What If Aborted Children Could Speak?

"There are things that you will only be able to learn [from] the weakest among us. And when you snuff them out, you are the one that loses....What sort of people are you going to be?"
~Gianna Jessen, abortion survivor

Since 1973, there have been 54 million children aborted legally in America. 

Over the last few weeks, I've been meditating quite a lot on those missing 54 million. I thought of the half-full services in mountain churches around my home. The dying congregations. The two-child millennial families. The elementary school that closed because there weren't enough children to keep it running. I imagined my college classmates blinking out of existence one by one - until 20% of each generation had disappeared. Celebrities and politicians and doctors and abolitionists and world-changers...blink - gone - blink - gone. Who would die? Who would live? Who were they? What were they like?

If they could speak to us - what would they say?

Planned Parenthood: The New Confederacy

Photo credit: USA Today

When I was about ten years old, my family attended Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The dinner show took place in a huge barn, where guests ate greasy food with their fingers and watched a dramatic display of stunt riding and antebellum fashion, to the backdrop of bluegrass. It was Southernness exaggerated, packaged, and monetized on an enormous scale. The guests were filtered to either side of the arena, based on place of origin. Yankees on one side; Johnny Rebs on the other. My family sat with the Confederates, and booed whenever the boys in blue galloped across the arena. Our Yankee opponents did the same as the Confederates appeared. It was fun, all in good humor, and in retrospect, more than a little obscene.

150 years ago, 600,000 men were slaughtered in a conflict which concerned the forced enslavement of 12.5 million human beings. The Dixie Stampede reduced that conflict to the level of a football game.

I didn't notice, because I didn't think about it very seriously. I wasn't alone. Southerners are quick to defend the confederate flag, because to them, it means a football game and not a war. Ask them to defend the flag, and they'll talk your ear off. Ask them where Antietam is, and they'll say, "What?" If you didn't know, the battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day in the history of the United States.

The Lost Art of Lament - Boston, Texas, and Gosnell

The trench is dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters
Torn apart
 

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

How long...

How long must we sing this song?

How long, how long... 

~U2, Sunday,Bloody Sunday

We all know what it feels like to be homesick. The many months in a foreign land, the unfamiliar sounds of a different country. After the hours on the road, you drag yourself indoors, ready for the weariness and discomfort to cease, ready to embrace that unconditional lover: the couch. 

But sometimes, there are problems that have no solution. Ever had a dream in your head? Perfect and untouched, the idea for a poem, or a book, or a piece of art? But when you take up the pen, the words cannot describe it. You know exactly what you’re talking about, but everything you try feels wrong, a futile attempt to describe a greater truth. You throw language at an object, but nothing captures the essence of it. The painting is just a scrawled crayon glimpse of an uncapturable vision. Sometimes, we feel a hunger that nothing satisfies.

I Liked White Better - or: Saruman and Social Darwinism - Part Two

Continued from I Liked White Better - Part One.

Saruman stands in stark opposition to the doctrines of Christianity. They teach that the weak and the poor are the ones that have the most to teach us—and, because of that, we should care deeply about how they are treated. God himself came to our world and was willing to be viewed as the bastard son of a poor carpenter from an underprivileged town which everyone (even inhabitants of the equally despised region of Galilee) shunned and avoided. He never attempted to get in the In Crowd; he never tried to look like one of the Wise.

Instead, he was firmly on the side of ordinary people, rather than those with Much. He was, theologically, a hobbit—one of the little people from a fly-over state. He was against the rich, but not just those Communists call bourgeoisie, the rich in material goods, but those prosperous in smarts or special talents. Not that possessing those things is bad (after all, he did give them to us), but not admitting that they are a gift is a great sin—akin to “blasphemy against the holy spirit.”

"Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

(Matthew 19:23-24 ESV)