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Monday, October 17, 2005 posted by R.C. 9:47 PM link |
Breeding Contempt I was young and foolish. I was taken in by their rhetoric, though not by their arguments. Back in the early 80’s, I was a carbon copy of Alex P. Keaton. I was short, well dressed, and preternaturally conservative. (Of course, now that it’s the 00’s, I’m still short, well dressed and preternaturally conservative.) My girlfriend, on the other hand, was my polar opposite. Well, at least she was short. I was raised in the country, she in the city. I was too conservative to vote Republican, she too liberal to vote Democratic. I studied the Bible at a Christian college. She had studied art and anthropology at Berkeley. So how did we manage? I practiced what was at once a mildly patronizing and wildly naïve understanding of my girlfriend, and those like her. I believed that liberals were well-intentioned dumb people. They were nice, gentle spirited mush heads who let their compassion drive their trains. I was visiting my girlfriend in San Francisco when Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schafly came to visit San Francisco. There we were, enjoying a treat at Rainbow Ice Cream on Powell Street, when we noted across the street dozens of police officers, some on horseback, some on dirt bikes lining the street. We went outside and discovered they were preparing for a riot. There was a demonstration against Falwell and Schafly going on at Union Square. My girlfriend and I went to take a look. My illusions were shattered. Hate more vile than anything a skinhead could come up with flowed from the podium. A sodomite dressed in a nun’s habit, a local activist known as Sister Boom Boom, performed a mock exorcism on an effigy of Schafly, pulling rubber snake after rubber snake out of her. I cried myself to sleep that night, mourning my lost innocence. Others, however, are still stuck with this foolish view. We have looked through the eyes of compassion, and missed our enemies. Those on the left, politically, culturally, theologically, are neither misunderstood, nor simply guilty of misunderstanding. They, while parading their broad mindedness, know that we are at war. They are by no means looking for peaceful co-existence. They are looking to drive us away. As I write, a court of appeals somewhere out west is hearing arguments. A pair of perverted young ladies, vile in their habits, are hoping to raise children. This particular pair doesn’t want to adopt. Instead they want to take advantage of the latest technology. They want their child to be conceived in a Petri dish, then implanted in one of their wombs. The only trouble they’re having, is that the doctor doesn’t want to do the procedure. His personal convictions, that such just wouldn’t be right, they reason, should not stand in the way of their own wishes. They are suing to force doctors with convictions against implanting lesbians with babies to do just that. So much for “We just want everybody to be free to follow their own conscience.” This is just one more example of the truth that the devil has scored a great victory with all this talk of left or right. We think the extreme right are those who want the government to decide this and that. And the extreme left are those who want the government to leave people alone. The truth is that those of us who love freedom want people to be able to do what they want, until they aggress against the persons or property of others. And those who hate freedom want all of us to be forced to embrace the foolishness of their vision of the good life. I am utterly ready to allow sodomites to raise those children they can breed to embrace the foolishness of their worldview. All I ask is that the rest of us, few as we may be, may be allowed to follow our consciences. [comments] |
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Saturday, October 08, 2005 posted by R.C. 6:13 AM link |
Grace and Justice Children, the Bible tells us, are a blessing sent from God, a reward, a heritage. To embrace this biblical wisdom is to invite such blessing, and if God should so bless, to delight in such rewards. We are thought strange by those around us who love death, but this cannot be compared to the eternal weight of the glory of covenant children. There is, however, a concomitant hardship that comes with embracing this view. We believe that children are a joy, and delight to be given joy, but we mourn when we lose that joy. Sometimes God closes wombs, and such times are fit, as Solomon spoke, for mourning. Through the course of our marriage, Denise and I have mourned five times for lost blessings, gifts God gave us all too briefly, that He in turn took through miscarriage. I’ll never forget holding Denise after the first, and choking through the wisdom of Job as I told her, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” We were comforted each time by God’s covenant faithfulness, and the hope that He might still bless us in the future. The Bible likewise tells us that a man who finds a godly wife has found a treasure. And so I have been blessed. A year or so ago, however, it was a distinct possibility that God would take her from me, as she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Again our confidence in God’s tender care was put to the test. Again, however, He not only did not betray that confidence, which He could not do whatever the outcome, but He allowed Denise to stay with us. We followed, despite the shared wisdom of many friends to try sundry alternatives, standard medical protocol for her condition. She has come out the other end of this ordeal cancer free, healthy, strong and, in all likelihood, barren. We began the process of adoption a month or two after Denise’s final surgery. We attended classes, filled out mountains of paper work, made countless phone calls to various agencies. We mentioned our hopes and plans to our families, congregation and a few close friends, and together we all prayed, and waited. A few months ago I received an unexpected phone call from my friend and co-laborer Doug Phillips. He began the conversation by telling me that he and his godly wife had recently, after seven healthy children, lost their first to miscarriage. Tears welled in my eyes as I sought to enter into my brother’s suffering. That, ultimately, Doug explained, wasn’t the reason for his call. He went on to explain that as he, and Beall and his children mourned the loss of their unborn child, that one son, Justice, approached his daddy with his piggy bank. “Daddy,” this young hero said, “I’ve got some money saved up. Could we go down to the orphanage and get Mommy a new baby?” There was no more welling for my tears. By now they had reached the cascade stage. “You have a fine son in Justice, Doug” I told him. “R.C., out of that conversation, the Phillips family has made a decision. We are going to send you a contribution to help pay for your adoption.” The cascade became a flood. Two days ago Denise and I picked up our new son. He was born seven weeks premature, but is doing very well. For our first six children Denise and I have followed a rather simple pattern in naming our children. As long as it is Celtic, I’ve told Denise, and a little unusual, you can name the children anything you’d like. We’ve now made an adjustment to that rule. Our motive, however, isn’t that our son doesn’t look particularly Scottish or Irish. He has brown curly hair, brown eyes, and when he grows into his big brother’s kilt, you’ll see that he likewise has brown knees. No, we’ve waived the rule for another reason. He has been given a Celtic first name. For his middle name, however, he has been named for a boy of honor, who loved his mother in her loss, which love in turn blessed our family. Our son will forever be known as Reilly Justice Sproul, and so forever more grace and justice will kiss. God is good, and His mercies endure forever. [comments] |
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005 posted by R.C. 9:00 PM link |
Double, Bubble, Toil and Stumble I try, like most of us, not to be easily offended. I don’t like the other idea of other people having to go about on pins and needles because of my weaknesses. But sometimes that’s where we end up. We are, after all, all Christians here, and are called to bear one another’s burdens. I pray one day my conscience will grow stronger, so that this wouldn’t be necessary. But we’re not there yet. So here it is. Would you please, so as not to cause me to stumble, stop suggesting that it is wrong to drink alcohol in moderation, or that drinking alcohol in moderation somehow is a failure to love my brothers? Thanks ever so much. [comments] |