When The Truth Hurts

Truth is precious but can be difficult, even painful, to find. It’s like looking for my golf ball after I hit my first drive off the tee into the middle of a briar patch. I always expect the result to be different next time. It never is. It’s not my fault. It’s a disability created by Gell-Mann amnesia. When people speak of their golf handicap, I’m pretty sure this is what they mean.

Gell-Mann amnesia is a cognitive bias that describes the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain where they are knowledgeable and then continue to trust reporting from the same source in other areas.

You read an article on a subject you know well. You see that the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong that it presents the story backward. “Wet streets cause rain” stories. Newspapers are full of them.

You then turn the page to national or international affairs and read as if the rest of the newspapers were somehow more accurate about Palestine or climate change than the baloney you just read. You turn the page and forget what you know. Like trusting my score was par on that first hole.

We seek truth in science or religion. Both are as corruptible as any other human activity. Stockholm Syndrome occurs when you compromise on the truth to get along. Consensus lives in the domain of politics and sociology. Consensus has nothing to do with science, religion, or truth. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Morality must always find its foundation in truth. The worst marriage occurs between morality and politics. We moralize about politics, and we politicize morality. We have learned to hate those with whom we disagree politically and justify it on moral terms. Issues such as abortion, crime, illegal immigration, same sex marriage, and transgenderism are divided sharply along political lines. Both sides claim moral high ground. What came first? The wet streets or the rain? Politics or morality?

The past 5–10 years have been transformative for our nation, and not in a good way. We’ve all been radicalized in some manner. Some further than others. Some louder than others. But we all watched as truth hit the briar patch. By rejecting the fundamentals of the very civilization that made possible its rise, wokeism and its philosophical stepchildren offer flash in place of genuine beauty, sensation in place of hope.

Intuition is a form of knowledge. It’s like one-way communication with God. What we learn from others can be misinterpreted by those not a fraction as knowledgeable as they present or by propagandists with agendas. We are born with intuition, a natural sense of right and wrong. When people continuously rebel against natural law, not only does that part of their intuition atrophy, but every other aspect of it as well.

Everyone speaks about justice and believes they are on its side. But there can be no justice where there is no truth, and these are times when the truth is seldom recognized and often despised.

Two recent blog posts spoke to this pathos more eloquently than I ever could.

Covid

I am a physician and married to a physician. I am a mother. During the COVID years, I had two children in high school in the rural part of a deep blue state. I still feel enraged about what was done to my children. What was taken from them.

My son had his Senior year destroyed. He went from a happy, charismatic kid to severely depressed. He ended up going to a large university in the south, where COVID hysteria didn’t exist, and he blossomed. My daughter performed better during the COVID-19 pandemic, as we were able to send her to a small, private school that met in person, thanks to its small class sizes.

How many children’s lives were destroyed? Not from COVID, but from the response. Mine were lucky. They had two parents who loved them deeply and had resources.

This was a transformation time for me. I have always been a bit of a rebel and a questioner of authority, but I did have deep trust in the medical establishment that trained me.

I lost my innocence and this trust completely. I was profoundly disillusioned by most of my colleagues, mentors, CDC, and FDA. I could not believe the sheep mentality, the scale of the lying and suppression. Everything we were told to do flew in the face of what we had learned practicing medicine and from common sense over generations– the masking, distancing, treatments, and what we learned early on about the vaccine, but was hidden.

I was surrounded by complete insanity in my profession, my state government, and my personal life.

I was working in a men’s medium security state prison. I continued to see patients in person, while all the private doctors were working remotely. What I found fascinating was the natural skepticism of all the inmates regarding everything that was being pushed. They were much less likely to buy into the masking and vaccine than my highly educated suburban soccer mom friends.

 Maybe it was because they had been lied to most of their lives, especially by those in authority.  But I found I had more in common with my patients (murderers, gang bangers) than most of my physician friends.

The prisoners and officers at the prison’s distrust of government and authority served them well. Of course, we had tons of COVID in my prison. Both staff and inmates. Only one patient ever went to the hospital, and he did well.  It has a younger population, but lots of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, HIV, Hep C, and substance abuse. All declined vaccines. All did fine.

Except for me.  There is no pathway back to the person I was before. The trust is gone.

Charlie Kirk

The bullet tore the air in half.

A folding chair rattled. A Bible dropped. A young man slumped sideways beneath a white event tent, eyes wide with the weight of eternity.

It was supposed to be a conversation. A “prove me wrong” segment. But this time, the rebuttal came not with words, but with a rifle. Charlie Kirk didn’t get to finish his sentence.

Hatred in this country isn’t simmering anymore. It is boiling. Europe is trembling. Israel is burning. Rockets lit the sky over Gaza again. And now, here on American soil, the blood of a Christian apologist paints the pavement of a university quad.

