it's a hard way to fall and it's an easy way down.

Today as i sat here at the computer i was listening to the new Ryan Adams & the Cardinals CD 'Jacksonville City Light.' The third track is a beautiful, remorse filled song of love lost and seeing that former lover with the 'new love.' Adams remembers the little things that he took for granted or perhaps caused him to love her in the first place. The chorus begins "And it's a hard way to fall and this ain't the easy way down."

Oddly enough I misheard the lyrics and the misinterpretation of those lyrics led me to this thought process I am about to share with you. At first because I was half-working, half-listening I thought the song was about cheating. And so when it got to the chorus the way I heard the lines were "And it's a hard way to fall and it’s an easy way to get there." That struck me as profound. On the service it seems contradictory and beyond that is seems a moot point since that is not the intention of the song neither the correct lyric. But bear with me if you will. If you are still reading at this point you might as well, right? Otherwise where is the reward?

This struck me as profound because I try to live as a Christ follower and a devoted husband in this sex-saturated, over-indulgent American consumerism we dare to call life I struggle, as any man, with impure thoughts. As a leader, or as a player-coach, as I think of myself I work with students and I walk with them in their struggles as well. Let me tell you why (misheard or not) this lyric struck me so. It rings true, in the context that I originally thought it was in when I misinterpreted it, which was a song about cheating.

"It's a hard way to fall," think about that. Is there anything as hurtful and destructive as adultery? As cheating on your spouse and the ramifications that has on your soul, on your partner, on your children, and on your family? We are in an America where it is so common that we take the consequences as just a happenstance of everyday life. That is so ridiculous to my mind to think that we have fallen so low. It is a hard way to fall. It is hard on everyone involved. It is hard on the soul and the psyche and the conscience and the kids. Does it stop there? How about beyond the immediate family? Has there ever been a father or mother who sees their own child’s marriage fall apart because their child was the adulterous spouse, who said "Now there is a son I am proud of," or "I raised her to cheat just like me."

No, of course not, but now we couch it in new terms so as to disguise the disgrace and shame with a false system of priorities. We say, "Well they just weren't happy," or "They weren't getting what they needed," and "They might as well have, they weren't in love anymore, anyway!" What? Huh? Where in the wedding vows does it say "until I fall out of love?" Where do we recite the lines, "until my needs are not met because it is all about me, until my happiness is not derived from this relationship any longer?"

Marriage is a covenant, love is a choice. Love is not an emotion, not merely an emotion. It is deeper and more meaningful then an emotion. Happy…sad…mad…love. Just reading those four words it is clear in my mind that one of the four stands out as different. Love does not even fit in the same category of our mind when we read the word on paper. Love…grumpy…annoyed…surprised. Again, which one doesn't fit? We categorize these words and love just doesn't fit. The others are moods. We know in our minds and our hearts that love is not a mood. We may think of it as an emotion but we still know that it is more than that.

"And it is a hard way to fall." We know this, we never set out in a relationship and say "This is beautiful, I love this person and I am gonna love them with all my heart until I get bored and fed up and have the opportunity to destroy the intimacy that we created together." No, we don't say that because we know that brings pain and anger and hurt and guilt. We know that when we fall, we fail. And a hard fall it is indeed. It is hard to get back up. Who will trust us if anyone? Can we even trust ourselves again?

"And it's an easy way to get there." This is so true when it comes to cheating, but not at first. We work ourselves to this point. We never enter a relationship looking for the way out, not usually anyway. Commitment-phobes, will have to wait for another misunderstood song to propel me into rhetorical prose. No, we always intend to make a relationship last but more and more these days we are failing. There are many reasons beyond the issue of adultery, but these two garbled lines of song have their limits. The fall is hard, but it comes easy, eventually.

We enter a relationship, hopefully more concerned about the happiness of the one we love over and above our own happiness. Otherwise what person on the other end of that commits? I am not so naive as to think no one ever gets together under false pretenses or false assumptions, but can it really be the majority? We get to the point where over time something draws our focus back to ourselves and our own needs and wants and desires. We begin to pour time and thought into these little fissures of expectation. They grow until our commitment if full of cracks and all crumbly at the edges. Our perceptions skewed and inwardly focused we think it is our love, our relationship that is broken.

In reality it is our lens of commitment that is tattered and torn but since our focus is on ourselves we don't see the difference. We decide to seek ways and means to get our needs met because they are so glaring and obvious to us now. If we were ever to be able stop at that moment, collect our thoughts and ask ourselves if our spouse feels the same way. What needs am I not meeting very well or even at all. But no usually by this point we are far beyond thinking of "the hard fall," and we are to the "easy way down" part.

For by now we have rationalized and done a fair job convincing ourselves that it is too late for a repair job. It is too broken, to tattered and torn and worn out, not worth fixing so why not just replace it. Men do this quite obviously in going for a newer, younger replacement.

For men, we can't help it right? We are dogs, pigs, animals. I can not help but see the obvious direct correlation to our American consumer-driven, evolutionary informed worldview, secular humanism degenerated to the point of nihilistic animalism. We are just animals. We are gonna do what animals do.

In one fail swoop, of little more than a hundred years, we have uneducated ourselves from rational, morally conscious, ethically capable human beings into soul-less animals in a dog-eat-dot, screw-or-be-screwed-over world. Am I touting a return to modernism and all it's trapping (for those who will even think to ask this question), no, certainly not!

I am fully and functionally a post-modern individual. But with the relativism of postmodernism there is still room for common sense and common decency, arguably more now so than there ever was during the height modernism. I reject that tired way of thinking. That way of thinking has created a Jerry Springer culture that is not based in reality. It basis in an evolutionary worldview that dehumanizes humans, devalues value, and elevates non-thinking creatures to have control over the thinking. How is it not based in reality? Reality can not be self-refuting. However, ill-formed, unreasoned, biased human opinion can and very often is self-refuting but that doesn't seem to stop us.

Evolutionary thought and teaching is the wide spread basis of the typical American worldview. Just awhile back Bill Mahr (who apparently is a well credentialed scholar and intellectual giant) was on Leno and he basically stated that evolution is a proven fact so for anyone to dissent they must be idiots. Wow, I guess I missed that major news flash that would have reverberated around the world until the roar was deafening. Evolution has become fact by default somewhere along the way so why are scientists still trying to prove it and find the first piece of evidence to support it. Not more evidence to support it, the first piece of evidence.

Evolutionary teaching is self-refuting for many reasons but here is just one very clear reason that everyone can understand. It denies the existence of entropy which is a proven law of physics to show that everything is moving towards chaos and disorder, everything is breaking down, getting worse; not evolving. Look at the ridiculousness with which evolutionary thought so succinctly is disproving itself. The more and more time passes in which evolution is taught to the masses and embraced by the majority, the more rapid social entropy progresses. The more and more society embraces the idea of evolution the faster and faster society as a whole unravels. One might argue that what I define as entropy is really just survival of the fittest. Come on do you believe that. The destruction of values and families and lives by evolutionary practices is not survival of the fittest. The fit aren't the ones surviving. Marriages are not surviving, kids are not surviving, no one is surviving.

The longer and deeper the evolutionary worldview penetrates our society and culture the faster society, culture, family, government, everything is disintegrating. It is right before our very eyes and everyone can see it. Well, everyone except for Bill Mahr. The fall is hard, but it is easy. It just takes time, time for entropy on a full blown molecular scientifically proven scale to flesh itself out. It just takes time to also reveal itself in a socially, relational test tube called a marriage and a family to see that entropy not evolution is being proven on a daily basis.