Why You Matter (A Letter to the Lost)

(Letter to the Lost)

You matter.

You matter because there is a case pending against you that all of history hinges on.  You, God’s masterpiece, knit together out of a secret DNA code that only He could write and science is still beginning to try to decipher.  Too much beauty is contained in that code to describe.  A thousand pictures could not capture how it makes those who love you feel when you laugh.  Too much wisdom is written in those helices for our most brilliant minds to comprehend.  Like the wisdom that teaches the feet of the illiterate to balance their weight perfectly on symmetrical legs.  Too much joy is written into those strands to be expressed; even your parents didn’t come close on the day of your birth.  The only appropriate celebration for your grandeur is of heavenly proportions…but that does hang in the balance.

Because your DNA was hijacked and your beauty marred and the wisdom despised and the joy stifled.  Because you and I have participated in the greatest treachery of all time.  The One who designed, crafted, and rejoiced over you for Love has been denied His heart’s desire:  full fellowship with you.  Your soul’s DNA no longer reads, “Lover of God with all heart, soul, mind and strength.”  It’s been changed to read, “Seeker of self for pleasure, glorification, identity, and source.”  The design is so grossly perverted that you have to be told…TO BE TOLD IN WORDS…to love the most beautiful, perfect Lover conceivable.  To love Love Himself.  You and I, we must be commanded to love Love (for which we were made).  To see Light (for which our eyes were formed).  To do Justice (which is HIs only possible course).  To cherish Mercy, by which we continue to breathe from moment to moment.

So because He must, He commands it.  And still, after the command, written long form in 66 books over hundreds of years, shouted by prophets who were thrown in jail and sawn in half, and then embodied in His own Son made flesh, still after all…still the Word is neglected and disbelieved, the prophets despised, and the Love, Light, the Son of God, made into a pendant.  Crucified by religion daily, His righteousness undesired.  And here you are in the now of history, with thousands of years of defiance of men before you and the return of the King to come, and everything is hinging on how you will respond.

You matter.  The case against you is unchangeable, insurmountable, terrifying.  You were made for greatness, one way or the other.  And you have been pursued in the sea of humanity for rescue by the Son of Man and the Son of God.  One and the same, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.  Have you heard His name?  Then you have been pursued eternally and offered the world’s only hope.  Have you seen His book?  Then He has cried out to you in a loud voice.  Have you been told of His death?  Then you have been confronted with the most astounding injustice the greatest imagination could ever conceive of, the greatest story ever told, and the greatest act of Love any man or spirit could attempt.  The immortal God dying slowly at the hands of the rebels, the underlings, the traitors.  The created killing Creator.  The Omnipotent nailed up by weaklings.  Voluntarily.

And YOU are the one at the center of the story.  The ONE for whom Christ died.  You matter.  You matter.  You could not matter more.  There is no more certain guarantee of your worth than this, Jesus Christ hanging on the cross outside the camp, bloody beyond recognition.  You matter.  If there is one question on which you dare not waste another moment it is the question of whether you are loved and important.  Do you see Him there on the Cross?  You matter.

No, the question is not whether you are loved, or whether you are significant.  You must disbelieve the Cross and reject history to remain asking what has been so resoundingly answered for all time.  No, the question is if you esteem Him.  Whether you see Him as worthwhile and significant.  Him, the King of Glory.  All Creation is groaning for His return, but He holds off, offering you another day and another breath to engage all the angels of heaven in celebration.  Will you repent?  Will you turn?  Will you bow and surrender to love, or defy not only the Righteous Judge, but your own Advocate and Redeemer, in the end standing only in agreement with your accuser and abuser, who calls you worthless and tutors you how to be so?  For a few moments the world will stand with you as you stand with them, but it is a vapor.  And so you will face the One before whose face all of heaven and earth flees away on your own.  And He will open the Lamb’s Book of Life, to see if your name is in it.

All the universities in the world, temples of idolatry, and drunken stupors of men will never change the eternal truth:  There’s a book.  He died to put your name in it.  You matter.  Will you believe, confess, and repent?  He will pay all debts, allowing you to die and be reborn.  To be a new creation, to have new life, eternal life in full fellowship with Him.  He will save you not only from the eternal penalty of sin, but from the life of slavery to sin you now live.  Sin will no longer be your master; if only you will submit to Him, the kindest and most preferred of all Masters, Lord of all!  Bowing to His Lordship will make you free!

When you do, friend and brother, finally the celebration of your worth is released in the heavenlies, all the angels rejoicing at the redemption of the Precious Prodigal.  What joy, on earth and in heaven, the Father’s will done.  Restored relationship with you.  You matter.

8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”[a](that is, the word of faith which we preach): 9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.  Rom. 10:8-10

And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ 10In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”  Luke 15:9-10

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21God made him who had no sin to be sin[a] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.  2 Cor. 5:18-21

November 5th, 2010 by Suzanna UncategorizedNo Comments

In Defense of Being a One-Issue Voter

I still remember my Mom telling me years ago after I had moved away from Chicago about a state senator from our own Windy City who was such a radical activist that he had fought on the senate floor against a bill called the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.  The bill was brought before his committee after a nurse exposed a Chicago suburban hospital’s practice of leaving babies to die when they were born alive after induction abortions.  She herself found out it was happening in her labor and delivery ward when she happened upon another nurse discarding a child in the soiled utility room.  She blew the whistle, only to uncover that it was not uncommon practice.  The public was shocked, and a bill to protect these children was brought before the state senate.  But this one rabid ideologue of a senator had tried to kill the bill and opposed it.  He was alone in his dedication.  When an identical bill came before the US Senate in 2003, NOT ONE SENATOR opposed it.  Nope, alone in his vigorous determination back in Illinois, was just our own Chicago special.

