So what is "wrong" anyway?

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values… it requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.

Now, I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.” –Barak Obama

I know I have already written a lengthy post about abortion, but I recently stumbled on this Obama quote on Facebook, and it really bothered me. I agree completely with the principle of what the president said, but I hate that he used abortion as the example. The way I see it, there are definitely different categories of “wrong” actions. Allow me to expound.

Category 1: Bible says it’s “wrong”, society says it’s “okay”, law says it’s “okay”.

I completely agree with Obama that I can’t expect everyone from every faith (or lack thereof) to adhere to Biblical standards. That would be ridiculous. Some things that fit in this category might be drunkenness, extramarital sex, and homosexuality. While the Bible does not condone these actions, society as a whole accepts them as the norm and there are no laws against them. Therefore, I cannot judge or condemn anyone who does not claim to be a Christian who practices these things, as they don’t even pretend to want to follow the Bible. Christians who condone these things are another issue entirely, but not the point of this post.

As a side note, I really wish Christians would stop judging non-Christians for wrongs in this category. It really makes us sound like stuck-up Pharisees. It’s not our place to tell them they have to follow the Bible when they have no inclination to do so. However, there are other categories of “wrong”, I think…

Category 2: Bible says it’s “wrong”, society says it’s “wrong”, law says it’s “okay”.

Some things in this category might be lying and adultery. While there aren’t any specific laws against them, even non-Christians feel offended when someone lies to them or if their spouse cheats on them. They feel like something wrong has happened to them, and they are justifiably hurt. Even so, the wrongdoer usually does not face any legal repercussions, just maybe a broken friendship or a divorce.

Category 3: Bible says it’s “wrong”, society says it’s “wrong”, law says it’s “wrong”.

This is where you might find things like stealing and killing. It is absolutely against the law to break into a house/store/car/bank/etc. and take things that don’t belong to you, and if you do so there are consequences. Same with murder, it’s a given that we do not have the “right” to kill people, and that we will be severely punished if we do. When these things happen against us or our loved ones, most of us, regardless of religious beliefs, feel something wrong or bad has happened.

Category 4: Most people agree that it is absolutely “appalling”, and most laws say it’s “wrong”.

Some things are so extreme that I feel they warrant another category. Appalling. Things like genocide and cannibalism. Most reasonable people look back on the millions of innocent lives brutally killed in the Holocaust with disgust. Most reasonable people would look at the selling of human flesh in a market alongside pork and beef as being a whole different level of “wrong”. (This happens in the world today, by the way. In the DR Congo they hunt, kill, and eat the pygmy people mercilessly, simply because they are a different race).

President Obama, who claims to be a Christian, places abortion in Category 1, so even though he says he thinks it’s wrong he refuses to pass any laws against it because other people don’t think it’s wrong. I wish we could place abortion in Category 4, or at least Category 3. It is, after all, genocide that is going on every day all over the world. Countless millions of innocent lives have been killed for the sake of convenience and in the name of “freedom of choice”. In my previous post I ranted about no one having “freedom of choice” to murder anyone after birth, so the fact that we can legally kill people before birth with no social stigma or legal consequence really confuses me. 

We. Kill. Our. Own. Children. 

How is that not appalling? How is that not considered “wrong” by society and the law? I think that is “subject to argument and amenable to reason”, how does everyone else not? This isn’t about religion. It’s about life and death.

Be Careful What You Pray For!

[Jesus] said to his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.”
Jesus called his twelve disciples together and gave them authority to cast out evil spirits and to heal every kind of disease and illness. 

Jesus sent out the twelve apostles with these instructions:“[Go] to the people of Israel—God’s lost sheep. Go and announce to them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, and cast out demons. Give as freely as you have received! (Matt 9:37-38, 10:1, 5-8)

A while back, Jon was praying for a number of things. One was that our church would have a greater influence on the campus, another was that he could have something productive to do on the nights he struggled with insomnia, and a third thing was that he could have a new ministry of some kind, because he was getting tired of how little contact he had with people at his desk job. 


In the passage above from Matthew, Jesus asks the disciples to pray for more workers to be sent into the harvest, and then in the very next verses he sends them. What they prayed for was answered... through them. That seems to be how God works pretty often.


It was my birthday last month, Jon's old boss from when he worked as an RA called him up to come meet with her. He came home from that meeting with the following (which has become one of the classic Reinagel family quotes now): "Happy Birthday, Carla! Um, do you want to move to TJ?" 


