Abortion as a tool of oppression.

I've been involved in counselling a young woman who is pregnant and considering abortion. In all honesty, she's not really the one considering it - her husband is. They have 2 children already, she has been suffering from depression and was planning to do some training that would enable her to get a job.

While she was shocked about the pregnancy, she didn't want to abort the child, but her husband has been manipulatively insistent. There are a number of very grim ironies in that. Firstly, there is the fallacious notion that abortion is a 'women's rights' issue.

Here we have a woman who does not want to have an abortion, but because it is an allowed option, is being pressured by a man into having one. The man has the bulk of the power in this situation. The second uncomfortable irony is that most of the pro-child-killing argument is based on banging the 'choice' drum.

But she has said a number of times to me that she feels she has no choice. Now, legally, of course she does. No-one can physically force her into an abortion. However, I trust none of my readers is naive enough to believe that there are not other methods of coercion equally as effective as physical force.

All this is very frustrating, and I have spent much time with her discussing her baby as a fact, not an 'option', trying to build her confidence in what she knows in her heart to be true. My estimation of her husband is pretty much near zero, though I haven't shared that with her, of course. He's being a selfish cowardly bully, suggesting that because she has had some alcohol, the child will most likely be deformed, so she should kill it. He is a doctor himself.

The mendacity involved in such manipulative arguments is breath-taking. He is not prepared to take the responsibility on his own shoulders, so he is using a mother's maternal instinct against her to convince to have their child murdered.

The very fact of legal, available, stigma-free abortion has made her life a misery. Please pray for her as she wrestles with her God-given conscience, and pray that I can continue to speak words of encouragement to her. And if by some odd chance, you happen to be a pro-abortion feminist dropping by, perhaps you can think of her and drop the pretense that to be pro-abortion is to be pro-women. It just ain't so.

If God is Sovereign..

..why pray?

As a 'Calvinist', one of the main tenets of my Christian belief is that God is in control. He is sovereign over the events of our lives. Personally, I have derived great comfort from this fact, but others find it very difficult to comprehend.

The question 'If God is Sovereign, why pray?' is a common one when my distinctive beliefs are discussed. There is a simple answer.

If God is not Sovereign, why pray? If God is not Almighty over all, what confidence can you have that your prayers will have any effect at all?

No, scripture tells us that the Lord knows the end from the beginning, and He is never surprised.

Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.
Isa 46:9, 10

What an awesome privelege prayer is when we understand the scope of His power. That He allows us to have a hand in His purposes is an exhilirating and humble thought.

Watching the Tories turn redder everyday.

My word. Every day it seems the Conservative Party seem to do something more to make my vote inaccessible to them. A few days after slamming the last few remaining Grammar schools, that gave working class kids like me the opportunity to reach potential the 'comprehensive' made harder for us by pandering to the lowest common denominator, the Brave New World Tory party is promoting 'race selection'.

Lashawn Barber has written extensively on the folly of this kind of policy in the US, and there's a sample of that here. It seems swapping social engineering is quite the fashion du jour between the US and the UK right now.

I find myself closer and closer to being entirely disenfranchised.

Half past four. aka TIWIARN

It's a pleasant feeling to realize that everyday this week I have felt better than I did the day before. The house is beginning to look presentable, the dirty washing basket isn't over-flowing, and the girls are behaving better because their mama isn't crying all the time and too distracted to pull them up on things.

I'm finding enthusiasm where before there was none - for the house, for the blog, for everything that before seemed just too much like an enormous mountain about to crush me. I've even managed to get around to changing the background on my PC, which I used to do every week.

I'm listening to music, bowling on with fiction that can't decide whether it wants to be a novel or a screenplay, trying to learn to knit again (I've been trying for about 20 years. It's like Sherlock Holmes and his violin).

But most importantly, I've actually been praying and not just doing it out of duty, but doing it because I've really wanted to. Last week at church, the sermon was about John 3:30. He must increase, I must decrease. The Christian walk in a nutshell, really. But what comes first? He increases. That's what I've been pursuing this week, and He really is faithful. You knew that, right?

