Our 21st Year in the 21st Century: Maturity?

Our 21st Year in the 21st Century: Maturity?

Making it to Maturity Means Much More than Amassing More Years.

by Ralph Blair
(PDF version available here)

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  That’s a very ancient riddle.  It’s a philosophical puzzle on the world’s beginnings and a question about all sorts of other sequences and consequences. 
   Responses to this old question, as with all questions, depend on how we begin, with what we assume or don’t assume, with what we believe or don’t believe, with what we know, or don’t know and how we then proceed from there.  As a riddle, it’s not supposed to have a simple, self-evident answer.  Such a stumper shows that, ready answers to some questions aren’t always readily available.
   It can be simply good fun, yet frustrating, or it can well serve to reinforce some humility, leading us into profoundly instructive and subsequent lessons in maturity, immaturity, progress, or regress.  At any rate, such exploration is so very much needed these days.  So, let’s look into this.
   In the beginning of Genesis (1-4), we read that God created all that exists, including human life.  God declared that, His whole creation was good, including the two humans He’d created in His Image.  He gave them authority to caringly steward His creation, and to do it with free will and moral responsibility, unlike animals who act strictly from instinct.  These two most complex of beings were brought on only after all else was made, so that they could then manage and care for it all.  We humans, were gifted by God, to be beneficiaries of, and benefactors for, all that God had made.     
   The first humans, as we’re told, were created as mature and not as embryos as we’ve all been made ever since.  So, in terms of that ancient riddle, humanity, that “chicken”, arrived as adult, not as an “egg”.  But then, and all on our own, we laid our own rotten “egg” in our self-centered rebellion against our loving Creator.
   Our self-centeredness ruined us, and it ruined all else, as we insisted on running our own selfish plan, to have “our very own world, in our very own way”.  And, in this, our very own damned fantasy, we destroyed our maturity.  And, we’ve been coping with our resultant immaturity ever since.  
   So, today, when we ask skeptics, what, in this biblical account, so distracts you in your 21^st Century woke way, they say, in their woke way, it’s our “sophistication”, since this story’s, “just nothing but fiction!  A ‘talking’ snake?!  Are you kidding?  Puhleeze!     
But, wait!  As woke, as you claim to be, you’re getting yourself quite distracted by making a big deal over that very same talking snake that so distracted those two back in Eden!  Those two got themselves distracted from even God’s call, by that same talking snake, and it cost them, all that they’d already been given by God, and then, so very much more!  Now, you’re getting yourself so very distracted by that very same talking snake.  Yet, you think you’re “sophisticated”, a Postmodernist, committed to being woke.
   No, my woke friends!  It’s not your virtue-signaling sophistication that gets in your way today, in this matter of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  What gets in your way is what’s always gotten in the way of those who try not to see what they see, and find so disturbingly true.  It’s, defensiveness – the attempt to deny what one finds undeniable, but what one is bent on not admitting to.
   Honestly, frankly, who, today, can say, they can’t see us, our everyday selves, in that very pair, back there, in Eden’s mirror?
   This “old story” describes us all, so uncomfortably, and so very convincingly.  But we can’t stand our resemblance to “them”, “our kin”, in Eden.  No!  We won’t stand for it!  But, right there in front of us, our defensiveness, our closest ally, denial itself, stands in our way, telling us, that’s us, that’s our own “oldest story”, and our everyday story still.  The resemblance is too recognizable to freely admit that it’s us.  Yet, for truest freedom, and for goodness’ sake, we need to come to terms with this unvarnished truth about each one of us, no matter the literary genre of the honest-to-goodness mirror in front of our faces.  And it’s there in that Genesis account.
   It’s all so contrary to our self-serving notions and all of our own wishful thinking about human development from immaturity to ever more maturity down through the years to today’s, so very obviously, immature and divisive and divided 21^st Century chaos all around us, and even within us.  But what would appear to be quite contrary to our self-serving scenario of denial, has proven to be quite ordinary.  Indeed, by now, our fatal fall into immaturity, no matter how we style it or try to spin it, as “progress”, is all, still, so very sadly, “old hat”.  And, it’s so often, so much worse, than that.    
   But our re-write tries to wipe out the true account of humanity’s mad immaturity throughout all of human history, down to our day.  We’re all still so swelled up, in all of our own ugly, self-centered perspectives, in jealousy of our Loving Creator and God, that we misbehave like that first thankless pair that sinned long before we followed up with all of our own egoisms.  We copy their lead, then we copy our own, falling into more narcissism and more excuses.
   They tried to displace their Creator and wound up displacing themselves out of the Paradise they’d freely been given.  We copy them, in our ungrateful greed, and into all of our own guilt and loss.  Trying to usurp God’s authority over all, and all on our own, we’ve wound up, as they did, in all of our chaos, and in all of our loss.  Way to go, “grown-ups”, growing yet more “grown up”! 
   Created for our morally mature fellowship with God, we sought to be our own creators, in our fantasy’s image of us, and trashed it all by denigrating God’s gifted maturity into our very own utter rejection of moral maturity.  And we’ve followed in all of the fatal footsteps of our earliest ancestors in every generation since then.   
   So, according to scripture, in that very beginning, adulthood came without a childhood.  Maturity was given without some time in immaturity and a gifted perfection was prior to the ungrateful imperfection.  This was all the reverse of our own experiences growing up, from being so totally dependent on the union of our parents’ egg and sperm, into an infant who had to grow up and learn, through thick and thin, to strive for maturity, though not ever reaching anything like our fantasy’s goals.
   In the beginning, in God’s intended good gift for all of creation, humanity’s experience in fellowship with God was present prior to humanity’s refusal to fellowship with God, humanity’s maturity preceded humanity’s immaturity, humanity’s reverent respect preceded humanity’s disdainful disrespect, human responsibility was pre-empted by human irresponsibility.  Humanity fancied its “much better” plan than God’s plan.  Humanity was dead wrong!
   There and then, we rebelled, as we still rebel, here and now.  We fell for a lie, and we still fall for the identical lie, trying to make of ourselves the sole source and the center of all that was, is and forever should be.  How tragically immature is self–centeredness!
   God’s gifted life for Adam and Eve was willfully demolished by them, into the opposite of what they aimed to achieve by and for themselves in grasping at God’s power and glory, for their own self-centered project.  Their self-centered stupidity and selfish greed were deadly, not only to them, but for all their descendants.
   Adults chose to sin as no embryo does or can.  No decision for death can be made by an embryo, a most innocent child all alone, inside a mother’s womb.  But deadly decisions to kill embryos are made every day, by supposed adults and governed and legalized by supposed adults.  But, understand: All of these alleged adults are, as we all are, descendants of our first parents, whom we all still so very much resemble in all our fatal self-centeredness.  We choose to go our own way, away from God’s Way, to try to get, for us, what can’t be gotten without counterproductive consequences.
   What a different world that was before the Fall!  Maturity before immaturity!  But, was it, really different?  That temper tantrum of a will-to-power was hatched in the midst of that plentiful Garden of Eden.  That’s where we sought to get the upper hand over God?  We chose to reject maturity for immaturity.  Recognize someone?
   Irrational lust is still never satisfied, as it was not satisfied, even in Eden.  Yet, selfishly, so easily, we still resist maturity!  Selfishly, so easily, we still relish at least our fantasy of immaturity before it explodes into something quite otherwise.  Against all graciously indispensable instruction from God, we, too, so quickly and so selfishly, draw ourselves into our chosen immaturity by our own obstinance and our own greed, just as our foolish ancestors did. 
   Aren’t we reading something of our own biographies when we read of the first two humans, so lovingly created in God’s Image, gifted with free will, an informed conscience, and fellowship with God, so selfishly ruining themselves and their relationship with God, and all else, by conniving to choose to remodel themselves into what they foolishly imagined as an improvement over God’s wise design?  Their immature fantasies reduced a gifted maturity into resulting immaturity.  Self-serving, coveting for their own possession, the benevolent God’s position as Creator/Sustainer of the universe, and all else that is, ever was or ever could, would, should or will be – they fell into a hell of a mess of their own.
   As they fell from their gifted good and innocence, into their earning their deadly evil by their own haughty and irrationally concocted self-centeredness, so do we.  And so, ever since that sinful fall of our early ancestors, who we “resemble to a T” (for traitor), we’ve followed in each and every one of their missteps.  Our own immaturity in ungrateful dereliction has been our own habituated way by default from the beginning of human history, all the way down, through history, to our own days here in AD 2021.
   Pressing the terms of that old riddle, “Those chickens of Eden have come home to roost in us!”  Though so obviously, mortally-wounded, we’re so adept at telling ourselves that we’re “maturing so wonderfully well, so swell, and we’re doing it all on our own”.  In 2021?  Are we awake?  We’re “woke”, but we’re not awake!
   Those who were the first in the human race, were given God’s gift of innocent maturity, created good, in our Creator’s Image, to live life with Him and with one another.  But they were not made to be robots, and neither are we.  
   These two humans, and we, ourselves, in our turn, were and are given free will for fellowship with God and with one another.  But they, and we in our own turn, revolted as we still revolt, with selfish grabs for power in self–centeredness.  Created with gifted life to live in maturity in relationship with God, we chose and still choose our, immaturity instead.  We fell and we fall, from God’s precious gift of maturity in Him into our own booby prizes.  God, help us!  Well, He has, and He does, and He will!  But we can’t do it on our own – again.  We need so very much more help than, “self-help”.  We tried that in Eden, and it killed us.  So now is no time to fall back into more of our self-centered, “self-help”. 

