SHE OPENED A DOOR FOR LOVE AND RICHNESS

 

“And what do you do for a living? I am frequently asked. “Well, umm, … I’m a stay-at-home father with a severely disabled daughter.”  “My, … you must be an amazing man, I could never do what you are doing.” 

Nothing puffs me up more than to be amazing, except with the realization that I am not. However, something is amazing to me. It's amazing to me that I have been blessed with the privilege of caring for my disabled daughter for 29 years.

From the beginning, as new parents, my wife Caroline and I were counseled by professionals to give up our child because a disabled child is a great burden and a huge financial commitment. We were encouraged to place her in the care of professionals so that we could “get on with our lives.”

There were two crucial considerations that we as parents that we think about. First was that healthcare professionals did not have a clue how to care for our child. Within days of Nancy's emergency caesarean birth, exasperated nurses handed our seizuring daughter to us because they were unable to feed or calm her.  It was evident that professionals didn't know any more about what Nancy needed then we knew, as young, inexperienced parents. We learned that after hours of cuddling, Nancy was relaxed enough to breastfeed.

The second consideration was that there were no professionals who could love Nancy like we did. Nancy is the product of love between my wife and myself; she is God's creation. Whatever Nancy was or would become, she was part of us; she was a member of our family. 

As Nancy’s father, my number one responsibility is to love and care for her even though I would be required to make sacrifices. I chose to honor God's instruction in Ephesians 5:28, “Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies”; because I knew that a strong marriage would equip us to be a strong family. Some days I felt cheated from time with my wife because Nancy's care came first. Other days I felt like a failure when my efforts to calm Nancy seemed useless. 

The love chapter (1 Corinthians 13) speaks about love and I took this command to love my wife, my child and my family seriously. I was reminded, “Love never fails.” Whenever anger welled up in me and my feelings of inadequacy bore down on me, these thoughts renewed my focus: 

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (verses 4-7).

Nancy taught our family a love lesson; We have learned that sacrifice and difficulty are made bearable by faith in Jesus Christ through the practice of love as defined in first Corinthians 13. While Nancy is not able to communicate and is totally dependent on those who love her, she has blessed me immensely. My wife and companion of 35 years passed away two years ago. Nancy continues to live with me and I love and care for her. What I have not achieved in my life because of my devotion to Nancy has been exceeded by blessings I could never have imagined. She truly is God's gift and she has opened the door of love and richness that I could have never imagined. God does all things well!

David P., Alberta Canada

THIS FATHER'S DAY, I REFLECTED ON HEART TRANSPLANT HISTORY

 

My father and me, September 1967

Two months later, my dad suffered a massive heart attack that nearly killed him (his heart stopped 3 times and was revived with defibrillators (that was the first time I heard of them). His heart was so badly damaged from earlier angina (he was a pharmacist, we suspected he had been treating his own symptoms with things like nitroglycerin for quite some time). When he had his major heart attack, he was 50 and I was 14. 

For days, his life hung in the balance. On December 3rd 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant on a South African named Louis Washansky. My father's treating heart specialist told the families with heart patients in the ICU, that they were not to talk about the heart transplant with them. The doctor said the transplant was premature because anti-rejection drugs weren't ready. He was right. Mr. Washansky died within 18 days of his heart transplant. We were devastated because we had been grasping at a staw of hope for our dying loved ones. Happily, my dad did not die and lived another two years, without a transplant.

Dr. Barnard did his second transplant on 3 January 1968, on a dentist named Philip Blaiberg who lived 19 months, dying from heart complications on 17 August 1969. Anti-rejection drugs progressed at lightning speed. Today, anti-rejection drugs and therapies have been perfected. According to the Mayo Clinic, of people who have a heart transplant, half are alive 11 years after transplant surgery. There are about 5,000 heart transplants performed around the world annually.

FROM ASSISTED SUICIDE TO ASSISTED LIVING

New Zealander Claire Freeman was disabled in a car accident at the age of seventeen. She became suicidal. and advocated for legalizing assisted suicide in New Zealand. In Canada, we euphemistically call it "medical assistance in dying" — even if the person is not actually dying. (People used to call it murder.)

Today Claire is happy to be alive. She worked through her external and internal trauma and grief. When it comes to suicide (assisted or otherwise) communities must never acquiesce to people's desire to die when they have sunk beneath the turbulent waves of their circumstances. 

