A Few Thoughts On this 26 Degree Day

Written By Terry Henry

I began this post more than a year ago and now that I find myself mostly unemployed, I logged into my blog account and this piece sounded to me like it needed to be finished. So here it is.

As I watched an episode of the television program “911” where two married lesbians adopt another daughter and a male fire fighter begins to date another male fire fighter, I thought back to the early 1950’s when the “I Love Lucy” series wouldn’t show Lucy pregnant. As I remember, Lucy and her real life husband, Ricky, were also shown sleeping in separate beds.

Recently turning 75, I am amazed at how the past seventy some years have been compressed and also how much has changed culturally and how the images of what is currently accepted in life are now being packaged and fed to us in films and television.

What was once considered an illness is now presented to us as a choice we are free to make. A choice that is championed by our good friends and politicians in the print media and in television and films.

Not only that, but if you “feel” that you were born into the “wrong” body, much of the progressive left is now eager to affirm your new gender, even to the point of paying for your “transition” with public funds and forcing governing bodies into accepting biological males to compete against women in sporting events.

And yet the public seems to be silent on these fundamental changes in what has been our understanding of what is “right” and what is “wrong”.

One of the most popular books in history is the Christian bible. Around 100 million Bibles are sold world-wide annually. This is the same book that tells us in Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

This creation story is seen as establishing a foundational equality in value and dignity between men and women, as both are made in the image of God. It is also foundational for the biblical view of marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

And so my question remains: What has happened to our past cultural understanding of life and our human existence in it?

I know at this point that I am on shaky ground in terms of trying to communicate my thoughts and feelings around this touchy subject of what I believe has been a gradual cultural decay.

In reality, what we see happening around us has been a part of the human story from the beginning of the book to which I have referred.

Cain was angry and killed his brother Abel. Sound familiar.

Lot was challenged by the wicked men of Sodom who wanted to have sex with his guests, which led him to offer his daughters instead. Sounds like a Hollywood movie.

The point being that the thoughts and actions of human beings hasn’t really changed that much over the past thousand years or so.

What has changed is the general acceptance of what was once considered a normal understanding of the way things should be.

Life is full of extremes and the shifts from the far right to the far left is the legacy we live with.

From Father Knows Best and Lucy and her husband in separate beds to Hollywood’s current portrayal of marriage, sex and love in the movies and television, the extreme is very visually real.

I am reminded of another bible quote that states in Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

At this point I had to pause and walk around the house for a little while in order to regain a thought I had, then lost, as to how to end this post.

And that thought is “...how did we arrive in 2025, with all this turmoil and cultural upheaval.”

To answer that, I am reminded of Proverbs 29:18 and what it says about “vision”.

The phrase “without vision people cast off restraint” is a variation of Proverbs 29:18, which means that when there is no clear, guiding vision or revelation, people become uncontrolled and act without self-restraint. This lack of direction can lead to aimless wandering, a disregard for rules and moral boundaries, and ultimately, chaos or destruction, while those who follow the law of the spirit remain happy and blessed.

In other words there are many paths that we can follow individually or corporately which can either lead us to wholeness or brokenness, to certainty or confusion, to life or to death.

The choice is ours to make.