Prince Harry’s autobiography Spare is now the UK’s fastest-selling nonfiction book. I started reading it yesterday and am already glad I’m not part of the royal family.

Closer to home, flights resumed yesterday after a Federal Aviation Administration system failure left pilots, airlines, and airports without crucial safety information for hours. My first thought when the FAA paused flights was to hope their action wasn’t related to terrorism. My second was to be grateful I wasn’t flying that day.

In other news, Goldman Sachs began layoffs yesterday; just over three thousand employees will eventually be let go. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will be forced to extend their stay for several months after their Russian MS-22 Soyuz spacecraft sprung a leak. The Center for Strategic & International Studies has wargamed a Chinese invasion of Taiwan (Taiwan, aided by the US, wins but at a devastating cost). And a bestselling novel about a fictitious same-sex love affair between the son of the US president and the Prince of Wales will be made into a movie this year.

As with the royal family and air travel, I’m glad I’m not employed by Goldman Sachs, work on the ISS, or live in Taiwan. Nor do I have to read the same-sex romance novel or see the movie.

On the other hand, the World Bank’s warning that the global economy is “perilously close” to a recession does affect me for obvious reasons. And Bloomberg’s report that antisemitism is “seeping into the workplace” deeply grieves me even though I am not Jewish. My love for the Jewish people, bolstered by more than thirty trips to the Holy Land, calls me to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” every day (Psalm 122:6) and to urge you to do the same.

Advice from Ronald Reagan’s daughter

Patti Davis is the daughter of President Ronald Reagan and the author of an autobiography many years ago in which, in her words, she “flung open the gates of our troubled family life.” She now writes in the New York Times that she deeply regrets exposing her family’s private challenges to the public and has learned that “not everything needs to be shared.” She would “respectfully” suggest this lesson to Prince Harry today.

Here’s one reason her advice is worth taking: how we treat others is inevitably how the world will treat us.

Jesus advised us in the so-called Golden Rule, “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). He also taught us to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39, quoting Leviticus 19:18).

Over the years, when I have followed his instruction, I have discovered this pattern: when I love my neighbor as myself, I love myself more. This enables me to love my neighbor more, which enables me to love myself more. And on the pattern goes.

My experience is not unique: a new study at Ohio State University shows that people suffering from forms of depression or anxiety may help heal themselves by doing good deeds for others. Evolutionary psychologists would no doubt call this finding an example of the “survival of the fittest”: the more compassionate we are with others, the more we experience their compassion and the more likely we are to survive and flourish.

But what if this pattern is not a coincidental product of chaotic chance but one dimension of our Creator’s design for us and our world?

“Believe the God we believe in”

If this is true, I am wrong to read Spare as though the royal family is not part of the human family and thus my family. I am wrong to care less about flight delays on the days I am not flying or to treat news of layoffs, strandings in space, war scenarios, and sexual immorality as though they do not affect me.

Instead, I need to make agape love, God’s unconditional love for others, my goal. However, since this is a “fruit” of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), I need to submit my thoughts and feelings to the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18) so he can manifest such love for others in and through my life.

The more our culture rejects biblical morality, the more you and I will need to pray for such compassion. As my wife brilliantly notes in her latest blog, “If Jesus didn’t come to condemn the world, we shouldn’t condemn the world, either.” Instead, we should “believe the God we believe in” (quoting R. C. Sproul) and thus share his truth with his grace.

It would be human nature simply to write our fallen society off, turning those who reject biblical truth over to the consequences of their sinful choices. But this would contradict the example of the One who came “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). It would ignore the example of the Apostle who wrote of his “great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart” for his unbelieving Jewish brethren (Romans 9:2).

And it would impoverish us personally. The more we love our neighbor, the more we love ourselves and the more we can love our neighbor as ourselves.

“The only way for us to stay well”

Henri Nouwen makes my point better than I can: “I think that we have hardly thought through the immense implications of the mystery of the incarnation. Where is God? God is where we are weak, vulnerable, small, and dependent. God is where the poor are, the hungry, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the elderly, the powerless.”

As a result, he asks: “How can we come to know God when our focus is elsewhere, on success, influence, and power?” Rather, he writes, “The only way for us to stay well in the midst of the many ‘worlds’ is to stay close to the small, vulnerable child that lives in our hearts and in every other human being. Often we do not know that the Christ child is within us. When we discover him we can truly rejoice.”

Jesus would agree. After describing followers who care for those who are hungry, thirsty, unwanted, naked, and imprisoned, he assured us that “the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:40).

