Helen Lemmel, a member of Ballard Baptist Church, died in Seattle on November 1, 1961, thirteen days before her 98th birthday; she had written nearly 500 hymns. Due to her extreme poverty, her remains were cremated and nobody seems to know where they were disposed of. No matter. Those are things of earth. Strangely dim. Imagine her joy, when she turned her glorified eyes on her Savior and Look[ed} full in his wonderful face”!

How are you doing? We’re often asking one another. And we dutifully respond, “Fine. I’m doing just fine.” When, in fact, we may be on the brink of despair. Do you ever feel that you’re believing and hoping in the darkness? Is your soul weary and troubled? You’re not alone. The life of Helen Howarth Lemmel (1863-1961) is a marvelous illustration of clinging and “doing well” though doing so in the total darkness.
Helen was born in Wardle, England, November 14, 1863. Her father was a Wesleyan minister who decided, when their daughter was about twelve-years-old, to immigrate to America. The family first settled in Mississippi and later moved to Wisconsin.
Early in her life, Helen had shown great love for music, and great skill. Her parents did their best to find good vocal teachers for their daughter, and her vocal expertise increased. In 1904, an opportunity arose in Seattle, Washington for Helen to write about music for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. After four years, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity arose: Helen was invited to further her musical studies in Germany.
While studying abroad, she fell in love with a wealthy European and they got married. How are you doing, Helen? Very well, indeed! So it seemed. Until tragedy struck. She was rapidly losing her eyesight. When she became totally blind—her husband abandoned her. Helen would struggle with loneliness and various heartaches throughout the rest of her long life.
Her soul, “weary and troubled,” blind Helen returned to America, “no light in the darkness” could she see. How are you doing, Helen? I’m lonely, afraid, blind, and abandonned–how do you think I’m doing? But her Savior had her graven on his heart, and she could still sing. Looking full in the wonderful face of her Savior, she travelled widely, singing in churches throughout the Midwest. During these years, Helen was hired to teach voice at Moody Bible Institute.
When she was fifty-five years old, Helen heard someone say something about her eyes–almost insulting–that had a huge impact on her mind and imagination: “So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will see that the things of earth will acquire a strange new dimness.”
“I stood still,” Helen later recalled, “and singing in my soul and spirit was the chorus:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face, And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, In the light of His glory and grace.
She continued her account, saying that there was “…not one conscious moment of putting word to word to make rhyme, or note to note to make melody. The verses were written the same week, after the usual manner of composition, but,” she added, “nonetheless dictated by the Holy Spirit.”
Now elderly, lonely, and infirm—and blind—Helen became acquainted with her neighbor, a young man named Doug Goins and his parents, Paul and Kathryn Goins. “She was advanced in years and almost destitute, but she was an amazing person,” recalled Doug. “She made a great impression on me as a junior high child because of her joy and enthusiasm. Though she was living on government assistance in a sparse bedroom, whenever we’d ask how she was doing, she would reply, ‘I’m doing well in the things that count.’” One day, the Goins invited her to dinner. “We had never entertained a blind person before,” said Kathryn, “…despite her infirmities, she was full of life.”
“She was always composing hymns,” said Kathryn. “She had no way of writing them down, so she would call my husband at all hours, and he’d rush down and record them before she forgot the words.”
Helen had a cheap plastic keyboard by her bed, at which she spent her days playing, singing—and, in her sorrows—sometimes crying. “One day, God is going to bless me with a great heavenly keyboard,” she’d say. “I can hardly wait!”
Helen Lemmel, a member of Ballard Baptist Church, died in Seattle on November 1, 1961, thirteen days before her 98th birthday; she had written nearly 500 hymns. Due to her extreme poverty, her remains were cremated and nobody seems to know where they were disposed of. No matter. Those are things of earth. Strangely dim. Imagine her joy, when she turned her glorified eyes on her Savior and Look[ed} full in his wonderful face”!
How are you really doing? In the things that really count?
1. O soul, are you weary and troubled? No light in the darkness you see? There’s light for a look at the Savior, And life more abundant and free!
Refrain: Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face, And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, In the light of His glory and grace.
2. Thro’ death into life everlasting, He passed, and we follow Him there; O’er us sin no more hath dominion– For more than conqu’rors we are!
