Love

April 11, 2022

Treasure in Jars of Clay

I have walked down the aisle so many times before: as a baby in a baptismal gown; as a candidate wearing a dress that was specially selected for the final step of my journey into Catholicism; as a bride, veiled and adorned with white lace; as a mother carrying a little child draped in white. Yesterday, I came to the front of the Church shepherding a little girl whose post-Lacrosse hair had been forgotten and hung in an off-center, half-fallen out ponytail. I came carrying a little boy whose shoes were inadvertently left at home. I came after sitting through the reading of Christ’s Passion while trying to prevent that little boy from poking the lady in front of us with his palms. I came after whispering threats of spending the remainder of the service in his car seat if he didn’t quiet down and stop kicking the pew. I came hoping that no one heard him belting out, “The Doggy of Faith!” in a distorted echo of the priest. I came after keeping my foot suspended for almost an hour so that the kneeler did not get knocked down into any unsuspecting shins. I came after trying but failing to silently mouth instructions to my daughter through my mask. I came realizing I should have worn a belt with my new pants. I came thinking that I should have checked what my daughter picked to wear before we left for church. I came hobbling along with my ankle in a brace, unsure when it would choose to give out again. In short, I came as a very human, very imperfect person and that act of coming helped me realize the incredible beauty of my Savior and the Mass He gave us.

The wonder of our liturgy is not the bells that brought a gasp of awe from my distracted son and redirected his attention towards the altar. It is not the music we sing, texts we read, or words of prayer we say. It is not the faithful solemnly processing in a line. It is not those who are meticulously clad in their Sunday best. It is certainly not my ragamuffin family tripping and stumbling its way along.

The treasure of our liturgy is Jesus, himself. He is the one at whose presence the bells ring. It is Jesus to which all of our songs, readings and prayers point. He is the Bridegroom waiting for us at the aisle’s end with nothing but infinite love. He is the one who wants to be united to us whether we are dressed like royalty or paupers, knowing that we are all hopelessly a mess underneath the coverings with which we wrap ourselves. His unquenchable love for us that endures all of our short comings and His all-knowing and complete welcome are the true treasures of the Church. He is what makes our faith beautiful and in the process of surrendering our pride and coming to Him in the midst of our own humanness, we are made beautiful, too.

So I encourage you to come to Him this Holy week. Come with whatever shortcomings, embarassments, and disappointments you have. Come with your Lenten failures and your unruly children. Come if you don’t remember when to sit, stand or kneel. Come if it has been years since you last came. Come if you just can not get over your sense of guilt and shame. Come if you are late. Come however you can. You will find a Savior waiting for you with wide-open arms, ready to dazzle you with His unbelievable love as He welcomes you home.

October 5, 2021

Seeing the Perfect Christ In His Marred Body

When I was in high school, I spent a horrible week doubting that God is the good God who He says He is. Like far too many in our world, a family I cared about had been wounded by the abuse of someone who should have been safe for them and I could not understand how a good God would allow such a terrible thing to happen. I was angry and felt betrayed by the God who I had, up to that point, always trusted implicitly. Believe me, I let Him know about it. I raged at Him exactly as you might expect a rebelious teenager to do and, somehow, He responded by leading me to the Book of Job.

I devoured the chapters, accusing God alongside Job and then, suddenly, God spoke back. Who was I to question Him? Would I discredit His justice? Did I understand enough to condemn Him? Me, who was not there when the foundations of the earth were laid, who cannot command the sun and the moon, who has never walked in the heavenly storehouses full of snow? Like Job, my doubts were consumed in the wake of His overwhelming, mind-blowing presence. At the same time, my certainty that I knew enough to challenge Him was swallowed in the doubt that comes with the awareness of how little I truly knew. Who was this God I had challenged, this One whose power was so far above and simultaneously so encompassing of all the ways of man? Who was this Almighty Strength who could destroy me with a glance and yet chose to mercifully forgive my accusations and draw me more intimately to Him through my doubts? Could a God who has so many responses at His disposal but chooses to respond with gentleness be anything but good?

For the first time, the realization that God was so far beyond anything that I had ever thought or known engulfed me. I had always rested in the fatherly intimacy of God, yet, in that moment, I came face-to-face with His otherness.