And to yourself as well.

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According to a new report (PDF) by the nonprofit child advocacy group Common Sense Media, 73 percent of US teenagers seventeen years of age or younger have viewed online pornography. Fifty-four percent of those age thirteen or younger have seen online porn. On average, they first consumed pornography when they were twelve years old. Nearly one-third of all teens reported that they had been exposed to porn during the school day.

A majority who have viewed pornography also indicated that they had been exposed to aggressive and/or violent forms of pornography; 52 percent saw depictions of rape, choking, or someone in pain.

I have warned frequently about the “plague of pornography (PDF)” sweeping our nation and the damage it is doing to those who view it. Singer Billie Eilish is one example: she says porn “destroyed my brain” after she began watching graphic online movies while she was still in elementary school. She added that she still suffers from night terrors and sleep paralysis as a result of some of the porn she watched.

Brad Salzman, founder of the New York Sexual Addiction Center, responded to her story: “Parents aren’t paying attention and [porn exposure] can affect [their children] for the rest of their lives. It totally colors their perception of what normal sexuality is supposed to look like and it changes the way they think that they’re supposed to interact.

“They can begin seeing other people as sex objects as opposed to human beings.”

Therein lies my point today.

A factor I had not considered

It is a tragic fact that our secularized postmodern culture has desacralized life from conception to death. It was once conventional wisdom that children in their mother’s womb were gifts from God to be cherished; now they are seen as inconvenient impositions to be disposed of as easily as possible. The elderly and infirm were once valued equally with the rest of humanity; now they are being euthanized more widely and efficiently than ever.

Sexuality was once seen as part of God’s design for his image-bearers (Genesis 1:27); now LGBTQ advocates are doing all they can to normalize their ideology among children. From the federal government down, teachers, administrators, and school nurses are being urged to adopt LGBTQ curriculum and endorse transgender identity.

Seen in this light, the ever-spreading plague of pornography is unsurprising. When a culture abandons biblical morality and objective ethics, tolerance becomes the de facto rule of the day. As D. A. Carson has perceptively shown in his masterful book, The Intolerance of Tolerance, “tolerance” used to mean that we allowed people the right to be wrong. Now it means that there is no such thing as wrong, pornography included.

But there’s another dimension to the story, one I had not considered until I began writing this Daily Article.

Of all our moral failings, pornography especially dehumanizes humans. It turns people into pictures, humans into bodies to be used. And the more pervasive and powerful this becomes, the more easily those affected by pornography transfer this desacralizing of humans to all other aspects of human experience, from birth to death.

In a culture where people are a means to our ends, we should not be surprised when lying, property theft, and violent crime are on the rise. Nor should we be surprised when an “epidemic of loneliness” spreads across our land. Pornography is teaching millions of Americans, beginning as children, that people are commodities, nothing more.

The courage of Michael Gerson

The good news is that the good news of the gospel gives meaning to life that can be found nowhere else.

Michael Gerson is an example.

I was privileged to know Mr. Gerson, former Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush and well-known Washington Post columnist who died last November at the age of fifty-eight. He was the featured speaker at a Dallas Baptist University event in which I participated five years ago; we spent much of the evening together.

I found him a person of great humor, winsome charm, and personal warmth. At no point did he tell me that his physical health had been torturous for many years. According to his good friend Peter Wehner, Gerson struggled with depression since his twenties and suffered a heart attack in 2004 at the age of forty. He developed kidney cancer in 2013 and suffered from debilitating leg pain that probably resulted from surgical nerve damage. The kidney cancer spread to his lungs; he developed Parkinson’s disease and metastatic adrenal cancer, then metastatic bone cancer in multiple locations.

You would never have known the pain he suffered. As Wehner explains, Gerson was grateful “for the life he was able to lead and for the people who loved him and were able to travel his journey with him. He was in pain, but he was in peace.”

What was the source of such courage? Wehner explains: “Mike’s views reflected what he called a ‘Christian anthropology’—a belief in the inherent rights and dignity of every human life. It led him to solidarity with the weak and the suffering, the dispossessed, those living in the shadows of life. His faith was capacious and generous; it created in him a deep commitment to justice and the common good.”

Michael Gerson knew that his life, no matter its sufferings and challenges, possessed eternal and inestimable value. The same is true of every person on our planet. Including you.

“The core truth of our existence”

Henri Nouwen was right: “Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’ Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”

Do you know that you are the Beloved of God?

Does this fact constitute the “core truth” of your existence today?

If not, why not?

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