January 20th

❀ ❁ January 20^th ❀ ❁

"Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.  If you say, 'But we knew nothing about this,' does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?  Does not He who guards your life know it?  Will He not repay everyone according to what they have done?” Proverbs 24:11-12, NIV
 

“And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts...If we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill each other? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, rather, to use violence to get what they want...It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”  
― Mother Teresa

 

“When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 

"The embryo and fetus are entirely dependent on and living in the mother’s body, but they are not a part of the mother’s body.   Healthy women’s bodies don’t grow organs and body parts of a differing DNA than their own.  Their bodies don’t have four arms, four legs and an extra set of genitalia that may even be male... a parent has a basic obligation to feed and shelter her biological offspring, that a fetus has as much a right to his natural environment as the rest of us have to our own biosphere, and that a fetus’ dependence and vulnerability obligates us to them more, rather than less."

―Christopher Hitchens

 

Our culture is such that we do not know how to love ourselves, let alone others.  We have lost patience and a sense of peace, joy, and hope.  We increasingly cannot find satisfaction and continue to up the pleasure ante.  We look over life's simple beauties and seek more and more stimulation.  We learn, think and speak violence.  We cannot tolerate that which does not wholly seek to serve our own ego.  In return we are oblivious slaves to Mammon.  Blind and without direction, we wallow in our own pain.

 

We vilify the act of giving our child over to adoption as "selfish." We revere self-love, the antithesis of sacrificial love, of agape--unconditional love with no agenda.  We vilify forgiveness as "weak," when one of the bravest things we could do is to let go of another's sins against us and to be free from them. 

 

Love has to be at the forefront of helping and healing ourselves and others.  Until then, we will continue to be a people of hedonism rather than agape, of anger and violence rather than service and deliverance. 

 

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it...

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."  Martin Luther King, Jr. 

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/martin_luther_king_jr.html#mGypdVpZ5fghRjGd.99

Pray for the grace to see how you may help others whose beliefs differ than your own, especially those that make you feel uncomfortable.

 Ask Him for an opportunity to make a loving sacrifice on behalf of helping another, being Christ's arms, hands, feet, and words.