I'm of the belief that for public high school teachers like me, there is little that causes you more heartache than watching young people you've invested in, and grown to know, love, and respect, make tragically poor decisions once they leave high school.
Sometimes those poor decisions involve hurting themselves or others, sometimes it can involve bad career moves or failed marriages, and sometimes it involves them utterly abandoning the kind of deep thinking and morally grounded logic you thought had been successfully embedded in their soul. The latter seems to be happening with increasing frequency these days, and for me personally, it's brutal to watch.
But in one of His countless examples of divine mercy and provision, God will sporadically send me examples of the exact opposite. He'll give me moments to observe from a distance, or sometimes even in a surprise face-to-face encounter, instances where those former students have not only grown in wisdom and spiritual maturity, but also demonstrate a capacity to think for themselves in a sea of conformists.
I'll never forget, for instance, a young woman I ran into years after she had graduated. In our conversation, she was almost giddy to tell me that despite having known her during her high school years of, as she put it, being "married to the world," she had surrendered her life to Jesus. What's more, she expressed how she'd changed her thinking about a lot of things she was once so adamant about believing. "I couldn't escape the inconsistency," she recounted, about believing the death penalty for murderers was immoral but believing a death penalty for innocent unborn children was morally permissible.
She did most of the talking that day, while I spent my time quietly thanking God for the work He had done in her life and on her mind.
That incident brought a feeling similar to the one I had just yesterday when a former student who had my cell phone number texted me a quote from a New York Times story her husband had read to her. "We both sat stunned at how they miss the irony," she wrote before attaching the screenshot:
The quote, belonging to State Senator James Sanders, Jr., appeared in the Times' story about New York City requiring proof of COVID vaccination for anyone dining indoors or going to a gym. And the irony, if you hadn't picked up on it, is the obliviousness progressive politicians seem to have as they make an ironclad case against the very practice of legal abortion that they defend like a religious sacrament.
Scripture says that God will not be mocked, and He won't be. At some point, He'll make a mockery of man's wisdom and put it on full display.
It is a logical leap wider than the Grand Canyon to conclude that a person choosing not to be vaccinated is "killing" other people. Particularly in an era of free, effective vaccines for those who want them, such a statement is jaw-dropping hyperbole to say the least. An abortion, however, is the intentional killing of a separate, distinct, unborn human being. Yet progressives futilely attempt to justify the act by claiming the mother "has a right to her own body." If they are now conceding such a right ceases when it infringes on another human being's right to live, then we appear to be on the verge of a monumental societal turning point.
While I don't feel good about the chances of that actually happening, I can't tell you how good I feel to learn former students realize it should.
* * *
P.S. While you're here, watch our latest video about the gaffemaster Joe Biden's "most inspirational quotes" 😆:
