Self-reliance

Humans have been trying to chase away gray hair for millennia. Clay tablets from the Assyrian Empire dated to the 7th Century B.C. mention using the gall of a black ox, cypress oil, licorice, and honey to turn gray hair black.

Ancient Egyptians applied oil cooked with the blood of a black calf, according to the 3,500-year-old Ebers Papyrus. (Presumably, if it worked, we’d still be trying it).

Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who is spending millions experimenting on himself to slow aging, posted a YouTube video detailing his regimen to reverse hair loss and graying; the video has over 1.5 million views.

Johnson, 46, uses two topical treatments. One contains an herbal extract that, Johnson acknowledges, has colored his hair. But he says something is reversing his grays. When he has looked closely at plucked hairs, he says color has returned to some of them.

What is working? He isn’t sure. Johnson’s routine also includes more than 50 supplements daily and trips to a Honduran island for $25,000 gene-therapy injections.

One-third of U.S. adults said they would probably or definitely take a drug to prevent or reverse graying if such a medication were approved, according to a poll of 9,000 people. Some endorse gobbling black sesame seeds and blackstrap molasses to give gray hair the brush off. Others take liquid chlorophyll or douse their hair in onion juice. In online forums, posts about reversing grays can draw hundreds of replies.

Humans have been trying to chase away gray for millennia. Clay tablets from the Assyrian Empire dated to the 7th Century B.C. mention using the gall of a black ox, cypress oil, licorice, and honey to turn gray hair black. Ancient Egyptians applied oil cooked with the blood of a black calf, according to the 3,500-year-old Ebers Papyrus. (Presumably, if it worked, we’d still be trying it).

Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who is spending millions experimenting on himself to slow aging, posted a YouTube video detailing his regimen to reverse hair loss and graying; the video has nearly 700,000 views.

Johnson, 46, uses two topical treatments. One contains an herbal extract that, Johnson acknowledges, has colored his hair. But he says something is reversing his grays. When he has looked closely at plucked hairs, he says color has returned to some of them. What is working? He isn’t sure. Johnson’s routine also includes more than 50 supplements daily and trips to a Honduran island for $25,000 gene-therapy injections.

On a recent episode of The Howard Stern Show, the “shock-jock” host asked his guest, music legend Paul Simon, questions about music, life, art, and anything else that came to mind. Stern rose to fame with his exaltation of immorality and self-adulation. At the end of the interview, Stern said:

Paul, just give me one last answer. You seem very wise. You’ve lived through everything. You’ve created great masterpieces. Is there a God? Because I need to know. I’m getting older. Is this it for me? Am I going to die and that’s it or am I going somewhere? And please answer it in a serious manner.

Simon responded,

This is my feeling about God or Creator. The planet that I’m living on is so beautiful and the universe is so awe-inspiring. If that is the work of a creator, I say, “Thanks so much. I really love your work on the universe. Excellent work, coming from me, Paul Simon, to you, I really dig what you’re doing.” If it turns out that there’s another explanation for creation, I’m still unbelievably grateful for my existence. I still think it’s amazing. If it turns out, I thought it was God but it’s some other explanation, it doesn’t matter to me ….

Then, Stern interrupted, “But it’s so cruel. We have this existence and then we have to disappear. It’s hard.”

Actress and former Seinfeld star (as Elaine) Julia Louis-Dreyfus has had moments when tragedy and comedy get put in a blender. Monday, September 18, 2017, was one of them. Louis-Dreyfus and the hit TV show Veep had triumphed at the Emmys the night before. By morning, her doctor was on the phone telling her she had cancer. The first thing she did after hanging up was double over with laughter.

She said, “I mean, it felt like it was written. It felt like it was a horrible black comedy. And then it sort of morphed into crying hysterically.” [But she was also] terrified. “You just simply don’t consider it for yourself, you know, that’s sort of the arrogance of human beings. But of course, at some point, we’re all going to bite it.”

As a young adult, writer Andrew Leland was diagnosed with a rare disorder that caused him to become blind. In a New Yorker article, he notes that throughout history people have either bullied or coddled visually impaired people. But he gives an example of one school that empowers the blind by challenging them to achieve new heights of independence. Leland writes:

In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National Federation of the Blind and is staffed almost entirely by blind people. Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people.

The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park, or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one question along the way. A member of an R.P. support group told me, “People come back from those programs loaded for bear”—ready to hunt the big game of blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time there, “It was an epiphany.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, our heavenly Father will stretch us by “dropping” us into challenging situations.

