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

 

My father and I, September 1967

Two months after the photo the photograph above was taken, 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. It was breaking news around world! My father's treating heart specialist told the families with heart patients in the intensive care unit (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 father 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.

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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. 

 

SEX AND SLOGANS

 

Someone once said that a good slogan can stifle rational thought for 50 years. A new slogan is “Love is Love!” It is a great-sounding slogan, but is it true? I know from personal experience it is not necessarily true. 

I knew a teacher who “fell in love” with a 15-year-old student. He was 47. I’ll call him N. He left his wife and four children to be with her. (Think Mary Kay Letourneau with the genders reversed.) 

N spent time in jail for sexual exploitation of a minor. His teaching license was revoked, and he became a community pariah. N betrayed his wife of 22 years, his children, his profession, and the trust of the student’s parents. He was a  stiff-necked and unrepentant hebephile (sexually attracted to girls in early pubescence) who stubbornly maintained “Love is Love.” (It was later discovered his hebephilia overlapped with pedophilia.)

Did the slogan hold true? He was certainly in love with the girl. There was no denying it. Is love still love when it’s used to justify deviant behaviors that defy community standards, betray those who loved the culprit most, or defy long-held societal morality? No!  Not all behaviour can be justified by catchy phrases or slogans. 

And that’s accentuated when it is harmful to children. Why do children always seem to pay the highest cost for adult aberrance from societal norms or cultural social experiments? This is glaringly evident with abortion acceptance (contrived “reproductive rights”), and sexual orientation and gender identification (SOGI) curriculums being thrust upon children as early as kindergarten.

Not all behaviour is acceptable just because a society’s sexual mores and preferences change or become accepted by the majority, by a well-connected vociferous minority. Pedophilia and hebephilia are never acceptable, even if most people support it! Pedophiles call themselves “minor-attracted” persons. Bah! Beware of people who hide their abhorrent behaviors behind slogans, catchphrases, or euphemisms.

I am part of the baby boom generation. I witnessed the sexual revolution that took root during the 1960s-1970s. There were popular slogans to promote sexual promiscuity and drug use. Slogans like, “If it feels good, do it” were used to justify promiscuous sex outside of marriage. The slogan “don’t knock ‘til you’ve tried it” was used to justify illicit drug use, among other things. “Free love” was used for casual sex. It wasn’t free. The cost came in the form of broken homes and divorce, rampant sexually transmitted infections, abortion, and countless broken hearts. The slogan of free love promoted lust, not love. The sexual revolution was based on a false promise of freedom, behavior without consequences, and irresponsibility to the community in favour of personal autonomy. Instead, what we got was more than the ‘boomers of yore anticipated. As of 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated:

• STIs like herpes, gonorrhea and syphilis can increase the risk of HIV acquisition.
• Mother-to-child transmission of STIs can result in stillbirth, neonatal death, low birth weight and prematurity, sepsis, neonatal conjunctivitis, and congenital deformities.
• HPV infection causes cervical and other cancers.
• Hepatitis B resulted in an estimated 820,000 deaths in 2019, mostly from cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. STIs such as gonorrhea and chlamydia are major causes of pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility in women.[1]

That is not free love. It has been a catastrophic 60-year social experiment that has deviated within deviancy, where a hook-up culture is normalized, or the myth that men can become women and women become men has been embraced by the cultural élites, educators, and media. Free love was a failure.

True freedom comes with responsibility. It never includes the freedom to kill another (abortion and assisted suicide). True freedom does not search for ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ or relative truth. It searches for THE Truth. Freedom does not just include what I want to do, but also what I ought to do. The word “ought” indicates there is such a thing as right and wrong, truth and falsehood. What I want to do is less important than doing what I ought to do. 

Am I saying there is such a thing as objective truth? Yes. My behaviour should draw me closer to that truth. My smallest of actions or behaviours either draw me closer to it or take me further from it. The sexual revolution (and its sad legacy) has taken us further from the Truth. That Truth is found in following Jesus Christ,[2] and His word.  The dismantling of our former Judeo-Christian cultural ethic and ethos was intentional. I think our culture is collapsing because we have thrown off restraint and the idea of an ultimate source of what defines Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. In other words, God.  America and Canada must turn to back Him.

That is the only way out of the cultural and human collapse we are witnessing.

 MDP

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[1] World Health Organization, Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI), 10 July 2023.  https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sexually-transmitted-infections-(stis)

 

[2] John 14.6.