   Seeking “maturity” in “self-actualization” or “self-realization”, so-called, in the latter years of the 20^th-Century and now in this 21^st, there’s been interest in, “New Age” self-fulfillment schemes that are promoted by popular gurus.  They promise that more positive feedback inside one’s sense of self will lead to more positive feedback from others.  But being an obnoxious bragger has never worked well.  None of such schemes ever fills the bill. 
   And, that’s basically because, they don’t adequately diagnose the problem, so, they have no real answer to the real problem.  They’re being far too superficial to even begin to understand that, at bottom these deep and disturbing senses of self-inferiority are rooted in our own not measuring up in our relationship with God – and that sense of inferiority is a clue to this, but instead of being wisely discerned, it’s so unwisely denied.   
   Though, extremely distracting, people refuse to see why it’s so. So, they foolishly keep looking for superficial solutions in self that, of course, never work, and so they’re still seeking more and more affirmation from others, who, of course, are all so very basically distracted inside themselves, and can’t afford to so affirm others.
   Wanting to be in control, by themselves, they’re all stuck in self, and refusing to admit that their real problem runs so far deeper in their relationship to God.  They, as did Adam and Eve, want to be in charge of fixing what they view as, not enough self-satisfaction, even in that Garden of Eden.  
   One of the popular New Age gurus is Marianne Williamson, whose self-help advice took off in the early 1980s in the terror-filled days of “The Gay Plague”, HIV/AIDS.  In 2019 she ran for nomination to be the Democrats’ Presidential candidate but dropped out in early January 2020 when her popularity was toward the bottom of the pool of candidates.
   Yet, as a guru, she irrationally pushes immature mantras for seeking “maturity”.  She tries to “motivate” people out of their obsessing over their low self-esteem and towards “maturity” by claiming, in her pep talk that, “Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don’t see in ourselves.” 
   In other words, if you want to be seen by others as better than you privately see yourself to be, you must think better thoughts about you and, somehow, your own thinking more highly of yourself will get across to others’ views of you and then they’ll think more highly of you.  Her approach did not work for her!
   And, of course, it didn’t, for, to the contrary, what one thinks of self is one’s own thought in one’s own brain, one’s own agenda’s priority, and nobody else experiences either that one’s sense of self or that one’s priority to be more desirable.  So, the one who’s in his or her own brain cells, grunting to move his faux “flattering” revision of his own sense of self into another’s brain cells is trying to do the impossible.  So, it’s frustrating.  And, its unconvincing to both the sender and to the intended recipients.  What’s in each person’s brain cells is unique to that brain.  Nobody else lives in somebody else’s brain cells.
   It’s neither the other’s version of the one who’s trying to send that positive thought into the other, but the other’s agenda does not rank the significance of the other’s sense of self as high on the priority as the other rank’s his or her own concern about his or her own sense of not measuring up.  No mix accumulated in our brains is duplicated in others’ brains.  Reality is the reverse of her notion that, to gain another’s admiration, one must admire one’s self and then project that inner sense into the mind of the other.
   So, she urges all, to see ourselves as “measuring up”, to see “our good”, so that, by our seeing ourselves that way, we’ll then be seen by others, that way?  What nonsense!  Nobody has seen, sees, or will see in us what we see in us, no matter if we like or don’t like what we see in us!  Our thoughts are inside our brain cells, not in others’ brain cells.  Their thoughts are in their brain cells, not in our brain cells.  Thinking otherwise is not only unwise, it’s totally self-delusional, and totally so self-defeating.  
   Even if one tries to spell out for another, one’s image of one’s self, the other agrees or disagrees to different degrees, based on his or her own agenda.  And if the other person is indifferent about us, if his version of us isn’t even on his or her agenda, it’s not.  Each one’s view is idiosyncratic even if superficially similar.
   There are such unavoidably different agendas at play in the interaction between one who’s complaining, to get relief, and one who’s expected to supply relief.  When the interchange is all said and done, each still experiences his or her own version and agenda, even if revised in some way. 
   Moreover, listeners may mistake complaints as requests for complements that they can’t afford to grant, or grant but flippantly, out of their own sense of not measuring up to their own version of the complainant, which, in such a case, would likely be positive even envied, which, then, the one envying the other couldn’t afford, truthfully, to give.  These are a few of the irrational ways to, unsuccessfully, try to improve one’s sense of self by getting another to affirm one’s self.
   Additionally, as indicated, Williamson’s entire approach totally contradicts all of the biological science of the brain.  So, in this and so many other ways, her self-help advice makes no sense. 
   Biologically, as I’ve said, our thoughts of us sit all alone, in our own brain cells, not in others’ brain cells.  They don’t sneak out of isolation cells inside our skulls and sneak into isolation cells in others’ skulls.  We’re numbskulls if we think otherwise. 
   The rational approach toward maturity in such situations is not to extrapolate from what’s in your sense of self from your lifetime of living inside your brain, to which no one else has any access, to what others think in their brains, to which you have no access.  If rationally understood, as grown-ups should, this obvious reality relieves us from worrying that, others think of us, from within our obsessing over our sense of self in our brains.  Of course, they don’t, for, they can’t.  But, our squatting in ours, gets in our way.
   And, of course, they’re far too distracted over there, squatting in their own brains of self- obsession to ever be internally distracted over our worries over our version of our not measuring up.  They may even be motivated to insult any of whom they’re jealous.  It’s all part of what our membership in our fallen race entails for us all.
   So, do yourself the favor of waking up to this brisk aroma and fine flavor of a coffee called, reality testing!  As it’s been said so often: “Wake up and smell the coffee.”  In other words, get real!
   Williamson didn’t even make it through the course of the efforts of candidates for nomination to President, even with her version of positive thinking.  She dropped out of running in early January.
   Another candidate was running for re-election as President.  In his youth he’d been influence by Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking”.  His foes interpreted his adoption of Peale’s advice as his being but a “trumpeter”, pun intended, a synonym for “bragger”.  Yet, he neither won his first election nor lost re-election due to Peale’s influence.  There were as many reasons for voting for Trump or against Trump, or for voting for Biden or against Biden as there were voters who voted for or against either one of them.  Again, any action is the story of the actor, not the story of the acted upon.
   Back in the mid-50s, when Adlai Stevenson ran against Ike, he was asked what he thought of Peale.  Adlai snapped, “I find Paul appealing, but Peale, appalling!”  It was such a quick reply, he’d probably used before.  And, Stevenson was a Unitarian, not a sect that’s usually much acquainted with Paul.  It may have just been his idea of a clever play on words.  At any rate, whatever one says or does is the story of the speaker or actor – though we may not be aware of what that story is.
   Here’s a pathetic, but indelible, example of what I’m talking about, from a New York City group therapy session on its first night’s meeting after 9/11/2001.  The group was struggling to process the utter horrors of that week in Manhattan, when, finally, one of the members who hadn’t been engaging interrupted with frustration to angrily demand rhetorically: “Can’t we get off this subject?  I have my own stuff to talk about.”  If that tragedy within the week of 9/11, right there in New York City, can’t be a reality check on our own perspectives on all of our own problems and our obsessions over what distracts us so self-centeredly in our own private lives, what in this world, pray tell, could ever do it?
   There’s a myriad of ways that everybody views everybody else, and themselves, but none of these multiphasic ways of seeing resides without an idiosyncratic twist from one person’s brain to another.  No one experiences oneself as others experience him. It’s all a matter of what all is stored within each brain.  Everyone’s own individual formative years, interpretation of those years, the sense of one’s self, agendas, beliefs, interests, preoccupations, priorities and all else that went into and goes into whatever’s in each person’s brain cells is the very proof that, his or her own unique mind’s complexity isn’t ours.  Even brain surgeons can’t find our thoughts, however much they poke around in our brains.
   Biologically, we don’t operate with, or in, anyone else’s brain cells.  What’s so difficult to get about this basic biological fact? 
   Well, what’s so difficult to get about this basic biological fact is the truth of the fact, itself, i.e., that, we’re squatting and squirming, alone, within our own brain cells, so, our thoughts are in our own awareness.  That’s why we’re aware of them!  And that’s why others are not aware of them!  They don’t think our thoughts.  They think their thoughts.  Their thoughts preoccupy them. Ours preoccupy us.  Realizing this truth about the brain is a “no brainer” that’ll free us to get on with what’s our job that needs our brain’s attention.  
   Have you ever thought you had trouble being able to be understood by others, try as you may to get your point across to them?  Have you ever been told by others that they were frustrated, trying to get their point across to you? Communication can be hard, even when, supposedly, we’re trying to understand each other.  That’s because none of us is on the very same purpose page at the very same time, nor coming from the same formative years and experiences and distracted as we all are by our own self-centeredness and self-consciousness.  The more each can step out of his or her own way, to be able to carefully listen and try to identify with what we have in common, the better each can try to communicate with the other.  But, self-distracted, we can’t.
   And, for goodness sake, as well as for your own good sake, do operate with the brain God gave you.  Don’t try to operate with what you merely guess He gave to others.  He didn’t give them carbon copies of what you and your experiences accumulated there in your own brain.  We may and should try to relate to one another, however, inside ourselves, we’re not that other person!
   It’s not hard to understand this biological fact, so we need never trip over our unreasonably agitated versions of us or our envious versions of anyone else.  Your “you”, your “him”, “her” or “them” is invisible to him, her and them and to any other onlooker from within that onlooker’s private, self-centered, self-distracted view. 
   Get it?  If you do, you’ll not forget it!  Move through the cells in your own brain all you want.  You can’t help but do that.  But, for sanity’s sake, for your sake, and for the sake of others, for the sake of all that God has called you to be and to do, pick up all that trash about what all you think, on your own, regarding what you suppose others think of you, and toss it into your own trash bin. 
   None sees within us, but the One who created us, the One Who loves us far deeper than we, self-centered “lovers” of self, do. 
   Grow up!  Mature into the one you were created to become, not your daydream that you foolishly patched together on your own.  And then, you can afford to love others and to be there for them, realizing that God is there for you, and He’s been there, for you, from all eternity to all eternity.  Function under His parameters.
   As in all immature misinterpretations of so-called “maturity”, we misuse and trip ourselves up over all of our so-called “progress”.  In today’s freeze-framing of our supposedly “progressive” society, bent so self-centeredly on self-serving, self-flattering and currently held ideas of “progress”.  Folks claim to be woke but it’s all such a joke, and a very tragic joke, for, it’s all so very badly broken, and all reminiscent of tripping ourselves up, away back there in Eden.