Is there really an afterlife? While most people think humans will never be able to prove what happens after death, half of adults still believe their spirit lives on—somewhere.

The new survey of over 1,000 people in the United Kingdom, finds 50% of respondents believe in an afterlife. Of this group, 60% believe everyone experiences the same thing when they die—regardless of their individual beliefs. However, two in three believe scientists will never be able to tell us what really happens when someone passes.

Regardless of whether people think they’re going to heaven (55%) or worry their life choices could end up sending them to hell (58%), the poll finds 68% of all respondents have no fear of what comes next. Overall, one in four think people go to heaven or hell, 16% believe they’ll exist in a “spiritual realm,” and 16% believe in reincarnation.

No matter what happens after death, respondents are confident it’ll actually be an improvement over their current life. The poll finds adults think heaven provides people with a chance to recapture the things they’ve lost throughout their life.

The vast majority (86%) think the afterlife involves a sense of peace and 66% describe it as a place of happiness. Three in five adults believe there will be no more suffering when they die.

However, respondents think there are a few conditions people need to follow in order to reach this peaceful realm. Over four in five people (84%) say you have to live a good life and be a generally good person to reach heaven. One in three claim you have to place your faith in a higher power to reach the afterlife and one in five say it requires you to confess all your sins.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This survey was taken in mid-life when old age and illness are seen as far away. When one gets closer to the end, it is likely many of them will change their opinion, or fall deeper into denial with the help of Satan who wants to soothe them with lies.

An article in Bloomberg Businessweek described the quest of multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old software entrepreneur, to turn back the clock. This year, he’s on track to spend at least $2 million on his body. He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, and hair of an 18-year-old.

The effort has been named Project Blueprint, and Johnson’s doing it with the assistance of 30 doctors. They try the most intriguing new treatments on Johnson and obsessively track the results using everything from whole-body MRIs to blood draws. It's all on top of a rigorous framework of a 1,977-calorie vegan diet, and an extremely specific brushing and flossing routine. If you think he's crazy, “This is expected and fine,” he says. The crazy part is, it's working.

According to the article, "Johnson’s body is, as they measure it, getting medically younger," citing the biological age of his heart (37), skin (28), lung capacity (18), and gum inflammation (17). Each morning starting at 5 a.m., Johnson takes two dozen supplements and medicines. There’s a supplement for artery and skin health, another to prevent bowel polyps, others to reduce inflammation, and also his vegan diet. He follows a daily hourlong workout, consisting of 25 different exercises. Then there are weekly acid peels to counteract sun damage and sound therapy to better his hearing.

Kristin Dittmar, a cancer specialist, says, “I think what he’s doing is impressive, and he has personally challenged me to be better. What he does is also essentially a full-time job.” She also stresses that cancer has genetic components that no cutting-edge science, let alone juices or creams, can yet beat.

It’s also easy to imagine how a group of Johnson wannabes experimenting with ever-riskier procedures could go horribly wrong.

In a recent Q&A with CT magazine, veteran AI engineer Tom Kehler, talked about the limits of the popular ChatGPT, and the wonders of the human brain.

Kehler has worked in artificial intelligence for more than 40 years, as a coder and a CEO. He grew up a preacher’s kid and got into mathematical linguistics in high school. After earning a PhD in physics, he wanted to do linguistics with Wycliffe Bible Translators, but “God kept closing that door,” he says. Instead, he found himself working with natural language processing in computing.

He was asked “Why is there an obsession with sentient AI?” Kehler replied, “If you are a person of nonbelief, you want to create something that gives you hope in the future. On the AI side, we want something that will cause us to have eternal life—my consciousness is going to go into eternity because it’s in a machine.”

Kehler was also asked about Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer, who said in 2022 that his chatbot had become sentient and had a soul.

The way these systems work, we’ll say, “This is the number seven.” We keep reinforcing until the neural network can recognize that seven. That correlation of events is the core way AI works now.

However, the way kids acquire language is truly mind-blowing. And not just language, but even if you go open the cupboard door. Kids see something once, and they figure out how to do it. The system that this Google engineer was talking about … was given trillions of examples in order to get some sense of intelligence out of it. It consumed ridiculous amounts of energy, whereas a little kid’s brain requires the power of a flashlight, and it’s able to learn language. We’re not anywhere close to that kind of general AI.

(AI) is taking inputs to build its knowledge. It doesn’t check the truth value, or as it’s called, the data lineage. Where did this data come from? Do we know it’s true? It’s translating input text to output text based on some objective.