(For those of you who don't know, TJ, or Thomas Jefferson Residence Hall, is a large dorm with about 850 residents on the university campus where we attended and where I still work. Jon lived there 2 years of his undergrad studies). 


Wow, was THAT out of the blue or what! Apparently a fairly important worker was leaving her job halfway through the semester, and they desperately needed someone to fill in the spot. Would Jon take it? I agreed to pray about it with him over the weekend. It seemed a little strange to me to live in a dorm with a family, but as I prayed I felt a distinct peace about the prospect. It strangely enough DID answer a lot of Jon's prayers, and seemed like God's hand was all over it. I said yes.


A couple days later Jon was scheduled to have his first official interview for the position, and on that same day he lost his job as a web designer, as the company he worked for was struggling and all its workers were laid off that day. Also on that same day, I commented to my boss that Jon had been laid off and she offered me a raise. Talk about provision! 


Two weeks later we moved into TJ, we have a cozy little apartment inside the dorm and Jon works in an office down the hall. So far Kyran has loved it here, he gets lots of attention and can ride his new little trike down the long halls. I'm enjoying having lots of babysitters and a dishwasher (nice little convenience we didn't have at the last place!). Jon enjoys his job and the interaction he gets with tons of college students every day, and the fact that he gets to work from home again like we did in Mozambique. So... our church now has a new presence on campus, he'll have something to do on the nights he can't sleep, and he has far more ministry opportunities than before. Overall it has been a great answer to prayer, just maybe not exactly the way we expected those prayers to be answered! 

Burnt Rice

Last night we had fish and rice for dinner. I guess I had the electric burner on a little high, because the rice got a bit scorched and stuck to the bottom of the pot. The rest of it was fine, so we just scooped off the top and, after I put away the rest of the edible leftovers, I unceremoniously dumped the burnt bits into the trash.


Then I had a sudden flashback to another meal of fish and rice, a couple years ago and thousands of miles away from here.


In Mozambique we helped a vibrant jail ministry in our town, lots of prisoners turned to God to transform their lives and many came out as completely new men. A visitor from the States had been particularly touched by this ministry, and he helped fund it even after he returned home. One time he decided to send us enough money to make a meal of fish and rice for the entire prison of about 250 inmates, just to bless them. For hours the ministry team stood around two fires, one with a gigantic pot of rice and the other with a comparatively tiny skillet, frying up the mackerel in small batches of a 8-10 at a time. It took forever. 


Before you can fully appreciate what this meal meant to the prisoners, let me tell you what their normal fare was. The staple food of much of Africa is a thick cornmeal mush, called xima, pap, massa, ugali, or sudza in various languages around the area where we were living. It didn't have much nutritional value, but it was cheap and filled the belly. At the prison they would add too much water, making it soupier and thus less filling, and throw a couple beans on top. Tiny portions. Once per day. If that were not bad enough, the guards were known to lace the cornmeal with tons of baking soda, which gave the prisoners diarrhea and made them feel weak all the time. That way, even if given an opportunity to escape, they probably wouldn't have the energy to do so. Always hungry. Always sick. 

Finally the fish were all fried and we hauled all the food into the prison courtyard. The inmates lined up in a very orderly fashion, like 250 well-trained Oliver Twists, each carrying the item they used for a "bowl". Some had real plastic bowls or plastic containers, but many others had the cut off bottoms of jugs, some just a cup. They patiently waited in line, we served up the food in as large of portions as we could (and just trusted God to multiply it if we ran low before everyone was fed). Most thanked us with very appreciative smiles. They all quietly walked away and enjoyed their relative feast. It was all so organized and peaceful.


At the end, after the last prisoner walked away with his prized meal, we still had the bit of rice that was burned to the bottom (it's really hard to cook THAT much rice in a pot THAT big over an open fire without some of it getting burnt). Someone mentioned that there was a little bit left over and that they were welcome to have it...


Unlike the Oliver Twists of a few minutes before, no one came up to quietly ask, "Please, can I have more?"


On no. Chaos ensued. 


At least 20 of the closest men all trampled over each other, yelled, punched, pushed, shoved, swarmed the pot and fought over those last little bits of burnt, barely edible rice. They were just that hungry. They were just that desperate. 


We have no idea how good we have it. We will probably never know what it's like to be that desperate, to be willing to risk a black eye for the same thing I threw in the garbage last night. 


"When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required" (Luke 12:47b).

We have been given. So. Much. What are we doing with it?

