Elisabeth Elliot’s story reminds me of the importance of grappling with mystery and certainty, the realization that the more we know, the more we see there’s more to know. Here is a portrait of a valiant woman who knew her sins but, better yet, knew her Savior.

When I finished Lucy Austen’s biography of Elisabeth Elliot a few weeks ago, the book went first to my desk, not my shelf, because I knew I’d have to write something about this remarkable woman’s story. Elisabeth rose to prominence as the widow whose husband Jim died in 1956 with four of his fellow missionaries at the hands of Waorani men in the jungles of Ecuador. Her life was long, her ministry vibrant. Austen’s portrait reveals a woman of courage and conviction who developed spiritually and theologically over time.
In this telling, there’s no halo over Elisabeth’s head, no smoothing out all the rough spots. Austen’s admiration for her subject comes through, but the way she shows respect for Elisabeth is by refusing to sugarcoat the challenges that arose or ignore the doubts that hovered over her hardest years.
Strange and Compelling Love Story
Readers unfamiliar with the story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot may be surprised at its roller-coaster highs and lows, and just how long it took before they agreed to marry. From the outset, the reader senses they were both right for each other and tortured in the way they sought God’s will for their relationship.
The twentysomething Jim could sometimes be callous, often immature, clearly in the throes of a throbbing passion for God yet confused because he was confident God had called him to a life of celibacy. Torn between his devotion to God and his interest in Elisabeth, opinionated to a fault yet with a charisma and grace that charmed and influenced those around him, Jim was both honest and obstinate. Often unaware of how his vacillating affected Elisabeth, his words and actions carved channels of both love and sorrow. They were called first to the mission field and only then to each other, and once married, the couple’s life was marked by intensity: a fierce devotion to God and to each other, and to the people they hoped to reach with the gospel.
Life After Tragedy
If you’re familiar with the story, you may think the most interesting part of Elisabeth’s life is wrapped up in the mission she shared with Jim, their commitment to a dangerous and remote place in the jungle while still in their 20s, and the circumstances surrounding his death. But Austen’s biography devotes more attention to Elisabeth’s life after the tragedy on the beach.
First, we see the grieving widow with a young daughter honor the story of her husband and his fellow missionaries by giving the world an account of their dedication. Then we see her return to the area, labor for many years in language development and Bible translation, and eventually live with and observe closely the tribe responsible for Jim’s death. Along the way, she wrestles with doubt and disillusionment, ponders the miracle of conversion, and bemoans the monotony of a missionary’s life. She struggles relationally with Rachel Saint (the sister of one of the missionary men killed), always wondering how to rebuild and restore what was broken. Once she becomes a writer and speaker in the United States, Elisabeth bucks the expectations set for a missionary widow, refusing to give American audiences the gauzy and inspiring stories they most want to hear, choosing instead to be honest about her experiences and observations.
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Our social media habits have made slander so prevalent, so normal, that we’re willing to overlook its pernicious effects as long as it helps our cause or confirms our narrative. We no longer see this sin as disqualifying. We no longer even see it as sin. I fear we’ve normalized this form of worldliness to the point that the righteousness described by James (“peace-loving, gentle, . . . full of mercy”) now gets reframed as soft, or squishy, or compromised. These dynamics should scare us.