If you think about how scientific knowledge or medical knowledge was developed, it’s by peer review. We as a human race have considered that trustworthy. It’s not perfect. But that’s how we normally build trust. If you have 12 of the world’s best cardiac surgeons say a certain procedure is good, you’re going to say, “Yeah, that’s probably good.” If ChatGPT told you to do that procedure, you’d better have it reviewed by somebody, because it could be wrong.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God-designed the human brain to be a marvelous, compact, and vastly intricate organ. It has a conscience, the ability to empathize, to feel joy and regret, and to ultimately seek a higher purpose in life in fellowship with the Creator. The human-designed AI is an attempt to potentially create eternal life for humans, but without ethics, and without submission to the Almighty God.

In 2013, Micah Redding founded the Christian Transhumanist Association, a group bringing faith and ethics into transhumanist conversations. Transhumanists believe that human capacities can be enhanced by science and technology.

Some are anti-aging researchers applying biomedicine to improve humanity. Aubrey de Grey studies preventative maintenance for the human body and believes the first human to live to 1,000 has already been born. Others look to computing advances; futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by 2045 artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to “the singularity,” where everyone’s brain will be connected to “the cloud.”

These predictions may seem outlandish, but recent breakthroughs in the science of aging do make modest, if not radical, life extension a real possibility. Various studies on lab animals have extended lifespan by up to 30 percent.

At the same time, the church must continue to proclaim the basic reality of our existence, as summarized in the Ash Wednesday call, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Life is a gift.

Philosopher Diogenes Allen made the distinction between extended life and eternal life. Extended life is what we are trying to make for ourselves through scientific solutions. Eternal life, on the other hand, is “that which we can experience and have to a degree in this life but can have fully only after death.” Eternal life, in other words, is received.

To the extent that we receive this eternal, abundant life, Christians offer it to others—through loving our neighbors and building communities of mutual care and hospitality. This is our ultimate goal. Though caring for bodies may be part of this process, it is not everything.

In his best-selling book Essentialism, author Greg McKeown describes how we develop a sense of what’s called “learned helplessness.”

The phrase comes out of the classic work of Martin Seligman and Steve Maier, who were conducting experiments on German Shepherds. They divided the dogs into three groups. The dogs in the first group were placed in a harness and administered an electric shock but were also given a lever they could press to make the shock stop. The dogs in the second group were placed in an identical harness, and were given the same lever and the same shock with one catch: the lever didn’t work, rendering the dog powerless to do anything about the electric shock. The third group of dogs were simply placed in the harness and not given any shocks.

Afterwards, each dog was placed in a large box with a low divider across the center. One side of the box produced an electric shock; the other did not. Then something interesting happened. The dogs that either had been able to stop the shock or had not been shocked at all in the earlier part of the experiment quickly learned to step over the divider to the side without shocks. But the dogs that had been powerless in the last part of the experiment did not. These dogs didn’t adapt or adjust. They did nothing to try to avoid getting shocked. Why? They didn’t know they had any choice other than to take the shocks. They had learned helplessness.

Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen’s new book, Why Liberalism Failed, is a challenge to those who want to revive the liberal democratic order.

Deneen argues that liberal democracy has betrayed its promises. It was supposed to foster equality, but it has led to great inequality and a new aristocracy. It was supposed to give average people control over government, but average people feel alienated from government. It was supposed to foster liberty, but it creates a degraded popular culture in which consumers become slave to their appetites.

Many young people feel trapped in a system they have no faith in. Deneen quotes one of his students: “Because we view humanity—and thus its institutions—as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves.”

A 1961 research project asked ordinary people to send extremely painful electric shocks to a stranger. (Unbeknownst to the participants, the fake shocks were only delivered to an actor.) A staggering 65 percent of the subjects obeyed. Most of us are confident we would have been in the 35 percent who refused to go along with this program.

But in his essay, "You're Not as Virtuous as You Think," Nitin Nohria, the Dean of the Harvard Business School, has a name for this "gap between how people believe they would behave and how they actually behave." He calls it "moral overconfidence." Nohria insightfully notes our need for repentance and confession:

In the lab, in the classroom and beyond, we tend to be less virtuous than we think we are. And a little moral humility could benefit us all. Moral overconfidence is on display in politics, in business, in sports—really, in all aspects of life … There are political candidates who say they won't use attack ads until, late in the race, they're moral overconfidence is in line with what studies find to be our generally inflated view of ourselves. We rate ourselves as above-average drivers, investors, and employees, even though math dictates that can't be true for all of us. We also tend to believe we are less likely than the typical person to exhibit negative qualities and to experience negative life events: to get divorced, become depressed, or have a heart attack.

