Don Roach

A few people have had a profound effect upon my life. One of those people is Oswald Chambers. Chambers was a minister whose collection of sermons were encapsulated within My Utmost for His Highest, a little book that provides a daily nugget of inspiration. A friend of mine gave me the book when I graduated high school, and I was a skeptic, Christian books weren’t ever (and still aren’t) high on my list of must reads. I often feel they are too cliche, over the top, and not thought provoking.

This book? A completely different story. For example, the passage from today’s text (the book has a message of each day of the calendar year) asks, “Am I carnally minded?” Going back to cliches, I’ve heard this question put to many a young teen and young adult with the ensuing message of abstinence. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but talking about abstinence without addressing the issue of young love, hormones, and peer pressure leaves young people without a lot to hold onto when they find themselves in tricky situations.

Oswald changes the script a bit and doesn’t necessarily focus simply on sexual carnality nor in the insistence upon stopping the act of carnality itself:

If the Spirit of God detects anything in you that is wrong, He does not ask you to put it right; He asks you to accept the light, and He will put it right. A child of the light confesses instantly and stands bared before God; a child of the darkness says – “Oh, I can explain that away.”

Indeed, it is not up to us to put it right but to trust God to put it right. It’s a power shifting and one I don’t think often is talked about when talking about carnality. In any event, Oswald often went to the heart of the matter ignoring surface issues.

From time to time, I’m going to write my thoughts on his sermons as I believe they are very inspiring, challenging in many ways for Christian and non-Christian alike.

As an aside, one of the best things about being a Christian is that I’m a perfectionist. I’ll never attain it, no, but serving a God whose number one requirement is surrender and not perfection leads me ever closer to it, nonetheless.

William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal wrote a powerful piece regarding the compromise pro-life Democrats made with the president over the issue of federal funding of abortions in the recently passed health care legislation.

Amid the recriminations it’s easy to overlook what Mr. Stupak had cobbled together. His amendment restricting federal funding for abortions, passed in November, marked the only bipartisan vote in this whole health-care mess. For the first time since Roe v. Wade, pro-life Democrats had seized the legislative initiative in the teeth of their leadership’s opposition—and brought the party of abortion to heel.

Now Mr. Stupak has thrown it away. By caving at the last hour, he discredited all who stood with him. (What does it say about Ohio’s Marcy Kaptur and Pennsylvania’s Chris Carney that they had already agreed to vote yes even before the fig leaf of the executive order had come through?) In addition to undermining an encouraging partnership with pro-lifers across the congressional aisle, Mr. Stupak signaled that, in the end, you can’t count on pro-life Democrats.

Here in Rhode Island, we have our own pro-life Democrat who also caved – far earlier than Stupak – on this issue. By now many of you have read about the e-mail Rep. Langevin sent out to his constituents stating his support of the health care bill. It was very discouraging to read as a member of the pro-life community. And Langevin stood with other pro-life Democrats and decided that it was not worth the fight, and that’s a tough pill to swallow.

Stupak and others caved, passing a massive bill and leaving behind the very stipulation that stood in their way of supporting the measure by accepting “fool’s gold” in the form of an executive order. An executive order isn’t law and if anyone challenges the executive order it’s likely they would win in court. Stupak and others must have known this, no?

Sad day indeed.