“This people says, ‘The time has not come, the time that the Lord’s house should be built.’ Then the word of the Lord came by Haggai…, ‘Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, and this temple to lie in ruins?…Consider your ways! You have sown much, and bring in little; you eat, but do not have enough; you drink, but you are not filled with drink; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes’” (Hag 1:2-6).
“Pessimism” wrote G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, “is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.” Woe to the people who feel no need of petitioning God! If God will not satisfy, surely His blessings will not either.