Pro-Life Moments

Within a year or two of becoming a Christian, I became aware of the nature of abortion. In the 1980’s I was very involved with the political wing of a Canadian pro-life group, called Campaign Life, and served on their board for several years. I thought I would share just a few memories I have of that time.

Campaign Life intersected with its educational counterpart, Canadian Right-to-Life. So I got to know their personnel, as well. I have a vivid memory of the president of Right-to-Life, Laura McArthur, saying in her inimitable, gravelly voice, “Dey want to teach my son sex ed. De kid still goes to bed with Curious George.” Exactly! And, oh Laura, if you were only alive now….

Jim Hughes was then president of Campaign Life. (He is still active as vice president of the international Right to Life Federation) Like most of the executive then, and perhaps now, Jim was a fervent Roman Catholic. We became good friends – I liked him greatly – but, on my part, there was always the discomfort of knowing my Catholic friends saw this as a joint religious crusade – something that I could not accept, and which gradually drove me from the movement.

I was not aware that perceptive Jim saw this clearly. One day after I had sat awkwardly with them in the office as a priest lead them in prayer, he pulled me aside and said, “Roman Catholicism is really hard for you, isn’t it, Barbara?” and I told him of my many concerns. He listened intently and then said, “Barbara, I would say you represent 10% of Evangelicals…..No, 5%…..”

About this same time, we had another board meeting. There were, perhaps, ten of us , carefully chosen, hand-picked. Jim said, “Someone in here is leaking our plans to the opposition.”

I have never forgotten the shock of that moment. And, of course, I have no idea who it was. I just know it wasn’t me! But it gave me a taste of what it must be like to be a Christian in a country where our faith is illicit. Who do you trust?

In one of the final years of my involvement, Right-to-Life’s media people decided they wanted to make several ads featuring couples at different stages of life, all telling of their opposition to abortion. They would be shown in Toronto during the Grey Cup – Canada’s equivalent to the Super Bowl.

They asked John and I if we would be the family couple. We agreed, though I can’t say we shone as scripted spokesmen. In any case, while they were filming us, my little one-year-old Susanna came and demanded to be held. So somewhere in the archives of filmdom are John and Barbara, with little red-kilted Susanna, speaking about one of the most important moral issues of our day. And little Susanna, now a mom with four children, writes articles (as one of their evangelical voices) for a website begun by these same tenacious old friends and their children!

If you are interested, check it out. Very Catholic. But very well done.

lifesitenews.com

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Family

As I have mentioned before, John and I met at Bishop’s University. Bishop’s was strong academically, but also close to ski hills and golf courses. Because of this, it was sometimes called “The Country Club of the Eastern Townships”.

With these multiple attractions, it attracted many young people from wealthy homes. One family, in particular, had sent several children to Bishop’s. John and I, separately, got to know two of the youngest boys.

Years later, I picked up a magazine and saw a lengthy article about their older brother.

He has done very well for himself in a number of areas. But what fascinated me was this:

Apparently, as a young man, he was floundering. Simply didn’t know what to do with his life and had not made much of a beginning at anything. A bit of a ‘ne’er do well’, I guess.

So his father sat him down and said he would go through a list of all the companies/corporations where he had friends that could give this young man employment. They would start with “A” and go right through the alphabet until they found something suitable.

That is how he got his start.

Then I think of the people we have gotten to know through our rentals in north Georgia. They come from bits and pieces of families with no meaningful oversight, and so very much to destroy them. One wrong step – which they usually make – and they can’t recover. Ever. There is no support to help them get back on track. And often, the whole train has long been derailed anyway.

The disparities in life fascinate me.

I am glad for those people who have strong, intact families and give their young people a leg up when they need it. I ache for the others who make a bad decision and are going to live with the consequences forever.

Such is life. Always has been and always will be. “The poor you will always have among you”.

But it is lovely that God’s heart is moved by the vulnerable. The early apostles sought out the poor very specifically to tell them the good news. And so have so many Christians through the ages.

And the Old Testament prophets raged when their plight was the result of injustice.

Still, whatever the circumstances, there is only one thing that can systematically lift people from poverty in great numbers.

Not a ‘thing’ at all.

Our one God. Who restores the soul and makes all things new.

A Father for the fatherless.

Burdened

When I was first a Christian, forty years ago, there was much talk of ‘burdens’. “God has given me a burden to do so and so.” “God has burdened my soul in such and such a way.”

It took me many years to see what an apt description that term can be.