It was this separation between God and His creation that helped me to make sense of how a good God was not irreconcilable with the evil committed by His people. Over the years, I have often come back to that lesson that God taught me during that torturous week of my adolescence – when facing abuse by a person studying to be a youth minister, when journeying into the Catholic Church with eyes wide open to the abuse that was covered up in the city of my birth, when wrestling with allegations within my own Catholic Community. Always, I am reminded that God and His Truth exist regardless of the actions of His creations and even His followers.

Yet, more recently, this has been harder to remember. Over the past few years, it seems that too many Christians have done unimaginably heinous things to mar the precious Body of Christ here on earth. From supporting ideology and lies that foment hate, to failing to sacrificially love and protect one another; from devaluing the precious value of all of the lives God has created, to allowing divisions to shatter Christian unity; from the unbelievably horrific acts in Canada’s Native American Schools, to the 330,000 child victims of abuse by the French Catholic Church; from my own Diocese’ choices that continue to lead to unnecessary COVID spread and deaths, endangering my own children, to the desires of some radical traditionalists for the Pope’s death – the actions of Christ’s representatives on earth recently have been heartbreaking.

Yet, I can’t help but think of Christ’s other body and how man similarly marred and distorted it beyond recognition. I think of the image left on St. Veronica’s cloth – bruised, beaten, bleeding. I think of the broken back and the pierced hands. I think of the lifeless body, brought down from the cross and laid in the arms of a mother who knows she holds her Son but would not recognize Him if she had not stayed with Him throughout His destruction. I think of a powerless corpse, laid in a tomb and left to succumb to the final destruction of death’s decomposition.

And then…

And then that body had the power to do what none had ever done before. It defied death, defeated it, and it walked out of the grave.

Somehow, God took all of that damage and destruction of His son’s appearance and He made it the ultimate picture of Who He really is: a God of infinite love, mercy, and even power. Somehow, out of the distortion that His creation had inflicted on His image, He drew the purest, truest representation of Himself. He who described Himself simply as the One Who Is, was so far above and beyond the deeds of his creatures that what they did could in no way diminish Him. Infact, inspite of their worst intentions, their abuse only led to His glorification.

I don’t know how God will deal with the misrepresentations and distortions of His image here on earth right now, but I know that they won’t be the end of the story because I believe that God exists independently of anything His people do or don’t do. His goodness and His truth are not dependent upon us – they are realities that exist by their own right. He is, He has always been, and He will always be. Nothing we do can change that – it can only serve to glorify Him, whether or not that is our intention.

February 1, 2019

Why I Hesitate to Say I am Pro-Life

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I was a child the first time I heard 2nd Chapter of Acts sing “My God, they’re killing thousands. Killing thousands, without blinking an eye.” I remember my horror when my mother explained what the lyrics referred to: sometimes people kill babies before they are even born.

That was my introduction to abortion and, as I grew, my lessons continued. Raised an evangelical Christian, I could have been the poster child for the pro-life movement. I helped gather items for pregnancy care center baby showers and organized pro-life walks at my public high school. I had lengthy debates with my grandmother, whose nursing career had shown her the horrors of botched abortions and had influenced her politics. In my spare time, I read books about abortion survivors and mothers like Karen Santorum, who chose to fight for their sick children’s lives at great cost to their own. My carefully crafted, homeschool sexual education curriculum even involved a meeting with the director of our local pregnancy care center.

When, as an adult, I became Catholic, I guess most people assumed that I would become even more unapologetically pro-life, but that is not what happened. Instead, I began to be uneasy about some of the tactics that the pro-life community was using to fight their battle against abortion. At first it was theoretical. I reasoned that screaming at a pregnant mom as she entered an abortion clinic probably did not have the desired effect in most cases. I mean, I am a believing Christian and how often do I let a ranting street preacher have any kind of impact on my actions? Then I started to see my friends, who had previously been open to Christianity, turning away from it because of the loveless way conservative Christians were acting and the hypocrisy they perceived in people who were pro-life in regards to an unborn baby but simultaneously devalued so many other lives (immigrant lives, black lives, criminals’ lives, and the lives of those living in poverty, for example). I too felt their frustration about this political dichotomy. More importantly, I began to grieve as they moved further and further from a saving faith, pushed away by the very people who claimed to speak for that faith.

