I remember well the Great Depression, World War Two, the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, and all that followed. It’s been a wild ride! History is going somewhere. While many see time, chance, and evolution as the driving forces in the world, I have found a way better paradigm in the Bible. I’m further anchored by the fact I have enjoyed a personal relationship with the Creator, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, for more than fifty years now. I am not a recent convert. There are many subjects I can rant about today, but I suppose one of the biggest changes I have seen in my life concerns marriage, sexual expression, and family structure. My observations are my own perceptions and offered here for fellow searchers who may be looking for something deeper than a mere secular (or religious) world view. My parents were professing Christians when I was a boy. Sexual expression was for marriage only. Divorce was taboo. Abortion was rare and limited only to situations in which the mother’s health was in jeopardy. There were glaring discrepancies back then of course, and we kids were the first to spot these on our radars. For example, an unmarried young man was "weird" if he insisted on sexual abstinence before marriage. Virgin girls were highly prized. Parents did not, as a rule, sit their sons down for "the talk" at puberty, so most of us learned on our own about sex from our peers. We went on to college piling up advanced degrees but never learning which way was up. For instance, what happens when I die? Is there any purpose to life or is all meaning generated by experience, by trial and error? Are there no moral absolutes? Marriage as an institution back then was sacred even when the wedding had been hypocritical or feigned. Great expense and social pressure accompanied important ("royal") weddings, as if the ceremony alone guaranteed happiness, bliss, and flawless offspring. When a wedding took place, two families came together and bonded across cultural divides, to one degree or other. So marriage was a healing, stabilizing social institution. Therefore a healthy nation (it was widely believed)--was assumed to be built around monogamous marriage, life-long fidelity, and controlled sexual behavior. In this scenario children were special and usually sought after. Parents knew they had to raise their kids "right," knowing it would be many years before offspring would become productive to society, paying back the society as well as parents. All sexual expression outside of marriage was assumed sinful, but there were no standards once you were married, apparently. We were also more law-abiding then. I was genuinely patriotic, a loyal citizen, and fairly well informed about our national heritage and our history. "In God we Trust" was universal, pretty much. Law and Order were prized. The Courts were assumed just, good churchgoers went to heaven, and bad people went to hell. Certainly living in America was a great privilege. The "fabric of society" is radically different now. Important cultural revolutions have swept through society since World War 2, especially. Many of my friends have kept track of these and can expound by the hour on what has changed and what remains. I’ll assume here that you the reader are well read, well informed, and hopefully not carried along every instability in the social fabric. Hopefully you are looking and hoping for better days to come? The biggest change in fifty years, I believe, has been the loss of absolutes and the decline of belief in any absolute - including God. We had been given permission, it seems, to live pretty much as we please. As near as I can tell, most men and women under 30 or 40 years old are apparently sexually active and have been since puberty. The biological sexual drive can’t be turned off, it is said, once one enters adolescence. Masturbation is considered normal and desirable, that is, between hookups. "Hookups" can be either straight or gay according to one’s preference. Marriage is cool but there are few role models anywhere. That the world has changed since 1950 is not disputed. Some see that as progress, or evolution at work. I don't. I believe in absolutes because I have been convinced by evidence from a higher dimension, namely because Jesus Christ has been real in my life since 1962. My convictions are Biblical and experiential. Here are some of my thoughts about the universe. I am adding various links which hopefully some of you will read in the interest of thoroughness. A classic message from Gordon Dalbey "Healing Father Wounds" has relevance for all of us-especially at this time in human history. My first TV was black and white but that did not last very long. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity shook me up in high school. I knew I wasn’t living in Kansas anymore. My first encounter with an Absolute took place 57 years ago when I took a big tits chance and invited Jesus Christ into my life. It seemed ludicrous at the time, yet I had met others by then who insisted they knew Jesus personally and were living high quality lives. I was told at the time by my new Christian friends that Jesus waits for our permission before invading our space-time domain. Sure enough, that’s been my everyday experience ever since. Jesus is a perfect gentleman even though He owns the whole cosmos and is kind even to His enemies. I now believe the universe was created to be an orderly, harmonious place. Somehow man is located at the mid point between a microcosm of order and fine tuning extending at least 31 orders of magnitude (factors of ten) smaller than man’s scale (a few meters). Looking from the microcosm the macrocosm continues outward for at least 26 orders of magnitude bigger. Actually there is good reason to believe that much of the created universe resides in space-time regimes we can not presently observe, measure, explore. Vast reaches of the spiritual realm, ("the heavenly places") are hinted at in the Bible. As one gains appreciation of the Lord Jesus and the vastness of the real universe, earth is soon seen as cramped, overcrowded, and very much damaged. The subjects of suffering, sin, dying, and death are subjects of much revelation in the Bible! All this should persuade us to pay attention to Jesus every day. Naively we know we grow up believing that we live in a rather confined space or cage. We don’t know exactly how we got here but we know we began as babies, grow up and die within a hundred years or less. Neither is the world a safe place! All sorts of flawed explanations about our existence and destiny assault us from the first grade onward. It’s terribly dangerous down here. But most of us think we are special-bad things can’t happen to us. Whoever I am, I am the most important being in the universe whether others acknowledge that or not. Reality is the sum total of my life-experience, I deserve to live forever. But the way of escape eludes us--all because wholeness and everlasting life is found only in Jesus Christ. All these notions from "me, myself, and I" are only partially true about the universe. They will quickly be displaced when I take my last breath or am killed in a crash. Most of who I really am is software not hardware. This is discoverable as soon as I become aware that our Creator has given us a huge body of information from outside the system of observable reality. Jesus is "Truth focused." He is alive now and available. We are invited to know Him exactly as we hope to know friends, big tits family,and lovers. The created universe macrocosm and the microcosm are indeed orderly and show evidence everywhere of design.