Don’t lose hope. Not because your child, your boss, your employee, your spouse, or yourself is capable on his own of the change that he or she has have failed at time and time again, but because we believe in the Spirit of God, who can transform any heart, who can resurrect the dead, and who can restore relationships beyond repair.

“I don’t even know why we’re here. Nothing is going to change.” I’ve heard those words many times in counseling sessions. And I’ve felt those words from the empty eyes, the rigid shoulders, and the dropped heads of those I have counseled.
Who is it that you don’t believe can change? Your boss? Your employee? Your friend? Your son or daughter? Your spouse? Yourself?
Who have you given up on?
Be honest. You’ve probably given up on someone somewhere. You know what the theological term is for not having hope for someone? For giving up on them? Damning. That’s right. When you lose hope in someone you’re damning him.
The latter half of Romans 1 speaks of the hopeless situation of those who have turned against God. In chilling language, Paul explains that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men…”[i] He explains that those in rebellion “are without excuse,”[ii] and then he goes on three times in the next five verses to explain how God damns them: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts…”[iii] and that “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions,”[iv] and finally “God gave them up to a debased mind…”[v]
On those four words—“God gave them up”–hang the icy chill of damnation.
Only God can damn. We can never give up on anyone. We can never lose hope for anyone. Jesus tells us that we are not only to love our neighbor, but also our enemy. And Paul explains that that this love has the shape of hope.
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The science we never share risks being a finding we never found. As the pile of unshared science grows, our scientific understanding of crises like pandemics suffers from the attrition of the science it doesn’t know. It should be in the interest of all scientists to facilitate the sharing of scientific ideas to ensure no science goes unshared from fear of ridicule or public execution. 

Early in the Covid pandemic, Michael Levitt noticed a gradual decay of case growth rates over time in Wuhan, and many dismissed or ignored his observations on account of what they viewed were improper credentials and unconventional mathematical methods (Gompertz curves, as opposed to conventional compartmental models in epidemiology).
Some researchers went so far as to call Michael Levitt’s work “lethal nonsense,” saying he was being an irresponsible member of the scientific community by not being an epidemiologist and presenting work that Levitt’s critics believed downplayed the coronavirus.
On March 17, 2020, John Ioannidis argued that Covid severity was uncertain and extreme containment policies such as lockdowns could possibly cause more harm than the pandemic itself, provoking a persistent culture of animosity towards Dr. Ioannidis, from false claims of conflicts-of-interest in 2020 to people accusing Ioannidis of “horrible science” and more.
My Experience as a “Deviant” Epidemiologist
As a mathematical biologist studying viruses jumping from bats to people for a few years prior to Covid, and as a time-series analyst with nearly a decade of experience forecasting by early 2020, I was also studying Covid since January 2020.
I noticed the wisdom of Levitt’s Gompertz curves – Levitt found an observation I myself had found independently, of regular decays in the growth rate of cases well before cases peaked in Wuhan, and then in early outbreaks across Europe and the US. In my own work, I found evidence in February 2020 that cases were doubling every 2-3 days (midpoint estimate 2.4 days) in the early Wuhan outbreak at a time when popular epidemiologists believed Covid prevalence would double every 6.2 days.
We knew at the time that the earliest cases were exposed in late-November 2019. Suppose the first case was December 1, 2019, 72 days prior the approximate early-2020 peak of cases in China on February 11, 2020. If cases strictly doubled every 2.4 days over that 72-day period, as many as 1 billion people, or 2/3 of China, would have been infected. If, instead, cases doubled every 5 days, we’d expect roughly 22,000 people to be infected in China.
If cases doubled every 6.2 days, we’d expect 3,100 people to be infected in China. The slower the case growth rate one believed, the fewer cases they expected, the higher the infection fatality rate they estimated and the more severe they worried the Covid-19 pandemic would be. These findings led me to see the merit in Dr. Levitt’s observations, and to agree with Dr. Ioannidis’ articulation of the scientific uncertainty surrounding the severity of the Covid pandemic the world was about to experience.
However, when I saw the world’s treatment of Levitt, Ioannidis, and many more scientists with contrary views that mirrored my own, I became fearful of possible reputational and professional risks from sharing my science. I tried to share my work privately but encountered professors claiming I was “not-an-epidemiologist”, and one told me I “would be directly responsible for the deaths of millions” if I published my work, was wrong, and inspired complacency in people who died of COVID.
Between these personal encounters from scientists in a variety of positions and the public stoning of Levitt and Ioannidis, I worried that publishing my results would result in me being publicly called not-an-epidemiologist like Levitt, and responsible for deaths like both Levitt and Ioannidis.
I managed to share my work on a CDC forecasting call on March 9th, 2020. I presented how I estimated these fast growth rates, their implications for interpreting the early outbreak in China, and their implications for the current state of COVID in the US. Community transmission of Covid in the US was known at the time to have started January 15th at the latest,
I showed how an outbreak starting in mid-January and doubling every 2.4 days could cause tens of millions of cases by mid-March, 2020. The host of the call, Alessandro Vespignani, claimed he didn’t believe it, that the fast growth rates might just be attributable to increasing rates of case-ascertainment, and ended the call.
Just 9 days after I presented on the CDC call, it was found that Covid admissions to ICUs were doubling every 2 days across health care providers in New York City. While case-ascertainment could be increasing, the criteria for ICU admission, such as quantitative thresholds of blood-oxygen concentrations, were fixed and so the ICU surge of NYC revealed a true surge of prevalence doubling every 2 days in the largest US metro area.
By late March, we estimated an excess of 8.7 million people across the US visited an outpatient provider with influenza-like illness *ILI) and tested negative for the flu, and this estimate of many patients in March corroborated a lower estimate of COVID pandemic severity.
Having watched Levitt, Ioannidis, Gupta and more get mobbed online for publishing their evidence, analyses and reasonings for a lower-severity pandemic, I knew that publishing the ILI paper was an act of deviance in an extremely active online scientific community.
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“What God has joined together” implies that marriage is not merely a human agreement but a relationship in which God changes the status of a man and a woman from being single (they are no longer two) to being married (one flesh). From the moment they are married, they are unified in a mysterious way that belongs to no other human relationship, having all the God-given rights and responsibilities of marriage that they did not have before. Being “one flesh” includes the sexual union of a husband and wife (see Gen. 2:24), but it is more than that because it means that they have left their parents’ household (“a man shall leave his father and his mother,” Gen. 2:24) and have established a new family, such that their primary human loyalty is now to each other, before anyone else.

