A Striking Contrast

Today browsing CNN, I came across this article and my heart broke. While I can feel some sympathy for these parents as they face a lifetime of caring for their disabled children, I feel more sympathy for the children and hope that they never reach an awareness of the fact that their parents - the people on whom they depend for everything - find them so worthless that had they known, they would have chosen to kill them rather than raise them. Beyond that, I'm ashamed to belong to a culture that looks at this situation and embraces a quote like the one that ends the article: "I believe that this case is so powerful and this tragedy was so preventable and is so poignant, that it is the kind of case that should rise above the fray and rise above party politics."

Life is not about party politics. Determining who is fit to live is not our job. It's God's. There's no way around it. And while suffering and hardship certainly come as the result of imperfection, in God's eyes we're all imperfect, and who are we to say that one imperfection is better or more worthy of life than any other.

Perhaps this hit me harder today than it might have on any other day (though any day I would read it with sorrow for what we are becoming) because a young couple at my parent's church are in a situation that provides a startling contrast to the couple in Florida. On the heels of discovering that their first child (now 2ish) has disabilities, they find that their second child, as yet unborn, has severe genetic problems that, at a minimum will result in a need for lifelong care and at the worst will result in stillbirth or death shortly after birth. And in the face of this, they say:

"I can honestly say that [we] are upset, but we will be fine. God has been good to us all along and we don't expect He will change now. I just feel bad for the little guy and pray that God would give him a good life for as long as we are his parents."

How amazing the difference that Christ makes.