   These days, what should be simply a comment of a differing opinion, can quickly be branded, a “microaggression”, at the very least.  And then, that politically incorrect “culprit” is consequently “cancelled” in, his or her own group, on social media, or fired and blacklisted as never-ever-again-hirable!  This is called progress?  This is called maturity?  This is called woke!  It’s wokus-pocus or less delicately: “BS”!  And, it could be put even more bluntly.
   A New York Times poll finds that, just 51 percent of their Times’ employees are “not afraid to say what they really think”.  Where, professedly, “All the News that’s Fit to Print”, is printed, not all the employees’ opinions seem fit to be spoken, even, in-house.  Self-censorship by employees is done to keep their jobs.  Given the NY Times’ narrowly woke-slant on everything, any forbidden opinions are so very easy to spot and then, to tattle on.  
   Facebook’s woke algorithm on prejudice “weights” posts of “hate” to hone in on “hate” against its privileged LGBTQQ+, Blacks, and Muslims, but relegates to “low priority”, all the “hate” against “whites” and “men”.  AOL dumps into users’ Spam folders, “for your security”, it claims, e-mails from, e.g., “Right & Free”, “Flag and Cross”, “Judicial Watch” or headed with words such as, “Patriot”, “Freedom”, “Liberty”, “Herschel Walker”, “Marco Rubio”, “Jim Jordan”, etc.  Presuming to “baby-sit” un-woke allies of these sites, AOL also insults users who don’t support these sites, as if they were clueless and needed AOL’s “childcare” to feel “safe”.
   In Black History Month, Amazon nixed from its streaming service, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, an inspiring documentary on this Justice’s rise from poverty down in Jim Crow’s segregated Georgia to Yale Law School, and on up to his becoming only the 2^nd black on the US Supreme Court.  Is Big Tech’s, as it certainly seems to attest, the racism de rigueur?
   By definition, freedom of speech should be highly prized in all institutions of higher learning.  But the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, finds that, among university students, 70 percent of conservatives are self-censoring, compared with 61 percent of moderates and 55 percent of liberals.  And religiously active students self-censor at 63 percent, in contrast to atheists, agnostics and the otherwise openly non-religious, at 56 percent. 
   Thankfully and reliably, FIRE publishes an annual list of 150 schools, i.e., “The Worst” and “The Best” colleges for free speech.   
   Woke targeting of professorial scholars for voicing “unpopular” views has quadrupled just since 2015, so that, now, a fourth of all such attacks on openly-articulating professors’ free speech rights have already cost them their jobs!  How tragically illiberal, how stupidly immature is all of this allegedly “progressive” and “woke” censorship!  It’s no true maturity!  It’s an absolutizing of prejudice by the Left.  It’s routine in every dirty dictatorship through history.
   Pampered college students, “snowflakes”, are requiring “trigger warnings”, a term that can now, itself, be feared to be too scary to even utter, even as a warning.  So, as The New Yorker reports: “Those who received trigger warnings, reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not.”
   Leftist bias is propagated for no sound educational purpose, while responses from the Right are ruthlessly labeled as “hate”.  The woke allies in offices of student affairs, in HR, and in college counseling centers push this indoctrination.  To help all of these so very easily-triggered college students try to cope with all their emotional fragility, they’re offered some time with puppies and Play-Doh.  Were they any better prepared to read and to think critically, they’d be able to do far better with some wisdom from Plato!
   Are these still, far too immature college students, as in need of “safe space” as when they scared themselves into a panic in their “boogeyman-haunted” bedrooms of early childhood?  Or, are they demanding trigger warnings as the manipulations of spoiled brats, so as to hear only what they want to hear, in order to still get their way, each and every day?  Just whose finger is on that “trigger”?
   Meanwhile, many of their non-college peers are being readied for truly tough military combat in perilous, very predictably deadly, encounters with actual, angry, life-threatening enemies.  That’s not what only seems to appear in woke fantasies of inexperience.
   These latter youth learn to face truly hard realities, undistorted by woke progressivist professors, bent on propagandizing all of their own self-righteous disparagement of Western Civilization, or any and all accurate understandings of really true history, and the necessary principles of clear rational thinking and reasoning for intelligent assessments, to prepare to fend off all of the pitifully pop propaganda that’s so continuously dished out all around us.
   According to our major media, “Islamophobia” rages in America. Yet, actually, it’s Jews, not Muslims, who are more often targeted for hate crimes.  Anti-Christian prejudice, while quite common, is given very little, if, actually, any coverage as a hate crime, in the mainstream media.  Indeed, the media commits that hate crime.
   Where, for example, were the headlines around the web about a 5-year-old, forbidden to sing his song in his public-school talent show because, it “mentions Jesus too much”?  Any kid forbidden to call out his own, “Allah hu Akbar!” in his submitted performance for his public-school talent show, would have been prime news on CNN, MSNBC and all the rest.  Administrators of a public-school, even in a “Bible Belt” town of only 1,543 residents, knew they had to be woke enough to mandate that a third-grader not be allowed to wear her facemask inscribed with three “offensive” words.  The words?  “Jesus Loves Me”.  Indeed, it took the filing of a federal lawsuit about our American Freedoms to remove that anti-Jesus rule so that this little girl could wear her favorite facemask. 
   Interviews on American college campuses find that, most of the students know virtually nothing about 9/11.  Of course, they were babies back then.  That’s all the more reason to learn about it!  Yet, only 14 out of our 50 states mandate instruction about 9/11.  The students vilify “pro-lifers” as “Taliban”, so, they do know that, that’s a bad word, but don’t seem to know really why it’s so bad.  They’re quick, repeatedly, to scorn, “American exceptionalism” and quick, repeatedly, to denounce “American imperialism”.  They favor Socialism, saying they want “more freedom”.  Yeah?  Under Socialism?  Teen Vogue headlines, “Socialism for Gen Z-ers” as it labels “capitalism’s very existence as a system of profit and exploitation”.  What’s ahead in such ignorance and propaganda?
   No doubt, there’s all of the same sort of blissful ignorance and forced bigotry, but in reverse, at Fundamentalist Bible colleges!  But this doesn’t justify the bigotry that’s pushed in any schools.
   Is there hope for a fairer tolerance all around?  Well, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education finds that 83 percent of its survey’s respondents say that they’d respect someone who disagrees with them, “as long as the person respected them back”.  Sounds nice. But, is this response real progress toward reasonable discussion and debate, or is it only a virtue signaling, for one’s very own ego gratification?  Well, these are only some examples of the dismal academic immaturity that already abounds in America these days.
And, in terms of the trending, the college and university scene is only getting more restrictive of alternative viewpoints.

   So, how long does it take to grow up?  That depends on what’s learned and put into good use in a lifetime, however long the life.  One can continue to learn and put all of that, too, into good use so long as one is alert enough to be able to continue to learn and to recall what’s learned.  And if you’re able to continue to keep on learning, you’re able to put it into practice.  Once you’ve moved beyond your ability to learn more, you may still be quite able to keep using what you’re used to using, for yet some time to come.
   Of course, growing toward increasing maturity takes more than merely the passage of time.  Hours, days, years, and decades are merely the sequences for our human development, but they’re not our mentors.  We need to learn to put to very good use whatever life experiences we have, ours, and others’, and to diligently and rationally interpret, so that we don’t waste any significant lessons by either neglecting them or by rationalizing them away.
   Being alert to learning what we need to learn requires learning that we may, at first, try not to learn.  But trying not to learn what we really should try to learn does us no favor.  Examining our own reasons, often expressed as excuses, can allow us freer access to what may be, indeed, necessary to learn.  The more we resist learning what we think we don’t want to know or what, off the top of our head, we don’t agree with, can be a clue that we should pay at least some attention to learning at least a bit more about what we’re “resisting” and why we’re “resisting” it.  It might well mean that we don’t really know enough about “it” yet, to resist “it”.