What does it mean to be worldly? I still find David Wells’s definition unbeatable: “Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.”
Wells emphasizes the perniciousness and pervasiveness of worldliness. We get so accustomed to sin we don’t see it. And that means we should always ask, What sins appear normal today? What sins are so common we hardly shrug at them?
The more I contemplate this question in a digital age, the more I’m convinced we’ve entered an era marked by the normalization of slander.
What Is Slander?
Slander is spreading untruth about someone else so their reputation is damaged. These untruths are sometimes flat-out lies designed to inflict maximum harm, but often slander takes the form of deceptive inferences, assuming the worst of others instead of the best, or deliberately crafting a preferred narrative out of conveniently edited facts.
God hates slander (Prov. 6:16, 19) because he is the Truth. Satan loves slander because he’s the father of lies. Jon Bloom remarks on “its poisonous power” as “one of the adversary’s chief strategies to divide relationships and deter and derail the mission of the church. . . . He knows that slander deadens and splits churches, poisons friendships, and fractures families. He knows slander quenches the Holy Spirit, kills love, short-circuits spiritual renewal, undermines trust, and sucks the courage out of the saints.”
The antidote to slander is found in the Westminster Larger Catechism’s description of keeping the ninth commandment against bearing false witness. Faithful Christians will be inclined toward these actions: “the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own, . . . a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them.”
Instead, we often demonstrate a propensity for slander. The Puritan writer Thomas Manton believed the source of slander is self-love and the desire for human praise. Slanderers feel contempt toward someone with a sterling reputation. “They blast their gifts with censure, aggravate their failings, and load them with prejudice, that upon the ruins of their good name, they might erect a fabric of praise to themselves,” he says. Slander and censure go together, ever blasting outward, never looking inward. “Self-lovers are always bitter censurers; they are so indulgent to their own faults, that they must spend their zeal abroad.”
Slander’s Poisonous Effects
Matthew Lee Anderson describes the soul-sucking nature of slander by pointing to the New Testament’s framing of this sin in terms of consumption. Galatians 5:15 warns against the tendency to “bite and devour one another,” which echoes the psalmist who speaks of people with teeth like “spears and arrows” and tongues like “sharp swords” (Ps. 57:4). Anderson also quotes a medieval text that describes a woman “slandered, eaten away at, gnawed at, by the people, for the grace that God performed in her of contrition, of devotion, and of compassion.” He writes,
Slanders and defamation limit the sphere of the victim’s action: they constrict his agency and move them to the margins of the community. To that extent, they impose a form of poverty, as they are designed to remove the social conditions necessary for that person’s flourishing. In stripping away the person’s “good name,” slanders, detraction, and defamation hollow out their social identity and reduce the person to whatever interior resources they have left to survive.

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Jesus assures us the Father sees not only when we’re wronged but also when we do right, when we practice our righteousness in secret. The reason he tells us not to perform righteous acts before others is because, once again, the Father is El Roi: the God who sees. We live for the Lord, trusting that the Father who sees in secret will reward us (Matt. 6).

The longer I live, the more often I whisper to myself, “The Lord sees.”
It’s a biblical truth repeated throughout Scripture. The psalmist sees all of life taking place coram Deo: before the face of God. “The LORD looks down from heaven,” he writes. “He observes everyone” (Ps. 33:13). Nothing escapes God’s notice. “The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry for help” (34:15).
The heart’s silent cry, giving rise to tears of anguish no one else sees—the aloneness compounds the heartache. In those moments when you’re wronged, or your name is slandered, or your intentions are questioned . . . In the times when you feel alone or abandoned . . . In the aftermath of saying what’s true and paying a price, when you’ve experienced the deep wounds of injustice or betrayal . . . the Lord sees.
The Lord is the One who untangles all our hidden motivations, the Shepherd who knows our hopes and fears. The Lord knows our desires. The Lord sees the quiet suffering we endure when others sin against us. The Lord sees us in troubled times, notes every unmerited slight and insult flung our way, and observes the chill that descends when those around us fall short of Christ’s call to love.
El Roi: The God Who Sees
“El Roi” is a name given to God in the Old Testament, a source of comfort and peace in times of distress. It first falls from the trembling lips of Hagar, the enslaved woman driven into the wilderness after being caught up in the sinful designs of her master and his wife. There she kneels, despondent and despairing, ready for life to come to an end. And there in that desert of sorrow, the Lord sees. Transformed by the gracious presence of the God of all justice and mercy, Hagar speaks with surprising confidence. She names the Lord who spoke to her: “In this place, have I actually seen the one who sees me?” (Gen. 16:13).
El Roi. The God who sees.
It’s the tender nature of our Father to speak to us in the wilderness of pain, to come alongside us when we feel the sting of injustice, the sadness of lost love, the sorrow of dried-up friendships, the hurt of neglect and rejection.
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The call of discipleship includes teaching everything Christ taught. The goal isn’t just a cognitive level of doctrinal understanding but total obedience. To obey all that Christ teaches. Nakah and Poobalan comment: The Great Commission forbids a selective attitude to Christ’s demands on all who follow him. We cannot pick and choose or add what we like. His instruction is to teach “all that I have commanded you.” As beautiful as it may be to see the explosion of Christian witness in many parts of the world, we must recognize the importance of deep discipleship and lament its absence.

