Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Supreme Court declines to block Texas abortion law that bans procedure at six weeks

Dear God, something really, really big recently happened in my state that will impact a woman’s ability to abort a pregnancy. As someone who is pro-life, I’m curious that I’m not dancing on the tables and celebrating. I’m a believer in protecting the right of unborn children to live. Now that the state where I live is supporting that cause through its law, and the Supreme Court of the United States is passively affirming the law, what does that functionally mean?

By the numbers, 150 children per day will not be aborted in Texas (I’m going to ignore the possible number that will go to another state or will be illegally aborted). That translates into over 50,000 children per year, in Texas, who will now be born and require resources to survive. That means more Medicaid spending, More food stamps. More WIC. More needs for Early Head Start, Head Start, and spaces in schools. Assuming that a lot of them are born into difficult homes and poverty, ultimately we will need more police, more jail space. Maybe this is why I’m not dancing on the table. I’m playing the tape to the end and realizing that there is now a lot of work to do.

Father, show me my part to play in all of this. Whether it is helping crisis pregnancy centers, early childhood intervention programs, parent support programs, etc. Show me how to respond. How to spend my money. How to spend my time. Give me your eyes, and, Holy Spirit, move me.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen

Dear God, I have a confession to make. I’ve pretty much avoided the prophets. The only excuse I have is no excuse at all–I’ve been lazy. I can’t just take a little chunk from Isaiah or Jeremiah and figure out what is going on. I can’t even read the whole book and really get a picture of the context and what is happening. It would take some research and time for me to understand what you might have to teach me through those men, and I’ve been unwilling to commit the time to do it. I’m sorry for that.

I have a vacation coming up soon, and I have an entire set of biblical commentaries. I’ve also been looking for something to read on this vacation to take the place of some of the normal things I do that take (waste?) my time. So my plan is to pick two commentaries and read them while I’m on the trip. And I will pray to you about them as I go. Sometimes through these journals and sometimes not. But I know you have a lot to teach me and apply to our current world through those books.

One thing I feel pretty poignantly right now is the different things happening in the world and what my personal role is in addressing them. What is my response to the tragedies in Afghanistan and Haiti? Human trafficking everywhere (including here)? Supporting the local medical community through COVID? Becoming an advocate for smart pandemic policies? What would you have me do?

Then there are personal things. My relationships with family members. My witness to friends. My willingness to lean on friends and be vulnerable with them.

Something tells me that there might be some words of the Holy Spirit for me buried within those books. So I’m committing you to now that I am going to take the time to start doing a little mining. I might start this weekend, but I am sure I will start when my vacation begins next weekend. I am sorry for my laziness in this area. I am sorry I’ve shunned about 1/3 of your scripture. I’m sorry there are still these parts of me that are so selfish.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen

Dear God, I have a friend who is dying. While I sat watching him lie in bed yesterday and then listened to people talk about him in the times when I wasn’t in the room with him, I started to kind of put some things together.

First, earlier in the day, he wasn’t ready. He was scared. He was fighting the oncoming death. He’s been on hospice for weeks. He’s been terminally ill for years. But he wasn’t ready. He didn’t want any medications to ease his pain or anxiety. Yeah. He wasn’t ready. Then, and for his privacy’s sake I won’t go into too much detail, but about the middle of the day he was tired. He was ready.

So what was he ready for? Well, as I sit and think about myself and what I hold onto in life, I think there might be a few things.

• Ready to stop participating in the world and its history.
• Ready to stop contributing to the lives around me.
• Ready to accept that I’ve done all I will do and the world will now go on without me, perhaps forgetting me completely.
• Ready to say goodbye.

So how does that relate to the title I gave this prayer? Well, when one mom was talking about this friend’s influence on her children, she said he always instilled in them that they could do anything they wanted to do, but it would take hard work. When I heard this, I started to put some things together–even in my own heart. For so many of us, this is how we approach life. We have things to accomplish. We have things we want to achieve. We have power to attain, influence to acquire, and admiration to earn. Ultimately, we want to be able to stack up our life against someone else’s and hope we compare favorably. And I use all of this broadly and from a worldly perspective because these are the things the world calls us to do.

