In the spring of 2025, researchers from Harvard, Baylor, and Gallup released the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study, tracking more than 200,000 adults in 22 countries for five years. It measures flourishing in six domains: happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security.
Two findings made headlines. First, younger adults, especially those aged 18 to 29, scored lower in nearly all of those areas. Second, people who attend religious services regularly reported considerably higher flourishing, and the association held even in the most secular societies. Japan, with the lowest attendance of the 22 countries, also reported the lowest flourishing.
Christians read that second finding and exhale. Somebody screenshots it. Somebody preaches it. Science agrees: church is good for you.
The data deserves a fair hearing. The researchers are careful, and the correlation is real. Our reflex deserves a harder look.
We track sleep. We track steps. We track protein. We track screen time. Now we can track church attendance and watch our score climb. Somewhere in that list, God became the best supplement on the shelf.
I’m in this too. I wear my Apple Watch to bed every night along with my Oura ring. I track every walk, even if it’s a few blocks. I log every meal.
Even deeper, I often treat my Bible reading as a checkbox to tick off instead of a moment to meet with God. My Bible app even keeps a streak. Ticking the box buys me a clean conscience and a better day.
Under the tracking is a longing worth honoring. We want to be whole. The Hebrew Bible calls that wholeness shalom, and the study is reaching for something close to it. The trouble is the assumption riding along with it: that wholeness is something you build, one input at a time.
Jeremiah saw it coming 2,600 years ago.
This is what the LORD says: Cursed is the person who trusts in mankind. He makes human flesh his strength, and his heart turns from the LORD. He will be like a juniper in the Arabah; he cannot see when good comes but dwells in the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land where no one lives. The person who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence indeed is the LORD, is blessed. He will be like a tree planted by water: it sends its roots out toward a stream, it doesn’t fear when heat comes, and its foliage remains green. It will not worry in a year of drought or cease producing fruit. (Jer 17:5–8)
Jeremiah never promises the blessed man better weather. Heat comes for both plants, and so does the drought year. Same sun, same sky, same calendar.
The difference is underground.
Jeremiah’s “salt land” points toward the basin around the Dead Sea, the lowest dry ground on earth, about 1,400 feet below sea level. Nothing grows there by trying harder.
The juniper’s real problem is worse than scarcity: it “cannot see when good comes.” Self-reliance starves you twice: once in the drought, and again when the rain comes, with no roots to take it in.
Then comes the line I can’t get past. The blessed tree “will not worry in a year of drought or cease producing fruit.” Jeremiah measures flourishing in the worst year.
Run Jeremiah’s tree through the study’s six domains in a drought year, and it scores poorly. Health down. Finances down. Happiness, who knows? God calls it blessed.
Verse 9 explains why we miss it: “The heart is more deceitful than anything else.” The man who makes flesh his strength is trusting his own read on what he needs: the least reliable instrument he owns. Your heart is a bad dashboard.
Psalm 1 uses the same picture and adds a detail.
He is like a tree planted beside flowing streams that bears its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. (Ps 1:3)
The tree is planted. Somebody put it there. Some scholars hear “transplanted” in the Hebrew word (shatul); others think that pushes it too far. Either way, the tree didn’t pick its riverbank.
The phrase “in its season” is where the flourishing project breaks. We want fruit every quarter, measurable and trending up. Psalm 1 gives us a tree that bears when it’s time, and a God who decides when that is.
“Whatever he does prospers” sounds like a prosperity sermon until you read it beside Jeremiah. Prospering happens on God’s schedule, to a person rooted in the right place, and the schedule sometimes includes a drought year.
A tree doesn’t bear fruit to earn the river. It bears fruit because it’s been planted there.
The study asks what makes people thrive. Scripture answers with where we were planted, how we were uprooted, who replanted us, and what we’re growing toward.
“The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed” (Gen 2:8). God is the first gardener, and the first human is placed. Work comes next (2:15), good work done inside a location God chose. In Eden, flourishing was an address before it was an achievement.
The woman saw that the tree “was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom” (Gen 3:6). Read that as a survey: physical wellbeing, aesthetic delight, intellectual growth. The fall was a flourishing strategy, Jeremiah’s cursed man in the first garden: humanity reaching for a tree to secure life on its own terms. Every self-made flourishing project since has been a garden planted east of Eden.
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, because it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree” (Gal 3:13). Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 21:23, not Jeremiah, but the echo is hard to miss. The one man who trusted the Father completely was hung on a tree and took the curse of the shrub. He went to the salt land so we could be planted by the water.
“The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations” (Rev 22:2). Psalm 1’s tree bore fruit in its season. This one bears every month: no drought year, no off-season. Its leaves go to the nations, including the 22 nations the study surveyed. The survey can measure what’s broken. The tree heals it.
If you’re tired, it isn’t from lack of effort. You’ve got the reading plan, the streak, the gym membership, the budget app, and the podcast queue on how to live well. You’ve built a decent irrigation system.
Somewhere along the way, the whole thing started depending on you. Miss a day and the day goes worse. Break the streak, and you assume God is disappointed before breakfast. That’s the juniper’s logic, human flesh as strength, with a verse taped to it.
You may be thinking, “So I should quit reading my Bible?” No. Jeremiah’s tree “sends its roots out toward a stream” (17:8). Roots reach. Scripture, prayer, and the gathered church are where they reach.
What changes is what you think the reaching earns. Read because the river is there and you’re thirsty. A better day may come with it. Some days it won’t.
If you’re in a drought year, hear Jeremiah again. The dry year is where he sets his blessing, so it can’t be proof you’ve lost it. His tree is green in it.
Isaiah describes God’s restored people as “righteous trees, planted by the LORD to glorify him” (Isa 61:3). The word is plural. Isaiah pictures a grove, not one heroic tree hitting its numbers.
I suspect that’s what the researchers keep finding without a word for it. Read their data through Scripture, and the people who gather on Sunday are a planting: trees sharing a riverbank, holding each other up when the heat comes.
Who’s standing next to you in a drought year? What would your city notice about a grove that stays green when everything around it is tracking, striving, and drying out?
If you walked away from church because someone promised you’d thrive and you didn’t, God never made that promise. He made one about where you could be planted, and it’s still open.
A tree doesn’t bear fruit to earn the river. It bears fruit because it’s been planted there.
My streak will break someday. Trees don’t keep streaks.
If your streak broke tomorrow, would you still believe you were planted?