Ted’s Place

Adopted For Life

This book comes highly recommended for anyone that has ever considered adoption or has been involved in the adoption process. But the book goes beyond promoting adoption. In the author's words:

“In this book I want to call us all to consider how encouraging adoption—whether we adopt or whether we help others adopt—can help us peer into the ancient mystery of our faith in Christ and can help us restore the fracturing unity and the atrophied mission of our congregation.” As Moore explains, “The gospel of Jesus Christ means our families and churches ought to be at the forefront of the adoption of orphans close to home and around the world.” It is the gospel that calls us to adopt but it is also the gospel that teaches us how to understand adoption. In fact, “as we become more adoption-friendly, we’ll be better able to understand the gospel... I want to ask what it would mean if our churches and families were known as the people who adopt babies—and toddlers, and children, and teenagers. What if we as Christians were known, once again, as the people who take in orphans and make of them beloved sons and daughters?”

I see the adoption of a child into a loving family as a beautiful reflection of the gospel. Like the orphan, we were once outcasts and strangers to God, but because of the sacrifice of Christ, we are welcomed with open arms into God's family and provided an eternal home. I hope to read this book soon and report back with more thoughts at a later time. 

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world," - James (1:27).

Just_Do_Something

Recently I've been thinking about the issue of "finding God's will", and came across this book. It offers a refreshing perspective that counters the paralyzing notion of waiting for God to directly guide us in all of our major life decisions that aren't clearly addressed in the bible.  Here's a quote:

"...when it comes to most of our daily decision, and even a lot of life's "big" decisions, God expects and encourages us to make choices, confident that He's already determined how to fit our choices into His sovereign will. Passivity is a plague among Christians. It's not just that we don't do anything; it's that we feel spiritual for not doing anything. We imagine that our inactivity is patience and sensitivity to God's leading. At times it may be; but it's also quite possible we are just lazy. When we hyper-spiritualize our decisions, we can veer of into implusive and foolish decisions. But more likely as Christians we fall into endless patterns of vacillation, indecision, and regret. No doubt, selfish ambition is a danger for Christian, but so is complacency, listeless wandering and passivity that pawns itself off as spirituality. Perhaps our inactivity is not so much on God as it is an expression of the fear of man, the love of the praise of man, and disbelief in God's providence."

- Kevin DeYoung, Just Do Something, p. 51, 52

In response, someone might push back and say that it sounds like he is advocating for a cavalier approach to decision making. I'm sure he has heard that objection before and I think he addresses it in his book. Nevertheless, I tend to agree with him that for every 10 Christians that are too reckless in how they make decisions, there are 100 who over-spiritualize their passivity and fail to do anything.

Parenting

(2nd post - taken from my notes from a parenting course we took in 2007 called "Growing Kids God's Way")

The Parent Factor

Unfortunately, many adults parent in response to their own unresolved childhood fears, conflicts and disappointments. As a result, they sometimes parent their own past more than their children. For example, if the growing-up years were pleasant, there is a strong tendency to employ training techniques similar to those by which you were raised. If your childhood years were stressful, the tendency is to swing to the opposite extreme of your parents' methods when rearing your own children. For example, parents brought up under unfair, restrictive or even abusive methods often unknowingly move toward permissive parenting, allowing their children to become self-centered. These parents in many ways become more concerned about their children's feelings than about their actions. They elevate psychological health above moral health, and any standard of right and wrong is subject to how their children feel, not what they do.

Parenting Extremes

Permissive/child-centered parents fear inhibiting the child, so they go to the extreme of creating an environment of unrestrained freedom, resulting in an under-controlled child. On the other hand, authoritarian parents fear spoiling their child, so they see their salvation in the power of rules and limitations; resulting in an over-controlled child. Both extremes deprive the child of basic skills necessary for healthy adolescence.

Authoritarian Parenting

• predominantly concerned with restraining evil, and little attention paid to elevating good
• although children typically conform and do virtuous acts, they do so out of the fear of reproof, not because of the love of goodness. The child hears "You will do it or else." The "or else" becomes the motivation for right behaviour, not a resident principle of the heart

Permissive Parenting

• predominantly concerned with creating the right environment for the child, and not behavioural results
• for them, child-rearing is reduced to avoidance of all the negative emotions and pursuit of all the positive ones. Thus right and wrong training are measured by how parents think their child feels rather than by the end product - their child's behaviour

Parenting

My son Benjamin recently turned 2yrs (Feb.23) and has since made it clear to us that he is now in a new stage of life - the "terrible twos". His will of defiance is constantly testing the patience of his parents. Although his vocabulary has increased exponentially over the past year, the one word we still constantly hear from him is ... "NO!" (in a loud disobedient tone accompanied by hand flailing). As such, I will soon be investing more time in learning about parenting/discipline.

