Month: August 2016

I interact every day with the mentally ill and the developmentally delayed.  I struggled with surface impressions that suggest people whose brains are not working right are less than me somehow.  Then, without me knowing it, my brain started to not work right.  And people couldn’t “see me” anymore.  They saw mental illness.

And they locked me out of their hearts.

One writer jolted me with the observation that the Bible teaches that our “minds” go to heaven while our brains are buried.  His conclusion is that the brain is an interface between the physical world and our minds.  This suggests that though we may have an defective brain, our mind is whole.  Our mind “sees” the world through the distorted brain and makes decisions, etc. based on inaccurate data.  But when we get to heaven we will see that the person we thought was less than us was in fact just the same as us.  They were simply dealing with life through a distorted lens.

When I meet that person in heaven, without defect, and with full memory of how I treated them, how comfortable will I be?

I don’t know if it is clear from “When satan works through “christians” (Part 1)” what I believe about abortion.  I believe a person is a person at fertilization.  I believe God already has a beautiful life planned out for them before sperm and egg are joined.  The “theologian” Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) has a character Horton (an elephant) who has big ears and can hear the tiniest sounds.  After investigating a speck, that others thought had no life, Horton found life and declared, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”  He was persecuted for defending life.

When does a person become a person?

Is it when the Supreme Court declares it is? (Not until born).  Is it when the baby can survive on its own? (That changes when technology changes).  When it has a heart beat (18 days?), fingerprints, or brain function? (Less than 10 weeks?).

When do you say?

The most honest answer from a staunch pro-abortionist I have heard is, “I don’t know.”  I said, “then if you don’t know if it is a person or not, wouldn’t it makes sense to say, ‘I don’t know if you are a person or not, just in case you are a person, I’m not going to kill you.’ ”

That is how I feel about abortion, not the people involved.

If a woman doesn’t know Jesus she can feel desperately alone with her decision.  She doesn’t know where help can come from.  The father may be pressuring her to end the baby’s life in order to escape his responsibility to the mother and his child.  She may not know that there are non-judgmental, loving Christians who will help her.  She may only know the condemnation of hate-filled, “christians” who are following satan (who only say they are Christians but do not know His love.  And the doctor almost certainly doesn’t know Jesus, and cannot share Jesus’ desire for the baby’s life.

Jesus does not judge these desperate people.  He died for them.  He loves them.  And I do too.  But His heart is grieved over what they have chosen to do with his unwelcome gift of a child.

Before I knew Jesus I honestly did not know when a person became a person.  What those-who-don’t-know-Jesus need is our love, not condemnation.

As the song so beautifully says, It is Your kindness that brings us to repentance, O Lord, knowing that you love us, no matter what we do, makes us want to love You too.