The goal of any civilized society must be to encourage live with dignity and assisted for the despaired or defeated individual find that dignity. Nobody knows what tomorrow may bring, or what's around the next corner of life. It's that way for everybody and has been forever. 

Euthanasia and assisted suicide advocates talk about "death with dignity." Dignity is not bestowed someone by injecting them with a lethal substance. Dying with dignity is the end result of having lived with dignity. Helping someone kill themselves is not dignity it is abandonment and exclusion from the human family—the ultimate exclusion of the tomb.  

People with disabilities (often acquired as adults) need support and a community of concern that lifts their value, even if they have ceased to believe in their own value. We must ensure resources are available to them to overcome their trauma, loss and grief and eventually strike a new course for their lives within their new reality.   

That's what a real community is. That's what a real community does.

MDP

DONALD TRUMP'S TRIAL AND CONVICTION: HARBINGERS OF THINGS TO COME?

 

I think Donald Trump’s conviction will be overturned on appeal—but it won’t happen until after the election. It was part of the Democrat’s nasty strategy to win the election; they were willing to make a mockery of America’s justice system, to achieve it. They had to get rid of the effective and threatening opposition: Donald Trump. 

We saw similar tactics with Vladimir Putin and the recent election in Russia he handily won (see https://www.voanews.com/a/putin-wins-election-with-no-effective-opposition/7531874.html ). You could easily and accurately replace the headline by replacing Putin’s name with Joe Biden. In the abhorrent farcical conviction of Donald Trump, we witnessed, by their actions, that the Democrats do not believe in free and fair elections; they are only concerned about retaining power at any cost and winning the Presidency again in November. 

Exactly one week after Donald Trump was falsely convicted in New York, the free world solemnly observed the 80^th anniversary of D-day.  

I am grieved that the great democracy of America—perhaps the greatest nation to ever exist in the course of history—a nation that raised human rights and liberty to heights that ever existed, … has come to this point: Its long and honoured system of established legal jurisprudence rooted in more than 700 years of Anglo-American Common Law, was betrayed and sullied by Democrats for the sake of political gain to win the November presidential election. They and their liberal media propagandists, like (MSNBC and CNN and others) want to gleefully refer to Donald Trump as a “convicted felon”. In its bluntest terms, the Democrats have betrayed the high ideal of free and fair elections—and democracy itself. 

I believe that the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers who gave up their lives in the Second World War would be appalled at what America is becoming (also Canada and Britain). America is slowly abandoning the towering and sacred principles that founded it. (The same is true for my nation of Canada.) 

Indeed, things may seem dire, but may I remind you of Winston Churchill’s immortal words on the eve of the Battle of Britain, for which so many Allied soldiers died:

“I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”[1]

 Those who still believe that Western Christian civilization with its laws, traditions, institutions, and mores—that raised human dignity to its greatest heights in history—must prepare to do battle! 

This new battle will not be fought with guns and blood, it will be a war of ideas, fought against moral corruption, pernicious philosophies and ideologies that turned against God and His blessings that America enjoyed for 248 years. America was the city of the hill, as Ronald Reagan so often called it, a beacon of freedom, justice and liberty for the world to see and emulate. 

In 1787, when the American Constitution was being signed, Benjamin Franklin turned toward the President’s chair. Behind it was a painting of a rising sun. He commented to a few members standing near him:

“I have often and often, in the course of the sessions, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looking behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now at length, I have the happiness to know. That it is rising, and not setting.”[2]

It is time, 237 years later, for Americans to look to the President’s chair once again, and decide if the sun is rising or setting on the United States. Who will sit there: Donald Trump or Joe Biden? There are only two choices. I believe that decision will determine whether the sun that rose on sunlit uplands of the United States of America will drag the nation into the abyss of a new Dark Age? 

With all his faults, and there are many, it will be Donald Trump who can avoid the abyss. The Democrats, their useful idiots and propagandists in the liberal media, and establishment élites are leading America toward it a New Dark Age. I believe the future of America looks stark unless She changes course. But change to what? Reach in your pocket, pull out a coin and read it: “In God We Trust”. There lies the answer in all places and all times. 