Jeanie and I took a parenting course a few years ago called "Growing Kids God's Way" and found it to be very helpful. It was a big investment in time and energy (we travelled to Aurora, which is about 1&1/2hrs from Toronto, every Fri night for about 5months in the middle of winter), but we both received valuable paradigm-shifting life-lessons - both from the perspective as parents and as children. I'll try to share some of what we learned in the next few posts. Here are a few points from the introductory session:

• The primary consideration in early parenting is the child's heart and not simply outward behaviour
• The heart is the center of all of life and behaviour, and is that portion of man that God looks upon and searches  [Ps 139:23; Proverbs 4:23]
• The general goal of heart training (the portion that parents can impact) is to help a child gain personal self-control
• In early parenting, external pressure is necessary to bring about acceptable behaviour even though a young child has no cognitive understanding of the reason for the behaviour. With adults, beliefs precede actions; with children the opposite is true - actions precede beliefs.
• If the child does not learn to resolve conflict early in life, it will be much more difficult to do so later in life.
  
  

Here's a helpful nugget for parents taken from a recent Tim Keller sermon:

• When we are raising children, if we push them away and keep them at arm’s length in order to preserve our freedom and independence, they will grow up emotionally dependent and damaged. The only way our children can grow up with freedom and independence is if we sacrifice our freedom and independence, for years on end. Once again, it’s them or you.

Choose Life

I have a good friend, Peter, who recently took up the cause of defending the unborn in the Vancouver pro-life movement. He has been raising awareness about abortion in his community and has committed to approaching every church in the greater Vancouver area in order to challenge the pastor/leadership to give at least one message each year that addresses this issue. He's also mobilized some of his friends to stand up for this cause. I'm wondering if I'm going to be one of them.

I've always been burdened about abortion, but just never made the time to do anything about it. There was always something else that demanded more of my attention (school, work, family, friends etc). But now that I'm almost middle-aged and running out of time and excuses, I'm wondering if I should be doing something about this too. Having become a father of two young children in recent years has only increased this burden for me. 

With an aim of highlighting the gravity of the issue, some have compared abortion to the issue of slavery in the 19th century - in that although some of us may believe it's wrong, we still allow ourselves to live with it because of the extreme inconvenience and "collateral damage" that would result otherwise. The abolitionists fought against slavery even though it was clear to everybody that to end slavery would lead the country into economic suicide; and that's exactly what happened for a whole generation of the British empire. To quote Tim Keller:

"When the abolitionists finally had British society poised to abolish slavery in their empire, planters in the colonies foretold that emancipation would cost investors enormous sums and the prices of commodities would skyrocket catastrophically. This did not deter the abolitionists in the House of Commons. they agreed to compensate the planters for all freed slaves, an astounding sum up to half the British government's annual budget. the Act of Emancipation was passed in 1833, and the costs were so high to the British people that one historian called the British abolition of slavery 'voluntary econocide'. Rodney Stark notes how historians have been desperately trying to figure out why the abolitionists were willing to sacrifice so much to end slavery. He quotes the historian Howard Temperley, who says that the history of abolition is puzzling because most historians believe all political behaviour is self-interested. Yet despite the fact that hundreds of scholars over the last fifty years have looked for ways to explain it, Temperley says, 'no one has succeeded in showing that those who campaigned for the end of the slave trade ... stood to gain in any tangible way ... or that these measures were other than economically costly to the country.' slavery was abolished because it was wrong, and Christians were the leaders in saying so."

As such, I wonder what future generations will think of the decisions we make today as a society in regards to abortion. The stats show that over 1.2 million babies are aborted each year in the US. It's a tough and complicated issue with plenty of inconvenience and potential "collateral damage" if we ever succeeded in abolishing abortion. But I can't think of a more clear wrong than to take the life of an innocent unborn child for the sake of convenience or a woman's "right to choose".