O Christmas Tree...

First, some background information. When I was almost 12, my family decided to stop celebrating Christmas in the traditional (read: materialistic) way, and take it back to the bare bones of just remembering Christ’s birth with no additional hullabaloo. My mom might pull out a little nativity scene for the month of December, but other than that Christmas came and went just like any other day. While I understood my parents’ reasons for cutting out the stress in buying and greed in getting gifts, losing the holiday still made me a bit sad. Christmas has always been such a happy time for me, it makes me think of family gatherings, good will and charity, thinking of others, and that it truly is a greater blessing to give than to receive. I never really cared about what I got, but I loved spending lots of time thinking and planning what to give—when I was a kid these gifts were usually handmade crafts of mine. Now that I am married and have a family of my own (and in-laws who celebrate Christmas to a slightly greater degree than my side of the family), I decided to find a happy medium. I don’t want to go overboard and spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on Christmas, or make sure my kids get 20 gifts every year, or get stressed about making sure everyone I know gets something, but I do want to bring back some of that sparkle of joy that I always found in the holiday.

As a brief side note, Jon’s family’s Christmas story is the exact opposite of mine—they didn’t celebrate the holiday for all of his growing up years and then suddenly decided to start when he was a teenager. To compensate, in college he kept not one, not even two, but THREE Christmas trees up in his tiny dorm room all year round and wore a Santa hat all winter. On our wedding day, one of those Christmas trees mysteriously found its way into the backseat of our getaway car, but I digress. I don’t know what happened to all those trees after we left the country in 2007, someone else moved all of our stuff out of our apartment while we were gone.

All that said, I wanted a Christmas tree this year. After living in Africa for the past 3½ years—where it was somewhere between hard and impossible to find a tree—I wanted to do up my house “right” for a change, and in my mind that includes a tree. Yesterday we stopped in to Lowes to get a florescent light fixture and I glanced at the real trees; the cheapest they had in the respectable sizes were $16, which I didn’t think was that bad (I was expecting them all to be $40-$60), but Jon didn’t think it was important enough to spend even that much (we’re a bit the frugal type, you might say). I reluctantly agreed. Then today I was at Salvation Army…

First I saw a fake tree all set up and on display, but it wasn’t decorated. I asked the guy behind the counter if it was for sale, and he said yes. After conferring with another worker, he held up his hand with all fingers out. Five dollars. That was a bit better than $16, but the tree was missing a few branches… I kept browsing, and in the back I discovered one of those big cow-printed Gateway computer boxes full of that wonderful artificial evergreen—another tree! And this one I wouldn’t have to disassemble to get into the car, another plus. I searched the box for a price and found none, so when a lady with a Salvation Army t-shirt walked by I asked her how much it would be. “Oh, $3 I guess.” Score. I scarfed up the box (along with a couple strings of lights for 25 cents each) and was grinning all the way to the checkout. I was almost giddy as I loaded it up into the car, I really can’t say it enough that this tree. Made. Me. Happy.

When I got home I unloaded it into the hallway and tried suppressing my grin when telling Jon I got a tree—for only $3! I started pulling out the branches, noting their color-coded tips… I pulled out quite a few branches… and the base… and the top of the tree… but no trunk to stick all of the branches into. That was nowhere. I knew I should have checked the box at the store to make sure it had all the parts! So I ended up with this:

A heap of fake tree branches on the couch. I wished at that moment that I had bought the "expensive" $5 tree with a few missing branches. I really didn’t want to spend any more money on the tree—we are, after all, the frugal sort—so I looked around the house for anything that might serve as a tree trunk to hold all those branches up. I eventually rigged up this:

This is the tubes from three rolls of gift wrapping paper stuffed with a tightly rolled strip of cardboard from the box of the fluorescent light we got at Lowes. Finding all of those elements came very slowly, and with much trial and error and finding out that anything less can’t fully support the weight of the branches. So I got to know the awl tool on Jon’s Swiss army knife very well as I punched many, many holes in the solid cardboard trunk:

Then I started inserting branches:

And voila!

I think it ended up a little shorter, bushier, and a bit flimsier than it would have with the manufacturer’s trunk, but I was still mighty pleased with my little tree! Add those lights and a few Chinese knots:

All in all, I’m calling it a frugality fail but an ingenuity win! Now just to find some more decorations… but cheap ones of course, we are, after all, the frugal sort :-).