What shall it be? One nation under God, or one godless nation, as Joe Biden and a Congress dominated by Democrats will make America; the terrible abyss of a New Dark Age is not far away. The city on the hill will fade. America’s beacon of liberty will dim and then extinguish.

 You must decide! I believe the 2024 Presidential election will determine whether the great American experiment will live or die and whether that which America's Founders envisioned will fade into history. The people must decide. 

I believe that if you choose Joe Biden, America is doomed. The Democrats have special agendas they will inflict on the people (think Title IX, support for abortion up to the 9th month, willingness to stack the Supreme Court and return Roe v Wade, to mention just a few). The Democrats are leading the charge to the New Dark Age that Winston Churchill spoke about. At least Donald Trump is open to ideas that will make America great again. The truth will keep marching on be it good or bad. Click here. 

MDP

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[1] “THEIR FINEST HOUR”, International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/their-finest-hour/ , accessed from Internet 07 June 2024.

[2] “FRANKLIN ON THE CONSTITUTION, in READINGS IN WORLD HISTORY, ed. Leften S. Stavrianos, Loretta Kreider Andrews, George I. Blanksten, Paul L. Murphy, Lacey Baldwin Smith (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1962), p.258.

SUFFERING AS GOD'S HAMMER AND CHISEL

 The following article was written by Joni Eareckson Tada for a small book HumanLifeMatters published about  20 years ago under the title SURRENDER TO FREEDOM: Devotions For The Hurting Soul. It contained many devotional stories of Christians (and/or their loved ones) who have faced serious disability or illnesses. 

I am considering revising and updating the book, depending on the interest expressed. If you are interested in purchasing the book (all proceeds will help finance the making of my Christian pro-life movie about transcending disability called"TRANSCEND: A Journey Toward Love" return this email and put "Surrender To Freedom" in the subject heading.

______________________________________________________________________________

If there's one verse I know by heart sittin’ in this wheelchair, it's 2 Corinthians 8-9, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

In the early years of my paralysis when I was squirming to be healed, I pleaded with the Lord to take my wheelchair away. To make a long story short, I got the same response as Apostle Paul. My condition remained chronic.

Why would some hardships never go away? You pray and plead until your knees get sore; yet the pinched nerve doesn't heal, multiple sclerosis doesn't halt, the Alzheimer's doesn't regress, the marriage doesn't get better, the job promotion never comes, and the engagement night never arrives. After 47 years in a wheelchair, this is the conclusion I've come to...

The core of God's plan is to rescue us from self-centeredness. Suffering, especially the chronic kind, is God's choice tool to accomplish this. It means the hurting and hammering process won't end until we become completely holy (and there’s no chance of that happening this side of Eternity).

This is why I can accept my paralysis as a chronic condition. When I broke my neck, it wasn't a jigsaw puzzle I had to solve fast nor was it a quick jolt to get me back on track. My spinal cord injury was the beginning of a long, arduous process of becoming more like Christ. There are times I wish it were easier, but I recognize I have a long way to go before I am like Christ, polished and complete in His image.

The good news is God is ready to give me more than enough help from His end. Abundantly more. If grace abounds where sin abounds (as the Bible puts it), then grace must also abound where suffering abounds. God's power more than sustains us through hardships that hang around. God's grace—the desire and the power to do His will—is sufficient. “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled but healed” (Hebrews 12.12). Health and wholeness, maturity and completeness, will be mine one day. Then, the hammer and chisel will be put away once and for all. The only thing that will be “chronic” is joy.

Joni EarecksonTada

TELEVISION COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH MORE

Fifty years ago, I trained in radio and television arts. I briefly worked in both before moving to the federal government to work in community development. Multiple sclerosis (diagnosed at 30) forced me into medical retirement at the age of 38. 

But my love for television's potential continued: Not in what it turned out to be, but what it could have been. Television could have been so much more than the programming wasteland of mediocre formula sitcoms and reality shows (that are not real). Television should have been about education not the indoctrination of liberal agendas. 

Television could have been a constructive tool to promote community, human development and social cohesion. It could have been a tool dedicated to educating children and adults about the arts, sciences, history, classics in literature, ... programming that people can trust not to have a political bias or promote special agendas such as sexual orientation and gender identification (SOGI). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and PBS used to do that, or at least they tried. 