Pastor Daniel Schreiner from Portland, Oregon received the following marketing piece from a local fitness gym. It was called "The Year of You."

[The New Year] is right around the corner and you're either going to own the year OR the year is going to own you. It's 100% your choice. It's in your hands. That's the first thing. Simply by taking all of the responsibility and putting it on your shoulders you become empowered.

Next, you take that feeling of empowerment. Of invincibility. The feeling you can run through a wall ... and you take action. You take action like you've never taken action before. You become prolific. You become consistent. And you let no obstacle stand in your way ... no matter what. No more pity parties. No more whining about anything.

YOU are in control. YOU.

Possible Preaching Angles: Schreiner went on to say that we are not and cannot be in complete control of our lives. There is only One who is truly in control.

Every little girl dreams of the day she gets to walk down the aisle in a white dress toward her "Prince Charming." But when a "Prince Charming" didn't come along for Italian fitness trainer Laura Mesi, she decided to forget that piece and move along with her big day anyway. In a ceremony that was not actually legally binding, the woman said "I do" to herself, in front of bridesmaids, 70 guests, and a 3-layer wedding cake. "I firmly believe that each of us must first of all love ourselves," said Mesi. "You can have a fairytale even without the prince." Her near-lavish wedding seemed to prove it. But she went on to admit, "If one day I find a man with whom I can plan a future I'll be happy, but my happiness does not depend on him." Proponents of the growing trend (dubbed "sologamy") say it is not necessarily about feminism, but about celebrating and embracing those who have not found the social affirmation of marriage.

Potential Preaching Angles: While it may be possible to have "a fairytale without a prince," how mistaken we would be to forget that we already have a Prince in our love story. Indeed our happiness cannot depend on other humans, but neither can it depend on ourselves alone. Love for oneself and love for others both come from something much, much greater—God's immeasurable love for us.

Imagine that you've decided to go sailing. The problem is that you know next to nothing about sailing. So you to the store and you purchase several books to find out what's involved. You carefully read them and then you talk to a veteran sailor who answers questions for you. The next day, you rent a sailboat. You examine it closely to make certain that everything needed for a successful sailing experience is present and in good working order. Then, you take your boat out onto the lake. Your excitement is at a fever pitch, though you're also afraid. But you follow the instructions you've read and the counsel received from the experience sailor, and you launch your boat into the water. You carefully monitor each step and hoist the sail.

At that precise moment you learn a crucial lesson. You can study sailing. You might even be able to build a sailboat. You can seek from the wisest and most veteran of sailors. You can cast your boat onto the most beautiful of lakes under a bright and inviting sun. You can successfully hoist the sail. But—and this is a big "but"—only God can make the wind blow!

Possible Preaching Angles: Sam Storms adds, "You and I can study the Bible…. We can orchestrate a worship service according to biblical guidelines. We can do everything that lies in the power of a Christian man or woman. But only the Spirit can make the wind blow.

In Yosemite National Park stands a 3,000-foot wall of granite known as El Capitan. It's long been a rock climber's dream, but it's a daring dream. Reaching the top "used to take days to complete with the aid of ropes, safety gear, and a partner," Olga R. Rodriguez reported in TIME. "In the past few decades, speed climbers working in tandem and using ropes have set records in reaching the top of the steep cliff."

On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold smashed those records, taking about four hours to summit El Capitan—without ropes, safety gear, or a partner.

Honnold, a native of Northern California, is 31 years old but has 20 years of climbing experience—at 11, he started indoor rock climbing. He left the University of California Berkeley in order "to conquer major summits around the world."

He prepared for this El Capitan climb for two years. While the climb is certainly an extraordinary physical challenge—at one point "2,300 feet off the ground … there are very small holds where only a thumb can fit"—Honnold said that the "mental hurdle" was even harder.

"To walk up to the base of the climb without rope and harness, it just feels a little outrageous," he said. "Getting over that side of it was the hardest part."

Potential Preaching Angles: With his incredible feat, Honnold proved to the world that El Capitan can be conquered solo—but just because we can do something on our own doesn't mean that we always should. What we need is a community around us and a reliance on our God. Take these famous words from Proverbs: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart / and lean not on your own understanding … " (Prov. 3:5).

The Walk is the 2015 motion picture, and true story, about high-wire artist Philippe Petit. In 1974 he fulfilled his dream of walking between the World Trade Center towers, but in an early scene from the film he's in a Big Top circus in France tying a rope to a beam. Philippe says, "So [my mentor] Papa Rudy let me travel with his troupe. Of course I never did any performance. But any time the big top was empty, I would practice on the wire."