3. His Word shall not fail you–He promised; Believe Him, and all will be well: Then go to a world that is dying, His perfect salvation to tell! (Tune)
Douglas Bond, author of more than thirty books, directs the Oxford Creative Writing Master Class, leads Church history tours (join him on the Rome to Geneva Tour, 2023), and he is copy editor for authors and publishers. Contact him at [email protected]
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The creative class and the affective revolution now “do the work of soul healing and education.” This complex, along with global capitalism, forms the “hypermodern cultural system.” If it can succeed in taking full control of the human rights doctrine “we will have a morality legislated globally.” This possible future for Christianity in the world, he said, is “dark.”

Guilherme de Carvalho, a Brazilian Baptist theologian and founder of the Brazilian Christians in Science Association (ABC2), discussed the impact of the “affective revolution,” which focuses on emotional life and has powered identity politics, and its impact on law, general culture, and thus Christian witness at the recent L’Abri Conference in Rochester, Minnesota.
The revolutionary turn to subjectivity has been reviewed at some length by the L’Abri Fellowship. It has had a major impact on the contemporary world, and Latin America is no exception. But it also has deep roots in European civilization. While the West, especially since the Enlightenment, is supposedly is “founded on reason,” it has also long been an “empire of sentiment.” From this aspect of the Enlightenment, we get “sentimental man.”
De Carvalho said that in the recent past, he was “very much focused on fighting rationalism, new atheism.” This was certainly true of Christian apologetics in general. More recently, particularly in the last decade, he “felt something changing.” He “felt that the frontier of Christian apologetics was moving from epistemology to ethics.” A “main theme” has become “happiness.” There is a “disengagement from the moral universe.” This is done “in the interest of self-expression and well being.” This has become “normal currency.”
Behind and before this change, he said, was a much deeper change that happened from about 1950 to about 1970. This was the mixture of “modern hypercapitalism” with a unfettered sense of “how to feel love, and to organize” one’s emotional state. He called it a “second individualistic revolution.” The idea of  “emotional intelligence” emerged in the 1990s, and it has been normalized since then. By 2011, emotional intelligence tests were more important than IQ tests, de Carvalho claimed. Teachers have tests to “assess the emotional realities of students.” Another development is “positive psychology.” This focuses on individual and social well being. He sees some good in this last item. There is also “affective computing,” which was started in 1995, and attempts to take human psychological reality into account.
The emphasis on feeling rather than thought has also led to a “narrowing of the human/animal gap.” Here he referred to the atheist Princeton ethicist Peter Singer. Singer emphasizes the emotions, and therefore the “interests,” of animals. This then gives animals “rights” as a result of their “feelings.” This narrowing the human/animal gap is also found in “pop culture,” he said. He noted that Pope Francis has referred to the preference some people have to pets over children.
De Carvalho referred to The Transformation of Intimacy, by Anthony Giddens. It proposes an egalitarian “pure relation as a description of modern love.” People stay in such relationships only because they get “emotional rewards” from it. The relationship can be terminated at will. This, according to de Carvalho, was proposed as “a new standard for modern love.” Sociologist Mark Regnerius used Giddens’ idea to research sexual activities and relationships in America. Giddens “even recommended” Regnerius’ work. Regnerius “pointed out the problems” the new egalitarian and consensual sex ethic has for women and children.
The affective revolution has affected family law in Brazil. The idea is that “the point of the family is to make each member of the family happy.” It is a “new foundation” for the family, which has changed Brazilian law and jurisprudence. The concept of family is changed “without any reference to kinship.” Any group of people who share living space “and have affections, this is a family.” It might be added that this effectively undermines both marriage and parental authority. A marriage which is unhappy can obviously be ended at will (as is now legally the case, but certainly not in Christian doctrine), and it appears that the state can terminate a parent/child relationship if the child is unhappy with it.
But, he said, there are “things that are worse” in Brazil. There is being advanced the doctrine of “affective rights.” This involves saying that marriage is not about rights and duties, but “affectivity.” This resulted in the Brazilian Supreme Court mandating same sex civil unions in 2011. It has led to a “politics of self-regard.” It can easily be in conflict with the Christian doctrine of sin, which focuses on duty and responsibility, and aims at inducing guilt and repentance. It appears similar or the same as the LGBT claim of “dignity” for deeply felt desires and behavior. As this writer has often noted, this cannot be consistently applied. There can be no right-not-to-be-offended, which is what the “politics of self-regard” would seem to amount to.