   Obviously, it takes a whole lot more to become mature than to be, simply, officially, counted as an “adult” on one’s 21^st birthday.  Birthdays occur in an annual succession over time that passes by.
   To become increasingly mature, requires, in no particular order: a lifetime of honest commitment, patience, flexibility, intelligent attention, rational thinking, wise intentionality, frank examination of one’s own motives, truly serious efforts, realistic goals and expectations, a mental ability to work at recovering from life’s inevitable disappointments, an ability to rightly refuse to rely on boasting of oneself and blaming others, empathic awareness and a serious willingness to identify with and cooperate with others, loving others and actively committing to a deeply serious spiritual growth for the absolutely most profound of all perspectives and confidence for the deepest sense of truthful, dependable and everlasting security, i.e., the deepest faith in, and love of, God.  
   Given such reasonable requirements for truly fruitful living, how disadvantaged students will be, if woke tutors get their way and provide them with nothing but what panders to immature whims of even these still immature tutors, themselves, in virtue-signaling in quest of more ego applause, tenure and a safe, continuing salary!
   Just because one is older, doesn’t mean one is any wiser, more mature, relevantly informed, competent, honest or even decent.
   It’s much like this, too, in the longer haul of civilization’s history and, in particular, in the competition between conflicting cultural assumptions, philosophies, worldviews, and value systems, etc.
   Maturity can’t be defined by labeling a point of view as “up-to-date”, to signal, it’s, “true” and “useful”, any more than by labeling a point of view as “out-of-date”, means it’s therefore, “false” and “useless”.  The really true and the really false sweep through all of the ages of humanity.  That’s why it’s necessary to have a keenly reliable awareness of both world history and American history.
   DNA-based evidence indicates that we, on earth today, are all related to one another.  We all descend through these latest forty or so generations of genetic and cultural influences from common ancestors.  Moving back in time, as a Yale statistician notes, “All individuals who have any descendants among the present-day individuals, are actually ancestors of all present-day individuals.”  Ponder that, if you will or dare, while reflecting on all of your daily interactions with, “the folks”, i.e., your long-lost kin, all around you.
   Unfortunately, in the latter half of the 20^th Century and in these early decades of this 21^st, Postmodernism pushes dismissal of the best of all the rational wisdom from the past and pushes selective prioritizing and magnifying of a divisive relevance to racial, ethnic and gender identities.  How very much “of the moment”, all this is!  But far deeper than all of this contemporary divisiveness, there’s, really, a more basic connection within our common humanity.   
   In their ordering all of us to so quickly adopt radically different assumptions, values, priorities and paradigms toward a radical reset into virtue-signaled “progressivist” redefinitions of maturity, against all of the alleged “immaturity” of all of the past, these self-styled woke “progressivist revolutionaries” are, as such, blinded by their own shortsightedness, unidentified, thus, unexamined assumptions, prejudices, ignorance of actual history, their naïve expectations, values, customs, styles, standards, popular whims, fantasies, etc., and their own absolutizing of the immediate, that seriously threatens the foundations of the most valuable cultural heritage that is, indeed, our Western civilization, the most truly progressive and most truly productive civilization in the entire history of the world.  And all of this historical ignorance, fear and prejudice is by the courtesy of naïvely woke, Postmodernism.
   Today, in schools, K-12, the fundamental, indispensable “3 R’s” are relegated below the importance of increasingly irrational and inevitably harmful distractions, e.g., so-called “critical race theory”, setting up internalized racist rivalries between even the little kids, premature transitioning into very foolish responses to prepubertal gender fantasies, reminiscent of old “ex-gay” hoaxes, along with other former fads like that very harmful “recovered memory” farce.
And I’ve seen clinical and social harm that’s been done by all of these come-and-go fads.  It’s been tragic.
   Now, this all struts under newer, yet still “progressive”, banners.
   Fads rise, fail, fall and fade away as other fads, too, rise, fail, fall and fade away, but not before they’ve already done yet so much more damage to yet another generation caught up in all of the very newest, then passing, nonsense.  Newer fads and fashions cram, squeeze and bully through ever rapidly-revolving doors of yet more unexamined “progressivisms”, that, although likewise doomed, if the past is even suggestive of what’s to come, do their damage in those tender, formative years of their victims.  And, the damage can last for a lifetime, for, as always, with unexamined fads, there’ll be destructive contamination left behind to cause more pain for years ahead.  
   Writing in Newsweek for Rosh Hashanah, 2021, year 5782 in the Jewish calendar, Rabbi Yaakov Menken, was inspired by this Holy Day’s traditional reflections and contemplation over how one “veered off course during the previous year”.  He saw that this self-reflecting time could also be as “opportune a time as any, to contemplate how we, as the American people, have recently strayed from our own covenant – specifically, our united dedication to the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” 
   So, he notes the American Booksellers Association’s calling its own “inclusion of an ‘anti-transgender’ title in a mailing, not merely worthy of apology, but a ‘violent incident’.  In another story”, as the rabbi notes, “terrorists launching bombs attached to brightly colored balloons were recently described by the Associated Press as ‘pro-Hamas activists.’  Put together, these statements suggest that exposing adults to uncomfortable ideas is more barbaric and dangerous than trying to blow up Jewish children.”  Menken also cited Big Tech’s “exploit[ing] its dominance to arbitrarily curate the content that most Americans are allowed to see.  The leader of the free world was banned from Twitter both before and after the election, while both the Taliban and the ayatollahs of Iran use the platform as often as they desire.  That Twitter, thus became America’s de facto foremost promoter of terrorism and genocide, passed almost without notice”, this noted Rabbi observes.      
   We need to truly wake up and recognize that, just because the years seem to go by at increasing speeds, in all of our lives, as individuals and as generations, even of entire cultures, doesn’t mean that anyone becomes any wiser or more mature.  Indeed, it’s far more likely that we can all get egomaniacally fixated inside our nearsightedness, clinging to stupid, self-centered fantasies for our selfish purposes, or at least attempting to do so, while alleging that ours are simply, “sincerely good intentions for the welfare of all”.  Really?  This all can end in our never really learning any truer wisdom that was not only better understood, but proved to be so very practical, long before we all were born.
   The epitome of immaturity is, me, me, me and we, we, we, as up and over against, me and her and him and them – and Him!  That’s the pity!  And it’s a selfish pit of hell.  Sadly, it’s been the chosen way of the living dead since Adam and Eve turned all of that gracious generosity, blooming in Eden’s Garden, into their own tiny tent of ungrateful discontentment.  And, ever since, we’ve imitated their disgruntled, ungrateful immaturity.  We are surely their descendants!

