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Archive for the ‘commentary’ Category

Let’s Add One More Factor

Posted in commentary, News, Scripture on April 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The horrors of abortion were in the news again last week, this time with a doctor performing an abortion on the ‘wrong’ baby.  As you can probably guess, the ‘wrong’ baby was diagnosed with Down syndrome.  Al Mohler, in his blog posting, Aborting the Wrong Baby, provides some helpful commentary on the subject.

Every time he does so, I end up looking at other information on the subject, and discovered this.

Dov Fox and Christopher L. Griffin, Jr., in their article for the Utah Law Review, Disability-Selective Abortion and the Americans with Disabilities Act, quote Dorothy Wertz from a 1992 article she wrote,  How Parents of Affected Children View Selective Abortion.  I’m going to look for that article.

According to Fox and Griffin, Dr. Wertz “identified eight factors that determine parents’ ‘revealed preferences’ for childbirth rather than disability-selective abortion:

(1) guilt over rejecting a child with a disability;

(2) the quality of life from infancy through adulthood for a child with a disability;

(3) whether the pregnancy is “wanted,” independent of fetal disability;

(4) optimism that children with disabilities will be cured or treated of the disabilities with which they are born;

(5) spousal compromises;

(6) financial constraints;

(7) risk; and

(8) the effect of a child with disabilities on existing children.”

I suggest we give parents one more factor: hope in God!

And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:19

Actually, I want to make it the SOLE factor, because all of the above from Dr. Wertz are based on personal feelings, predictions about the future, or information which may or may not be true.  God’s word, however, is always true.  And with his sovereign help, all of the above can be faced with hope.

Best of all, we can remind parents who God is in relation to all the people giving them information or advice about the future of their baby with a disability:

From Psalm 146:

Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the Lord!

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Is it too beautiful?

Posted in commentary, Scripture on April 19, 2010| 1 Comment »

As I lingered over some of the pictures in Just the Way I Am yesterday morning, the thought struck me:  will people going through hard times look at these pictures and not see their family situation?  The pictures of the children with disabilities (and their siblings or parents) are beautiful.

Frequently our lives are not like that.  My child has times when he does not carry ANY external manifestation of beauty.

That thought was quickly followed by this one:  of course the pictures are beautiful, because the children are beautiful!

Josh Hackney, the photographer for this book, overcame the Western cultural expectation that to look at or photograph disability is to look at and capture something strange or hideous or sad.  Josh worked hard to capture the children as God sees and created them – as God’s very own, for his glory.

Thus, Josh captured beauty!

Paul sometimes has bad days, and sometimes that results in my wanting to weep and hide over how hard everything seems to be.  And that doesn’t have ANYTHING to do with Paul or the situation. On those days, I have taken my eyes off  Jesus.

The fact is that God will supply all my needs (Phil. 4:19) in those moments, for me and for my boy and my other two boys and their sister and my wife and everyone else in Paul’s life.

How?  “According to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19).  That kind of wealth is both infinite and indescribable!  Easily God can supply every need, no matter what it is.

So, I am grateful this book is full of beautiful pictures of extraordinary children, even if some people, at first, will struggle that these are not their experiences with the children with disabilities they know.

Because together with the words from the Bible that accompanies every picture and the work of Holy Spirit, God can turn their mourning into joy, like he has done so frequently for me:

For the Lord has ransomed Jacob
and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy;
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.

Jeremiah 31:11,13

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Satire Saves?

Posted in commentary on April 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Satire is dangerous for me because it tends to fuel bad things in my heart.

But this piece of devastating humor by Joe Carter could serve to shake people up and maybe save some of our precious babies.

I recommend it: Four Reasons You Might Be Aborted: An Open Letter to Fetal Humans

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A regular reminder not to waste your cancer

Posted in commentary, Helpful things on April 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

If you want to find out where someone lands on the sovereignty of God, try saying this out loud:  God gave me my cancer, for his glory and for my good.

You will not receive a neutral response to that statement.

On a monthly basis my wife visits her oncologist’s clinic so they can test samples of her blood and administer drugs and generally see how she’s doing.  And at various times during the year, she will have a PET scan, CT scan, bone scan and MRI.  Each of these scans allows her doctor to see her body in different ways, which lets her doctor know if her Stage IV breast cancer is active again.  So, 16 times a year, she is not just reminded of her cancer, but submits to other people’s invasive procedures.  It is a constant reminder in our household not to take the life of a wife and mother for granted.

But we would waste it if that is all we believed about cancer, or if that was the only good that we saw.

Dianne already knew that God was sovereign over all things, including her cancer, when she got her diagnosis in October 2004.  When Pastor John received his cancer news in 2006, he wrote about it in a very helpful way, made even better when David Powlison, who also was diagnosed with cancer in early 2006, added his commentary.

