Every "age," every era, has a certain flavor to it. Groups of years and the events within them lunge in a certain direction of thought and action.

The idealism of this age largely centers around power. Its rhetoric clusters around the powerful and the oppressed. People are primarily divided and labeled by these distinctions.

It is sex-crazed.

Identity-driven.

And technology-addicted.

Lonely.

The highest virtue is tolerance or kindness, perhaps?

Let each individual be who they want to be, regardless of what that does to others, regardless of how that affects anything else.

We can compare our treasured virtue of tolerance to other time periods where the most prized virtue might have been courage or honor or loyalty or hardworking-"ness."

And like all the other ages, we think we are quite superior, quite "past" the ages come before. "We are quite enlightened now."

People are pronounced and stamped by this train of thought, rolling out of the chugging cars in tight packages, out of the train that is the time that they inhabit.

And so, the contemporary individual is seen through this contemporary lens. The 'someone' is not known most by their career or their character, which can create a different set of problems.. In this age, they are most defined by the society around them (or define themselves to society) by their idea of gender, by their sexuality, and by their status among the various bunches of oppressed peoples.

It is almost like there has been conjured an inherent virtue in being mistreated. According to the charts, the more you have been mistreated, the holier you are. The less you've had trouble in life, the more opportunities you've been given, the more inherently wicked you are.

And I can understand some of this type of thinking. Some of it makes sense. As grandmothers say, there's a grain of truth in everything.

O Church, O bride of Christ. We are not called to be labeled by our time period, not called to chase the fashions of the present age, for they are evil. They are organized and orchestrated by the powers of the air to steal our souls, whether by 'tolerance' or 'intolerance' or what-have-you. It is a spiritual scheme,

all of it.

The trends of art, the trends of clothing, the trends of thought, they are crafted by the prince of this earth to tie our souls down to this earth, and to himself.

We called to be sealed by Christ, to bear only His mark.

In an age that falls towards meaninglessness, that is destructing every created construction, from various power structures, to the idea of absolute truth,

one does not need to fall into the abyss of despair.

In his current war on our souls, Satan is attacking foundational concepts of society and humanity, is attacking order and beauty.

This is the essay of the day: Order is a mirage. Beauty is completely subjective. Beauty isn't even a thing. People are stamped by their wounds. The masses run towards addiction and celebrate sin. We love ourselves more than anything else. We are only evolved and random. We are only the materials we are made of, nothing more. God is dead. We are gods, frail and fleeting gods of atoms. We are completely bearing the burden of ourselves, built on a foundational slab of falsehood.

So in this current evil age, as in the other ages, Christ gleams like a beacon in a storm. He is our life and light in the chaos.

He gives us every ounce of meaning and joy and truth that we could ever long for. We are hungry no more.

He himself is order, beauty, and light. His word is our standard. When all things we knew as fixed begin to float, begin to be questioned, He is the anchor to our tossing identity. Because if you are a child of God, your identity is not primarily found in your culture, your family, or even yourself. Your identity is hidden in the person of Christ. Because of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, we literally can have His identity, and if we give our lives to Him, we now live because He lives.

So as this age sails away from truth or whatever other thing I treasure into stormy waters of despair and discord, I have a peace-giving hope.

Time flies by, and ages pass. Over all of it, Christ is King,

a humbled, loving Shepherd,

our Sacrifice. The world will always see him as a farce.

They will scoff, and they will fade, but He remains, a lighthouse to those with eyes to see, to see that

He is the "Hymn of the Ages, the Hope of all the world."