But what if we take the philosophy of doing anything we want in life and bring it under your authority? When we get to the end of the road, what is it that you would like us to stack up for comparison?

• We we able to be humble, admit our faults/weaknesses, and share them with others?
• Did we pursue relationship with you and become more Christlike in the process? In other words, were we Jesus followers, and not just Jesus believers?
• Were we in close enough relationship with you that we knew to stop and listen for your still, small voice to call us to action?
• Did we love richly and give your mercy to others?
• Did we bring others the hope and peace of relationship with you?

Out of the 350 million Americans, or 6+ billion people in the world, the odds are long that my life will be remembered more than a few years beyond my death. Few people achieve the notoriety of leaving a mark on the world like presidents of the United States, great captains of industry like Steve Jobs, etc. No, my life will be smaller than theirs. But that’s okay.

Father, what I want in life is to be found faithful. I want to be open-minded to the idea that I don’t know as much as I think I know–about the world, or myself. I want to be willing to do what I think is right even though it might cost me the love of someone I love, even if what I’m doing is for their good. I want to have touched lives in a way that plays throughout history, and it’s okay if I do this anonymously. It’s okay if my name is lost to history. I know it is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. That’s all I need.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen

Dear God, I was just scanning headlines this morning when I came across this article from Buzzfeed. Let me just list the 17 reasons really quickly:

• I have never seen a person with children and thought to myself, ‘I want that life.’
• I’m too mentally ill from childhood trauma and have various autoimmune diseases It wouldn’t be fair to have a child when I’m not completely present for them. I love kids, but not for me.
• Once I’m a mom, I can never not be a mom. I like deciding what I can do whenever I want to without having to care for a child. I feel like a partner is already ‘compromise’ (for lack of a better word) of free time.
• I understand the immense responsibility and sacrifice they are, and choose instead to work on myself and continue to nurture my own experiences and growth through the one life I have.
• Pregnancy is terrifying to me. I never want to try it.
• I’ve just never had that desire. I always thought it would ‘kick in’ as I got older, but no. It’s been kinda hard to come to terms with it in regards to society’s standards and expectations.
• I don’t want to go through birth and don’t like the baby stage. Children and toddlers are fun and can be adorable, but not 24/7. I like money and the peace of mind that I won’t do anything to screw up their lives, and finally, I’m not responsible or mature enough.
• I love my life too much. I hate mess and noise, I love traveling whenever I like, I love going for trips and meals out with my husband, and I love being able to do what I want whenever I want. I don’t want to spend my days listening to crying, arguing, whining, doing the school run in the rain, and shopping for food. The planet has plenty of humans and we have done a great job of wrecking the planet and treating animals so cruelly, I don’t want to add to that problem.
• In my opinion, I should justify why I want kids instead of finding reasons why I don’t want them. In my case, I don’t have a reason to want them.
• On the relationships front, I remember seeing a statistic that more marriages with kids end in divorce than marriages without kids — having kids wrecks marriages. Other studies have found that child-free couples are FAR happier than couples with kids.
• I don’t have the delusion that having children will somehow guarantee love or that I won’t be alone on my deathbed. Lots of people are alone on their deathbed anyway (I work in end-of-life care). Also, given the state of the Earth with regards to climate change, I feel it’s kinda s***** to keep making more humans. We probably can’t turn this ship around.
• Our society is structures so that nearly everyone but the wealthy are living hand-to-mouth. I feel no security in my life and find life stressful. I can’t imagine how bad that would be if I had to worry about another soul.
• I’m selfish, so I’m not going to sacrifice my time for them. I don’t want to bring kids into this world if they can’t be unconditionally loved.
• I’m absolutely terrified of developing postpartum depression.
• I’m stingy. I don’t want something that takes up the majority of my life for the foreseeable future.
• I’m the kind of person that often changes his mind. Like, to do whatever he wants and go back if need be. Where will my return option be if I have a child?
• I’d rather regret not having children than regret having them.