In the Great Commission Report, issued ahead of this year’s meeting of the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization in Seoul, South Korea, Victor Nakah and Ivor Poobalan offer a theological basis for “the Great Commission” as one of the most-used phrases within global Christianity today.
Matthew 28:18–20 records the mandate King Jesus entrusted to the church through his apostles in the period between his ascension and return. (Also important are Mark 16:15; Luke 24:46–49; Acts 1:8; and John 20:19–23.) It’s a climax to a summons issued by God in the Old Testament, a theme evident in the call of Abraham (Gen. 12:1–3) that unfolds throughout Scripture. “The Great Commission was issued as a directive to follow, a command to obey, and a decree to execute,” Nakah and Poobalan write.
I’m grateful for this contribution in their introduction to the Great Commission Report, especially for opening my eyes to the four “alls” in the missionary mandate Jesus gave his disciples, as seen in Matthew’s formulation.
1. All Authority
The Great Commission begins not with a command but with a coronation. Jesus makes the stunning claim that “all authority in heaven and on earth” has been given to him. He didn’t grasp or steal such authority; it was granted as part of his exaltation (Phil. 2:9–11). Nakah and Poobalan comment,

That the Great Commission is premised on this authority says a lot about the intent of God in getting the work done. With this authority, not only are we sure that we will be delivered from harm, but we are confident that when it matters most, we will not be let down, since the Father has put “everything in subjection under his feet” (Heb. 2:8).

2. All Nations
The Great Commission has a worldwide scope. The assignment is global and cross-cultural. Here we see God’s passion for all peoples, tongues, tribes, and languages of the world.
We’re called not only to proclaim the gospel but to make disciples.
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In a world marked by coddling and canceling, let’s call up the next generation. The gospel is true. God is real. The church that reaches the next generation will not be riddled with insecurity but will hold out, with confidence and humility, a serious faith.

Not long ago, I sat across from a pastor of a church known for its attractional (church growth) ministry philosophy. We discussed the methods common to seeker-sensitive megachurches in the 1990s and early 2000s—the attempt to find points of connection with the culture through sermon series based on popular movies or TV shows, the edginess of starting a service with a secular song to demonstrate cultural IQ (and how rocking the worship band was!), and the strict policing of language that could come across too “churchy” or off-putting to the newcomer.
Many of these well-intentioned efforts were built on showing how “relevant” or “in touch” the church was with the world around it. Today, these methods are cringeworthy. Young people who visit a church expect to experience, well, whatever church is. The strangeness is the appeal. Now that fewer people have any family background in church, no one hears a worship band cover an Imagine Dragons song and thinks, “Wow! This isn’t my Grandma’s church!”—in part because Grandma is in her 60s and never darkened the door either.
Young Churchgoers Today
Listen to Gen Z churchgoers today and you’ll hear conversations about powerful worship songs that facilitate an experience with God, about the realness of the preacher who just “tells it like it is” from the Bible, and about the beauty of church architecture and older traditions and recitations.
When young people accept the invitation to visit a church, they’ve already committed to experiencing something unusual. Attempts at being overly accommodating or making the church seem “cool” come off as desperate and insecure. If your ministry is seeker-sensitive and attractional today, remember that the churchiness of church is a draw, not a turnoff.
Unfortunately, many pastors have yet to figure this out. Too many churches still think the way to reach young people is to replicate the entertainment you can get anywhere else, or to lean into the social activism you find at the local university, or to offer the practical advice a podcaster delivers better.
Serious Faith
Young people are swimming in pools of superficiality, with torrents of information flooding through their magical devices. Adrift in a sea without navigation, in a world where moral strictures have been blown up in the name of freedom, many long for paths of formation, growth, and maturity.
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God is the fountain, the storehouse, the depository of all goodness; the cross is the key that unlocks the inexhaustible, boundless riches of his grace. His goodness is pursuing us, running after us like the father hot on the tracks of the prodigal son. And so, “With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God.”