The overall effect, de Carvalho said, of “affective rights” is make people turn inward. People are guided by “fear, and gut feelings.” This is happening both on “the left and the right.” He said that “democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling in ways that cannot be ignored or reversed.” He referred to commentary of columnist David Brooks of the New York Times, regarding the business and professional “creative class.” According to Brooks, the creative class has been emerging since around the year 2000. Their ideals are “to be smart, to be original.” The really important thing for this class “is to be creative.” This class is “connected to the tech industry,” and is also “connected to gentrification in … big cities.”
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No one should be required to express fidelity to academic queer theory. Those of us who care about actual pluralism should resist this form of narcissism-fueled political theater. If unconventional pronouns have any room in our society, they must be uttered in the context of civic friendship based on trust, self-restraint, and mutual respect. Above all, nonbinary pronouns must be strictly voluntary, and there should be no penalties—social or legal—for those who dissent from their underlying ideology.

The Biden administration has announced a series of policy initiatives in support of “transgender, nonbinary, and other gender expansive” Americans. Among these is that Americans will now be able to have “X” as the gender listed on their passports—a benefit for those who self-identify as neither male nor female.
Nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia have already implemented similar measures for state-issued documents. In 2019, the New York City Commission on Human Rights issued a legal guidance that requires employers, landlords, and providers of public accommodations to use a person’s preferred name and pronouns, irrespective of the sex “assigned” to that person at birth. This includes not only “she” for men who identify as women and “he” for women who identify as men, but also honorific titles such as “Mx” and individual pronouns such as “they/them” and “ze/hir.”
According to the Williams Institute, 1.2 million adults in the United States self-identify as nonbinary. For Americans under 18 that figure is likely much higher, given recent data showing that over 20 percent of Generation Z (born after 1997) identify as LGBT, compared with 10 percent of millennials and 4 percent of Generation X.
Progressives tend to believe that this sudden rise in numbers reflects a society more welcoming to people “born that way,” but a more plausible explanation is that young people are responding to new social cues and incentives. Teenagers are now regularly told that being “cisgender” (identifying as male or female according to reproductive traits) means conforming to social expectations, while identifying as anything else reflects nonconformity, authenticity, and courage. Given this messaging—and the fact that, unlike homosexuality, which entails sexual feelings and behaviors, one need only to declare oneself nonbinary to be nonbinary—it is a wonder that merely 20 percent of youth regard themselves as part of the alphabet coalition. In any case, the Biden administration’s actions add further confusion to a conversation already characterized by shallow thinking and badly misunderstood research.
Start with the fact that what makes most transgender people transgender is precisely the fact that they conform to gender conventions—albeit those of the opposite sex. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists conformity to “stereotypes” as a relevant criterion for diagnosing childhood gender dysphoria. Federal courts have ruled that transgender boys really are boys, and thus deserve to use the boys’ restrooms at school because they look and behave like typical boys. If gender is an “identity” wholly independent of reproductive traits (of which there can be only two complementary sets), then there is no logical reason that there should be only two gender identities. Indeed, there would have to be as many gender identities as there are people, since each person’s way of expressing gender is unique and irreplaceable. As one federal judge conceded in a rare moment of candor, restrooms separated by male and female “gender identity” rely no less on stereotypes than does the conventional practice.
This presents a problem for the notion of gender identity used by diversity trainers, academic bureaucrats, federal judges, mainstream progressive and LGBT advocacy groups, and Democratic Party leaders: that gender is a core, immutable, and socially valuable aspect of the human person. According to superstar academic and godmother of queer theory Judith Butler, gender is not an innate property but a system of social oppression that gains legibility through repetitious “performance.” “Gender identity” is a “regulatory fiction,” Butler writes. A girl who seeks hormones and surgeries to make her body conform to social expectations regarding the male sex is not being a brave nonconformist but “submitting to the norm of the knife.” She is perhaps even more conformist than her “cisgender” peers considering the pain she is willing to endure to “pass” within the traditional “gender binary.” Feminists and gay rights advocates have echoed this line of argument.
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