Life and Choice

I don’t really know why I’m writing this post, I’m probably preaching to the choir as far as my known reader base is concerned. But the topic of abortion and the recent debates and votes about “personhood” are really bothering me right now, and keeps burning in my mind and I feel I need to vent it a bit.

People can choose whether to have children or not. People can choose whether to use birth control or not to prevent getting pregnant. Even if faced with an unplanned, inconvenient pregnancy people can choose whether to keep the child or let someone else adopt and raise him or her. But I have no idea why it is even legal to choose to kill the child.  

If I’m annoyed with someone, if they inconvenience my life, that does not give me the right to kill them. If someone at your workplace really gets on your nerves, that does not give you the legal right to poison their coffee. If a student in your class is always disruptive and disrespectful, that does not give you the right to take them outside and shoot them. If your baby cries all night and you can’t stand another minute of it, that does not give you the right to smother them with a pillow. I don’t see anyone picketing for the legal right to murder people who make your life harder, whether they are children or adult. The public gets outraged at people like Casey Anthony, and more recently Shelby Dasher, mothers who allegedly killed their already-born children, at least one on accident when she was drunk. But somehow no one would even bat an eye if those two women had instead soberly chosen to end those children’s lives before they were born.

There is the constant cry of “What about rape and incest? That woman didn’t have a choice to prevent that pregnancy!” and “What if the health of the mother is in danger?” Seriously, people? Let’s start with rape. Yes, a terrible crime has been committed. Yes, that woman’s life was probably shattered. I’m not trying to be insensitive, it truly is a tragedy. But did the baby commit the crime? No. So why is the baby the one getting the death sentence? Punish the rapist, not the innocent. Again, if she can’t or doesn’t want to keep the child, adoption is always an option. Even so, statistically only 1% of abortions are women who choose to end their baby’s life because they got pregnant through rape or incest. One. Percent. Another 6% are from serious health risks to the mother should she continue the pregnancy or because the baby was diagnosed with health problems in the womb. Many times even in the cases of the mother's health being in the balance, she could try to carry the child to viability as opposed to full-term, and give the baby a fighting chance to live. At 24 weeks, just past halfway through a 40-week pregnancy, the baby has a 50% chance of survival thanks to modern-day medical technology. If the baby doesn’t make it, at least the mother tried. So for every 7 babies who die these “justified” deaths, 93 are killed for convenience.

Why is it that millions of people think that’s okay to end someone else’s life just because they are inconvenient and disrupt your life? How selfish can you be?

Another common line: “It’s my body, so it’s my choice.” Wrong. It’s someone else’s body we’re talking about affecting. You are not your mother, you are a separate entity that came about inside your mother. Your baby is not you. He or she is another new being that has come about inside your body due to choices that you made. Whether to use or not to use birth control was your choice. If you chose not to, don’t be surprised if another person suddenly enters your life. The child forming inside the mother is not “her body”. It’s a whole new somebody else. 

When tallying up members of a household to receive benefits like Medicaid, the government counts unborn children. They’re people in the household. If a pregnant woman is attacked and injured in such a way that she loses the child but she lives, it is still counted as murder. They’re people in the womb. But if that same woman were to walk into an abortion clinic and choose to end that baby’s life, that’s okay. Then it’s not murder, it’s “freedom of choice”. It’s only a person if she wants it.

How is that okay? Does anyone else see something inconsistent here?

By the time a woman even finds out she’s pregnant, there’s already a beating heart. That is life. That heart is made to stop beating when an abortion is performed. That is death. Usually the purposeful causing of a human life to end in death is called murder and it is illegal, immoral, unethical, and just wrong. Most people recognize that. I love the “personhood” movement going on in several states. I’m frustrated at the response, that it’s not getting the justice it deserves. Babies are people. Small people, but people nonetheless.

Another thing that just makes my heart sad is thinking of all that lost potential in those lives. Hundreds of famous, successful, creative, noble, honorable, heroic people were unplanned pregnancies. Just think of what the world would have lost if their mothers had chosen to end their lives. Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Alexander Hamilton, and Eva Peron are just a handful of people who were born outside of wedlock, unplanned, inconvenient to their mothers. Oh, but what they have offered the world! Now think of the abortion clinic in your town, killing the next great inventor who might have revolutionized transportation. The next great doctor who might have found a cure for cancer. The next great leader who might have transformed a society. It’s sick. So much potential is being snuffed out before it can even begin.

Save the trees. Save the baby seals. Save the whales. Save the endangered beetles. But kill your children. Is something wrong here?

//end rant