Complimentary Story
Editor, Wisconsin Christian News:November/December 2024
Years ago, I was talking with a psychiatrist who had been assigned to write a report on a local sex murder crime. He told me that our sex drive is the strongest human emotion. I thought he was exaggerating until several years later, we were expecting our fifth child in eight years. I felt having this child was a mistake. We hadn’t planned for this pregnancy, we hadn’t exercised self-control, we hadn’t used any of many cultural safeguards available to avoid getting pregnant. God, however, saw this as an opportunity.
A few weeks later, we attended a conference on spiritual growth. At one of the noon lunches, I mentioned that we were having an unexpected fifth child. Several Christian friends confronted me and said I was a problem in our culture, not an answer. I came to realize I needed Holy Spirit help in the area of sexual relations. Within days, a born again experience followed.
Recently, we celebrated seventy one years of a very enjoyable marriage with five children and numerous grand-children and great grandchildren.
Unwanted pregnancies are even more common today despite the many helps available to prevent pregnancy. This has led me to think. We all make mistakes and it is generally understood that people who make mistakes should be the ones responsible for related costs. Then why is it today when a man and a woman make a “mistake” resulting in an unwanted pregnancy, abortion is often the “solution” and it is the unborn who pays the price for the mistake?
The price? The baby’s life.
Think about that. People avoid paying for “mistakes” that lead to pregnancy by believing the unborn is just an embryo, not a child, not living, not a human being. We have a thirty five year old granddaughter born in the seventh month of her mother’s pregnancy. She is intelligent, capable and lovely. How could she not have been a child seven months, five months, or three months before birth?
What is going on? Men and women driven by the strongest human emotion are creating life and labeling the unborn an embryo or fetus, anything but a baby or child. On the other hand, parents who want a child speak of their unborn as a child as soon as they learn of the pregnancy. Are we living in a world where what parents think, rather than the biology of the unborn determines reality?
The heart of the matter is our tendency and willingness to let emotions rather than our God given self-wills determine what is true. Our self-wills are a fruit of the spirit and play a key role in determining our quality of life. We call on our self-will multiple times daily when making decisions on whether to choose man’s way or God’s way. The former leads to works of the flesh; the latter to fruit of the Spirit.
In choosing not to admit that the unborn is a child, we are dulling one of our most precious assets, the ability to choose right from wrong. We are in a culture that lets its “self” walk away from truth. Letting feelings determine what is right is “woke” thinking and a path to despair and hopelessness, and too often destruction.
Christ said it clearly, “without Me you can do nothing; with Me all things are possible.” It is bad enough to make wrong choices on matters that affect us as individuals but it is unconscionable when the unborn is the one who must pay the price with their life.
-Jim Dickson, Neenah, Wis.
Jimdick777@aol.com