Pastor Walter Hoye

Here's an inspiring story of someone following through with their convictions - Pastor Walter Hoye, a pro-life advocate chooses jail over a plea-bargain. The full article is below:

For 19 days in March and April, Walter Hoye was locked in a cell with 29 other prisoners at the Santa Rita jail near Oakland, Calif. There were times when he wished he could have stayed longer.

When the metal door first clanged shut behind him on March 20, Hoye, 52, decided the space was really more of a cage than a cell. A metal grid penning in prisoners. Fifteen bunks lining two walls. Two toilets and a urinal for all 30 men, and a shower that inmates had gradually transformed into a pornographic shrine.

As Hoye made his way to an empty bunk, a few prisoners, mostly black and Latino, dogged his path. "You smuggle in any drugs, man?" one of them asked.

"No," Hoye said quietly.

Then the veteran inmates left him alone, he told me, except for "one of the brothers who was kind enough to help me make up my bed."

A few minutes later, another man walked over to Hoye's bunk and jabbed his finger at a newspaper he was holding. "This you?" he said, eyeing Hoye skeptically.

Hoye peered at the Oakland Tribune headline: "Anti-abortion pastor chooses jail."

"Yeah, that's me," he said.

In the next moment, the inmate was striding up and down the length of the cell, announcing, "Hey, he don't have to be here! He turned down probation! He doing straight time for what he believed in!"

It was true: On Feb. 19, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stuart Hing sentenced Walter Hoye, a Missionary Baptist minister, to 30 days in jail after Hoye refused a plea deal that included three years' probation, a small fine, and an order that he stay at least 100 yards away from Family Planning Specialists, an Oakland abortion clinic.

Passionate about the sky-high abortion rate among African-Americans, Hoye began offering men and women assistance at the clinic in 2006. About one in three Oakland residents is black, compared with a statewide African-American population of 6 percent. And though blacks make up only 12 percent of the U.S. population, they account for one-third of all abortions performed in the United States. More than three in 10 black women abort their unborn children.

According to the 2006 census, deaths now exceed live births among African-Americans. "We're no longer replacing ourselves," Hoye said. "So we're not using terms like holocaust and genocide just to elicit a response. It's the truth."

In response, once a week Hoye stood quietly outside Family Planning Specialists with a sign that said, "Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help." When people approached the clinic, Hoye would ask their permission to speak with them about abortion alternatives; he also offered them pamphlets describing available help.

In 2007, pro-abortion clinic "escorts" began to show up in groups, surrounding Hoye and impeding his movement. They blocked his sign with sheets of blank cardboard and shouted down his low-key offers of help. When that didn't scare Hoye off, clinic managers lobbied the Oakland city council and in December 2007, the council instituted a "bubble-zone" ordinance applicable within a 100-foot radius of any Oakland abortion clinic. The law made it a crime to "approach within eight feet of any person seeking to enter" a "reproductive health care facility" in order to offer literature, display a sign, or engage in "oral protest, education, or counseling."

"This law is horribly unconstitutional," Hoye said. "It allows abortion clinics to decide which U.S. citizens are allowed to retain their constitutional right to free speech."

Represented by Life Legal Defense Fund (LLDF), Hoye challenged the ordinance in court. The case is still pending, but in May 2008, Oakland public attorneys acting in cooperation with clinic managers charged Hoye with "unlawful approaches" to women, and "force, threat of force, or physical obstruction."

What prosecutors did not know was that LLDF attorneys possessed four hours of uncut videotape documenting Hoye's activities outside the clinic on the dates in question. At trial in January 2009, the tapes impeached the testimony of clinic director Jackie Barbic, who claimed that Hoye repeatedly broke the 8-foot rule and that she and a patient had to put up their hands to fend him off. Instead, the tapes showed Hoye standing still as Barbic approached him; then they showed Hoye walking away. No incident shown on the tape matched Barbic's testimony, and even clinic escorts testified that Hoye was always cordial and never obstructed anyone's path or used threats or force.

Inexplicably, the jury still found Hoye guilty. At sentencing, the prosecutor recommended the probation and the clinic stay-away order—or two years in jail. When Hoye refused the stay-away order, Judge Hing appeared "surprised," Hoye said. "The judge was essentially asking me to stop trying to help men and women outside an abortion clinic, and I just would not voluntarily give up my First Amendment rights."