It's an Oracle, I tell you!

You Are 19% Feminist

You are definitely not a feminist. In fact, you are every feminist's worst nightmare. You believe that women belong in the kitchen.... barefoot and pregnant.

Are You a Feminist?

I did one of these quiz things and came out a Reformed Baptist. Now they tell me I'm not much of a feminist. I'm not sure I want to do another one, in case I find out what 2004 hit pop song I am and have to take that as definitive.

HT:Carla

Because it's worth highlighting

At some point, people have to have some kind of theology of church which doesn't make it a necessary evil.

I heart Frank Turk. He bringeth a mighty big laser-guided sledgehammer, and it is very good.

The running cow. No, really.

I was watching Blue Peter with my eldest the other day. For those that don't know, Blue Peter is a venerable old childrens 'magazine' style telly programme which has been going for years, and changes presenters every few years or so. Like someone's favourite Doctor Who, you can usually date someone by who they remember as their Blue Peter presenters.

It's not as good as it used to be, with rather more nods to popular culture than I'm happy with (a recent example being a performance by the Eurovision song contest entry, laden with gross sexual innuendo), but it is still a worthwhile program, encouraging children in a wide variety of interests - sports, travel, art, different hobbies, animals etc.

So anyway, we were watching, and there was a giant Boa Constrictor snake being shown. One of the joys of Blue Peter is that it's live television, so anything can happen. In a very famous instance, before I was born, Lulu the elephant stamped on John Noakes' foot and went to the toilet.

Well, the Boa Constrictor decided to make a bid to upstage Lulu in Blue Peter history, and went to the toilet in all the ways possible for a snake to do so. It was, erm... educational. The presenter was completely surprised, and it very much appeared that her surprise was that snakes actually go to the toilet at all. Which seems ridiculous, of course. It's surely obvious that an animal that eats will have to go to the toilet at some point.

But I understood her surprise - it's one of those things that normally never even crosses your radar. It reminded me of a similar instance I had on a train. Fear not, this isn't some distressing tale of a snake on the loose on the British Railways.

No, it's about a cow.

I didn't grow up on a farm. I'm not exactly a city girl, and I did spend quite a bit of time in the countryside growing up, but didn't really have much up-close-and-personal contact with farm animals.

I mostly saw cows and sheep and horses through the pane of a car window, or, as in this story, the window of a train. When I'm travelling at speed, and at some distance, cows look just like they do when they're plastic and 2 inches high. Black and white and very static. Except, this day, one cow wasn't static. It was running. Actually going full pelt across the field.

I actually said aloud "A Cow! Running!" The other people in the carriage must have thought I'd been locked up in a basement somewhere most of my life. It was a moment when I was surprised and then realized that I had no real reason to be surprised; it was just something that had never occured to me before.

Now, you're probably reading this and thinking I'm completely bananas, but there it is. It had honestly never crossed my mind that cows run, just like it had obviously never crossed the Blue Peter presenters mind that snakes go to the toilet. I'm sure you, gentle reader, have never had a moment like that. Or maybe you have? If you have, share it in the comments and make me feel less like a bimbo.

A few further thoughts about apologetics.

An important thing to remember about apologetics and debate is that it rarely happens in a vacuum. Whatever position of conviction we hold to, it's important to remember that the people we're talking to are not mere cyphers for a point of view - they are people with real lives, struggles, dreams and experiences.

When they come to us with certain erroneous assumptions, it's most worthwhile to take a step back and realize that it's unlikely they will hold those assumptions out of sheer stubborn contrariness.

I recall a number of times when I have been in heated, passionate conversation with someone on one topic, and also been privy to knowledge about a very painful and difficult situation in their life. While it didn't make them any more correct in their belief, it was an insight into why they were fighting the corner they were, and why that belief was important to them at that time.

Now, that doesn't absolve me of the need to speak the truth - in many ways, it's even more vital that I do, because the truth will be more comfort to them in the long run - but it does remind me that my motives should be about reaching real people, not winning an abstract point.

Different people respond to different means of apologetic argument. Jesus could be blunt and to-the-point, as he was with Nicodemus, for example; but he could also be gentle and personal, as he was with the woman at the well.