   Well, here we are, in this 21^st year of this 21st century AD – a rare combination, albeit arbitrarily linked to our cultural imposition of “maturity” onto that number, “21”.  Nonetheless, let’s look into a few facts, fallacies and meanings of maturity and immaturity in our own personal lives, in the life of today’s world and in life, as such.
   As the human race, how are we doing these days, in terms of maturity?  How are we, as individuals, doing in this regard?  May we all be wise enough to take an honestly frank inventory of our own everyday lives and of life in general, in this, our own lifetime!
   On each individual’s level, one’s first two decades of life are felt, subjectively, as absolutely, the very longest twenty years of one’s entire life.  Isn’t that so, in your own experience before adulthood? 
   That’s because each year of life is personally experienced in the context of how long we’ve lived so far.  Thus, over the length of all of our years, so far, each additional year seems shorter, because each additional year really is experienced as a relatively shorter span of our entire lifespan’s experience, so far.  Got it? 
   And this same phenomenon of experienced time is there in our hourly and weekly experience of segments in the passage of time.  What slows down or speeds up this sense of time’s passage is influenced by whether and to what degree we’re bored or in flow.
   Recall how l-o-n-g, as kids, we had to wait, frustrated, impatient, from the day after Christmas until next year’s Christmas presents! 
   Far more seriously, during the Covid-19 lockdowns and isolated from in-person comradery at school, there was an alarming uptick of suicidal ideation in kids – for whom the lockdowns were felt to be so much more never-ending than the adults experienced them.  These suicidal thoughts increased by 24% in kids under 18 years of age during what were experienced as l-o-n-g weeks and l-o-n-g months separated from their in-person contact with classmates.
   Think back to 20 years before today.  That most recent 20-year span doesn’t seem as long as the time it took to crawl from your crib to your college graduation, does it?  Yet, the two stretches of time, from your crib to your college graduation, and from 9/11, 2001, to today, were exactly, the very same number of years! 
   So, timewise, your parents and you, as a little kid, weren’t in sync.  This explains a lot to you, as an adult, looking back.  You and your parents never did experience time the same way, while you lived together, and later, in visits home, together.  No wonder your Mom might have said at the end of each of your “too short” visits later on, “Oh, you have to leave, now?  You just got here!” 
   Even with all of those childhood “naps”, “time-outs”, bored and impatient, we had a lot to learn through our first 20 years – as we were experiencing all of those growing pains, physically, mentally, academically, interpersonally, psychologically, sexually, morally, spiritually, etc.  They’re called “formative years” for good reasons!  So, it’s no wonder the years before we were, legally, adults, seem to have taken soooo long – back then and even now, in memory. 
   If old enough, we can’t forget where we were on 9/11, that truly most terrible morning of unleashed evil.  Its stench filled the air in New York City for many weeks.  Still, today, of course, that acrid aftermath lingers in the lives of all of those who so suddenly, and without any warning at all, lost their precious loved ones to all of that evil Islamist loathing and lunacy.
   Babies born in 2001 have now graduated from college, and as kids, their first two decades crept by for them, as ours once did.  
   Now, we may be older than we feel.  So, we may wonder, as did Billy Graham, late in life, saying that, his biggest shock in life was how soon he was so old.  He lived to within 9 months of his 100^th birthday, so, from conception to his dying day, he made it to 100! 
   We experienced pre-school and grade school as if stuck in time.  “When?”, was our constant complaint.  Yet, as years passed, we noticed that, time was on the move.  As little kids, time goes by at, say, 5 miles an hour, hm?  In our teens, maybe 10 miles an hour?  In our 20s, time is going some 20 miles an hour (no matter what our speedometers say).  In our 30s we’re doing 30 miles an hour.  In our 40s, 40 miles an hour, and so on until, in our 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? we’re speeding faster and faster and faster, and, we’re suddenly shocked to suspect that, we’ll likely, “so soon”, crash!
   As we age, we may try to “adjust” our expectations.  Yet, all of our well-intentioned “adjustments” really don’t ever quite prepare us for what we’ve not “learned” since our having “grown up” at 21!
   As those Pilgrims were experiencing their real-life challenges in their newfound habitat in the Dawn Lands of 1621, back across the Atlantic, a Catholic priest, later to be known as, Saint Vincent de Paul, served as a chaplain to the galley slaves imprisoned at Marseilles.  He, himself, had been kidnapped and enslaved by Moslem pirates who plied the vulnerable Mediterranean coasts to capture and enslave “infidel” peasants, i.e., the Christians, so that these hateful abductors could “earn the pleasure of Allah”. 
   One of Vincent’s insights – learned from his life and the lives of others – he, thoughtfully, left behind for us to contemplate: “What is to endure for a long time is slowest to reach maturity.”  He then added, with his trust in God: “All comes at the proper time to those who know how to wait.”  And, the very best way to wait is to wait with God!  If we wait with our faith in our faithful God, we can fully afford to be patient.
   We’re reminded of what those Pilgrims’ pastor, John Robinson, shared with them when he bid them Godspeed on their voyage to the New World.  He said: “I am verily persuaded that, the Lord hath yet more truth, to break forth out of His Holy Word.”  So true!
   Well, the stupidest of immature expectations, although, it’s quite common when we’re young, is: “Yippy!  I’ll be an adult at 21!”.
   “What?”, an old man smirks, “You kidding?”  “OK”, the pre-21-year-old quickly admits, to sound more mature, then, impatiently, asks, “But, if not, then, when?”, repeating his frustrated tantrums from preschool.  “Well,” that old man replies, “Just you wait, just you listen, and live, and learn that waiting won’t always be so irritating.”  That old man could have “saved his breath to cool his porridge”, as our pastor, Maurice Boyd, so very often reminded us in that fine Irish brogue of his.
   Still, let’s put all of the necessary time and intelligence into moving toward more maturity by growing as best we can, all along the way! 
…It was on Friday, February 19, 1960, a leap year, that I leapt eagerly, and officially, into “adulthood”.  On that same day, Prince Andrew was born to Queen Elizabeth II and China launched a rocket that reached an altitude of five miles.  
   Now Prince Andrew is accused in a Jeffrey Epstein rape case though, it’s thought that, by a technicality and perhaps some money, it’ll be settled soon.  A still hostile Chinese Communist regime has now test-launched a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile that circled the globe.  A China expert says it came as China was waging its “malicious” propaganda against the US, “laying the justification for an attack.”  His concern is that, “Beijing will someday take a clueless political class in Washington by surprise.” 
   An evil world still plots its way into sex scandals of immaturity and deadly wars of immaturity.  “Way to go, world ‘maturity’!”
   Well, back there, on my 21^st birthday in 1960, when I, myself, arrived at “maturity” so-called, I was a senior at Bowling Green State University in my home state of Ohio.  I was about to fly down to Dallas, Texas, to take a look at Dallas Theological Seminary to continue my education there. 
   During my visit, I met with a student I’d known before, and with his DTS friends, who’d later become my friends, too, at DTS.  We dined at a popular “grown-up” restaurant, Trader Vic’s & Tiki Bar, under “Big D’s” bright skyline with its famous red horse, Pegasus, flying high atop the city’s first skyscraper.
   Since, at 21, I’m so “mature”, I buy, and bring back, a little tin of chocolate coated ants for my Bowling Green dormmates to enjoy. 
   Back at BGSU, and for fun, prior to our indulging in these little candy-coated crispy critters, I say nothing about what they are.  So, there we are, all chatting away and chewing the candy, when one of the guys spots the label on the little tin and he shouts out: “Yikes!  We’re eatin’ ants!”.  Some of us find it hilarious – this little vignette of my arrival into maturity, as I’m anticipating my BGSU graduation day in June and my going on to grad school in the fall.
   Down at Dallas Seminary in my first few weeks there, fellow students planned a little vignette of their own on me.  And they all, likewise, were 21 or even, older, and all, too, were now graduate students!
   They suggested that we take an evening’s stroll for ice cream.  When we got back to the dorm, I opened the door to my dorm room and I found that it was now totally empty.  Not one stick of furniture was under all of the many unrolled toilet paper strands draped from the ceiling.  My fellow grad students all laughed their heads off.  And then, they all pitched in, to retrieve all my furniture from other rooms down the hall, and they ripped down all of the toilet paper streamers.  “Maturity” can be such fun!
   But some take many more years than others do to reach truer maturity – if, they ever do.  Some, so very sadly, never seem to. 
   On Easter Sunday, 1960, two months after I turned 21, as racial integration was being supported by at least some whites in the South, Bob Jones University’s founder, Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., chose to preach his Easter Sunday sermon for racial segregation and against racial integration.  His sermon was called, “Is Segregation Scriptural?”  He loudly insisted that the Bible calls for racial segregation.  So, he chose to displace Easter Sunday’s focus on Jesus’ Resurrection with a death rattled defense of racial segregation.  In so doing, he “biblically” abused all Southern blacks and the Bible.

   Ironically, to do it, he also had to contradict two of his own most popular sayings from his, Dr. Bob Says list: “Do Right!” and “Don’t sacrifice the permanent on the altar of the immediate!”  Doing right surely means doing what’s truly biblical, e.g., the Golden Rule’s loving others as we love ourselves, and our praying, “Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven”, etc.  Did he really picture Heaven as racially segregated?  He threw away what’s permanent, “on the altar of the immediate”, for his Jim Crow era was already on its way out, and the truly integrated Kingdom of Heaven is what’s permanent.
   And, he did this, on Easter Sunday!  Apparently, he was so hell-bent to defend his own inherited racist culture, that he had no more relevant a topic for an Easter Sunday’s sermon than his racist rant.  It was a tragic lack of Christian maturity even in 1960, by an Alabaman born in 1883. 
   Yet, we all can be just as self-righteously stubborn in our own entrenched immaturity in all sorts of our own very favorite ways. 
   I didn’t hear that “Easter” sermon in person, for I’d already left BJU, to continue my college education and then to graduate from BGSU, that very spring.  And I’m thankful I didn’t have to hear it.
   After Dr. Bob Sr. died in 1968 and Dr. Bob Jr. died in 1997, Dr. Bob III, BJU’s third president, for yet 5 more years, announced in 2000, though he did so under duress, that “BJU was wrong in not admitting African-American students before 1971”.  Yet he passed the buck, saying simply: “It sadly, was a common practice of both public and private universities in the years prior to that time”.  He also then discarded BJU’s “policy against interracial dating”. 
   In 2015, Dr. Bob III finally apologized for what he said was his “reckless” calling for the stoning of homosexuals 35 years before. 
   Even the most stubborn, change if need be.  They may even mature.  But these changes made by Dr. Bob III would have been too “compromising” of “Bible standards” for his old grandpa.
   In that fall of 1960, with a few of my new fellow students at Dallas Seminary, we, sent our President-elect, John F. Kennedy, a congratulatory telegram from the very readily at hand Dallas Seminary business office, as 1960 was far too early for emails!
   Well, cluelessly immature, as we DTS novices were, we were very quickly reprimanded for conveying an impression that Dallas Seminary endorsed a Roman Catholic for President.  But to us, JFK was a war hero, articulate Senator, and, now, our President.
   Having had good Catholic friends as I grew up in my hometown, in my neighborhood and at school in the 1940s and 1950s, and as I was an avid viewer of Bishop Sheen’s TV program, I was not at all prepared for this raw anti-Catholicism at Dallas Seminary.
   Three years later, in grad school at USC, as I was walking from the university’s campus to downtown Los Angeles, I passed the Herald Examiner’s parking lot and I noticed the rush to load piles of extra editions into cars and vans.  Then, I saw the headlines announcing that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
   In 1999, Dallas Seminary celebrated its 75^th anniversary, and guess what?  A Roman Catholic, Bill Bennett, the US Secretary of Education, was the invited special guest speaker at this big DTS 75^th celebration!  Clearly, since 1960, DTS had had a change of administrators, even of policy, yet it still held to the evangelical theology of its 1924 founders, though, this Dispensationalist brand of evangelicalism originally emerged just a century before, after some two millennia of Christianity’s overall history. 
   Well, institutions can and do change – as BJU and DTS did – by either becoming more, or even less, mature.  Changes are made when it’s thought there’s more to be gained by changing than not.
   As DTS honored Bennett, predictably, other Christians labeled it a “trespass”.  It was self-righteously denounced by anti-Catholic Fundamentalists for their own perceived in-house “advantages”. 