In the midst of my growing unease about the pro-life movement’s methods, I lost a daughter at birth and then another at 10 weeks gestation. I found myself journeying alongside countless bereaved parents, some of whom had made the heart-wrenching decision to terminate a wanted pregnancy in order to save their child from unimaginable suffering.

I looked at these parents, desperately grieving the loss of their babies, and remembered my own daughters’ deaths. I reflected on the moments when I worried about my older daughter’s suffering. “How long would it have taken for her to lose consciousness without oxygen?” I had desperately asked my doctor. “Would she have known to panic when she couldn’t breathe, even though she had never taken a breath before? Did she have pain as her lungs became so eaten by bacteria that they broke apart and adhered together in all the wrong places? Did she suffer all alone while the NICU team broke her tiny ribs and stuck tubes in her sides to release the air escaping from her ruptured lungs?” Then I remembered the peaceful death that my 10-week-old had, passing away silently in the warmth of my womb, never knowing cold or panic.

With these memories crowding my mind, I look at the parents who chose to try to give their sick babies a more peaceful death and I can’t blame them. If I did not believe that God alone holds our lives in His hands, then I would make the same choice they did. If I did not believe that God would redeem even our most terrible suffering, then I would do anything to limit my child’s pain. I understand these parents, I share their grief from losing a child, and I am angry that Christians, the very people who should be walking with them through their pain, are compounding it by vilifying them as “murderers.”

So all of this is why I hesitate when I am asked if I am pro-life. The question being asked cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or a “no”. It requires nuance and explanation. Yes, I believe life begins at conception. Yes, I believe only God should chose when that life will end and I know that, as difficult as it is, we must speak the truth in love about this. Yes, I am committed to working towards a society in which mothers do not feel the need to abort their babies, where they can be confident that they can meet their children’s needs, where all life is valued. Yes, I am working towards figuring out ways to get kids out of the foster care system and into loving homes. Yes, I am teaching my own children to cherish life and to fight for it.

But, no, I do not believe that the mothers who seek abortions are any greater sinners than I am or that murderer is an appropriate name for them. No, I do not agree with the often hate-filled and judgmental stances taken by many in the pro-life movement – abortion needs to be fought, but it is just one of many battles being waged on humanity and we can’t try to fight it in isolation. We will fail if we keep usinf tactics that might advance us on this one front, but will destroy us on others. No, I do not think that saving an unborn life justifies damning countless other souls by repulsing them with propaganda that is often loveless and aggressive. No, I do not believe that my entire political view can be determined by the single issue of abortion, while I turn a blind eye to the starving, the persecuted and the sick.

Am I pro-life? I suppose some will say I am, some will say I am not. I will say that I am a Christian who is trying to love my God and my neighbor (born and unborn) and whose ultimate hope is that my actions help all of God’s created ones to know His tender love and to one day be united with Him in paradise.

December 7, 2018

Abandonment

20181207_155205Our little guy just spent some time in the hospital. The place was packed and we had to spend over twenty-four hours in the emergency department while we waited for a room. During our stay, the room across from us was occupied by a school-age boy whose parents were not with him. Instead, various hospital staff members took shifts sitting in the room while he played computer games and fought sleep. When it was time to transport this boy, he became so combative that the hallway was full of adults who were trying to pacify him. In a scene that was reminiscent of a shell-shocked war veteran, he screamed for his mother while being physically restrained by strong security guards. The response he was repeatedly given was, “We are trying to find your mom. We don’t know where she is.”

I don’t know the story behind this young boy’s hospitalization, nor do I know where his parents were. I certainly do not mean to cast judgement on them without knowing the whole story. However, I do know that this little boy was suffering without his parents. His panicked actions reflected his feelings of fear and abandonment. It was heartbreaking to witness.

