Life of Pride

This is a story I wrote in 2009 to bring home the horror of abortion.

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The boy, age seven, loved the sunlight. It smiled down on him, warm and comfortable, in a way that little else around him did. Inside, cold blue-white light froze the boy and the others into their seats in stiff rows.

He hated inside. When they were all little, the boy used to wriggle and jump and play outside with the others. All that ended when they turned four. They were expected to sit on the inside. Many of the boys and a few of the girls didn’t want to sit. They were given shots to help. The boy hated the shots.

He still didn’t know how to read or to do things with numbers. The boy couldn’t explain that only his body knew how to do those things—those beautiful, strong things. That his mind sang with the wind and played along with his feet. His feet had not played for some time. They carried him quietly from room to room, but that was about it. So his mind also couldn’t move the way the big people wanted.

“Number Twelve,” called the loudspeaker one day.

The boy jumped. He looked around him, at the curious eyes, at the back of the neck of the boy in front of him, at the vid instructor. Today it was an anamorphic feline. The Cat had been saying something about numbers, swishing its three-dimensional tail. The boy had been wondering what it would be like to have a tail.

“Number Twelve,” announced the speaker in the ceiling again, and the Cat froze into a whiskered smile. Others shifted in their chairs. The boy in front turned around.

“That’s you,” he said.

The boy slid out of his seat and stood. Sensing his bare feet, the electrodes in the floor flushed bright green. The Cat resumed its lesson, calling the attention of the other children. Alone, the boy padded into the hallway.

One of the big people waited there, wearing, as always, a white mask across his mouth and a shapeless white garment. Today, the boy saw, he also wore white, rubbery gloves.

“Come, Number Twelve,” he said, and turned on his heel. After several steps, he looked back. The boy had not moved.

“Please,” said the boy.

The big one cocked his head.

“Please, no more shots,” the boy said.

“No,” agreed the big one. “No more shots.”

So the boy followed him. Down the hallway, up a long staircase, and down another hallway. Cold metal all the way, the electrodes underfoot registered his presence with green light. Green like grass, the boy remembered, only grass was soft.

They entered a room full of the big ones, all wearing white. The ceiling was white, the boy saw, and the walls. The tables and floor and the tools were silver.

“Number Twelve,” the big one told the others. Two of them put down tools and turned from a table. One of the two slapped a button, and the boy saw piece of table slide over something pink that they had been manipulating with the tools.

The three scrutinized him, faceless behind their masks.

“It doesn’t look broken,” said one at last.

“They never do,” said another.

“We want to be sure,” the first one said. “It would be a shame to waste one, if it were still viable.”

He squatted down in front of the boy, so that he could look into his eyes on a level. The boy noted that the big one’s eyes were blue. Not the blue of the sky, but the chill blue of the inside light.

“Number Twelve,” said the big one, “can you read?”

Mutely, the boy shook his head.

“Can you add?” the big one asked. His gaze bore straight through the boy. The boy shivered down to his toes and gave no answer.

“What is one plus one?” the big one prodded.

One thing and then another with it; the boy knew there was a word for that. His mind drifted away, back down the corridor, to the room he had left. Paws on the Cat, there was one and then another. But there was only one tail.

“There’s only one!” he blurted.

The two big people standing overhead exchanged a glance, and the eyes of the squatting one narrowed into the color of sharp metal. Slowly, he straightened up and stared down at the boy.

“You’re right,” he told the other. “It is useless.”

He turned away and slapped the table open. The other two shared another look.

“Come, Number Twelve,” said the one who had met the boy in the hallway. He led the boy to the white wall and palmed a sensor. A door slid open. The big one stood aside.

“What do you see?” he asked.

The boy peered in. Another white room, empty, much smaller than the other. But in the far wall, a door, and in that door, a window. Through the window, he saw blue and green, Sky and grass—the outside! It captured him. Bouncing up and down, all else forgotten, he darted into the room and plastered nose and hands against the window.

The boy’s curious eyes saw tiny children running, playing in the grass. He remembered how it felt, both soft and prickly. A yellow sun poured down its warmth on their heads.

The door hissed closed behind him. Hands still against the warm glass, the boy turned his head to see the big one’s eyes observing him through a small, round window.

Above him, a grinding noise sounded. The boy whipped his head up to see two tubes that had hung flabby and soft against the ceiling descend toward him. They pulsed with a foul, pink light.

