So, the day has arrived!
There’s something about our fascination with round numbers and the import we assign to them, numbers like…. 50. Numerically, it’s no big deal, really. It comes after 49 and before 51. But we love our round numbers and stop at them to catch our breath and survey the terrain upon which we trod. We look back from whence we came with perfect 20/20 hindsight and see dimly through the mist that is ever before us. So I’ll stop for a moment and do just that.
50 is less an occasion of angst for me than a cause of wonder and rejoicing (except for the 50,000 mile check-up with all of the doctors coming up).
This blog has certainly catalogued the disastrous course of self-destruction that we are on as a civilization and outlined some of the remedial steps necessary. It will continue to do so going into the future. I won’t wax elegiac over the world of my youth and how life was simpler then. It was. And it wasn’t.
JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, Race Riots, assassinations, Jonestown, Roe v. Wade… The list is endless. It was anything but placid.
I tend not to sit and look back very often, because I find myself laughing and grimacing by turns at how every one of my best laid plans has NEVER come to pass in the way I intended it to.
I plan, God laughs.
Looking back though, I can see how the many tributaries of my life have all converged at the pro-life juncture. It is without a doubt that I have been led here to this point. Seminary, College, graduate school, teaching, social services work, retreat ministry, campus ministry all have illuminated and informed a different aspect of the anthropological picture now being torn asunder by some pretty bad people.
Looking back at the Civil Rights Movement, who could have imagined that contraception and abortion would have been used to such tremendous effect in tearing apart the Black family, Black Community in ways that the KKK would have envied?
Looking back, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the prediction.
Looking back to 1968, Pope Paul VI predicted with deadly accuracy what would become of women and society with the adoption of contraception.
Looking back, Pope John Paul The Great predicted as much as Pope Paul, but then laid out the roadmap for us to reclaim our tattered human dignity in his stunning pontificate that lasted for 26 years. It’s all right there.
Looking back over the scientific literature of the past 50 years we see that the scientific and medical communities both show the disastrous effects of abortion and contraception. Many would love to come forward in support of the literature, but fear the loss of grant funding in retribution for so doing.
And that for me is the way forward. It is all but impossible to “play the game” in science and witness to life. So I decided not to play, to step out in faith and just start witnessing to the truth of science by linking to it in my posts, in my public speaking. I’m not hiding out.
God has stopped laughing at my plans. I’m where He has led me.
The way forward? I’m not making any more plans. He’ll lead.
His Grace is sufficient for me.
excellent article Gerard——–
My heart rejoices to see the number of men God is raising up to take back what belongs to God and to protect women and children -born and unborn—
Thank you, thank you & God bless and guide you
Missed this one — happy b-day!
Contraception is like dynamite: It can be used for evil as well as good. (And I know this because I have personally used it for the former….contraception, not dynamite, that is.)
Anyway…ha, ha, I am younger than you. But not by much!