In neither case was Christ concerned with winning an argument - He was concerned with winning a soul. When we 'speak the truth in love', I believe this is what is meant. Love is our motivation; true, sacrificial Christian love. We want lost souls to see Christ, and through Him gain eternal life.

We must passionately defend the truth of the gospel and the glory of God - we must do so because it's the only loving thing to do, if we are to have any hope of being effective evangelists. However, that is the goal. We are reaching out as the means of a loving God to save the poor lost people of this earth.

Be bold as you speak to others about Him. But remember these words of Jesus:

The Spirit of the Lord [is] upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. Luk 4:18

These are the people we speak to; love them.

You made your point, move on.

I was up late an on my own last night and I had a go at flexing my brain muscle again in debate. It's been a long time since I've properly debated on 'big boy' sites. I mananged to hold my own amongst many other competent men, and that was really great for a woman whose head has felt like mush for months now..

I got up this morning to check the thread, and it's really depressing to find the person holding the other position is having a strop and mine is the name he's using. The writer of the blogpost told him he'd made his point and was just repeating himself, so he needed to drop it. I'd already stopped posting because, quite frankly, the horse was long dead and not even twitching anymore.

But the poster was mightily put out and started stropping that 'Libbie' was allowed to post further and he wasn't. I mean, hello? He was asked to stop, because he was repeating himself. A couple more people have already come along, said that they haven't read the thread and repeated his arguments. I have no intention of posting further, because all that needs to be said really has been said. I think the thread will either descend into silliness now, or be closed because the usualy suspects have appeared and they normally have their own axes to grind on this particular blog anyway.

I sometimes think Dan Phillips can be a little bit too blunt with commenters who don't get it straight away, but I think he was totally right in this instance. You don't come on to someones blogpost that is about one topic and basically say, 'Yeah, but I want to talk about this.'

Well, bully for you, mate. Blogs are widely available and free to use. Knock yourself out. Tsk.

I'm pro-choice... about feeding.

Reuben is over three months old now, and I love looking at him. He's chunky, round-faced, has a lovely open eyes and is starting to smile. It's such a relief, after everything else, to have a baby who is textbook healthy.I decided to bottle-feed him from the word go, and I feel not one whit of remorse or regret about that.

I nursed my first daughter for a whole year, and she thrived on it. It was a lovely experience, and I loved spending a couple of hours settled down with her. With my second daughter, breast-feeding started well enough, but it soon became apparent that I was physically very unwell. I lost a lot of weight and even had tests for cancer.

We decided that whatever the outcome of those tests, I needed to stop breast-feeding, and Connie went on the bottle. She had problems at first because she was allergic to cows milk, but she did very well on Soya and is bonny and healthy now.
I felt dreadful at having to give up breast-feeding, but I was reluctantly convinced that my health was as important as anything else.

Then, with my third daughter, Aurelia, I had my first encounter with SPD and was very ill indeed. I was still determined to breast-feed, to do the best by her, but I hated every second. She didn't feed well. She latched on well and all that, but she was easily distracted, and I would regularly end up in tears with the stress of it, and the extreme tiredness. These things are part and parcel of the job of motherhood, but they were not worth it when it was clear that she wasn't doing very well at all.

At 6 months, she was still lying on her back, and couldn't hold her head up properly. She was also tiny. The HV referred us to a pediatrician because of developmental delay, and she had tests for chromosomal abnormalities, as my family medical history includes those kinds of issues. It was a very difficult time.

As part of the medical investigation, we needed to be able to monitor how much milk she was getting, but there was no way to reasonably measure it while I was still nursing. So, very, very reluctantly, I began using formula with her. Thankfully, she had no problems with the milk, and in fact guzzled buckets of the stuff happily and immediately began putting on weight. She was still a little behind, but she started improving straight away, and is now dainty, but doing well.

I was delighted that she was doing well, but utterly consumed with guilt that I hadn't been doing the best for her by feeding her myself. It was dreadful.

