Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. Others have called this deepest quality confidence, and I have referred to trust as the earliest positive psychosocial attitude, but if life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired. (The Erik Erikson Reader, ed. Robert Coles, p.192)

When someone decides they simply can't live with the pressure of appearing to be perfect, they drop out of church altogether. They know they'll never measure up to the perfection club, so they stop trying.
Somehow church has become a place where we don't want to hear about real issues or relevant struggles or sins we've been dealing with all week long. (Perry Noble, Overwhelmed, Winning the War Against Worry, p.30f.)

Our problem is that we are created by God to live in relationship with him and yet we have rejected God and decided to run our own lives our own way without reference to him. We are not designed to function smoothly without the presence and power of God in our lives. The absence of God's love and power in our lives results in dysfunction. We become anxious, fearful and depressed. We live at the level of animal life rather than as children of a loving God.

World War I produced a remarkable number of poets. My favorite is Studdert Kennedy, who was a chaplain. I have a copy of his Rough Rhymes of a Padre which contains poems that strive to make sense of all the sorrow of what Abraham Lincoln called “this mighty scourge of war”.