I think it captures very well the circumstance where something previously abstract suddenly, or gradually, becomes distressingly real to you.

‘Abortion’ is no longer just a term. You can now hear babies screaming as their lives are painfully taken from them. ‘Sex trafficking’ becomes little girls with stolen pasts and futures who have little meaningful legal protection. ‘Adoption’ becomes heartbroken little ones with no support or hope.

These situations become living realities. And they are not passing disturbances in everyday life, but are recurring and gripping.

I think that is what a burden is. And I think it is often God’s call into action in a certain sphere of life. The only way to alleviate the pain of what you are understanding, ‘seeing’, is to go into action to try to remedy the situation.

In the meantime, the rest of the human race, even the Christian community, seems to be going on blissfully oblivious to this condition that is consuming your soul.

A burden is God-imposed, it is lonely, and it is painful. Sometimes to the point of crying out to the Lord for relief through death as various prophets did, who were so ‘burdened’ for their rebellious people.

Many sincere Christians will carry them at certain times of life.

And usually they are based on an increased apprehension of evil, of ‘fallenness’.

I marvel that God, who knows every detail of existence intimately, can let life , with its everyday wickedness, go on.

The merest glimpse of what he sees day in and day out quickly becomes almost unbearably wearisome to us.

So we call on him to become the burden-bearer of our burdens.

He does. And history goes on.

At least for now.

Infant Fears

I was born in the ‘nightie’ age. Sleepers had not yet been invented. So every night I was tucked in bed with a nightie wrapped around me and pulled down to cover my toes. Yet at the end of every nap, according to my mother, my nightie would be pulled up to cover my face. So I felt secure. So I could sleep.

I see the same pattern in my grandchildren. Most have needed something soft in order to get through their early years – blankets, cuddle-bears, teddy bears….

And in some we have seen rituals – shoes needing to be lined up, words spoken the same way in each similar situation, schedules that can’t be varied in the least degree. All to stave off unknown dangers.

Isn’t it sad that human beings are born with such a residual amount of fear? I remember it in myself, I saw it in my children, and it now touches very deep chords indeed as I see it in my grandchildren. It breaks my heart.

And who can soothe away these fears with promises of safety in anything close to an absolute sense?

That would be a fairy tale. A turning of the back to Scripture. A lie.

That is one reason we grandparents are so much more compassionate and tender with our grandchildren than we were with our children. We are more aware of the nature of evil, the repercussions of the Fall. As CS Lewis said, who can stand unmoved and see infants that, as children of Christian parents, are called to fight against the world, the flesh and the devil throughout their lives – which have barely begun.

Poor little ones. Privileged little ones.

That dichotomy of life now.

As small children begin to realize the terms of life, they need so very much encouragement and comfort. So do the big ones. (And us, the biggest, for that matter)

May we comfort and strengthen them well, showing them God’s own compassion. Even more importantly, may we encourage them to go directly to God for peace and strength from the time they are tiny.

May it become the routine of their life to – first thing, and in every situation – cry out to the God of All Comfort.

More Cognitive Dissonance

I continue to have a raging recurrence of insomnia so am going to weave together a few sentences from the biography ‘Benjamin Franklin’, by Walter Isaacson, for today’s post.

We all know that Franklin, though a token Presbyterian, was in reality a deist. Still, he couldn’t stop being common sense Ben Franklin – observing and analyzing effects. Consequently:

As a young man, “….he soon came to the conclusion that a simple and complacent deism had its own set of drawbacks. He had converted Collins and Ralph (two friends) to deism, and they soon wronged him without moral compunction.”

Of course. No lawgiver. No accountability. No restraint. Franklin saw this clearly.

So did this send him scurrying back to the Calvinism of his youth?

No. He decided to fine-tune and expand his deism! He declared that, “The most acceptable service to God (‘God’, that is)  is doing good to man.”

And he developed thirteen categories of moral uprightness he felt he must cultivate to meet this goal.

So, as Charles Stanley used to (and may still) say, “Now watch this.”

“On the pages of a little notebook, he made a chart with seven red columns for the days of the week and thirteen rows labeled with his virtues. Infractions were marked with a black spot. The first week he focused on temperance, trying to keep that line clear while not worrying about the other lines. With that virtue strengthened, he could turn his attention to the next one, silence, hoping that the temperance line would stay clear as well. In the course of the year, he would complete the thirteen-week cycle four times.

