My Truth - My Choice

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” (2 Tim 4:3-4, NIV)

Some truth is hard to accept. Drug abuse and addiction is a choice, not a disease. Gender dysphoria is an accepted psychiatric disorder. Gun-free zones cause gun crime. Sanctuary cities/states are illegal. Global Warming is a lie. These United States of America has become a Godless nation.

Difficult or not to accept, truth is truth. Truth is not relative. Truth is not open to discussion. Truth is not colored by your race, religion, gender, political or sexual leaning, or your desire for alternative information.

Truth can also be complicated and easily disguised or sugar coated. Science has proven that drug addiction is the result of chemical changes in the brain caused by uncontrolled processing of physiology and psychology-altering drugs. Never mind that those chemical changes are the result of a choice – sometimes a single use of a very powerful substance, sometimes repeated abuse of the same or varying substances – but a choice to abuse nonetheless. The American Medical Association (AMA) defines a disease as “impairment of the normal functioning of some aspect of the body, [and] characteristic signs and symptoms, [and] harm or morbidity.” Therefore, instead of accepting the truth evident in every addiction – that poor choice(s) led to the impairment – we and AMA adapt the facts to fit the definition. We say regardless of the cause, the condition warrants diagnosis as a disease because the brain chemistry has become impaired through repeated abuse of mind-altering chemicals. Therefore, drug addiction is a disease because the addict cannot return to the pre-addiction state without medical intervention. The truth, complicated as it may be, is that this “disease” is self-inflicted.

Similarly the American condition is diseased. Our greatest Founding Father, George Washington, may not have been a devout Christian, but he understood the benefits to this nation of infusing Christian principles into her founding documents. Abraham Lincoln, by far one of the wisest of American Presidents, was not a confirmed Christian, but his personal tenets mirrored those of Christ’s religion. Our nation was founded and fought for equal freedoms. Some even say our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution contain Christian principles like equality and the providence of an almighty God. Early on, we broke from England for freedom from religious and political tyranny. Later we nearly broke ourselves defending freedom from one part of the country dictating troublesome terms to the rest of the nation – we romanticize the Civil War was about slavery, but that was simply a single factor in the complex truth that was secession in 1861.

Today, America’s moral corruption is almost absolute. We kill tens of thousands of babies annually, and call it “choice.” Nobody asked the child if he or she would rather live or be murdered – the baby didn’t have a choice. We spend millions of dollars on cigarettes and alcohol and drugs, and then millions more on medical care to fix the problems those choices cause. We watch movies and television shows glorifying the killing of humans without considering the victims’ innocence or guilt – and we allow children whose minds are still impressionable to watch the same adult entertainment without once weighing the cost. We buy our children video games where they earn points and designer guns by killing each other, all the while laughing at their anguish as they scream “revive me bro” into the ether. We prefer to hand a four year-old an iPad with interactive cartoons rather than spend time parenting, which not only impacts their brain processes but prevents us from developing the parenting skills they will need when life actually happens. And when we can no longer effectively parent because we chose to ignore them in their youth, we hop them up on psychotropic drugs and give them names like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). And yet we wonder why those same kids steal or buy a gun and shoot up a school or build a bomb to blow up their friends, or God forbid take drugs for not good reason at all.

And we ask “Where is God” whenever tragedy strikes. Why don’t we care about God when the bills are paid or the doctor’s report is good or the judge makes the morally right judgment? Why don’t we care about God when we buy the ticket to Fifty Shades instead of I Can Only Imagine or when we tell our nine year-old “sure” to Grand Theft Auto VII?

Where is God?

He’s right here. We just need to let Him do His thing.

“Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matt 28:20, NIV)

(Photo courtesy of metacritic.com)