In this world, Christians may often face earthly uncertainty. Who but God knows what tomorrow may bring? But our hope is secure because it is bound up in Christ, and we are secure in Him. Thus, we cherish the thought embodied in the hymn “A Debtor to Mercy Alone”: Yes, I to the end shall endure, as sure as the earnest is giv’n; more happy, but not more secure, the glorified spirits in heav’n. Because we are in Christ, in heaven we may be more happy than we are right now, but we will not be any more secure. We are in Christ, and we cannot be more secure than that.

The lives of Christians are filled with all kinds of blessings. Some of those blessings are unique and extraordinary—particularly our salvation. Ordinary blessings come to us as well, and many of them are easily taken for granted. In fact, some of them come to us so routinely that we mistakenly assume that they will always be there. Things such as home, health, food, and clothing are always there, at least for many of us. Greater blessings such as family and solid relationships can also easily be taken for granted. As the old saying goes and is too often true, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”

Stability in the smaller matters of life is a blessing that God bestows on many of His people. And though some of God’s people enjoy the blessings of stability more than others, God does not promise that these things will always be there, at least not in the way that we have known them. Even the smallest things in life are gifts from God’s hand. Learning to be content with little—even to rejoice in it—is one of the true marks of Christian maturity. It is also a signal to the world around us that we are exactly what the Bible calls us—a pilgrim people who are called to live by faith in an uncertain world.
Few stories illustrate this point better than the pilgrimage of Abraham. In Genesis 12, God calls Abraham (then called Abram) in a rather abrupt way: God’s first word to Abram is not “Hi there” or “How’s it going?” but rather “Go.” The first thing that God says to Abram is a direct command—a command to go. Few commentaries (including the book of Hebrews) overlook the fact that God effectively told Abram to go before He told him where to go. It’s as if God said, “Get up, start walking, and I will tell you where we are going along the way.” What God called Abram to was clear: He wanted Abram to walk by faith and not by sight. But where God was calling him to go was equally unclear.
Such is the nature of the life of faith. God often calls us, moves us, destabilizes us, if you will—never to injure or perplex us but always to refine us for His glory and our good. This was true for Abraham, and it is true for all the sons and daughters of Abraham who follow after him by faith.

Abraham’s willingness to follow God is even more greatly appreciated if we think about not just the life that was before him but the life that was behind him as well. Abraham may have had no idea where he was going at the beginning of Genesis 12, but he certainly knew where he was from. Abraham had enjoyed a life of stability in Ur. He had a people and place. He belonged somewhere. There were people who knew him and people whom he knew. There were trees and buildings with which he was familiar, and there were people who knew his story because they were part of it. Abraham surely had some measure of relational depth and community in the land that God called him to leave. In short, Abraham had stability.
God, however, had a different plan for Abraham. Rather than settle down into a life of comfort and ease, Abraham would prove to be the prototypical pilgrim.

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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Thursday, June 6, 2024
Economic, technological, and social changes affect the availability and norms of society in ways that make it difficult to avoid adapting to them. I want to dial in on cultural and social expectations. Because these can put pressure on people to upgrade their lifestyles in ways that might be possible to resist, but which are difficult to do so.

I grew up in a small house without air conditioning where I shared a bedroom with my younger brother.
I remember how awful it was on hot summer nights in August. I put a box fan turned to high on a chair about three feet from the edge of my bed to try to get cool. But other than that, growing up there wasn’t bad.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, lots of people did not have air conditioning, or only had bedroom window units. Sharing bedrooms also wasn’t uncommon.
Things have changed today. While plenty of people don’t have AC or have children sharing bedrooms, these are now almost entirely a result of lacking the money to get them.
Air conditioning and one bedroom per child have become socially normative to the point that it’s a point of parental contention to choose differently.
There was a recent interesting article “Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?” in the Atlantic addressing this very point.
When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room?
Over the past half century or so in the U.S., the practice has become what the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau calls a “normative ideal”—something that many aspire to, but that not all can attain. It’s gotten more common in recent decades, as houses have gotten bigger and people have been having fewer kids. From 1960 to 2000, the number of bedrooms available for each child in the average household rose from 0.7 to 1.1, according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld’s calculations using U.S. census data. It’s held fairly steady since, the University of Washington real-estate professor Arthur Acolin told me. Recently, Acolin analyzed 2022 American Community Survey data and found that more than half of all families with kids had at least enough bedrooms to give each child their own (though it’s not certain that all of them do). Even among parents whose children share rooms, more than 70 percent say they wish they could give everyone their own.
Economic, technological, and social changes affect the availability and norms of society in ways that make it difficult to avoid adapting to them.
I want to dial in on cultural and social expectations. Because these can put pressure on people to upgrade their lifestyles in ways that might be possible to resist, but which are difficult to do so.
One kid per room is an example of such a standard. When I was a kid, I obviously would have preferred my own room. I knew that kids from families with more money did have their own room. But there was nothing unusual about sharing one.
Over time, as one child per bedroom became seen as the norm, not having that would mark a family as an outlier.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, November 10, 2023
Children appear in the article as commodities, things to be made by a team of scientists. The parents will not conceive children in the traditional, haphazard, and deeply mysterious way. Rather they will be providers of genetic material from which children can be manufactured to order. Choice becomes key here, just as it is in purchasing a car or a toothbrush. And the feelings of the children manufactured this way are never addressed—how could they be? 

Last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal featured an article as fascinating as it was disturbing: “What If Men Could Make Their Own Egg Cells?” It discussed the work of Matt Krisiloff, CEO of Conception Biosciences. Krisiloff and his team are working on producing human embryos from genetic material that is not connected in origin to an egg or a sperm. Indeed, the article begins with a quotation from a Japanese biologist, Katsuhiko Hayashi, who believes that it will be possible to make human eggs from skin cells within a decade.
While the science is surely impressive, it raises all kinds of ethical questions. The article nods to the fact that developments in reproductive technology have transformed the notion of parenthood. Though it does not use the term, a contractual notion of parenthood as functional rather than natural seems to be emerging in the West. The recent (thankfully failed) bill in California that aimed to make affirmation of a child’s gender confusion a necessary parental virtue is a good, if egregious, example of this. Fail to affirm the correct political tastes and you are no longer considered a parent. Such cultural logic does not emerge in a vacuum or in a short span of time. The world of sperm and egg donation and surrogacy has attenuated the relationship between conception, pregnancy, and childbirth, fueling the kind of broader imaginative framework that makes the narrower logic of such a bill plausible. Gay adoptions have further contributed to this. While traditional adoption replaced the biological people (male and female) who should normally be there (as father and mother) with their equivalents, gay adoption effectively makes mothers and fathers fungible.
It is also interesting that children appear in the article as commodities, things to be made by a team of scientists. The parents will not conceive children in the traditional, haphazard, and deeply mysterious way. Rather they will be providers of genetic material from which children can be manufactured to order.
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