All commentary sections adapted from the ESV Study Bible.
1. Ephesians 5:22–27
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Read More
The first example of general submission (Eph. 5:21) is illustrated as Paul exhorts wives to submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:22–24, 33). Husbands, on the other hand, are not told to submit to their wives but to love them (Eph. 5:25–33). Paul’s first example of general submission from Eph. 5:21 is the right ordering of the marriage relationship (see also Col. 3:18; 1 Pet. 3:1–7). The submission of wives is not like the obedience children owe parents, nor does this text command all women to submit to all men (to your own husbands, not to all husbands!). Both genders are equally created in God’s image (Gen. 1:26–28) and heirs together of eternal life (Gal. 3:28–29). This submission is in deference to the ultimate leadership of the husband for the health and harmonious working of the marriage relationship.
The focus in these verses is on Christ, for husbands do not “sanctify” their wives or “wash” them of their sins, though they are to do all in their power to promote their wives’ holiness. “Sanctify” here means “to consecrate into the Lord’s service through cleansing, washing of water.” This might be a reference to baptism, since it is common in the Bible to speak of invisible, spiritual things (in this case, spiritual cleansing) by pointing to an outward physical sign of them (see Rom. 6:3–4). There may also be a link here to Ezek. 16:1–13, where the Lord washes infant Israel, raises her, and eventually elevates her to royalty and marries her, which would correspond to presenting the church to himself in splendor at his marriage supper (see also Ezek. 36:25; Rev. 19:7–9; 21:2, 9–11). without blemish. The church’s utter holiness and moral perfection will be consummated in resurrection glory, but is derived from the consecrating sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
2. Genesis 2:18
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Read More
“Not good” is a jarring contrast to Gen. 1:31; clearly, the situation here has not yet arrived to “very good.” “I will make him” can also be translated “I will make for him,” which explains Paul’s statement in 1 Cor. 11:9. In order to find the man a helper fit for him, God brings to him all the livestock, birds, and beasts of the field. None of these, however, proves to be “fit for” the man. “Helper” (Hb. ‘ezer’) is one who supplies strength in the area that is lacking in “the helped.” The term does not imply that the helper is either stronger or weaker than the one helped. “Fit for him” or “matching him” (cf. ESV footnote) is not the same as “like him”: a wife is not her husband’s clone but complements him.

3. Matthew 19:4–6
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” Read More
“What God has joined together” implies that marriage is not merely a human agreement but a relationship in which God changes the status of a man and a woman from being single (they are no longer two) to being married (one flesh). From the moment they are married, they are unified in a mysterious way that belongs to no other human relationship, having all the God-given rights and responsibilities of marriage that they did not have before. Being “one flesh” includes the sexual union of a husband and wife (see Gen. 2:24), but it is more than that because it means that they have left their parents’ household (“a man shall leave his father and his mother,” Gen. 2:24) and have established a new family, such that their primary human loyalty is now to each other, before anyone else. Jesus avoids the Pharisaic argument about reasons for divorce and goes back to the beginning of creation to demonstrate God’s intention for the institution of marriage. It is to be a permanent bond between a man and a woman that joins them into one new union that is consecrated by physical intercourse (Gen. 2:24).
4. Colossians 3:18
Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Read More
Instead of telling wives to “obey” (Gk. hypakouō), as was typical in Roman households, Paul appeals to them to “submit” (Gk. hypotassō), based on his conviction that men have a God-given leadership role in the family. The term suggests an ordering of society in which wives should align themselves with and respect the leadership of their husbands (see Eph. 5:22–33).
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