Darrow Miller and Friends

The Greatness of a Society

Many are familiar with the saying that “The greatness of a society is measured by how well that society cares for the weakest human life.” I find myself reflecting on this regularly during the shifts in our nation.  As I continue to work on our ongoing project, The 13 Transforming Truths, I was struck by a story that had challenged me in the past.  I’d like to share it with you. This story comes from journalist Tim Stafford who reported on an experience in Kenya:

When I lived in Kenya, which had at that time the highest birth rate in the world, I had a conversation with a university-educated friend of mine about children. My wife and I had just had our first child, and we wanted to know whether breast-feeding in public would offend people.

“No,” our friend said. “In fact, it would be good. People would be surprised that you want to be so close to the baby.”

“Why would that surprise them?” I asked.

“Well, you know, we tend to think that white people don’t like children.”

“But why would you think that?”

He thought a while. “Maybe because you people brought birth control, and since you don’t want to have children, you probably don’t like them.”

In a certain way, Kenyans are correct. We do not like children to inconvenience us. We do not like them to disrupt our careers or our marriages or our financial plans. We do not like them, then, in the way most Kenyans do. For Kenyans, as far as I can understand it, babies are just good. They are at a fundamental, unexplainable, nonfunctional level, filled with blessing.

That Kenyan attitude is not far from Scripture’s. Certainly God loves us not because we are convenient or useful to him, but because we are.

Since humans are created in the image of God, and since God sent his only Son to save them, we know that humans are to be loved (Christianity Today, October 3, 1994, p. 57).

I’ll share a link in my next post that has more to do with the abortion industry, but I want to let this post end with the simple truth of this excerpt. Why is any human being loved? It is not because of what we do, it is because of what we are:  created in the image of the eternal God and pursued by God.  In the same way, we are to love each human life as He does.

-Tim C. Williams

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