Recently, a pastor friend asked me what comes to mind when I think of God’s goodness. My first thought was God’s goodness to me personally, the countless reasons I have for gratitude, all the blessings of God that have flowed into my life.
Not even a minute passed before the words and melody of the worship song “Goodness of God” were in my heart. It’s a song I’ve come to love. A couple years ago, my brother sang that song as he walked through every room of the house he’d just moved into, a quiet expression of gratitude for God’s provision of a new home for him and his family. It’s a song I sang last year at the funeral of a children’s minister I had the honor of serving alongside for several years. “I have lived in the goodness of God.” It’s no surprise we think first of God’s blessings or that our gratitude wells up into song.
Goodness to the Undeserving
The longer I reflected, the larger the circle of God’s goodness grew. It’s good to exist. It’s good to be. Every breath we take testifies to the goodness of creation and the goodness of a Creator. And this fatherly benevolence flows to undeserving, often ungrateful creatures.
Jesus remarked on the Father’s goodness when he spoke of both righteous and unrighteous people enjoying sunshine and rain. Everyone on earth is a beneficiary of God’s goodness, whether they acknowledge him as the source of their blessings or not. God is so good that he sustains the breath of even the person who defies him. He grants life to men and women who deny his existence. He’s the fountain of all that’s good, the source of all life and love.
Compared to God’s magnificence, we’re mere ants, and yet God is good to us, small and weightless though we might be. It’s only because of his goodness that we have value and worth. We’re dust. We came from the ground and will return there. And yet, wonder of wonders, God is a dust-lover.
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The old way of thinking about apologetics or seeker ministries was to avoid the hot topics. But Vance can testify that young people aren’t put off by these conversations. On the contrary, they lean into them because they’re hot. The cultural craziness of the moment is an opening.

I love Tim Keller’s definition of revival: “The intensification of the ordinary operation of the work of the Holy Spirit, occurring mainly through the ordinary ‘instituted means of grace’—preaching, pastoring, worship, prayer.” It’s broad enough to not overly specify the forms a revival might take while narrow enough to give you a sense of God at work, helping you identify the signs of revival when you see them.
Today, I wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of a revival among Gen Z, particularly those in college. As I survey the landscape, I see signs of hope and renewal that strike me as unexpected and remarkable.
Generational Awakening?
Late last year, Kyle Richter and Patrick Miller reported on the renewed interest and enthusiasm of the college students in their area and pointed to similar outbreaks of spiritual fire elsewhere. They believe this generation may be primed for spiritual renewal.
Gen Z is spiritually starved. The disorienting circumstances of the last three years—a global pandemic, countless mass shootings, the woke wars, a contested election, rapid inflation, and widespread abuse scandals—created a famine of identity, purpose, and belonging. Gen Z is hungry for the very things the empty, desiccated temples of secularism, consumerism, and global digital media cannot provide, but which Jesus can.
As I meet with pastors and church leaders or visit churches and universities, I see signs of this spiritual hunger. The Asbury Awakening in 2023 was a big news story—an ordinary chapel turning into an ongoing service of praise and worship, confession of sin, and celebration of salvation, which garnered attention from all over the country and sparked similar stirrings of spiritual intensity in other colleges and universities.
I pondered the question Asbury presses upon us, and I noted Asbury Theological Seminary president Timothy Tennent’s wise hesitation to call the awakening a “revival.” “Only if we see lasting transformation,” he wrote, “which shakes the comfortable foundations of the church and truly brings us all to a new and deeper place can we look back, in hindsight and say ‘yes, this has been a revival.’”
In the last two months, I’ve spoken at two churches associated with The Salt Company—City Church in Tallahassee, Florida, and Cornerstone Church in Ames, Iowa. Both churches are teeming with students—passionate, spiritually hungry, mission-minded. “On fire for Jesus,” as we used to say. Cornerstone Church has experienced tragedy in recent years. In 2022, two young women were shot and killed before the start of a Thursday night service. The church has come through a season of grief, but God has been at work in it all, bringing about evangelistic fruitfulness.
Signs of God at Work
During my visit to Cornerstone, I asked pastor Mark Vance, who’s in contact with a wide range of leaders in churches and ministries across the country, what he’s seeing. What are the signs that God is up to something?
1. Conviction of Sin
Vance notes intensified conviction of sin among believers. Repentance is normal. Consistent. There’s deep remorse and a heartfelt desire to turn from sin.
Some of the repentance stories are remarkable, including a girl who was living with a boyfriend and came under conviction during a message on holiness—and decided to move out that very night. The church scrambled to facilitate lodging for her so she could follow Jesus in this area. Vance can recount many stories. Conviction of sin, assurance of salvation—these are the signs that sleep-walking Christians are waking up.
2. Heightened Desire for Spiritual Disciplines
Another rumbling of revival among young people is the yearning for spiritual discipline, for an encounter with God through ordinary means, such as deeper study of God’s Word, and a yearning to pray well and often.
Old traditions are back. Fasting during Lent. Rituals deeply rooted in church history. Kneeling prayer. Prayer at fixed hours of the day.
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It’s not hard to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are when watching a movie about the Nazis. But it’s a little harder to recognize evil when it’s closer to home, when it appears respectful and reasonable, urbane and sophisticated.