   Today, Greg Epstein, author of Good Without God, is a chaplain at Puritan-founded Harvard.  As a proud “progressive atheist”, he claims: “We don’t look to a god for answers.  We are each other’s answers”.  Oh?  One might ask: “As were Adam and Eve to each other, ‘each other’s answers’ in jointly rebellious self-delusions?”  
   So, Epstein’s boast is, as such, not “progressive” at all.  It’s just every bit as primeval, as “old fashioned”, if you will, as what was so tragically concocted under that self-deluded self-centeredness in Eden.  And, its fruit is no less bitter than what they swallowed.  And it’s certainly not what John Robinson meant when he assured those embarking Pilgrims that, “the Lord hath yet more truth, to break forth out of His Holy Word.” 
   Harvard claims that, in Epstein, it’s simply serving the religiously unaffiliated by offering them, an atheist chaplain.  So, this claim supports the fact that neither Epstein, nor his so-called “religiously unaffiliated” students, nor anyone else, is ever actually religiously unaffiliated!  All are worshippers!  But, worshippers of what or of whom?  There’s never any getting around worshipping, whether we worship ourselves, stuff, others, atheism, rationalizing of our defensiveness, gods and goddesses or God, Almighty, Himself.

   Since my own 21^st year, my life has continued to be a series of adventures and experiences, both less and more challenging, but each has been an opportunity for further maturity, both by way of wiser and unwise choices, a not unusual mix for all of our growing into yet more maturity.
   And, it’s been that way through my transferring from DTS up to Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, then through my graduating from the University of Southern California’s Grad School, and my year on the Inter-Varsity staff at the University of Pennsylvania before I was not reappointed for the following year due to my supportive views on homosexuality.  I then moved to Penn State’s religious affairs staff for just a year to fill in for a chaplain on leave and I stayed on at Penn State’ Grad School to do my doctoral research into the etiology and the mental health approaches to homosexual orientation and life.  I graduated from Penn State University in 1971. 
   While finishing my doctoral dissertation, I’d already moved to New York City to be the Director of Counseling at City University’s college in downtown Brooklyn, now known as CUNY’s City Tech. From my office window, looking across the Brooklyn Bridge, I saw the Twin Towers being erected in Lower Manhattan and certainly never imagined they’d be gone just three decades later. 
   I founded The Homosexual Community Counseling Center (50 years ago this year) and The Homosexual Counseling Journal and began my private practice of psychotherapy, individual and groups, to help same-sex couples put together and build a life with each other, a rationally monogamous partnership on firm foundations of mutual attraction, shared basic values, and the skills required for rational teamwork, as well as all of the other psychological challenges of daily life.
   In 1975, I founded Evangelicals Concerned to better inform gay and lesbian evangelicals, their families and the wider evangelical world, of a truly biblically-affirming understanding and acceptance of same-sex attraction and committed same-sex partnership.  
   I’ve taught our weekly EC Bible studies and annual winter Bible studies, written our EC quarterlies, review and Record, and our essays, booklets and keynotes for EC’s conferences, to which we’ve invited important evangelical leaders as guest speakers. 
   Our EC guest keynoters at summer ConnECtions since 1980, annually in the East and, for many years in both the West and the Midwest as well, have been, in alphabetical order:

   John F. Alexander, Kori Ashton, Randall Balmer, Beverly Barbo, Clark Barshinger, Mary Kay Beall, Melanie Beechey, Mary V. Borhek, John Bostrom, R. Maurice Boyd, Jane Bradbury, Ptah Brown, James V. Brownson, Patricia Burgin, Michael Bussee, Peggy Campolo, Tony Campolo, Matthew Carden, Holly Chaisson, Michael J. Christiansen, Mary Franzen Clark, Cynthia Clawson, Val Clear, Roy Clements, Gary Cooper, Carol Ann Vaughn Cross, Virginia West Davidson, Donald W. Dayton, Jane R. Dickie, Daniel Dobson, Ron Drummond, Jerushah Duford, Kyle Duford, Anne Eggebroten, J. Harold Ellens, Elise Elrod, Jan Evans, Reta Halteman Finger, Jeff Ford, Darlene Franklin, Nelson Gonzales, June Steffenson Hagen, Alex J. Haiken, Jeanne Hanson, Nancy Hardesty, Hendrik Hart, Phyllis Hart, Walt Hearn, Walden Howard, Fisher Humphreys, Deanna Jawarski, Shari Johnson, Tom Key, Todd Komarnicki, Roberta Showalter Kreider, Ling Lam, Stacey Latimer, Justin Lee, Kay Lindskoog, John Linscheid, Patricia V. Long, Jim Lucas, Chip Miller, Douglas J. Miller, Nancy Miller, Jeremy Marks, Ken Medema, Virginia R. Mollenkott, Jenny Morgan, David G. Myers, Theresa McClellan, Diana McLean, Kathy Olsen, Joan Olson, Mark Olson, Gerald Palmer, Mildred Pearson, Ann Phillips, Amy Plantinga Pauw, Jared Porter, Gayla R. Postma, Ann M. Quick, Jim Rayburn III, Howard L. Rice, Marchiene Rienstra, Rosalind Rinker, Linda Robertson, Stanley A. Rock, Jack Rogers, Ruth Rus, Stephanie Sandberg, Abigail Santamaria, Letha Dawson Scanzoni, Evelyn Schave, Ken Sehested, Nancy Hastings Sehested, Charlie Shedd, Gerald T. Sheppard, Mahan Silar, Caroline J. Simon, Steve Slagg, Lewis B. Smedes, Chuck Smith, Jr., Pamela Warwick Smith, Marsha Stevens, Kirk Talley, James Tinney, Miguel de la Torre, Sandra Turnbull, Ken Van Wyck, Mary Lou Wallner, Nick Warner, Mel White, Nicholas Wolterstorff. 

   EC’s ministry supports the building of a mature integration of an evangelical faith and same-sex orientation through faithful same-sex partnership or, if one chooses, in celibacy. 
   For many years before EC, I’d critiqued the “ex-gay” hoaxes as psychologically baseless and harmful, as well as biblically illiterate and contrary to Jesus’ Golden Rule about loving all others as we love ourselves.  EC continues to be a conduit for the support and publishing of that same message these days.
   Significantly and happily, I’m still good friends with a few of my classmates from our days at BJU, DTS and WTS, though I’m no longer in contact with classmates from BGSU, USC or PSU.
   What we, as Christians, have in common in Christ, is far more fundamentally intimate and mutually encouraging than what we, nonetheless, do have in common with our non-Christian friends.  Most of my BJU, DTS, and WTS friends support EC’s aims and seem to like what else I share with them, although one or two are not on the same page on the matters of homosexuality.  Still, as an old DTS friend, referring to other DTS alumni, informs me, our EC material is, as he puts it, from his own awareness, “read in many closets across the country”.  And even much younger DTS contacts have been encouraged by our EC material and connect with us from time to time for their own working with gay Christians whom they see in their own pastoral ministries.