The boy ran to the opposite corner of the room, and the tubes changed direction to follow him. He could see up one of them all the way to the top. At the top, as he watched, a sharp set of fan blades whirred to life. A powerful wind kicked up, almost lifting the boy off his feet.

He ran away again, back to the outside window. He pounded and pounded on that window. He could feel the tubes coming. He could feel them yanking on him. The boy opened his mouth and began to scream as the tubes ripped his soft body apart.

Outside, the children played happily in the sunshine. They couldn’t see or hear the boy because, on the outside, his window was just a silver piece of wall. So for them, the children vital in the sunshine, he died as though he never was. The tubes whirled away the substance that had been a boy and expelled it somewhere far down below, into the incinerator.

“Done,” reported the doctor, returning to the others at work.

“Good,” said the one with the blue eyes. “Now reassign the number.”

“So soon?” replied the other.

Blue eyes raised his eyebrow. “Why wait?”

The doctor shrugged. He walked to the back of the lab, palmed open another door, and stepped into a vast freezer. Rows upon rows of tiny test tubes, shelf upon shelf, stretched up and back into unlit darkness. The doctor’s breath puffed a cloud of vapor as he reached into the nearest tray and seized a tube. Quickly, he stepped back into the lab and slapped the door closed behind him.

“Here,” he said, holding it up. “Number Twelve.”

What must it have been like to know the young man Jesus? Such power. Such genius and leadership ability. At the age of twelve, he stumped the smartest scholars around. Thousands upon thousands flocked to hear him speak and to experience the wave of healing that washed out of him to make people new wherever he walked.

To an outside observer, he must have looked like a young leader of amazing potential. Someone to be cultivated — or feared.

But what did this young leader do? At the height of it all, just when things looked like they were really taking off, he gave himself away. He counted it all loss because his Father had other plans for him. In his death, he brought eternity into the present age. He bridged an impossible chasm so that we who are his children may walk straight from one reality into another.

The only person worthy to hold power of any sort is the one who has already given it all away and expects nothing back. The Father grants authority new again every morning, until the day he gives it to someone else. Then you leave it behind, and you cross the bridge, and you see Jesus and forget everything else.

This is basically a placeholder website still. I have a lot I want to do to it, but not enough time. Mr. Ted Slater from boundless.org suggested that I register the domain name, so I did.

Today’s topic is the stereotypes and limitations we impose on ourselves in life. I think we do this out of fear; we seek to discover the “rules” and then to adhere to them, in order to avoid possible negative consequences.

But we look in the wrong place for the rules when we study only the world around us. In truth, there is no script, only simple principles that we can carry with us anywhere we go:

1. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (i.e., everything).
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love does its neighbor no harm, so in these two commandments are tied up all the law.

Love, however, is a lifelong art that will require every faculty we possess, and then the help of the Holy Spirit. Every person is unique, and so requires a slightly different approach, which must be discerned. So we must fine-tune the skills of wisdom, discernment, and listening.

I also say love is an art because it can only be learned by hands-on practice. Also because it is beautiful. Love of the true sort heals the flaws of daily interactions and renders life in harmony. It is fairly unnatural to us and requires daily wrestling and instruction from the Master, God Himself.

Love is freedom. It binds me to the opinion of only one being — my Lord — God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No man can imprison my soul. I owe men allegiance only as my true Lord commands.

I’ve decided to kick off my new blog with a little imaginative speculation on the universe. This isn’t scientific in the slightest, only an experiment in bending my mind.

Up until last week, I have thought of the universe as a huge emptiness with various pieces of matter flinging themselves around in it. Last week, however, I dimly recalled the topic of dark matter and did a quick Google search. Apparently, 80% of the universe’s matter is invisible. It is spread out somewhere between the visible stuff.

So then my thinking began to turn on its head, much like this famous picture of the Rubin vase:

If you look at the “dark matter,” you see two faces. Otherwise, you see only a vase.

So I started thinking “what if,” which is when things get dangerous. What if, I wondered, our universe were a black something spread out, with 3D holes poked into it? Beyond our universe is a 4D something that is 100% sheer light that shines through the holes?

Preposterous, you say? Probably. But I recall an experiment I did when I was a kid. I took a sheet of black construction paper and poked holes in it with a pin, then covered a light with it. This 2D sheet covered a 3D object, and lights shone through. The sheet itself had substance, and to 2D creatures crawling around on it, the infinitesimally thin slices of light they encountered would themselves seem to have heat and substance.

The sun brings light and life to living things. We also say that about God. What if our sun and all the other stars were just the tiniest pinpricks of God’s glory?