When my mom told me, together we cringed and bemoaned the fact that such a horrific and shameful choice for self-government would have come from the people of our city. I remember the feeling of disappointment in the city I would love to love.  I couldn’t really remember the guy’s name, it was an odd one, but in my mind I called him “the butcher,” picturing a typical political thug from my bloody hometown’s streets, kind of greasy like Daley or Blagojevich.

But I found out four or five years later that I was totally wrong.  He was not greasy and he was no typical thug.  And his name would prove to be unforgettable.  Imagine the horror of every Illinoisan with a conscience when offered up before the nation as a redeemer was our own hometown “butcher,” our radical activist, our conscience-less ideologue:  Barack Obama.

It was like a bad dream.  I lived in Washington at the time, on the West coast.  People I liked and loved were entranced.  He was beautiful. He was eloquent, brilliant, persuasive, filled with hope…even seemingly gentle and meek.  America opened her mind and closed her conscience.  Millions of confused people blocked out his record, who he was, what he had been, who his associations were, what he believed, and (what sets him apart) how radically consistently his acts are with his beliefs.  The man who was unmoved by living, breathing babies left to die of exposure because of ideology.  His response to the nurse whose testimony prompted the bill:  ”This would threaten Roe v. Wade.”

That information was totally accessible, but most Americans did not care to know.  Or to really consider it.  Much more convenient to put that on the shelf as one issue among many, one which there are “many strong opinions on.”  See, one-issue voters are looked down upon as ignorant, or somehow incapable of taking in the complexity of society, government, and political science and so getting stuck on a fundamentalist’s broken record.  But one-issue voters are not ignorant.  They are walking through a bad dream, looking around them and asking, “Has the world gone mad?  Do you realize you just sent a proponent of infanticide to Washington to govern you and your children?”

Barack Obama, with his sweet talk and horrific convictions, perfectly represents what has happened to the abortion issue in America.  The most obvious, unclouded moral choice that ever faced a human being has been labelled “complicated” and “polarizing,” and Americans are buying the product.  I’ve seen believers totally deceived by political lunacy.  Arguments that take aim at anyone’s authority to make a moral stand on not killing children.  Coming from within the church.  Arguments about the hypocrisy of embracing the death penalty and rejecting abortion.  As if there’s no difference between the innocent and the guilty.  Arguments about neglecting the poor, as if aborting children is somehow a way to lift anyone out of poverty.

And most importantly, arguments about the complexity and importance of other issues.

I would like to be clear on this.  Any person who wants to govern me but cannot rightly divide the simplest moral question we could ever face…should we protect children or defend their destruction…has NO WISDOM to offer on ANY topic.  See, one-issue voting is not about naively believing that a pro-life candidate will make a great elected official, it’s about something even simpler:  that an abortion proponent has NO potential to make a great elected official.  They fail the most basic possible litmus test of good judgment.  When someone is a complete moral failure on the most horrific level conceivable, they SHOULD NOT BE ON MY BALLOT!  Has the world gone mad?  Must we sift through thieves and murderers when we are at the polls?

Unfortunately, our political system leaves us with polarized choices, so we don’t get to pick from among decent candidates.  Which one might have wisdom?  Which has great management experience?  Who has proved themselves, done well, governs rightly?  We don’t get to choose that.  That, my friends, is not my fault.  I have the intelligence, capacity, and experience to consider all those factors, as do many in our country.  But I do not get that opportunity.  I have to use my vote to try to keep the butcher away from the power to nominate Supreme Court Justices.

So don’t patronize me for being a one-issue voter.  Don’t call me ignorant.  Because I will ask you for some quick facts.  I will ask how much you know about the methods of abortion.  About saline, suction, induction, surgical dismemberment.  About whether pain-killer is administered to the child.  About whether or not a full-term baby can still be aborted.  I’ll ask you if you’ve looked at pictures.  No?  Why not?  I’ll ask about states where a parent cannot know if their thirteen year-old is aborting, but has to sign waivers to approve the use of aspirin.  I’ll ask if you know about the trafficking of human fetal parts, and how much a brain costs.  I’ll ask if you know about the medical research on aborted babies that occurs while they are still alive.  I’ll ask if you know about the billions of dollars generated, and where they go.  I’ll ask if you know that 80% of abortion clinics are in minority neighborhoods, and one out of three African-American babies is lost to abortion.  I’ll ask if you know that Planned Parenthood (you’ll recognize their logo from seeing our politicians give speeches from their platforms) was founded to reduce undesirable (poor and minority) populations.  I might have a lot of ignorant questions for you.

And if you feel that we should lower our voices because the conversation is polarizing, I’ll ask you if you think America experienced “polarization” around the time of the civil war, and if you think slavery was an important issue.  I’ll ask if you might have been a one-issue voter back in 1855.  And if you fancy you would have been, and if I’m really feeling saucy, I might ask you if you feel more comfortable standing up for the defenseless a few centuries too late.

But for now, just one question.  How can you NOT be a one-issue voter?

November 2nd, 2010 by Suzanna Thoughts4 Comments

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