   Well, here we all are, among the few in all of human history to reach this 21^st year of this 21^st Century AD!  We’ll soon be moving from this milestone year, to begin the 22^nd year of the 21^st Century AD.  And, for all of us, it’s all still going at a still faster clip, isn’t it?
   Have we all gotten more mature as adults in our 21^st year of this 21^st Century AD?  If so, how so?  If not, why not?  Think about it.
   As it was at 21, 31, or 51, and so on up the timeline, will we, as individuals, ever grow-up?  Surely, we’ll never “grow up” truly, this side of our Eternal Home with God. 
   But we’re here, for now, in the meantime, and called to live as we’re meant to live, here and now, in this still, very mean time, a still, immature time, in so many ways.  What else could we expect in a fallen world such as ours is, as it has been, ever since Eden?
   So, in our years in the 20^th Century and in these earliest years of this 21^st, don’t expect humanity on the whole, to become really any more whole, any holier, even in this very most advantaged nation in all of history.  Don’t expect folks to be really any wiser, truly any more mature, actually any more loving, in the here and now, for, we’re all, together, fallen, in this, our fallen world!  Our righteousness is in Christ’s gift of His righteousness.  We’re called to follow Him and, in doing so, to become more faithful followers.
   As those with faith in God, Who so loved all of the people of this fallen world that, in Love, He gave His only Son Who sacrificed himself, to die in our place, to redeem us from our sinful selves, we can surely and thankfully, receive His Love and, thus, be more loving here and now on earth.  The more seriously we take God’s Love for us and for all, the more we truly can afford to be more loving to all!  But, without His Love, we can’t; we don’t; we won’t.  With His Love, we can.  The question for us, is this: What, do we do about our calling to love God and others as we love ourselves?  If we’re dithering, we need to know, dithering is not God’s calling. 
   Broken humanity can’t fix what we broke in turning our backs on God, our generous, loving Creator, by Whom, alone, we can live.
   Reconciliation over our sin must be accomplished.  And it was and is, by the One Who is our Creator and the One Who is our Redeemer, that faithful Son, who accomplished it for us, there on the cross.  Nailed to that cross, Jesus pronounced, once and for all, “It’s finished!” (John 19:30) Done!  The Good News is this: At the cross, on that day we call, “Good Friday”, our own deep debt was paid by Jesus’ own deep death.  This is the Good News!
   It’s in this confidence, this faith in the Faithful One, that we can so fully afford to be faithful to Him in His call to proceed as sinners saved by God’s grace and by nothing else.  Zwingli put our faithful follow-up to all of this, so plainly, so pastorally: “Our confidence in Christ awakens us, urging us to live right and to do what’s good.  No self-confidence can compare with this.”  And, that’s for sure!
   But a proud self-confidence is so popularly, but so pointlessly, peddled by “self-help” gurus nowadays.  Gullibly and repeatedly, people try to muster it up, all on their own, and fail to make even a start, much less master it, for all of these attempts are by a self–motivation, the bane of “self-help”.  Our motivation is cluttered by mixed motives, but God’s motivation is the singularity of His Love.

   Increasingly, fewer Americans are being reared with the Bible’s Good News.  And it’s the sad case all across the rest of the West, and in the rest of the world, where rival religions, Islamism and atheism, etc., dogmatically and ruthlessly, rule entire cultures.
   Here, now, in America, church membership has fallen below 50%, impacting both spiritual and social life.  The Barna Group finds that, while in 2011, 43 percent of Americans reported that they attended church each week, by February, 2020, the number had decreased 14 percentage points to 29 percent.
   It’s no wonder so many churches have lost members since so many churches have lost their will to preach the Saving Grace of God and what God so lovingly did for us, in Christ, at Calvary.
   There’s no point to lament all the empty pews in those buildings where no Gospel is preached.  But we must truly lament over the few who do still sit there, but never hear the Good News.  They hear, there, what’s easily heard from everyday secular sources, so there’s no need to get up early on Sunday mornings to hear it.
   Rituals of virtue signals of pride in rainbow flags, rainbow stoles, BLM banners, politically correct CRT seminars as substitutes for Bible studies, and abortion promotion that deceptively ignores all of the science and all of those sacred lives of the pre-born, are what “modernist” churches offer.  And, the louder the “modernist” clergy shout their slogan, “Shout your abortion!”, the louder they shout their very own guilty repression of the truth that they fear to face or reveal, for fear of being cancelled by their woke comrades. 
   Do they hear a still small voice pleading, “Mommy, I’m not what you call, your body, I’m me!”  But, for years after her abortion, an awareness of an absence may be felt in mourning.  Moreover, in her aborting her baby, she’s also turning over her own future’s eldercare to strangers, who surely won’t lovingly care for her as a grateful daughter or a grateful son would have cared for her.
   But stubborn is stubborn, and “progressive” churches fear their loss of woke cred if they’re less “progressive” than their rivals up the street, for there are too few parishioners to go around for them all.  So, for cheap wokeness sake, for worthless cred, for paying salaries and other bills, they can’t afford to do or to be, otherwise.
   Yet, all these self-centered claims to wokeness, avoid, and thus, void, any true awareness of a deep and refreshing walk with God as was known by those “un-woke” folk, so wonderfully awakened to the Gospel’s Good News in all of the evangelical Awakenings across this country and around the world in centuries past. 
   Instead of getting to the Heart of the Matter of Who truly does matter most, regarding what’s really so woefully wrong with us all, to hear the Good News we’ve been called to receive, believe and proclaim, postmodernist “piety” is stranded in self-righteously self-signaled “social justice” warfare that folks try to claim to save themselves, by themselves, but it’s all to no real avail.  
   Postmodernist Protestantism emerged from the old “modernist” liberalism of Unitarianism.  In 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote insightfully of the stinking leftovers of Unitarian triteness, stating: “Liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. … Liberalism failed to see that reason, by itself, is little more than an instrument to justify man’s defensive ways of thinking.”
   But now, if you’re white and conservative, and revere Dr. King and quote him, watch out for a hostile woke attack from a self-styled “antiracism” guru, who now calls himself, Ibram X. Kendi.  His own racism shows up when, as he did again, in The Atlantic, this October, he attacks those who cite Dr. King’s inspiring lines, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 
   According to Kendi, we who revere those famous words from Dr. King in his “I Have a Dream” speech, are all, his “modern day assassins”!  We, of course, recall those words from his historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28^th, 1963 – two full decades before Kendi was even born, let alone was old enough to experience what Dr. King knew from his experience and what went into his created his wonderful dream for the future. 
   What more mature dream can any loving father, of any race, have for his children and for all children!  But today’s “antiracism” rhetoric so proudly puts the emphasis on color before character and that has made a terrible difference in so many terrible ways.
   Today’s woke, including the woke religionists, give expressions of that defensiveness of Liberalism’s superficiality that Dr. King so rightly found so very offensive, six decades ago. 
   The woke still reject the Gospel, refusing to see it as the very deepest answer to all of humanity’s sinful ways – including, the sin of racism.  So, the “religiously” woke cling to the only thing that they have to hang onto, yet, as it’s so flimsy and so unstable as it’s in constant revisioning, with other intrinsic disadvantages, it’s much worse than worthless.  Their clinging is so desperately insecure, since whatever’s woke today might not be woke at all tomorrow, so it’s all such a shaky deal, so unstable, and that’s distressing to all who, for their own reputations, fear that they might take a misstep and fall short of woke.  They “need” always to be, up to date, on the very cutting edge of “politically correct”.
   In defensiveness, the “religiously” woke assault the Bible, trying to pick and choose for their own purposes, alleged “proof texts” to “prove” the Bible’s wrong.  But, as the woke “religionists” majored in wokeness in their woke seminaries and got very little training, if any, in any rigorous biblical exegesis, it’s all done to no avail, not only because, what the woke are looking for, precisely, can’t be found in the Bible, but because their problem is not with the Bible, as such, for their problem is in themselves and their own agenda. 
   How can the woke claim to have answers to what’s all so wrong with us all, when they keep on tripping up over all of their woke self-centeredness, self-sired anxieties, and their hurt feelings that they bring onto themselves by personalizing what others say that they can’t refute, for they, themselves, suspect it, but can’t admit it.  Thus, they vent their vindictive resentment and then, revenge in desperate blaming and boasting, for they’re sure that so much more than their slips are showing!  And, predictably, others don’t appreciate any of this resentment and revenge, so, they retaliate.
   All these useless defenses are but frustrated hissy fits, inflated, but still limp.  They try to “cancel” all who stump them, against whom they have no rational way of escape from their own self-deluded entrapments and their unintentionally set felt failures to rationally wrestle and win in all of these deepest issues at stake.  Their self-centered and self-justified excuses in immaturity and uncertainty, not to mention their fretting over fears of losing face, all fail to deliver the true redemption that they profoundly do need.
   So, stumbling into their cycles of fear, frustration, and anger, they try to take it out on those whom they suspect might be right, but they need, so frantically, so frustratingly, to see as all wrong, as not woke, while yet fearing that those “unwoke” might be right! 
What a predicament!  Yet, what an opportunity for an awakening!
   Woke is a constantly aggravating and internal rivalry between a sensed insecurity in self-awareness and a sensed insecurity in self-pretentious responses to God’s gift of that self-awareness.
   There’s this troubling, yet truly divinely gifted awareness that, something’s not right in me.  It’s God’s call to come Home to the gifted maturity that was rejected and lost, back in the beginning. 
   It’s everyone’s worry about one’s self.  Whether defined in quite superficial ways to try to get on top of it all, politically, socially, financially, etc., or it’s sensed in the most intimately and deeply rooted supernatural ways, in which case, self-centered temptation abounds to suppress it by one’s continuing with self-righteous rationalizing in anxious denial and dishonest subterfuge.
   This latest effort – “wokeness” – is but yet another version of a constantly self-righteous human temptation to publicly “grieve” for oneself and push one’s own way into control over others, to better suit one’s self – yet, to no one’s satisfaction, much less, to joy. 
   Yet, truest maturity, wisdom and love, are rooted in God’s Truth. From that Truth, the truth of all else, including all of the truth about ourselves and this world, is to be derived, discerned and digested.  
   What we must ask as Christians, instead of trying to be the final judges of ourselves and others, is this: “How mature are we in our own allegedly Christian lives, today?”  Are our lives “our own” or Christ’s to own?  They should be Christ’s own, now and forever! 
   Herman Bavinck, passed into Jesus’ nearer presence 100 years ago.  He’d observed that, among Christians: “There is so much narrow-mindedness, so much pettiness among us, and the worst thing is that this is regarded as piety.”  Although, as Christians, we don’t have a monopoly on such self-righteousness, he was honest enough to acknowledge our part in this farce of fallen humanity. 
   The more we understand ourselves, the more we’ll be able to understand others, for we have much more in common with them than we like to admit, especially with reference to those “we can’t stand”.  What we “can’t stand” in them, undoubtedly reminds us of what we really can’t stand in us – whether it’s what embarrasses us about our sense of us or it’s what we envy in our fantasies of them, that we so selfishly, and so foolishly, covet.  Without a close and abiding walk with God, we’re still such a mess of multifaceted myopia, selfishly seeking our shortsighted, even deadly delusions instead of loving others in the love by which we’re loved by God.      
   What embarrasses us is our experience of our sense of falling short of our self-centered fantasies for ourselves.  What should embarrass us is our falling far short of God’s gifted purpose in creating us for relationship of lovingkindness with Him and with one another.  We need to wake up to this, our real problem!
   Our envy of others is always our story, not another’s story, of which we’re experientially ignorant.  As I’ve repeatedly said, our own versions of us and our versions of others are all inside our own solitary brain cells.  Their versions of us and their versions of them are all inside their own solitary brain cells.  Our brain cells never leak into theirs and theirs never leak into ours. 
   So, let’s stop with all of our foolish projections and our foolish introjections and use our heretofore dull numbskulls to far better advantage through more rational and biblically realistic insight – for our own welfare and for the welfare of all others.   
   With faith in God and with more reasonable thinking, we can get over our stupid misuse of our self-centered sense of “self” and our stupid envy of our stupid versions of “others”.  We can then drop our stupid excuses for our versions of us, and drop our stupidly useless blaming of them, so as to be of some real help to them and some real help to ourselves, while treating all of them better. 
   We can’t see their sense of self.  They can’t see our sense of self.  So, why do we so self-consumedly, waste any precious time distracting ourselves with our stupid extrapolations in all of these cases?  Let’s stop reinforcing all of our pointless projecting and pointless posturing.  We need to wise up and grow up into better touch with reality and more maturity instead of wasting even more of our precious, limited time, and others’ time, too, with our own immaturity!  Such a waste of time does no good at all for anyone.
   Remember, time is a nonrenewable resource.  We’re fools to waste time on our self-obsessing foolishness instead of doing what’s truly worth this precious time we’re given, responding in love to God with thanksgiving and in loving others as we love ourselves.  That’s what we’re called, by God, to do, for our good and for the good of others, with this precious time that we’re so graciously given by God.  Let’s use it to the true advantages of all.
   What we think of us and what we think of others is out-of-focus inside our brains and theirs.  But it’s all perfectly in full focus from God’s Point of View.  So, let’s pay attention to His revealed views.
   The mature focus for us is to focus on what God’s Word tells us of what we are and what we should be, and how we should love one another, whoever the others are and wherever the others are in their experience, without our expecting any reciprocity from any we foolishly envy and cluelessly crave something of theirs, for us.
   The better we understand us, in the perfect love by which we’re loved by God, in Christ, the better we’ll be able to let go of all of our own foolishly immature, counterproductive envy, coveting, and hurting of our own feelings, feeling sorry for ourselves for not being entangled up in the mess that’s behind that fantasy we so miserably miss.  And then we blame what we think we’re missing on others who, then, in their resentment of our resenting them, retaliate in kind.  Such immaturity!  Let’s gratefully pass God’s love, from Him, through us, to all whom God likewise loves and for whom, too, He gave his life, in Christ, to save.  Be part of that!
   In passing God’s love along, there’s always more love from God for us to pass along to them and, thus we mature in God’s love to us.  We must realize, lest we set ourselves up for really pointless frustration and needless exhaustion, that, the Love of God that we share is given to us by God to share with one another.  Let’s do it!