I'm still an optimist, even when there is no reason to be. If the public had demanded better from television networks, they would have done better. Television decision-makers did not use their opportunity wisely. Today's social media is making network television irrelevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA 

In 1969, Mr. Rogers saved public television

THE DIVINE LOVER SEEKS THE LOVED

 

I remember visiting a couple who had just lost their disabled daughter. I’ll call them Mrs. and Mrs. Smith. Their daughter’s name was Abby.  Abby was born profoundly handicapped and she died at the age of 34. She never spoke a word, never walked, never fed herself or lived independently. But Abby was loved by her family. Mr. and Mrs. Smith were in deep grief about their loss of Abby.

I asked them to tell me about their daughter. A cascade of memories poured out, accompanied by photographs, as they reminisced about their daughter’s life. Although initially surprised at their willingness to freely share bittersweet memories, I was deeply touched that they trusted me with something as fragile and tender as their sorrow and broken hearts. 

When Abby was born, a doctor with the bedside manner of a bulldog told Mrs. Smith to put her baby in an institution and forget the day she was born. Some advice! Some doctor! Some bulldog! 

Throughout her life, most people wrote Abbey off as a “vegetable.” But for those who made time for her, she was a blessing to their lives and she changed them. It was only in her last few years when Abbey became increasingly ill and frail, that she began to communicate through her little finger: up for yes, down for no. And then she was gone.

At the end of my visit with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I asked if Abby's disability made their lives richer or poorer. Without hesitation, both responded in unison, “Richer!” Mrs. Smith told me that Abby taught them “what really matters in life.” I asked, “What really matters?” She responded, “Health.”

Indeed, health does matter. Every person wants a healthy life, a healthy spouse, healthy children and grandchildren. It is right for us to always thank God for our health and the health of loved ones. But we must also be aware that health never lasts. It can't. The Fall mutated God's intention for His creation making inevitable decline and death as our fate.

I know of what I write. I lost my health decades ago at the age of 30. I’m 71 now. How would I answer the question: “What really matters?” Being a hopeless romantic, my answer would be “love.” But that answer is also incomplete: love of what or whom? Just as we are not guaranteed health, neither are we guaranteed human love. Although I am blessed with the love of a wonderful wife and family, I have met disabled people who seemed unloved by anyone. From all appearances, they do not seem to have health or love. 

Here's the very good news: appearances can be deceiving. They, you, me, we all are loved by God — the author of life and love — even if our health fails, our loved ones reject us or die, and our sorrow and loneliness make us turn in on ourselves, we are still loved by God, (even though we may be oblivious to it).

God's love is the one constant—the only thing we can ultimately depend upon. The divine Lover seeks the loved (Matthew 18:12, Luke 19:10, Revelation 3:20). The loved must seek the Lover (Jeremiah 29:13, Luke 11:10, Acts 17:27). 

Jesus told us what really matters: “you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:27-40)

There we have it, from none other than Jesus Christ. We must seek God and love him with our whole being. This comes first. The natural outgrowth of loving God with all our heart soul and mind is that we will begin to ache with genuine compassion for humanity. We will begin to look beyond ourselves to concern for others and that puts us on a road to a marvelous spiritual healing.  Out of spiritual healing of broken-hearted people, a new sense of purpose and meaning can come to their lives.

My own inner healing seriously started when I stopped focusing on my own situation of slow deterioration from disease. I needed to stop stewing in my predicament and become equally concerned about the predicaments of others. Seeking to serve rather than be served is an indicator that spiritual healing is happening and blessings result.

What about those who can’t serve, like Abby? Again, appearances can be deceiving. Abby served by simply being in the world. Her presence called others to a higher standard of love and service. That was her gift to those around her.

Throughout the decades, I was able to serve God more disabled than when I was healthy, and I have been blessed in it. To humbly serve in love gives purpose and meaning. It is a truism our Lord illustrated by washing the feet of his disciples. Before entering the anguish of His Passion Christ said: 

“If I, therefore, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, happy are you if you do them.” (John:13:14-17)

Mutual servanthood: We are served in our suffering and serve others in theirs. It is impossible to fully understand its depth because it embraces the concept of human community and interdependence with Christ as our model and master in the ultimate comfort of His divine love that needs to seek no more.