, it's a sad statistic, because the very people that claim to have a monopoly on happiness obviously don't, go figure.