So, fourth time around, I decided firmly that I was not going to breastfeed. Reuben would have a bottle from the start, because I could no longer be sure I could produce enough milk to satisfy a hungry baby, and I wasn't going to play fast and loose with my childrens health because of an ideology.

I would give him a little colostrum in hospital, and then introduce a bottle and let my milk dry up. I had no spare physical reserves after my pregnancy to sustain him further, and I needed the hormones out of my system quickly to have the best chance of recovering to be able to properly care for all of my children.

My decision was on my notes, and I had talked about it with the nurses and midwives when I was in hospital. Then he was born early. He was tube-fed for a very brief time, but pulled it out and I had no problem at all getting him to latch and feed well. But I knew I still didn't want to do it, and began asking for formula. Time and again, I had to re-emphasize that I had made my decision to bottle feed in good faith, and I wasn't giving up because I was having any trouble with breast-feeding.

I recall phoning Ant late one night in tears because the nurses had kept insisting I nurse Reuben because I was obviously doing so well with it. I was still in agony and utterly exhausted by a traumatic birth, ill-equipped to be assertive about what was already on my notes. Ant encouraged me to be strong, and remember that we had made a rational and sensible decision, and eventually the next day one of the pre-term nursery nurses spoke to me and completely agreed that our decision was perfectly reasonable.

Reuben took to bottles brilliantly, consistently drinking far above the expected amount. He started as a wee little preemie baby, and put on so much weight he was out of newborn clothes at just under 2 months. There is no way I am confident that I would have been able to produce enough for such a hungry little man. I am completely content with our decision, and I always have been. I realized after Aurelia that a mothers job is to do the very best for her child, and that is not always the same as the national policy.

If you breastfeed, I salute you, and I pray that you get enough support to do it for as long as you want to, and as long as your baby needs you to. If you bottlefeed, through choice or neccessity, I also salute you, because you're going against the grain, and it can be really hard to face up to the unjustified censure of those who would hold to a party line without thought for individual circumstances.

Breast is certainly ideal, but we don't live in an ideal world, and so breast isn't always best.

'Christian' politics.

I caught 5 seconds of Tony Campolo on telly the other night. He was complaining about the criticism he's received about his ambivalence on the issue of homosexuality. His wife is a liberal on the issue, and he was at pains to say that he didn't share her position.

However, as always seems to be the case with Mr Campolo, while mentioning in passing that he disagreed with 'same-sex eroticism', he really felt the pressing need to launch a broadside against the church for taking a stand against the relentless promotion of homosexuality in our culture over the past two decades.

Well, that's not the way he put it. He said that the church had sinned in its attitude towards homosexuals. He didn't elaborate, so I don't know exactly what he believes is sinful about the evangelical stand against homosexual sin. I haven't ever heard an evangelical leader call for mass beating of homosexuals, or encouraging Christians to get homosexual employees sacked. Based on Mr Campolo's 'red letter' campaign, I'm going to take a wild guess that it's the vocal stand many have taken against the normalization of homosexual 'marriage' and demands about adoption and IVF rights. This seems to be, according to Tony Campolo, akin to the Fred Phelp's picket-parties.

Let me say right here that I'm in the Frank Turk camp when it comes to what Christians should expend their energy on - and many Christian-based campaigns regarding the law tend to fall wide of the mark, in that we are attempting to enforce an external conformity without addressing the core issue, the gospel. If we focused more of our enthusiasm on preaching the genuine gospel (instead of the 'God-has-a-wonderful-plan-for-your-life gospel-lite version), and we saw real conversions, then society would change because hearts would be made of flesh, instead of stone.

But that doesn't mean I think it's at all wrong to campaign to protect children in adoption situations, or the other big bugbear that Mr Campolo finds so distasteful - anti-abortion.

He went on to say that he thought every Western christian should be supporting a child in the third world, and he said it like it was an either/or situation.

Now, I don't mind if your politics are to the left of centre. I will disagree with you on many issues, but you never know, we might be quite close on some things, as I am very keen on liberal society (and I mean liberal in the old-fashioned sense of authority only interfering with citizens if they transgress a law).