What do you do with that?  What do you say when courage gets gunned down in daylight?

Charlie Kirk was no perfect man. But he had a level of integrity most of us don’t have anymore. He was a believer. Unashamed. Unafraid. He understood that real conversations only happen when truth is welcome at the table. And the truth he carried most was Christ.

He brought the gospel into public space on purpose. Because the gospel isn’t supposed to stay in church basements and private Bible studies. It is meant to confront. It is supposed to offend. To convict. To change lives. It was not made for safety.

The Word became flesh, and they nailed Him to a tree. So, of course, they came for Charlie. Of course, they reached for a gun. This is what evil does when it runs out of arguments. It doesn’t reason. It kills.

This is the part that catches in my throat. It’s not just sadness, but the strategy of hell behind it. The Enemy wants us to be afraid. He wants us to see what happened to Charlie and backpedal. He wants the rest of us to whisper, to soften the message, to believe the lie that faith should stay private.

But Christ never whispered. He preached in temples, on hillsides, in courtrooms, to hostile mobs, and at dinner tables.

And when they told Him to be quiet, He picked up His cross. Not a symbolic one.

A real one.

Heavy. Bloody. Splintered.

When Jesus said, “Follow Me,” He didn’t hand out maps. He handed out crosses.

This is a war. A war between good and evil. A war between truth and lies. It’s the kind of war that kneels in gravel beside the wounded, hands them living water, and refuses to leave. The kind that speaks both mercy and judgment without flinching. The kind Charlie died for.

This world is not a friend to grace. But grace isn’t fragile. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”

Bullets don’t win. Slander doesn’t win. Prison bars don’t win. Death doesn’t win.

You can lose everything in this world and still walk into glory with your head lifted high. Because God’s love isn’t suspended by headlines or gunfire.

There are two worlds unfolding right now.

The one you see.

And the one you don’t.

One is filled with chaos, anger, and strife.

The other is filled with meaning, beauty, and purpose.

I believe that when Charlie Kirk’s body slumped to the concrete, his soul stood upright in heaven. Not limping. Not silenced. Not stunned.

He didn’t fall. He crossed. The great cloud of witnesses gained another voice.

I wonder if Stephen met him there. The first martyr. The man who got stoned for preaching what the crowd didn’t want to hear. The man who, in his final breath, saw the heavens open. It’s the only time in all of Scripture we see Jesus standing at the right hand of God, rising to receive one of His own.

I like to believe He stood again to greet Charlie Kirk.

Is it worth it? To speak the truth when people consider truth hate speech? To stand boldly for what is right? To share your faith in a world that doesn’t just disagree but wants you gone?

Do you feel the tremble in your spirit?

You’re not weak in feeling that.

But you are called to something stronger than silence.

You are called to the truth.

Jesus explained it was for this reason he came to earth – that people would know the truth.  Fear isn’t a theology.  Truth is.

Christ is not a concept. He’s the author of truth. The ultimate reality.

Heaven is not empty.

It is filled with scarred saints who refused to bow to fear.

Men who were stoned.

Women who were burned.

Children who sang while the flames climbed.

There is no adversity that can cancel the promise of God. No persecution that can derail your destination. No sniper’s bullet that can separate a soul from Christ.

Your life is not measured by how long you live on earth, but by how much of it was spent pointing to heaven.

Charlie Kirk did not die for nothing. He died carrying the same message you and I must live.

The cross stands tall.

The tomb is still empty.

And the gospel has not lost one ounce of power.

So, pick up your cross.

Wipe your eyes.And keep going.

The reward is worth it.

The King is coming.

And there’s still time to speak.

Both these stories touched me. I, among others, was attacked during COVID for my views. Others were punished much more harshly for speaking the truth. In Australia, the Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency put out this directive:

Be very careful when using social media, even on your personal pages, when authoring papers, or when appearing in interviews. Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging. Views expressed, which may be consistent with evidence-based material, may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.

Read that last sentence again. While our governmental and professional societies may not have used those words, the ones they did use meant the same thing. A physician with a gag order is not a physician you can trust. State-controlled medicine is no better than state-controlled religion.

In a June 29, 2025, appearance on “The Iced Coffee Hour” podcast, host Jack Selby asked Charlie Kirk how he hoped to be remembered if “everything completely goes away.”

“If I die?” asked Kirk.

Selby clarified, “If everything goes away.”

“I want to be remembered for courage for my faith”, Kirk said. “That would be the most important thing.”

I didn’t know Charlie Kirk in life. I learned more about him in his death. But his courage and conviction are exactly how I will remember him when “everything went away.” I would love to be known the same way.

Tim Powell MD