The prophet Jeremiah said, “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah understood the times and acted accordingly, so must we! God has entrusted you and I with the important stewardship of this critical moment in our nations, and the worlds history. And as my friend former United States Congressman Jody Hice rightly observed, “whoever wins the spiritual battle wins the cultural war.”

It appears that we have arrived at that place Billy Graham observed: “Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone, except God.” I see an insidious trend moving into society where tolerance has become synonymous with acceptance and a cult of victimization has become an excuse to suppress another individual’s right to express a different or opposing opinion. Political correctness, which has always existed, should not become the norm in an ethnically diverse republic. Wokeism and cancel culture squelches freedom of speech, honest debate, and genuine discussion.

Sarah Holliday in The Washington Stand wrote last week, “Why is it so hard for some people to recognize the biological differences between men and women? It’s a simple question, some would argue, and Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, shared her insight with The Washington Stand. The reason such a simple reality is tossed aside, she explained, is because “they are not accepting there is a reality.”

Kilgannon emphasized what NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher said during a TED talk, namely, that truth is subjective. Maher stated, “[W]e all have different truths. They’re based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive.” And for Kilgannon, it’s this mindset that leads the Left into a worldview where men can be women and women can be men. “They don’t believe there is truth,” she added. It’s as though “they don’t believe anything except the fact that they don’t believe anything. It’s the age old trope of [they] say there’s no definitive truth and [they] say that in a definitive statement.” It’s a cyclical argument, she observed, which is hard to escape from.”

Billy Hallowell is a digital TV host and interviewer for Faithwire and CBN News and the co-host of CBN’s “Quick Start Podcast.” Writes, “Recent studies about gender confusion unveil the unbelievably diabolical realities surrounding the dangers of rampant emotion and activism consuming real-life medicine. These studies show most children grow out of gender confusion and that the so-called treatments being offered don’t necessarily provide promised reprieves.

This is especially troubling because of the transgender-identifying children’s lives that have been forever affected by an invasive movement permeating every facet of the cultural lexicon. In some ways, it feels like this movement is losing its footing and could soon crumble. A Dutch study found most young people simply outgrow confusion over their gender. Yes, you read that correctly.

While activists are claiming a failure to embrace transgender ideology will literally kill people via suicidal ideation, this second study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found a major decrease in “gender non-contentedness” as young people became adults.

“Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development,” the paper read.

These damning results spark a plethora of questions with which we must all contend: How many lives have been destroyed because of emotionalism, ideological nonsense, and rhetorical bullying against anyone asking questions? Beyond that: How many young people have been misled and irreparably harmed in the process?”

Despite the aforementioned madness I still happen to believe that our nation is filled with great Americans who love God and love their country. Wonderful people who know that we are blessed to live here in the land of the free and the home of the brave where a Biblical worldview not only shaped our founding but was instrumental in this nation becoming a blessing to the entire world. I believe that most of America is awake and keenly aware of the times in which we live and the falsehoods that are embraced, propagated by corruption in government, media, and a host of entities in today’s culture.

We must be aware of and understand the time God has handed to us to influence. We must stand on and stand for the uncompromising truth which made us a great nation. May God help us to keep this land a blessing for the sake of those who will follow in our footsteps. Let’s stay awake and let’s stay true! But let’s NOT tune into National Public Radio!

Did anyone read this article hoping for something that would strip away all their hope, faith, and love? Did anyone want to be discouraged? Did anyone want someone to knock the wind out of their sails? Nobody who reads this column is thinking, “Please strip away all my motivation for serving the Lord.” Instead, you are reading this seeking hope, looking for encouragement, and desiring to be motivated to do greater things for the Lord. Some are reading this looking for help while others are looking for someone to understand their heartache and trials. We live in a world that is so filled with hopelessness, discouragement, and defeat, yet Paul tells us that he has found the secret of staying encouraged in a discouraging world! He says, “For which cause, we faint not”. Paul knows the secret to “not losing heart”! Paul is telling us that regardless of what comes his way, he does not give up, give in, give out, or “lose heart”! It is easy to lose heart, isn’t it? It is so easy to come to a place where a person is ready to throw in the towel, lay down one’s burdens, and quit. It would have been easy for Paul to “lose heart.” Yet, my friends, he lived above his circumstances. What we need to do is to come to the place Paul came to. We must come to the place where, even though we are attacked from without and from within, we will not lose heart. Paul shares his secret of keeping his heart true even when life turns against him. It is in knowing that the Lord strengthens the inward man or woman by giving them renewed strength to face the trials of that come upon us all. Jesus said it best in Matthew 6:34, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Brothers and sisters, each day has its own troubles. Your car was not meant to run on last month’s gas. You need to refill your tank! Your spiritual metabolism cannot survive on yesterday’s meals, neither can the spiritual dosage that brought healing to your heart yesterday help your problems of today. What you brought up from the well yesterday will not be sufficient for the trials you will be called on to face today! No spiritual fuel was designed to run your spiritual engine for ten years. No single spiritual meal will power your life for months at a time. No spiritual inoculation will cure the ailments that will occur as a new day arises.