However, we will have a strong disagreement if you try to suggest that your politics are the only valid politics for a Christian to have, and that the issues that exercise you are the only valid ones for a Christian to be concerned with. I am 100% ok with supporting children through Compassion and other child-sponsorship programmes. I just don't see how a concern for the poor cancels out a concern for children vulnerable in the womb, or a desire to encourage personal holiness, or the need to stand up for simple biblical standards of behaviour.

Christianity isn't left, and it isn't right either. Christianity is all about The Way, and that is Jesus Christ. You can read all about him in Scripture, and you'll learn even more if you read the black letters, too.

Shock news of the week.

By the way, did anyone notice that Tony Blair is leaving? ;-)

One of the things that has amused and saddened me in the response to his speech yesterday is the self-hatred the British seem to have cornered the market on. As usual, Mr Blair made a stirring and compelling orator. He's always been very entertaining to listen to. I thought it was well-judged and a fine speech in the circumstances, and readers of this blog will have no confusion about my general opinion of the man.

But the reaction I have seen again and again is utter contempt for the patriotic sentiments he expressed. Tony Blair being unpopular now, I can understand. But how does that translate into the self-loathing that would pour scorn on our own nation? If you think the British should wander around in sackcloth and ashes, perpetually making amends for daring to exist, why on earth should it bother you whether TB acted in this country's best interests or not?

To be saved - don't sin?

Adrian Warnock is doing sterling work investigating the full scope of the atonement and the implications of it. I do recommend reading his recent entries.

However, my heart falls reading his comment sections at the moment. There and elsewhere, I keep seeing this really troubling suggestion that God should just forgive repentant people who stop sinning. That somehow the Christian faith is all about people just stopping doing what is bad and becoming righteous. Which doesn't sound like Christianity at all to me.

Surely the point of Christianity, what sets it apart from men's religion, is that we cannot just stop sinning and become righteous, and that even if we could, that would be a big old pat on the back for us and nothing to do with grace at all?

What on earth is the point of the cross of Christ in these schemes?

I hear opinions of this nature and I feel even more depressed, because if it's acually all about me getting to the point where I don't sin at all, I am in some serious trouble.

Oh look, I have a blog...

I'm fairly depressed at the moment, so really, not ideally placed to join in rational conversation. In fact, I've mostly been coated in the kind of apathy that only depression induces. But I realized today that I felt urge to blog about something that has been bothering me, and I'm taking that as a good sign.

I participate in discussion in a number of places online, both secular and Christian, and in all honesty, I get much less grief from the secular sites. This is largely because in a secular setting, people are quite happy to actually debate about something with an understanding that we can't both be right. Despite all the fashionable gubbins about the postmodern generation, the only time I really come across people who aren't really happy to nail their colours to the mast on an issue is when I'm on a Christian site.

Now yes, I do come across rudeness in a lot of secular venues, but I find it much less difficult to be told that the person thinks I'm talking rubbish than for someone to say, 'Well, we can't really be sure after all. Group hug'

It's like mushiness has become a Christian virtue or something. Saying you believe another Christian is mistaken or wrong about something seems to be seen as nastier than calling their kids ugly. Which isn't something I've done, but I'd expect to be censured for if I had.

Now, the reason most secular debates I take part in possess conviction is that people really and truly care about the issues we're discussing. If someone is a passionate defender of the Welfare state, it's usually because they really care about it as an issue. I don't agree with them, but I respect their position and willingness to say I'm wrong. Not just someone with a different view, but wrong.

Now, what troubles me is that Christians should be even more passionate about the truth - and in particular the truth about issues in our faith. But I don't see that too often. Which leads to the disturbing conclusion that Christians don't care as much about their faith as unbelievers care about things. Now, that's uncharitable. I'm sure it can't be true, because the Christians I know online and off are good, heartfelt people.

But a fair few of them seem to have fallen into an odd kind of thinking that being sure and saying that what another believer has said is wrong is tantamount to slapping them.

For the record, if I believe you are wrong about an issue to do with faith and say so, it's not because I think you're a bad person. It's just because I think you're wrong, which is no crime either.