Discipline your children, for in that there is hope, do not be a willing party to their death. (Proverbs 19:18) According to the authors of Generations , each generation seeks to correct the errors it believes the preceding generation or two made. One result is that the rearing of children swings like a pendulum between too domineering and too smothering, or between too attentive and virtually negligent. The Millennials were seen, it seems to me, as golden children. They were our future, our hope, and could do nothing wrong, but we expected a great deal of them. The I-Geners or Z-Geners seem to have been, in some ways, the heir of the Millennials, reigning supreme but with no real expectations of them except “self-realization” in whatever form they decide to take it. Others may, of course, have very different ...
Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. (I John 5:12) What is life? How do we know when someone is alive? Dead? Medically, someone is generally considered alive if they are breathing, have a heart rate or pulse, are moving, have blood pressure and vital signs (yep), and, though it wasn’t listed, brain activity. The list is somewhat redundant, and there are always stories of people who appeared to be dead but somehow are revived, often dramatically as the result of medical intervention. As a general rule, however, dead is dead. When we shift our perspective from the physical to the spiritual, we sometimes start thinking in magical terms. We assume that spiritual aliveness is eter...