‘I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined’, he dryly noted. In fact, his notebook became filled with holes as he erased the marks in order to reuse the pages….”

So, again, did this send him back to the theology of his youth, which was so clearly being legitimized?

No.

“So he transferred his charts to ivory tablets that could more easily be wiped clean.”

Oh, human nature!

Post-Insomnia Post!

I was just rereading some old Voice of the Martyrs magazines and found this interesting quote from a book called “Proofs of God’s Existence”, cited by Richard Wurmbrand.

“During Stalin’s time in the country of Czechoslovakia, a leading communist named Loeb was imprisoned by his comrades and subjected to brainwashing. Alone in a cell, he had to listen day and night to a loudspeaker blaring at him maddening words: “Spy! Traitor! Counter-revolutionist! Oh no, I beg your pardon. Dear and faithful comrade, no, spy! Traitor! No, comrade! You will be hanged! It is a confusion; you will be released soon. Your arrest has been a mistake. Rogue, rascal, beloved comrade, innocent victim of injustice!” This went on for weeks.

Then he had a moment of illumination. The thought occurred to him: “If communists torture Christians or other enemies, it makes sense. We cannot triumph without destroying them. But if communists torture communists, this is wickedness without any sense. It is evil for evil’s sake. I have now seen the final depth of evil, But there is no electricity without two poles, no coin without two faces. If there exists an extreme depth of wickedness, there must also be an extreme height of love. This then is God.”

After this, when called to a new interrogation, he told the police officer, “You can switch off the loudspeaker now. I have found God.”

And an interesting quote I found on internet the other day, by a man from Communist China named Jun Yuan Chen, in the year 1999.

In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin.” (Though I bet many of us would now disagree with the first part of the latter statement…the second remains firm!)

You WILL Be Perfect (And I Will See to It)

I have been re-reading David Horowitz’s ‘Radical Son’ – about his experience of growing up in a Communist home and having that the entire worldview of the first part of his life. A worldview he eventually repudiated.

I hope to write more on this but let make just a few comments today.

What information are we given at creation about human nature? A lot, really. We are told that:

We are made in the image of God.

We are made male and female.

We are to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth.

We are to have dominion over the earth, subduing it.

We are to obey God.

Post-fall, we can’t obey God.

Do you see how much content there is there? The parameters of humanness are outlined – both our nature and horizontal obligations. And our fundamental vertical purpose – to know and to obey God – which we can no longer do.

Radicals, of course, deny all or the above theses. Just quickly go down the list and verify that for yourself.

But on what basis? As Christians, of course, we know more about them than they know about themselves. We understand the deepest motivation of the human heart is sheer defiance of God.

But, still, that is usually put in some sort of rationalizing intellectual framework. What is it for the radical?

It is that human nature is almost infinitely adaptable. There are no ‘givens’. The above list does not exist. (Nor does God Himself as list-giver, of course) Society is the sole vehicle influencing and producing ‘humanness’.

So what do radicals want?

To alter imperfect society. Radically. Why? To alter imperfect human nature. Radically. And so on, in circular fashion.

To attain wonderful humans in a wonderful world.

But often blood sacrifice has to come first. The sacrifice of those who stand in the way of this historical progression.

Great imperfection. Blood sacrifice. Then ‘heaven on earth’.

As Schaeffer said, Marxism, for instance, (the particular type of radicalism he was critiquing) is just a twisted Christian knock-off.

But more about all this as I continue to read through Horowitz’s unique book.

Rooted and Established

My husband has a singular talent for creating beauty. Some time ago we moved onto our church’s property with the understanding we would care for it, and improve it. It is a large property with several buildings, which was once a church/school complex –  sadly neglected until our present pastor determined to restore it.

The small stone church is the centerpiece of the property, of course. And next door to that is the little frame house that we live in. Natively, it is a Plain-Jane. White siding. Single story. Concrete porch. Elements that are all non-negotiable. Weedy lawn. No flowers or garden. Unkempt. Things that can be changed.

So John got busy. He washed the exterior. Added shutters. Faced the concrete porch with stone. Did away with the concrete steps and path altogether and re-built them in stone.  Added trees, gardens. Now, when people come to visit – and we have a lot of visitors – we get more compliments on this little home than we ever did on our large ones.

I have traditionally not been interested in the exterior of our homes. John has taken care of that one hundred percent. But I have been cheering for him in this situation, interested in seeing how he will work his magic. So I have paid more attention than in the past.

And I have actually been involved to a limited extent. I water the flowers and do some weeding!

I have become fascinated with a jasmine vine that John planted to wind around one of the wrought-iron pillars on the porch. It has become a (beautiful) monster – threatening to take over the world in just two short years.

Then a few weeks ago, once he had finished the porch and was able to do so, John planted two others at the base of the remaining pillars. These have done – nothing.

“John, why are these just sitting there? Why won’t they grow?

“Dearest wife, they have to root.”

“Oh.”

(Duh, as the kids would say)

In any case, it immediately brought to mind words of Spurgeon I had recently heard on an audio sermon…

”God helps us to grow downward when we are thinking of growing upward.”

Exactly. A plant that outgrows its roots will not be a healthy one if it survives at all. But when it is well-rooted, there is no stopping it.

And that makes sense of that Christian conundrum we are all so familiar with, doesn’t it? At least to some extent. We pray for sanctification and things in our life immediately get worse.

It can be frightening and discouraging.

But what better than adversity to cause us to run to Scripture with renewed vigor? To call out to the Lord from the bottom of our heart? To ponder and meditate? To seek godly wisdom from others?

Really, not much.

And as we do so we are becoming more and more rooted in His thinking, His love, His ways.

Ready for the growth we prayed for.

Make Way!

Awhile ago I wrote a tribute to Francis Schaeffer for my son, Tim. I mentioned an interaction I had with Schaeffer’s daughter, Susan, that was life-transforming – an unstudied moment in which her residual sanctification shone through in a way that helped me understand grace at a much deeper level. I called this ‘incidental holiness’. Something spur of the moment that could not possibly be contrived, but illustrates a basic facet of Christian character.

I believe in incidental holiness. I love it.

But the other day I was thinking of the flip side of this. Incidental depravity. In me. The kind that seems to shoot out of nowhere when I am least expecting it.

I am a Costco junkie – have been for almost twenty years – from way back when it was called Price Club. At least once a week I wend my way along a couple of highways, through stop signs and parking lots to get to my destination of choice.

Last week, for some reason, I was monitoring myself a little more closely than usual. And what did I notice?

Underneath the controlled exterior was a constant undercurrent of sheer malevolence.

Don’t you dare pull through that four-way stop ahead of me!…Walk faster! I am behind you and I want to get through this aisle quickly!….Let me get to that checkout counter first!…Micro-moments of sheer rage. This is my world!

Make way for Barbara the Great!

An everyday shopping trip can show me up – at least to myself – in all the ‘foulness of my fallenness’. (That has a certain ring….)

I hate it. My sin, that is. Not being shown my sin, though that can be very uncomfortable!

(The old two-step program of knowing God: Lord, show my myself; Lord, show me thyself – holds true from conversion to last breath, doesn’t it?)

In any case, my incidental depravity amazes me.

But again and again I fall back on that self-evident truth that it does not amaze God. He knew all about it, in its full goriness, when he took me on.

That is such a comfort to me. There is nothing about me he doesn’t understand. Nothing he has not provided for, in Christ

And my incidental depravity only propels me to move closer and closer to him.

For my protection from myself.

And for your protection from me!

God With Us

A quick thought in the midst of my chronic headache:

Recently I was chatting with a casual friend, just asking how things were going for her,  when I saw her face stiffen, then crumble, and she began to sob – noisily, deeply, like a small child.

All of a sudden the pieces of what I know about her fell into place and I began to have a sense of what has – probably – been going on in her life. I had not taken the time, or perhaps felt the right, to do so to this point.

Adult tears move me greatly. By definition, the roots are deep and the causes often irremediable with older people. Life is not ‘flexible’ any more.

I am so glad that God does not handle our sorrows with a “Shhhh. Don’t cry.” (Even a well-meaning one which, of course, would have to be the case with him!)

No, he lets us go to it. The bone-wracking sobs, the runny nose, the red-eyed aftermath.

 God is many things to us. Beautiful things. Majestic things. But, they are juxtaposed with something so very ordinary.

‘Listen’ to these concluding words of, ‘O Worship the King’

“Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.”

Maker – Yes, he is the great God who created all from nothing by the word of his mouth.

Defender – Yes, because I am his, he has promised to be my fortress, my shield.

Redeemer – Yes, he has bought me out of the slavery of sin.

Friend…Friend? ….After all of these mighty and wondrous titles and relationships?

Yes!

The one who will patiently sit with us through our storms of grief and wipe our tears away at the end.

Who is like him?