In the next scene, Philippe is high up just under the tent's ceiling and balancing himself on a wire with a pole. Papa Rudy enters the tent and looks up at Philippe, who was walking carefully but confidently across the thin wire. He hesitates as he is about to reach the platform and then takes a more assertive forward step. But suddenly Philippe and his wire start shaking precariously. He falls to the side, grabbing on to the wire with both hands, barely avoiding falling to his death as the pole plummets to the ground.

As he hangs onto the wire with both hands, the ground a great distance below, he slowly works his way to the platform. Breathing heavily and making his way down the ladder he faces Papa Rudy who tells him, "Most wire walkers, they die when they arrive. They think they have arrived, but they're still on the wire. If you have three steps to do, and you take those steps arrogantly, if you think you are invincible, you're going to die."

Editor's Note: This scene starts at Chapter 5 at 25:29 and runs to 27:02.

As a cold-case homicide detective, J. Warner Wallace called himself a hardcore atheist and "evidentialist" because he believed the truth was always tied to the evidence. But at the age of thirty-five, he took a serious look at the evidence for Christianity and became a follower of Christ. Here's how Wallace summarized his conversion:

As an atheist, I was very comfortable as the captain of my own ship … I had been a police officer for nearly ten years and was used to being in charge in difficult situations. I didn't like intrusions, and there was no room for God in my life. I am not a theist today because I was raised by believers—I wasn't. I am not a believer because I was hoping for heaven or afraid of hell—I had no sense of value for either. I am not a theist because I was trying to fill a "void" or satisfy a "need"— I felt none. I believe God exists because the evidence leaves me no reasonable alternative.

Warner added:

Jurors evaluate evidential cases every day across our country, and they are asked to make a decision even though they don't have every question answered or every possible detail explained. When the overwhelming evidence points to a reasonable conclusion, jurors make a decision … The standard of proof (SOP) in the most critical of criminal trials is "beyond a reasonable doubt," not "beyond a possible doubt." I've never conducted the perfect investigation, and we've never presented the perfect case before a jury. But in my career as a cold-case detective, I've never lost … If there's enough evidence to make a decision, they're asked to make a decision. When it comes to the case for God's existence, there's enough evidence.

Writing in The Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a CEO and business professor, had some surprising conclusions about self-confidence and leadership. Thomas wrote:

There is no bigger cliché in business psychology than the idea that high self-confidence is key to career success. It is time to debunk this myth. In fact, low self-confidence is more likely to make you successful. After many years of researching and consulting on talent, I've come to the conclusion that self-confidence is only helpful when it's low. Sure, extremely low confidence is not helpful: it inhibits performance by inducing fear, worry, and stress, which may drive people to give up sooner or later. But just-low-enough confidence can help you in the following three ways:

1. Lower self-confidence makes you pay attention to negative feedback and be self-critical.
2. Lower self-confidence can motivate you to work harder and prepare more.
3. Lower self-confidence reduces the chances of coming across as arrogant or being deluded.

Of course Christians would add a fourth and most important benefit for low-enough self-confidence—it helps us put our ultimate confidence in the Living God. But Christians can agree with this article's conclusion: "In brief, if you are serious about your goals, [low-enough] self-confidence can be your biggest ally to accomplish them. … It is therefore time to debunk the myth: High self-confidence isn't a blessing, and low self-confidence is not a curse—in fact, it is the other way around."

In an NPR interview, David Brooks, author of The Road to Character, observes how differently we deal with promoting our own success. Brooks said:

The day after Japan surrendered in 1945 and World War II ended, singer Bing Crosby appeared on the radio program Command Performance. "Well it looks like this is it," he said. "What can you say at a time like this? You can't throw your (hat) in the air—that's for a run-of-the-mill holiday. I guess all anybody can do is thank God it's over."

I was really struck at this supreme moment of American triumph that they weren't beating their chests. They weren't super proud of themselves; they were deeply humble. And I found that so beautiful and so moving. And I thought there's really something to admire in that public culture.

Shortly after studying about what happened after World War II, Brooks watched a pro football game. He observed something very different:

A quarterback threw a short pass to a wide receiver, who was tackled almost immediately for a two-yard gain. The defensive player did what all professional athletes do these days in moments of personal accomplishment. He did a self-puffing victory dance, as the camera lingered. It occurred to me that I had just watched more self-celebration after a two-yard gain than I had heard after the United States won World War II.