I also know that a little baby was born 2000 years ago who would also cry out to a parent who was not there for him in the midst of his suffering. As we admire our beautiful creche scenes, its easy to forget that God did not just send His Son for the adoration of Bethlehem but also for the isolation of the cross.  That Son, who God abandoned to death as a ransom for His creation, stretched out His arms to die and called out to His Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

As a parent, I cannot fathom abandoning my children to death and suffering. However, because God chose us as His children and refused to abandon us to the penalty for our sins, He was willing to give His Son. He sent this Son to be born in a stable filled with dangerous germs, in a land where a king wanted him dead before he was even born, and to a people who would one day choose to crucify him in exchange for the release of a notorious criminal. While the angels sang songs of triumph to shepherds in the fields, God witnessed the birth of His Child, knowing what this victory would require. He gave His son His first breath, fully aware of how He would exhale His last. He looked upon the wonder of Bethlehem knowing that He would turn His back on Golgotha. Yet, still, He gave.

How many of us have, like the young boy at the hospital, felt neglected by those who are meant to love us? How many of us have felt abandoned by God Himself? Yet, if we remember that God refused to abandon us, even at such incredible personal cost, we will be convinced that we are deeply loved and never alone. We might even find ourselves drawn into the warm fellowship that radiated from the stable in Bethlehem so many nights ago, when shepherds and kings, angels and beasts gathered around the little family of the newborn King. We may hear our hearts sing, “This is my family, too.” For by abandoning His Son, God adopted us as His own.

April 6, 2018

Divine Mercy

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I haven’t had much energy this month for writing. Its been one of those “everyone is fed, everyone’s clothes are clean, we did school today, everything else can wait” kind of months. However, I led a small group of women in a discussion of Divine Mercy today and I thought that I might share something that I learned as I prepared for that talk: God is love and His Divine Mercy is the outpouring of that love in response to our needs.

John 4:8 tells us that “God is love.” As incomprehensible as it is, His very being is love. When that Love encounters our many needs, He acts in mercy because that is what love does when it is confronted with need. Our needs are many, so we can see His mercy manifested in countless ways throughout or lives: comfort for our sorrow, peace for our fear, satisfaction of our hunger, justice when we are wronged, the presence of His Spirit to teach and grow us, and so many others.  In all these ways God’s Divine Mercy is manifest in our lives.

Yet, the most pressing of all of our needs, the one that threatens to separate us from God and even to destroy us is our sin. That is why, the most profound way that God demonstrated his Divine Mercy was by sending his Son to suffer and die and then to conquer death and rise again. Because God is love and His love for us is unchanging, He responded to the great need that our sin created by offering this incredible gift of love and mercy.

As we approach Divine Mercy Sunday, I pray that we will all have the time and the energy to spend quiet moments reflecting on God’s great love and Divine Mercy as they were revealed to us on the cross at Calvary and in the empty tomb. And I invite you to pray with me that each person on this earth will be filled with a deep, heartfelt knowledge of God’s mercy, for to be loved so deeply and not know it must be the greatest tragedy of all.

February 2, 2018

More

 

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“God, I know, its all of this and so much more, but God right now this is what I’m longing for…Heaven in the face of my little girl.” – Steven Curtis Chapman

I was thinking about the day Mary got to Heaven the other day. In my limited understanding of what reaching Heaven is, all I could think of was the incredible joy she must have felt to see her Son again. I just can’t imagine how it must have felt for her to touch Him and hold Him. Her rejoicing must have been beyond anything we have experienced in this life.

As I was thinking these thoughts, I realized that all of my thoughts about Mary’s assumption into Heaven centered on the very earthly delight of seeing her Son again, not on finding herself in the presence of the Living God or seeing His face which would also have been very really aspects of her joy. This focus on seeing her Son made me consider my own dreams of what it will be like to reach Heaven and I realized they were also completely focused on one thing: reuniting with my daughter.

Its silly, really how I can cognitively know that being brought into the presence of the Creator will be a much bigger deal than wrapping my arms around my dark haired child, but honestly, that act of holding my living little girl would be the most amazing and heavenly thing that I can imagine in this life on earth. Everything else is too far beyond my imaging to even begin to comprehend it because I just can’t imagine anything more wonderful than embracing my daughter in God’s eternal kingdom.

Yet, I thank God that He is far beyond the confines of my simple imagination and that He has prepared wonders for me that I simply cannot fathom – the greatest of which is Himself.