Wow, that’s quite a list. My responses to it have morphed throughout the day. My first response was to focus on the selfishness that most of these quotes claim for themselves and how it’s good for all of us to be broken from our selfishness. This is something that needs to be purged from all of our lives, and children is not a sure-fire way to do it, but it’s certainly a side-effect if I let it be. But the more I think about that the more I think about the caveat “if I let it be.” Too many parents do not sacrifice for their children the way they should. Perhaps the father shirks his responsibility and leaves the mother with all of it. The opposite can be true as well, although this can be less common.

And I’m not going to get into who the children become when they grow up, being damaged by their childhood (childhood trauma was mentioned a few times in the list). That’s a whole different topic. I’m talking about the parents now.

Back on topic, the more I thought about it the more I realized that a lot of key Bible characters were not fathers. We know that Jesus wasn’t a father. Saul/Paul wasn’t a father. I don’t know that we can be sure, but it appears that John the Baptist wasn’t a father. I don’t know about the others such as Peter (we know he was married), Timothy, John Mark, etc. But I think it can be concluded that it’s not a sin to not be a father (although there are some churches that hold birth control up as a sin, and I’m not going to get into that either–not the point of what I’m writing here).

So if it’s not a sin to not be a parent (the birth control debate not withstanding), how do I feel about these reasons? Am I willing to embrace them as legitimate? I have two children who are now in their 20s. Suffice it to say, things did not go as I hoped for them, but that doesn’t mean their lives haven’t played out so far exactly how you’ve needed them to play out for their sakes. I will say, as I think about them each possibly having children one day, I do worry about their ability to fight against the tides in society as they raise any grandchildren my wife and I might have. It was more complicated to raise them than it was for my parents to raise me. Technology made taking away privileges almost impossible because they had so many more ways to sneak around “grounding” than I could ever have imagined. Now you add the increasing toxicity of social media and the media to which they will be exposed without my ability to control it–it’s frightening. I was 26 when our son was born. If I were 25 now, I would seriously think twice about having children simply because of the current I have have to swim against.

At the same time, I heard someone say one time, if Christians stop having children then who is left to have children? The same is true for things like public schools. If Christians take their children out of public schools, who is left in public school?

I don’t know. I’m not getting as far with this topic and article as I had hoped. I guess I would say that I understand each individual’s reluctance to have children. I understand the fear. I understand the selfishness. I understand the philosophical question of whether the Earth can handle more children. I guess what I would counsel anyone wrestling with this question–or not wrestling–to keep an open mind as you go through life. Of course, if they are Christians, listen to your still small voice. Listen to the Holy Spirit. Be willing to have your life turned upside down and even made miserable. Maybe that’s what you have for us. Maybe that’s the road you need us to me or them to walk to turn us into the people you need us to be. Maybe our lives are not about us, but about you. But one thing I do hope–that each person who decides to not have children will refrain from giving parenting advice to those of us who have them. 🙂

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen

Dear God, it’s 9:20 at night and I’m sitting in front of my house, cooking off after a workout. The last 28 hours have been quite something. Really, I have to add the 12 hours leading up to it, so we will say that I’ve been in a bit of an emotional state since yesterday morning. I have so many things I’m thinking, and one of the challenges is that, for privacy reasons for others, I cannot explicitly say what I’m thinking if I post this on the blog. But then again, maybe speaking of my thoughts vaguely will be a good exercise for me to look beyond the actual circumstances and see what deeper issue(s) might be at their core.

It’s hard to watch someone else struggle. It’s hard to watch them have to walk a road you’ve already walked, at least to some extent, and know the strain that’s ahead for them. But I also know something they cannot quite yet appreciate. Actually, I know two things. One, the difficult path they’ve already walked has made them someone they’d never have otherwise become. Two, the difficult path ahead will teach them more about themselves and help them accomplish more than they would without the struggle. It looks bad now, but they will look back 10 years from now and see how this path made them who they are.

Father, help my friend. Make this count. Make their pain count. Don’t let it be wasted. Make it count for them, for those in their life now, and those to come. Show me who you need me to be in their life. And help me to not get in your way and short circuit anything you are trying to do. And use this to teach me as well. To thine, be the glory, oh, Lord.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen