Confusion of the Heart

In Nashville, Tennessee earlier this week, a young woman shot her way through glass doors into a small Christian School, where she then shot and killed three adults and three nine year old children, before being shot and killed herself by Nashville police, who by all accounts, stopped even more murders through their quick and heroic actions

Our communities in the Nashville area where I live are still trying to make any kind of sense as to what happened and why. Some of the details haven’t yet been released to the public, although the young woman left a detailed manifesto that is currently being studied. It may be some time before the public hears the manifesto’s explanation of why the shooting was carried out, why at this particular location, and the reasons for planning it in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of speculation and guesswork taking place on our televisions and across the internet and on social media apps on our phones. But the truth is, the truth is yet to be told, and until then, we are wasting a lot of time speculating when maybe our time right now could be better spent considering.

There’s a lot to consider here. And you really don’t need every detail to understand one simple thing about what happened this week in Nashville. There are individuals in our society who are terribly confused. And until we address this epidemic of confusion, rampant now in our youth, we will never make any meaningful progress toward changing the runaway train that we are witnessing in real time more and more. If it sounds radical to hear me say that young people are confused, then my point has already been made. The efforts to confuse not only our youth, but adults as well in our society has taken ugly root and seems to be growing.

I like the political debate and have for years. Carried out civilly and respectfully, it is the way in which Our Land has become such a success over the last couple of hundred years. In the theatre of ideas, good thoughts have always had a way of shining a light on dark areas of our nature and culture, exposing and sanitizing bad ideas to keep them from harming us and our children. The best ideas usually always win the battles over ideas that only sound good on the surface but are obviously weak and dangerous below. And during those couple of hundred years of healthy debate, there have always been strong leaders emerge who fought for the best new ideas, and defended the strong, settled ideas from change. But something has changed. The debates have turned into shouting matches, with the loudest prevailing too often supported by terrible ideas that quite frankly don’t even sound good on their surface. Additionally, the strong leaders who we have traditionally relied on to protect our values have simply, at times, given up the fight either from intimidation, weariness or greed.

You’ve always heard that wherever there is a void, or vacuum, something will fill it, and fill it quickly. In our culture, our unwillingness to defend good ideas and sound cultural values has created an immense vacuum for our youth, and evil has quickly rushed in to fill that void with it’s under the radar tools of confusion.

Confusion itself is harmless as long as you have someone to guide you to clear thought before you get into trouble. But imagine the chaos that would ensue in your life if you were confused about something as simple as who you are, and the only guidance you might get was confirmation that your confusion was somehow indicating that you weren’t confused at all. This is the picture of how a faction of our society is changing the minds of young people at an alarming rate. And we are obviously witnessing the results of those efforts more and more through individuals that are obviously terribly confused about what is right and wrong, and what human actions are considered acceptable or not.

If you think I’m only talking about the trans community here, you aren’t paying attention. I’m talking about the human heart. It is a terribly confused heart that can point a gun at a nine year old child and pull the trigger. And it doesn’t matter what label you stick on the killer, the problem is rooted in the same confusion, because if you know who you are, and have made peace with the truths of that, there is no way you can look at another human, child or adult, with the thought of taking their life from them, as though you yourself were a god of some sort. Doesn’t matter if you are gay, straight, white, black or from an undeveloped third world jungle community, if you don’t know who you are, you are likely not going to be able to respect who someone else is, and therefore, you will be much more likely to do them harm. Not because of anything they did. Because of your own confusion.

I don’t know the young lady who became a killer this week in Nashville. I don’t know her family, and I suspect they didn’t know her either. But I can tell you with certainty that she was confused about who she was, however you want to define that. And I can tell you with some certainty that she at some point had some really bad guidance from someone who encouraged her to believe she was something she wasn’t, and from that confusion, to the disappointment of the society she was a part of, came unspeakable evil, as she took the lives of innocent children and innocent adults who that very day were helping guide the rest of the children in that building in accepting who they were and building good lives from that kind of solid foundation.

Evil is always prowling around looking for innocence to dwell in. Evil is using confusion right in front of us in our society to change our young people into creatures they were never intended to be. Perhaps it is our duty at this moment in history to stop just complaining about how things have become and start considering why they are becoming that. Most children can’t defend themselves from harm. They need strong leaders and moral guidance to help them learn what is right and what is wrong. Someone else is not going to do it. We see that.

All the laws we can pass and all the twits we can tweet will not stop evil from pursuing our children.

We must step in and stop the confusion. It is our duty as adults in this society. And without your voice and mine, we will only see more and more in the coming days.

The Trouble with Truth

And the brick wall it is.

You’ve heard the old saying ‘running into a brick wall’. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock all of your life, which, ironically, would mean you’ve been hiding under some of the very same foundational materials that form bricks in the first place, in which case you should even more so know what ‘running into a brick wall’ could mean. Just sayin’.

And that is what this edition of Our Land is about. Life is interesting even when it’s troubling. But you don’t necessarily have to suffer the consequences of terrible decisions over and over again because of silly mistakes you may make or keep making. You just have to pay attention and understand that your own pride unchecked can cause you and those around you lots of grief, and make you seem pretty foolish at times to the rest of the world who might actually be watching what’s going on around them and can see the insanity of those whose stubborn devotion to fantasy cause them to continually run smack into reality. And it is confusing at best to try and understand what on earth keeps people from seeing that truth is like a great brick wall. It isn’t going to budge no matter how hard you run into it with your head.

Most people grow up understanding simple truths. Boys and girls are different from each other. Aside from physical differences, they are wired differently and therefore think in ways that support their apparent biological situations, almost like its … well … natural. Like it or not, God planned this and He alone can fully explain it and does, and having written the instruction manual that remains the only true source of proper direction for the human existence, He is still the ultimate authority on morality. Likewise, good and evil are separate things that don’t mingle well together, and most people have a built in understanding of where the line is that lies between good and evil, and do their best not to cross it even when they are temporarily confused. Long story short, most of us are born into an existence that exposes us to these simple truths very early, and as we grow and mature, the value of these truths prove themselves as we put into practice the common things we all know from very young ages, whether we believe God planned all this or not. It’s interesting to note, however, that the Bible correctly explains the human heart and predicts it’s actions and reactions with surgical precision every time.

In Our Land today, there appears to be a population bent on trying to turn fantasy into reality. So much so that they seem willing to act out these fantasies in public, right in front of everyone including our children, in a quite obviously selfish attempt to bring some sort of meaning to the fantasies they have committed their own minds to. We see daily right now the political talking heads and their media allies tell us all that our economy is fine, we’re too white, or our desire to protect our children’s minds from sexual immoralities or racial division is wrong and we should be more accepting. They’re telling us this while at the same time we are entering a winter where many people will probably die because they can’t afford to heat their homes, black and white and yellow and brown people all over the country live in great harmony in communities with no racial tensions whatsoever, and drag queen shows and critical race theories are being promoted to our children in town after town in the name of inclusion.

And although the bad things that are happening in Our Land directly as a result of these kinds of insane fantasies being played out in public just keep showing up on our local and national newsfeeds, those trying so hard to change the obvious truths just keep right on running back into the same brick walls over and over again, causing more and more trouble for the rest of our society who have to correct the course for our nation time and again because we let these things go on too long.

Perhaps the good news is that more and more Americans are beginning to see the actual dangers of allowing this kind of nonsense to progress any further. It’s already caused a tremendous amount of confusion and separation among all of us, and especially our children, who must try and navigate their way through an already difficult maze of social acceptance as they grow, and now compounded by the additional insanities of this overly progressive ideology that is most certainly become a cancer on our society.

The truth is the truth, no matter if you think so or not. That’s the brick wall that can’t be broken. It will not change. No matter if you think you can change it or not, the brick wall of truth will not change. And you must at some point decide if you are going to keep trying to break it down or understand it for what it is and adjust your own actions accordingly.

Men can’t be women. Women can’t be men. That’s not hard to understand. And when you accept that truth, you can better find your way through your own life and the society in which you live, and find your purpose in life and be content. You can put on a dress or blue jeans, or work boots or high heels, you can wear a cap and scratch your crotch, or fru fru your hair and put on lipstick to high heaven. But you are what you are at your core, and the more you try to change that, the more stress you are causing inside your natural self, and the more trouble you will ultimately cause for those around you as you try and break down a brick wall that can never be broken.

Take a look at the path America is on right now. We are very near a societal meltdown of total confusion and chaos. Not because we aren’t still working hard at our jobs and trying to raise our families in a good way. It’s more because we have probably confused tolerance with acceptance, and we have allowed a fringe of unacceptable ideas to permeate our neighborhoods and towns and cities and states with radical thought processes that include accepting fantasy as truth. And maybe the warning signal that it’s gone absolutely too far is the fact that men and women are confused about who they are, and that confusion is now beginning to culminate on acting out fantasies that were never intended for children’s eyes or minds.

Do what you want behind the closed doors of your house. It’s your house. It’s your life. But don’t expect the majority of Americans to accept obvious untruths and evil intents based on your own fantasies that don’t line up with common sense reality. Especially when you are attacking our children. It is a parents job to protect their children, and when you begin to make attempts to sexualize the thoughts of our children with adult concepts they aren’t ready to consider, you are stepping into a hornet’s nest of truth. And when the mothers become agitated, the stingers will be lethal.

In Our Land, we do not need to accept anything less than truth for ourselves or our children. We should be and are quite tolerant in the midst of an explosion of ideas and technologies in the current age, but we cannot be and should not be accepting of untruths that affect our children’s minds and futures, or the society we have worked so hard to build for so long. America is good. The people are good. The whole world knows that. That’s why they are trying so hard to come here.

If we keep allowing insane ideology to change the fabric of Our Land, we ourselves are running into brick walls of our own, and winding up looking just as foolish. Whether we like politics or not, it is our responsibility to pay attention to what is happening that is affecting our children’s futures, and to be a part of protecting that future and the truths we all want to live by. In our country, we vote for leaders to protect and defend us. If we aren’t paying attention to that process, then we can’t stand and say we are doing much to protect our children and families from the obvious dangers that are growing amongst us.

We should defend truth against those who are trying to change it. We should do all we can to preserve it as a beacon of freedom and morality. And we must teach it to our children the best we can.

One thing will always be true about the truth.

It can’t be changed.