January 5, 2018

Nativity

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Last week, my husband hurled our Christmas tree out of our living room window. We discovered this method of getting the tree outside last year and it saves us from having to collect needles that were, in previous years, strewn across our living room to the front door. Pushing a tree out the window is also just ridiculous enough to feel liberating. While our tree (which was so dry that it was ready to go up in a fiery blaze) had to be disposed of early this year, our Nativity set reminds us that it is still Christmas for one more day. However, it is a different Nativity scene that I find myself contemplating as I write this.

Unlike the peaceful statues that depict the birth of Christ in my home, the Vatican Nativity scene this year has caused quite a bit of controversy. If you haven’t seen pictures of it, I would encourage you to look it up. Far from the usual tranquil and picturesque scenes that tend to depict Jesus’s birth, this one is chaotic and messy. The walls behind the Holy family appear to be crumbling. The figures are crowded together, so much so that it is sometimes hard to tell which appendage belongs to which statue. When we really think about the Christmas story, we realize that this is how it should be – Christ’s birth was chaotic and messy. His family was “living out of a suitcase” as they stayed in a town that was overflowing with visitors. They were sleeping in a shelter for animals which, no doubt meant that they were enjoying all of the sounds and smells that accompany a quaint barnyard birth. Into this environment that was far from homey, came unfamiliar visitors from diverse social classes. To top it all off, the king already wanted Jesus dead. Certainly there was peace and joy on that night, but that had nothing to do with Jesus’s surroundings. Instead, God Himself reached down and drew peace and joy out of a virgin womb. It was this act of God that brought those two gifts into the hearts of those who worshiped the newborn King who was born to dwell in the desperation, filth and despair of humanity.

While the infant Jesus is at the center of the Vatican’s Nativity scene, the figures that surround the more traditional Christmas statues reveal another aspect of our Savior through the corporal works of mercy that they are performing. In one corner, a woman quenches her neighbors thirst. In another, a man offers dignity to a boy lying naked beneath him by offering him clothes. At the bottom of the scene, with arms outstretched, a figure walks toward an invalid who is bandaged and flushed with fever. Next to them, someone visits a prisoner and, in the far corner, a young man provides burial for a dead body. These figures not only prod us to do what Jesus calls us to do, but they remind us that the irresistible baby lying in a manger would grow up to be a man whose teachings divided families, who demanded that we take up our cross daily, and who told us that to truly serve Him, we must care for others.

 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” Matthew 25:34-40

If you know this passage, you will also know that Jesus’s next words are some of the most terrifying in the Bible:

“‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’” Matthew 25:41-43

Every time I read these words, I shudder. For how much food do I have in my pantry, while there is still great hunger in the world? How easily do I open my faucet that flows with pure water, while children are dying from diseases borne by unclean water? How many strangers have I failed to welcome into the safe, little world that I exist in? How many homeless men and women are shivering on the streets, while hats, gloves, scarves and coats hang unused in my closets? How many times have I been too busy or afraid to offer help to the sick or to those who are cast aside or imprisoned by society? The reality is that I do not measure up well to the standard that Jesus has set before me. However, one of the incredible mysteries of our faith is that salvation is available only through Christ even though we do not deserve it and, yet, Jesus Himself has commanded us to perform great acts of love and sacrifice.

The 2017 Vatican Nativity, portrays both of these truths: that God loved the world so much that He sent His son to be born amidst a desperate people and that He sends us to minister to that world today. It reminds us that faith in Christ has little to do with adoring the little Lord Jesus who made no crying and much more to do with following a man whose message was loud and painful. It forces us to consider the reality that, from birth, our God made His home in the often dirty, fragrant, and chaotic company of the poor, the forgotten, the sinners, the hopeless. It makes us wonder whether or not we have made our homes with Him there, too.

 

December 8, 2017

Preparations

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“Uh-oh!” I thought as I listened to my preschooler say, “I have to be really good now because Christmas is coming and I want to get all of my presents, but it’s so hard to be good!” Last year she asked us if Santa was “really real” and because she was in the midst of learning that Heaven is “really real,” and that her sister is alive there, we told her the truth. I was surprised, therefore, that she thought that Mommy and Daddy would give her coal if she was naughty.