The “inner man” is to be “renewed” day by day. What does this mean? It means that you need to pray to the Father, feed on His Word, and enjoy the fellowship of the saints on a daily basis. Going to church once a week, or once a month is not a biblical stance and will not get the job done. It is no wonder that so many “lose heart”, they make no investment in “renewing” the “inner man!” Therefore, people “lose heart” because they focus their attention on everything but the one thing that matters most in their lives. They take no thought of their relationship with God and do not focus on “renewing” the “inner man” “day by day.”

The first time I met Glenn was at his brother, Kenny’s, and sister-in-law, Tressie’s wedding anniversary party. Kenny was a hospice patient, and I was his social worker. Glenn walked into the party with a swagger, was wearing dark tinted sunglasses, grabbed his belt, pulled up his pants, stuck out his chest and sat down at the kitchen table. I thought, “Who is this guy wearing dark sunglasses on an overcast day?” To be honest, I thought, “This guy is kind of cocky acting”. Little did I know that in the not-too-distant future, I would become Glenn’s hospice social worker, nor did he?

Glenn was admitted to hospice with end-stage liver cancer when he was eighty-two years old. When I arrived at Glenn’s and his wife, Joann’s home for my initial social work visit, Chrissie, Glenn’s hospice aid, had just finished bathing Glenn, and was in the process of changing Glenn’s hospital bed with Glenn still in it. She was struggling a bit and asked for my assistance. So we dispensed with formalities; I put on a pair of latex gloves and helped Chrissie change the bed. When you are a hospice worker that’s what you do.

Once Glenn was comfortably situated, I commenced with the formalities. I explained my role as their hospice social worker and spent time getting acquainted. Glenn grew up in Adams County and was nicknamed by his family, “Glenn Roy the wild boy”. He’d worked in a local lumber yard for a few years and then at “Shupert’s Tire Shop” in West Union. He became permanently disabled from a back injury at age thirty-seven.

Glenn and Joann “got saved at White Oak Church” when they were in their forties. Joann shared, “Glenn loved to play the guitar and sing the old-time gospel songs. He learned to play the guitar by listening to Johnny Cash. If Glenn was in the next room playing and singing you would think it was Johnny Cash. And Glen always liked to dress in black, so everybody called him, ‘The man black’.”

Glen talked about how much he loved God and enjoyed singing. He stated, “I played all over!” and then he directed Joann, “Get that picture of me playing and show him.” Sure enough he was dressed in black and was wearing his trademark dark sunglasses.

Glen then shared a story that turned me upside down and inside out: “I was playing at this church and there were some teenagers there.” Joann interjected, “They were sitting in the back and they put their sunglasses on to make fun of Glenn. It kind of hurt his feelings.” Glenn continued, “This one boy came up and said, ‘Do you think you are cool or something with those dark sunglasses on?’” I asked Glenn if he responded to the boy and he replied, “No, he didn’t know any better”. Glen went on to explain: “When I was thirty-seven years old I was working on a tractor-trailer tire when it exploded and knocked me all the way across the room against the wall. It permanently injured my back and damaged my eyes. Ever since then the sunlight really hurts my eyes. That’s why I have to wear dark glasses.”

A couple years earlier I made the same snap judgment about Glenn as that teen age boy! That teenage boy may have not known any better, but I should have. I confessed and apologized to Glenn, and we had a candid and wonderful conversation about how understanding is better than criticism. I told Glenn about Stefan, a twenty-year-old young man that I used to attend church with. Stefan would tell me about buying and collecting “Transformers”. I thought, “That’s kind of childish for a grown man to be buying and playing with toys.”, until Stefan told me the rest of the story: “I was in Learning Disability class in school. I had a hard time figuring things out, so I’ve bought and practiced putting together Transformers to help me learn how to figure things out.” Stefan had created his own type of occupational therapy. I had no idea!

We frequently have no idea why people do what they do. The Apostle Paul wrote, “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of man which is in him? (1 Corinthians 2:11). And Oswald Chambers wrote, “Never make the mistake of trying to use your life as a template for someone else’s.” (My Utmost for His Highest). That’s why understanding is better than criticism. Criticism is sterile and fruitless, but understanding is fertile. Understanding and acceptance extend to others the grace to risk, to be, to grow.

“For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

Loren Hardin was a social worker with SOMC-Hospice for twenty-nine years. He can be reached at 740-357-6091 or at [email protected]. You can order Loren’s book, “Straight Paths: Insights for living from those who have finished the course” at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.