I recommend all 10 ways not to waste your cancer, or any disease or disability.  It can be found here at Desiring God’s website. Here is the first way:

1. You will waste your cancer if you do not believe it is designed for you by God.

John Piper:

It will not do to say that God only uses our cancer but does not design it. What God permits, he permits for a reason. And that reason is his design. If God foresees molecular developments becoming cancer, he can stop it or not. If he does not, he has a purpose. Since he is infinitely wise, it is right to call this purpose a design. Satan is real and causes many pleasures and pains. But he is not ultimate. So when he strikes Job with boils (Job 2:7), Job attributes it ultimately to God (2:10) and the inspired writer agrees: “They . . . comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him” (Job 42:11). If you don’t believe your cancer is designed for you by God, you will waste it.

David Powlison:

Recognizing his designing hand does not make you stoic or dishonest or artificially buoyant. Instead, the reality of God’s design elicits and channels your honest outcry to your one true Savior. God’s design invites honest speech, rather than silencing us into resignation. Consider the honesty of the Psalms, of King Hezekiah (Isaiah 38), of Habakkuk 3. These people are bluntly, believingly honest because they know that God is God and set their hopes in him. Psalm 28 teaches you passionate, direct prayer to God. He must hear you. He will hear you. He will continue to work in you and your situation. This outcry comes from your sense of need for help (28:1-2). Then name your particular troubles to God (28:3-5). You are free to personalize with your own particulars. Often in life’s ‘various trials’ (James 1:2), what you face does not exactly map on to the particulars that David or Jesus faced – but the dynamic of faith is the same. Having cast your cares on him who cares for you, then voice your joy (28:6-7): the God-given peace that is beyond understanding. Finally, because faith always works out into love, your personal need and joy will branch out into loving concern for others (28:8-9). Illness can sharpen your awareness of how thoroughly God has already and always been at work in every detail of your life.

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You can study God the way a man studies the wife he passionately loves!

Posted in commentary, Scripture on April 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I loved this reminder from Josh Harris, author of Dug Down Deep:

“Theology matters because if we get it wrong, then our whole life will be wrong.”

The more I see people advocating for various forms of eugenics or aborting children with disabilities, or making God small in light of hard things like disease, or earthquakes or poverty, the more I see it isn’t a problem of information or education.

But if we know who God is, what he’s like, and how he loves, our whole perspective changes.  And not just head knowledge, but a heart-driven desire to know this God, the way a man wants to know the wife he passionately loves.

I know that has changed how I think about God and disability.  And it was God who did it!

I am grateful God replaced my foolish, small, sin-filled, man-centered concept of who he is (one in which I not only felt I had the right but the responsibility to question his wisdom, care of, and love for me and my boy) with actual statements about who he is from his own word, like this from Psalm 89:1-8:

I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord, forever;
with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.
For I said, “Steadfast love will be built up forever;
in the heavens you will establish your faithfulness.”
You have said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one;
I have sworn to David my servant:
‘I will establish your offspring forever,
and build your throne for all generations.’” Selah

Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord,
your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones!
For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord?
Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord,
a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones,
and awesome above all who are around him?
O Lord God of hosts,
who is mighty as you are, O Lord,
with your faithfulness all around you?

And to those who still wonder if theology matters, I invite you to watch this short video from Josh Harris:

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“Feeling Rules” kill babies with disabilities

Posted in commentary, Scripture on April 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Abortion is a horrible thing.  Framing it in research or clinical language cannot hide that fact.

Judith L. M. McCoyd, PhD, LCSW, in her article, “Discrepant Feeling Rules and Unscripted Emotion Work: Women Coping With Termination for Fetal Anomaly,” in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry makes many horrifying statements, most of which I think are made unintentionally.  For example, on the decision to abort a child with a disability:

Women’s decisions were often framed by feeling rules such as “I feel like I should be a saint and love and accept this potential baby,” but this came into conflict with awareness that they had to consider the implications of disability and its impact on every member of the family—especially living children. (p. 448)

This one paragraph highlights several things that are wrong with our cultural understanding of human life:

  1. These ‘feeling rules’ are framed by the culture, not by anything solid or transcendent.  We have relegated something as important as the killing of babies with disabilities to the whims of a childish, self-absorbed culture.
  2. The title of the article indicates the goal is coping with abortion better.  This paragraph, like the entire article, makes no moral distinction between letting a child live or killing the child through abortion.  We should be clearly advocating for better decisions – like letting the child live.
  3. There is no such thing as a potential baby; if that woman is pregnant, there is a baby.  Some babies will come, and even die from, their disabilities.  That should not place them in a different category of human life.  Aborting a ‘potential’ life is still aborting a living human.
  4. The conflict listed here is entirely culturally created and could just as easily be reconstituted as normal and positive.  My family and many others view our disabled member as uniquely gifted by God to make us more aware and compassionate of others and more dependent on God.  In other words, the child with the disability has had and continues to have a positive impact on others.
  5. The unborn baby is just as living as the already born ‘living children.’