“You know,” I said, “I want you to be good because you want to be good, but you don’t need to be good to get Christmas presents. We can never be good enough to receive the gift of Jesus, but He came anyway, right? Mommy and Daddy give you presents because we love you (not because you deserve them), just like God sent us Jesus because He loves us and not because we deserve Him.”

As we prepare ourselves for Christmas during Advent, it is easy to focus on the many ways that we are not ready to stand in Jesus’s presence. Since it is a season of penance, we rightly examine the state of our souls, but we can become preoccupied with our sins and feelings of unworthiness. We forget that our failure to measure up is the very reason that Christmas is such an unbelievable gift: Jesus came into our world in the midst of all of its unworthiness because He loves us. He doesn’t love us “if we do something.” He doesn’t love us “if we don’t do something.” He just loves us.

It is in response to this love that we should begin to prepare ourselves for His coming and to set out on our journey towards becoming the people who He intends for us to be. It is because He loves us that we should persevere through hardship and do the work that He has set before us to do. It is due to His love that we should be willing to go where He leads us. It is only ever in response to His love that we prepare for His coming and never to obtain His love, for it cannot be obtained.

“…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

“…his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did.” (James 2:22)

September 1, 2017

SOS

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“You rule the swelling of the sea; when its waves rise, You still them.” – Psalm 89:9

I’ve often wondered what I would do in a real emergency. While I wanted to believe that I would prioritize my daughter’s safety above my own, I was not entirely sure and I worried that, in a moment of crisis, I would become irrational and focused only on my own survival. After all, while I love being a mom and want to be a good one, each day I engage in countless selfish acts. I worried that, since I respond selfishly when I want “just one more minute of peace,” I would respond much more selfishly when my life was in danger. Sure, I had heard about a mother’s instinct to protect her children, but that instinctive selflessness to protect offspring from danger seems to be one of the ways that we were made in God’s image and I worried that this part of who God created me to be had been marred by sin. Last Sunday, however, I was grateful to find that part of God’s image at the core of my being.

Our family had gone on a boat trip to a large lake that we only visit once every few years. While we know the lake to some extent, we are not completely comfortable on it. The day was sunny with a nice breeze and we decided to spend some extra time in the less familiar lake before returning to more familiar waters. After a middle-of-the-lake picnic, we began heading towards a more sheltered area for a swim and, as we steered towards shore, the wind and waves picked up. We were warned by three splashes of spray that hit our faces in rapid succession and then the bow of the boat suddenly plunged under water and I found myself standing on the downward moving deck of the boat in waist deep water. As I looked around me, I saw that my preschool aged daughter’s life vest had pulled her feet from the floor of the boat and she was floating towards the open water.

It was at that moment, that I knew God had kept part of His image intact within me: in the midst of the chaos around me, the only thing I cared about was my daughter’s safety. Yes, I wanted to stay alive, but, honestly, the only reason that I cared about my survival was that I knew my daughter would need me to help her survive.

I grabbed my daughter’s life preserver, pulled her with me to where the water was shallow enough for her to stand, and helped her run up the sloping deck to the back of the boat where the rest of our family was gathered. By the grace of God, the bow of the boat then surfaced and the water flowed to the back where it was able to easily flow off into the churning water beneath us. After a terrifying few hours, we made it safely home with a renewed thankfulness for God’s provision and gratitude for each other.

I share this story, not because I want to boast about my “Momma Bear” instinct. After all, I did not lift a car off of my child with my bare hands like some mothers reportedly do. In fact, if I am honest, I was the least courageous of the adults on the boat (which my tears during our torturous journey to shore soon revealed). Instead, I share this story because it was a moment that showed me something profound about God and about the depth of His love for us.

You see, because of sin, God’s children have also been on a sinking ship. The eternal life that they were created to share with their Father in paradise was lost and they faced destruction. Yet, God loved His children so much that, when they were drowning in sin, He sacrificed Himself to make sure that they survived. In the past, I had always assumed that this was a rational decision that God made but, having felt the all encompassing desire to save my own child, I now I suspect it wasn’t a decision at all, but a natural result of who He is at His core and how deeply He loves us.

So no matter what is happening in your life today, please know that you have a Father with a fierce “Papa Bear” instinct whose whole being was so focused on saving you that He willingly sacrificed Himself to do so. Having done that, He’ll be right by your side as He steers you safely to shore.

“Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.” – Isaiah 49:15

 

August 4, 2017

A Lament for the Church

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There is a serious problem in Christianity. It is not isolated to a single denomination. It may not be a global problem, but it is certainly ravaging Western society. It is being magnified by the unchristian behaviors of our world leaders, media news stories, and the heroes of pop culture; however, each of us is ultimately responsible for it and we cannot shirk our responsibility. It is resulting in the loss of souls and new generations who are growing up to reject Christ. It is undermining the legitimacy of the Gospel message and earning us every charge of hypocrisy we have ever received. It is so urgent that we should be sounding alarms and rallying troops, charging into battle against the evil that has infiltrated us.

The problem that we face is that, through our lack of love, we have become resounding gongs and clanging cymbals (1 Corinthians 13:1). Backed into a corner by our increasingly secular and permissive society, we have responded with anger instead of turning the other cheek and speaking the truth in love (Matthew 5:39 and Ephesians 4:15). Rather than seeking to meet our neighbors where they are, rather than cleaning and bandaging their gaping wounds, rather than saying,”Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” (Luke 23:34), we mock them, belittle them, hate and vilify them.

The absence of love colors our approach to homosexuality, end-of-life issues, contraception, denominational differences, racial discord, and countless other pressing topics that litter our social and political landscapes. Ironically, unlike many mothers who become more enraged by abortion after infant loss, since Noemi’s death, I have come to see our lack of love most poignantly in the way we address abortion.

Within a week of my daughter’s death, some dear friends gave me the book Sunshine after the Storm – A Survival Guide for The Grieving Mother, which contains a chapter about grief after medically recommended abortions. One of the stories in that chapter really struck me. While I absolutely believe that a new life is formed at the moment of conception and while I believe that abortion is, therefore, wrong, I also could not help but feel the agony of the mother in this story who was told,”Your child will be incapable of living without significant medical assistance. She will most likely seize to death upon delivery.” When that mother explained her choice to abort her baby by saying, “We did not want our daughter to exist solely because of machines…as much as we loved and wanted our daughter, we didn’t want her existence to be one of constant suffering,” I got it, I totally got it.

Having worked with profoundly disabled individuals who suffered years of intense pain and were constantly subjected to medical procedures that sustained their limitted existence, I was happy for Noemi when she died after 30 minutes of failed resuscitation. Had she lived, she would have sustained incredible brain damage and the choice to maintain her life would have been a way to avoid my own loss, rather than an opportunity for her to experience life. I am not saying that, had God granted her life, it would not have had value, nor that I would ever have deliberately ended it. Instead, I am saying that I would rather my daughter be in Heaven than be subjected to such a painful existence. Having experienced these thoughts about my own daughter, I understood the reason that this grieving mother chose to abort her child. Far from a “murderer,” she was a mother who, because she did not share my beliefs about abortion, did what she believed was the most loving thing that she could do for her baby.

How would Christ have responded to this mother if He met her leaving the abortion clinic? Would He shame her and condemn her or would He wrap her in His arms and allow her to sob on His shoulder? For that matter, how would He respond to a frightened teenager who gave her body away in an effort to feel the love and acceptance that she never recieved at home? Or to the young woman whose life was so incredibly painful that she preferred drug induced feelings of numbness and dissociation and then came out of her stupor and found herself “great with child?” Or to the mother who can’t feed the five children she already has or who fears that carrying a child to term will leave her children without their mother? Or to the young professional who has no relationship with God and has never understood how a bunch of cells can be considered a human but knows that those cells will ruin her career if she lets them grow?

He would never have compromised the truth or overlooked their sins, but, given the way He responded to the woman at the well (John 4), I suspect that He would have been more concerned about their salvation than about their sins. Afterall, He has already dealt with their sins, but He longs for a relationship with these women. I would venture to guess that He would have been careful to treat them with dignity and love.

What would our Christian witness be like if, instead of responding to these mothers with rage, disdain and condemnation, we responded like Jesus and we offered love? What would the world be like if, rather than resounding gongs and clanging cymbals, we were doves of peace and ambassadors of God’s love? The possibilities are endless because “love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:8)

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)