You’ve probably heard of Godwin’s Law—the idea that as an online discussion progresses, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler increases. Godwin’s Law is meant to be humorous, but it says something serious about our society that one of the last remaining vestiges of moral coherence is that we all know Hitler was wrong.
Richard John Neuhaus once described the Holocaust as “our only culturally available icon of absolute evil.” We may not know what’s good anymore, but we know that is bad. This is why many rush to Hitler as a shortcut to or substitute for making a moral argument.
The often tenuous attempts to link certain attitudes and actions to Hitler—as if we can’t name something as bad unless it’s tied to our culture’s agreed standard of what constitutes evil on a massive scale—signal that many in our society are increasingly incapable of recognizing evil unless it shows up without ambiguity, perpetrated by people already in the category we’ve deemed “morally problematic.” Our moral imagination is impoverished. And this may be why we have a harder time recognizing evil deeds by people who don’t seem to be villains.
Heroes and Villains
I recently watched Netflix’s adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See, a book by Anthony Doerr I appreciated several years ago. It’s been too long since I read the book to remember how the German villains were portrayed in the original text, but the miniseries made them out to be sadistic animals, gleefully inflicting terror and trauma wherever possible. It’s as if the German commanders know they’re the bad guys. They seem to relish their role.
The truth is scarier. Yes, the historical record reveals the brutality of some of the worst officers in the German army (the entire enterprise was evil through and through), but most soldiers believed they were on the right side of history. They were the heroes, preserving their fatherland by eliminating the Jewish menace and paving the way for their superior race to install a new kingdom in Europe. Don’t forget: for the highly educated, culturally sophisticated, technologically advanced German society in the 1930s, Hitler was a hero.
The Germans saw themselves as the good guys. That’s why a clip from the British sketch comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look went viral, where one Nazi looks to the others in a moment of self-assessment and says, “Are we the baddies?” It’s funny, but the point is serious.
Frighteningly Ordinary Face of Evil
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a deeply unsettling book about WWII. Browning reminds us of the sheer scale of the killing that took place in Eastern Europe, much of it outside the concentration camps and most of it done by ordinary people without much investment in the fight—simple men and women conscripted into Hitler’s killing machine. Browning claims the majority of individuals in this particular battalion weren’t zealous Nazis. They were ordinary, middle-aged, working-class men who nevertheless perpetrated heinous acts.
Browning’s book shows three distinct groups emerging within the battalion: a core of enthusiastic participants, a majority who executed their responsibilities reliably but lacked initiative, and a small minority who avoided involvement in the acts of violence but were engaged in other activities that did nothing to diminish the battalion’s overall efficiency in carrying out atrocities. Hardly anyone seriously resisted. Ordinary Men shows how easy it is for people to yield to the influences of those around them, leading to actions they’d never consider otherwise.
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It doesn’t take long to recognize the internal inconsistency between these two narratives. The first depends on maleness and femaleness being something real, for a binary must exist for it to be transgressed or transcended. The second questions reality altogether, falling for a radical skepticism that reimagines the world in terms of linguistic power plays.

One of the most remarkable women in history, Joan of Arc, has long been at the center of various conversations and controversies because, while no one can deny her significance, the meaning of her words and actions eludes easy explanation.
Was she, as Shakespeare cast her, a witch? Were her visions heretical, as church leaders at the time concluded, or was she the saint the later Catholic Church canonized? What do we make of her commitment to a shining chastity and her insistence on her physical virginity? How should we interpret the rationale for wearing men’s clothing while leading armies into battle? Was she a reluctant warrior who wished for an ordinary life or an ambitious girl who desired the spotlight? What do we learn from her martyrdom?
In First Things, Dan Hitchens reflects on recent attempts to enlist Joan of Arc for the LGBT+ cause. Many today want to reimagine her as a nonconforming, prototransgender revolutionary. Hitchens reclaims Joan for a conservative and biblical understanding of sex and gender, as opposed to the cultural trend that makes her a founder of trans identity.
The questions about Joan of Arc’s life and legacy fascinate me, but they go beyond my purpose here. Instead, I want to lean on Hitchens’s description of the most important yet often unnoticed contradictions at the heart of today’s transgender theories. He believes one of the transgender movement’s most remarkable achievements has been to conceal the internal division at the heart of gender theory. “There is no single trans narrative,” he says. There are two, “wholly incompatible and mutually destructive, which have somehow been fused into a single, all-conquering cause.”
“Wrong Body” Narrative
Here’s how Hitchens describes the first narrative:
The first narrative holds that there are two realities, maleness and femaleness, and that some people are tragically exiled from their true states. Jan Morris, in the opening lines of the only trans memoir written by an acknowledged master of English prose, puts it like this: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” This kind of story is compelling at an emotional level: It speaks to the universal feeling of dislocation, of alienation, of longing for completeness, and at the same time resonates with the hope of the oppressed for justice, with the sorrows of every human being denied true flourishing by prejudice and fear.
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The inability of entertainment to deliver on its promises gives us the opportunity to do something different, to live and worship in a way that resolves the paradox of the AMC ad. The high priestess of Hollywood assures us we can be reborn together, but there she sits—alone in a cold, dark theater. Meanwhile, the church lifts up the Great High Priest who made it possible for us to be truly reborn—

The past five years have been challenging for the box office. The pandemic turned theaters into ghost towns. More and more people stream movies online nowadays. Production delays, and now a writers’ strike—all this has slowed the output from Hollywood.
Moviemakers have done their best to beckon us back to the theater, lifting up the big screen as a place to set aside distractions, gather with friends and family, and immerse ourselves in the stories being told.
Nicole Kidman and AMC
The cinematic promise is epitomized in AMC Theatres’ one-minute spot featuring Nicole Kidman. It begins as she strolls through a rainy night to the theater, gently lifting her hood as if she were a Jedi. Meanwhile, her voice describes the “magic” of the cinema, where we learn to laugh, to cry, and to care. As she ascends the stairs, she celebrates the “indescribable feeling as the lights dim” and we get the chance to go to another world. Kidman is the high priestess of this spiritual experience. We’re not there “just to be entertained,” she says, but to be “somehow reborn, together.”
The AMC ad was an unexpected hit, its rhapsodic script inspiring a parody on Saturday Night Live that expanded Kidman into a superhero and surrounded her with moviegoers who salute the screen as new adherents to this quasi religion. The ad elicited numerous memes and good-natured ribbing, especially for the unintentional campiness of the line “Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”
Deeper Longing
Every effective marketing campaign taps into deeper longings than the surface-level issues it addresses. It’s a running joke every year when Super Bowl commercials wow us with attention-grabbing humor or inspiring stories that often have little to no connection with the brand being represented. (A longer Christmas ad for Chevy last year, a tearjerker if ever there was one, emphasizes the nostalgic power of the brand while implying a Chevy truck can reverse dementia.)
It’s no surprise, then, that AMC wants to portray itself as more than a place where you can see a good movie at a decent price with comfortable seats; the theater offers an experience that fulfills a more profound need. Something deeper than mere entertainment. Rebirth is the goal.
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