In February, Hing levied a sentence of 30 days and Hoye reported to the Santa Rita jail a month later. After the newspaper-reading inmate touted the Tribune article to the other prisoners—many of them inner-city drug dealers whose highest aspiration was to stay out of prison, they clamored to know why a man would choose jail over freedom. From that moment on, Hoye found himself in constant demand.

"I would be holding court with about 30 guys, explaining why I did what I did," he said. "I explained what an abortion actually does, that it takes an innocent human life. We held prayer vigils, we had Bible studies. I must have counseled and mentored guys all day and all night. It got to the point where we started talking seriously about Christ."

Most of the men in the cage at first mouthed pro-choice slogans, Hoye said. "But when I forced them to complete the sentence, 'I believe that a woman has a right to choose to kill an innocent life,' they couldn't do it."

One morning at about 2:30 a.m., a good-looking young man named Terrell approached Hoye's bunk and asked what actually goes on during an abortion. Using his fingers to simulate a woman's legs spreading, Hoye showed Terrell how the abortionist inserts a vacuum aspirator and sucks out the developing child.

Terrell, 18, told Hoye he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant and that she had aborted. "She made the decision," he said. "It was her choice."

"Yes, I know that, but what did you do?" Hoye replied. "Did you offer to marry her?"

Terrell shook his head. "No, I didn't."

"Did you offer to help her raise the child?"

"No, I didn't."

"Did you tell her that you love her and that you were going to go the distance with her as a man should, even if she decided to give the child up for adoption?"

"No, no, I didn't," Terrell said, his eyes filling with tears. "I never knew. No one ever told me what an abortion is. No one ever made it plain."

When Terrell understood that he had, "perhaps because of his own lack of participation, been complicit in the murder of his own child, it really broke him," Hoye said.

Before Terrell went back to his own bunk that night, Hoye prayed with him. "I told him God could forgive him, that what he'd done wasn't an unforgivable sin."

But the conversation didn't end then. Terrell continued to visit with Hoye. "He began to understand that men have a responsibility to women, and vowed that, for him, an abortion would never happen again. He came to me a young man in jail for dealing drugs, trying to make some money and live the large life. I began to see him grow up."

Released from jail on April 7, Hoye rejoined his wife, Lori, in their Oakland home. Today, he is not sorry for his choice. "I've been a jail chaplain in jail before, and even had the privilege of being a guest preacher at San Quentin. Being an inmate is completely different. I was actually one of them and it gave me a different kind of credibility. I'm sure my adversary meant my incarceration for evil, but God used it for good."

 

Cross

Good Friday marks the day when Jesus Christ was crucified, and is sometimes called Black Friday. It is the central event of the Christian faith - the one event that Jesus himself asked his followers to remember over all others. It is the day he lost his dignity, his friends, and his life; and the day he was forsaken by the One who mattered most to him - God the Father. I don't believe we can ever fully understand the depths of his suffering - how black that day was for him. Yet he went through it all for us, we are told.

Years later, we carry our own crosses and go through our own forms of suffering. However, we can do so with a measure of hope. We have a God who did not exempt himself from the darkness of death but suffered and bled as well - for our sakes. But more than that, he overcame death, and offers us a new life with Him - like a fountain of "living water" he says, that quenches our deepest thirst, and is so fathomless that we shall spend eternity drinking from it.

"What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup."

- Frederick Buechner

Timothy Keller

In one of his excellent sermon series on marriage, Tim Keller reviews three qualities of a Spirit-filled person who has accepted the gospel. I don’t want to forget them:

Bethany

It's been more than a week since Bethany was born (Mar. 20), and although I've been through this once before, the experience of becoming a father for the second time has not been diminished for me by the first. From the moment I heard her first cry, I realized my life would be irreversibly set on a new course once again. But more than that, the memory of seeing her for the first time when the nurse brought her to me will remain with me forever. Up until then, the fact of her impending arrival had been somewhat abstract and not fully real to me. For nine months she had just been a faceless bump growing inside Jeanie, unable to communicate with the world around her... But then the moment came, and suddenly there was a face - a new face that looked strangely familiar and comforting to me at the same time; and a new voice announcing to the world that she had finally arrived. I was thunderstruck. I couldn't help but gaze at her with wonder. For the few minutes when I first held her, it was as if the whole world had faded away and time had stood still. And I knew then at that moment, without a shadow of a doubt, that if life ever required it of me, I would readily give up everything I have and lay down my life for her.

I love you Bethany. God bless you. Welcome to the world.