There were other statements that were equally chilling:

The intersection of disability with decision making due to fetal anomaly reveals another place where societal norms differ and the feeling rules are discrepant. The women in this study all had desired pregnancies that they would not have ended had an anomaly not been diagnosed. Women’s ambivalence about the justification of ending a pregnancy intersects with the ambivalence about the nature and quality of life with a disability as lived in the United States. (p. 447)

So, rather than attack the ambivalence about the “nature and quality of life with a disability,” we simply remove the person with the disability.  That is not ambivalence, that is a final, irreversible act of violence done by the powerful against the powerless.  In any other context except this one, we call that wrong.

No, let us attack those societal norms and bring them down!  When women and men create a child, let them get fully informed responses when the child is coming with a disability, and not just from medical professionals.  Let them hear from other parents with similarly-disabled children, and siblings, and grandparents and friends and church members and pastors.  Let that family be showered with people who care about them and the child who is yet to be born.

We will tell them the truth about how hard it will be and how much they will all suffer.  And we will tell them the truth about the sovereignty of God in all things, his sustaining power and overwhelming love.  We will tell them about the mistakes we have made, and how God has worked even through our mistakes to make his name glorious in how he helps us.

Lord willing, there will be fewer women ‘coping’ with the effects of abortion and more women triumphing as God-centered mothers, parenting in the strength that God supplies.  And the fathers who were largely absent from this journal article will take their rightful place as guardians and guides of their children – all of them.

Then we will not be ruled by our feelings which change quickly, but by the One who created and sustains us, including our children with disabilities.  And together we will declare with the Psalmist:

Praise the Lord, all nations!
Extol him, all peoples!
For great is his steadfast love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord!

Psalm 117

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“Out of the mouths of babies. . . to still the enemy and the avenger”

Posted in commentary, Scripture on April 6, 2010| 5 Comments »

More than one person made the reference, ‘out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise,’ to me after seeing Paul sing yesterday.  Usually people are referencing Matthew 21:14-16, where Jesus himself uttered those words:

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.  But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,

“‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?”

Jesus is referencing Psalm 8:2

Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

To still the enemy and the avenger?

I needed some help with that, so I turned to Matthew Henry’s Commentary and found this very helpful statement on that verse:

Sometimes the power of God brings to pass great things in his church by very weak and unlikely instruments, and confounds the noble, wise, and mighty, by the base, and weak, and foolish things of the world, that no flesh may glory in his presence, but the excellency of the power may the more evidently appear to be of God, and not of man, 1 Corinthians 1:27,28.

Yes!  But why the reference to enemies?  Matthew Henry continues:

This he does because of his enemies, because they are insolent and haughty, that he may still them, may put them to silence, and put them to shame, and so be justly avenged on the avengers; see Acts 4:14,6:10. The devil is the great enemy and avenger, and by the preaching of the gospel he was in a great measure stilled, his oracles were silenced, the advocates of his cause were confounded, and unclean spirits themselves were not suffered to speak.

In singing this let us give God the glory of his great name, and of the great things he has done by the power of his gospel, in the chariot of which the exalted Redeemer rides forth conquering and to conquer, and ought to be attended, not only with our praises, but with our best wishes. Praise is perfected (that is, God is in the highest degree glorified) when strength is ordained out of the mouth of babes and sucklings.

My boy is not a baby or an infant – he’s almost 15 years old.  But he has been graced with both innocence and confidence.  When he sings, he sings without fear or any thought to what other people may think.  He sings at school and he sings on the bus and he sings in stores and he sings at home.  He proclaims, frequently, who God is.

Can you imagine what that does to the evil one when my boy, and all the other girls and boys like Paul, sing?  How many unclean spirits have our children with significant cognitive disabilities silenced by their innocent praises?  How often have we been spiritually protected through those in our care?  How frequently has God smiled at the God-centeredness of those the world considers expendable?

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The Lord is risen!

Posted in commentary on April 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I had the privilege last week of meeting with many friends of Desiring God – the Lord is up to something in South Dakota!  I’ll probably blog on some of it next week.

In the meantime, this video has been a great encouragement to me.  On this day of celebration, enjoy who our Christ is!

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In His Image – a blog by a healthcare professional

Posted in commentary on March 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »

God has blessed me with many people as we have walked this path of disability.  One is a young woman who writes the blog, In the Small Stuff.

Her blog posting for March 19 is stunning; I highly recommend it.

And please join me in asking God to make her view of God and his purposeful creation of people with disabilities the norm among medical professionals rather than the exception.

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An update from Matt Chandler

Posted in commentary on March 18, 2010| 1 Comment »

Pastor Matt Chander continues his fight against cancer, with a future hope of eternal joy!

“Wanted to root myself in the truth.”  Powerful example of continuing to read in the word, even passages we might consider familiar.

I loved his preaching before he became ill with the cancer.  God has given him even more credibility as he now lives suffering and the sovereignty of God.

Thank you to Justin Taylor for pointing me to it.

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