   Well, in concluding our overview of this long and constantly stumbling trek toward sinful humanity’s ever meager moving to “maturity” of any kind, and not overlooking humanity’s still ever-stumbling self-righteousness, let’s look back into ancient biblical history at a glimpse of what, from those early days, was foreseen for the future, for example, by Abraham, in his reasoning with God, so far above petty wokeness, that justice and mercy would finally come through, by way of God’s always, now and forever sovereign providence and loving provision.  Thank God for that!
   Abraham, in pleading with God for God’s mercy on the people of Sodom, reasoned with God, knowing that God is, indeed, both Just and Merciful, and that, His truly absolute justice must be truly tempered by absolute mercy.  Abraham carefully, so respectfully, said to God: “Far be it from You to do a thing such as punishing the righteous in Sodom along with the unrighteous.  Far be it from You to destroy them all!  Will not the Judge of all the earth do what’s right?”  And God does not push back against Abraham’s clear and reasoning faith and trust, that God will always do what is most right, both just and merciful. (Gen 18:25)
   This deep sense of justice and mercy has been available to the awareness of even fallen humanity all along, as it’s been put, for instance, in the Latin phrase, “summum jus, summa injuria”, “extreme justice is extreme injustice”. 
   God called on Abraham again, not long after that interchange between Abraham and God on mercy and justice for the folks in Sodom, but, quite significantly, after Abraham had seen, in his sojourning among the Philistines, their lack of any awe of God.
   God called: “Abraham!”, and Abraham immediately and faithfully replied, “Here I am.”  God said: “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go up to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a sacrifice on a mountain that I will show you.” (Gen 22:1f) Abraham didn’t resist God’s instruction.  He didn’t try to change God’s Mind.  He didn’t replay his previous approach, “Far be it for You to command such a thing.”  He trusted that God well knew what e was saying and that God was to be fully trusted.
   We read that, Abraham, early that very next morning, started on his journey to Mount Moriah, with his dearly beloved son, Isaac, in tow.  He did it in faithful compliance and without second- guessing God, but with full faith in God’s wisdom and love. 
   When, after three days, Abraham and Isaac, along with their servants, arrived at Moriah, Abraham told the servants to remain behind, saying, “The boy and I will go over there to worship, and then we will return to you.”  “We” reveals Abraham’s faith in God.
   Abraham had brought wood for the burnt offering and gave it to Isaac to carry.  He himself carried the fire and the sacrificial knife.  Then at the site for the sacrifice, Isaac said to his father, “My father!”  “Here I am, my son,” he replied. “The fire and the wood are here,” Isaac noted, “but where is the lamb for burnt offering?”  Abraham answered, with faith in God, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”  
   So, Abraham built the altar and arranged the wood on it.  He then began his binding of his son Isaac to be placed on the altar, on top of the wood.  Abraham then reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.  But, just then, the Angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham!  Abraham!”  He replied, “Here I am.”  The Angels said: “Don’t lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you are in awe of God, since you have not withheld your only son from Me.”
   Abraham looked up and he saw a ram in a thicket behind him, caught by its horns.  So, he went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering in place of his son.  And Abraham called that place ‘The Lord Will Provide’.”  Indeed, the Lord did provide.
   Then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven, “By Myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, for you have not withheld your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will multiply your descendants like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. … Through your offspring all nations of the earth will be blessed, for you obeyed My voice.” (Gen 22)
   According to Talmudic sages, Isaac’s killing was never, as such, intended.  There’s no doubt they’re right, for all are sinners and, no sinner’s death can absolve another’s sins.  Abraham seems to have assumed this when he answered Isaac’s question, “Where is the lamb?”, by saying, “God Himself will provide the lamb.”
   Again, this year, in September, 2021, the shofar, a ram’s horn, was blown to summon Jews to repentance at Rosh Hashanah, recalling that Divine Intervention of God there at Mount Moriah.
   In God’s Providence, when the right time had finally come, after yet another 20 centuries from Abraham and Isaac, and once again, there at Mount Moriah, God, the Father, Himself, provided the Lamb of God, in God, the Son, to take away the sins of the world, where Justice and Mercy met in Christ’s own sacrifice of Himself.
   He had said, “The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life, that I may take it up again.  No one takes it from me.  I lay it down of my own accord.”  (John 10:17f) And, he did lay it down of his own accord – contrary to the unbiblical accusations in anti-Semitic slurs against all Jews throughout history, accusing them of being, “Christ killers”.  No.  He laid down his life for our lives, forever.
   Then, because Jesus died for us, his resurrection from the dead came three days after his crucifixion.  By him and in him, we too, shall be raised from death.
   Jesus’ crucifixion and his resurrection were the bottom lines on the entire history of humanity’s sinful rebellion in willful immaturity.  God was there as always, “In the beginning, God!” (Gen 1) God is ever present.  God is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the Fulfillment of our lives – all of that, in Him, our merciful and righteous, Creator and Redeemer Who saves us from our sinful fall into immaturity to Maturity through His indwelling us and in our resurrection to Eternal Life in God’s Eternal Love.   Amen.