Your Marriage Will Not Go Smoothly

Our back yard

Once a man I was counseling for his failing marriage told me, in anger, "I just want my marriage to go smoothly!" (As he said this he spread his two hands before me as if he was smoothing out a tablecloth.)

I told him: "It won't."

It's not logically impossible to have a "smooth marriage," in the way "square circles" and "married bachelors" are impossible. It's more like an oxymoron, perhaps, such as "Microsoft Works."

When he told me this I thought - there's the problem. He wants everything to go his way, and for his wife to always agree with him. He's controlling and self-centered. He doesn't want conflict.

Mark this: every good marriage has conflict. Two very different persons have come together to do life. There's trouble a-brewing. When it comes like a tsunami (not "if" it comes) what's needed are humble hearts + good communication skills. Marital partners must go through conflict, not turn tail and run from it (warning: you can't outrun conflict; it's faster than you are, especially as you grow older). And mostly, do not repress it, for if you do you are squashing your significant other.

One book I recommend is Caring Enough to Confront: How to Understand and Express Your Deepest Feelings Toward Others, by David Augsburger.

Another is To Understand Each Other, by Paul Tournier.

And especially Mike Mason's The Mystery of Marriage: As Iron Sharpens Iron.

Also good is Fit to Be Tied, by Bill and Lynn Hybels.

Argentina's "Miracle Baby" takes turn for the worse

So many, including myself, are praying for this little child to live.

Argentina's "Miracle Baby" takes turn for the worse.

God Has Already Dealt With the Forces of Chaos Within

Linda bought these tulips a few days ago.

I have met many people who do not pray because of a fear of what is inside them. James Houston writes: "Beyond the defects in our character that we know about, lurk deeper fears and anxieties that are even a secret to ourselves." (Houston, The Transforming Power of Prayer: Deepening Your Friendship with God, 49)

Thomas Merton writes: "Who can swear that his intentions are pure, even down to the subconscious depths of his will, where ancient selfish motives move comfortably like forgotten sea monsters in waters where they are never seen!" (Merton, No Man Is an Island, 115)

Some people have a loveless, abusive childhood past and cannot shake its images. Some struggle with the dark forces of addiction, and these forces seem to rise up within them when they try to pray, screaming words like "Shame" and "Failure" and "Worthless." "Some people fear to look inside   themselves at all. It is as if looking into one's soul is to look through a window of the heart into a bottomless pit." (Houston, Ib.)

Prayer can be threatening. Because "it calls for us to face our darkness and uncover it." (Ib.)

If that is true, who would want to pray? Why pray at all if it might bring us face to face with our inner demons? The answer is: "God has already dealt with the forces of chaos - with cosmic chaos far greater than we can ever imagine. Because of this, we can go to him in prayer with a confidence spoken about in Psalm 139." (Ib.) Which reads:

"If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you."
- Ps. 139:11-12

The same God who has dealt with the vast, deep moral and spiritual darkness that has entered the world is able to face and lovingly expel the darkness inside of us. When this happens we are not only not further damaged, but we are restored and healed. God removes our fears and addictions. God eradicates our sense of helplessness and despair. This is why the enemy would not want us to come to God in prayer; viz., because God wants to kick him out of the spiritual house that belongs to Him.

God transcends all our enemies.

God lies beyond the shadows.

Go to God and trust in Him.

Houston writes: "Our trust in God is a realization that he is already working for, in and through us, calling us to a new, whole life beyond our broken lives. The darkness will not wim through, because light will overcome the nght and love will destroy evil and hatred." (Ib., 51)

The "Miracle Baby" Is Still Alive

Detroit

Last night, in my MCCC Logic class, I began teaching "inference to the best explanation." The form of this reasoning goes like this:

1. Phenomenon Q.
2. E is the best explanation for Phenomenon Q.
3. Therefore, E is probably true.

For example, suppose Phenomenon Q is: I discover my mailbox by the side of the road is lying on the ground broken, 50 feet away from its original location. The 4X4 post is broken off at the base. And, there are pieces of broken plastic lying on the ground. Tire tracks are there where my mailbox was once anchored.

What best explains Phenomenon Q?

It would be Explanation E: A car strayed from the road and ran over my mailbox.

An alternative explanation F could be: An alien spaceship landed on my front lawn, broke my mailbox, and left plastic on the ground.

If these are the only two explanations, then clearly E is best. This is Sherlock Holmes' kind of thinking. In logic it's called inference to the best explanation.

Last night in Logic class I gave, as an example of Phenomenon Q, the recent story of the Argentinian "miracle baby."

Phenomenon Q (from what we know so far) is:

A premature baby - who was declared dead shortly after birth - was later discovered to be alive after spending 10 hours in a morgue refrigerator. How did this happen?

Doctors at the Perrando Hospital in northeast Argentina can’t explain how several doctors pronounced the child dead or how the premature infant born three months early survived for so many hours inside a chilly coffin.
A similar case occurred in Israel in 2008. A baby was found alive in a morgue refrigerator after having been declared dead for five hours, according to the Jerusalem Post. An Israeli doctor suggested the premature infant's irregular heartbeat could've eluded doctors and that placing the child in the cooler kept her in "suspended animation." The baby later died.
In a case last year, a 60-year-old man woke up in a South African morgue after 21 hours.
- CNN report

To ask "How did this happen?" is to ask for Explanation E. The CNN report given today reasons: Can cooling explain why ‘miracle’ baby survived?

Not if it was dead already.

Were the doctors wrong? Perhaps. Remember, reasoning by inference to the best explanation is inductive (probableistic), not deductive reasoning.

The students in my class last night did a great job giving possible explanations.

I suggested that one explanation could be: God resuscitated the baby to life from death.

Here is the point where your worldview kicks in.

(See: Newborn Baby Pronounced Dead, Placed in a Hospital Freezer, and Comes to Life 12 Hours Later)

Free to Love #3 - What You Think of Others Is Very Important

Me, Lee Davis, & Jon Standifer

Years ago God told me "John, what others think of you is mostly not important. But what you think of others is very important." And: "What I [God] think of you and others is most important."

Here there are three ideas:

What others think of you is mostly not important.

1. What is most important is what God thinks of you and others.
2. What you think of others is very important.

Today, I'm addressing #3.

3. What you think of others is very important.

#3 is not possible without 1 and 2. The more you are concerned about what others think of you, combined with an experiential lack of God's love for you, the less you will be free to love others as Christ did. The person who tries to please others to gain approval would not do so were they secure in God's love for them.

Only a free person can selflessly love others. Love is selfless and other-cenetered. More strongly, only a free person can love even their enemies. At its highest this includes feeling. Com-passion is "to feel with others." Real love is feeling + action, expressed outwardly. Jesus looked on the people with compassion, as sheep without a shepherd.

This is important because God so loves the world, and the world includes more people than you. If God loves others, then we are to do no less. It is not a God-thing to think little or not at all towards those in your circle of life.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

Love your neighbor as you do your own self.

That is the heart of true Christianity.

Beckwith On the After-Birth-Abortion Debate

Ann Arbor

For me, Francis Beckwith is the one to read on the scandalous, horrendously evil debate on aborting persons after they are born.

See Beckwith's "Potential Persons in the 'After-Birth Abortion Article'."

"The fetus, then, is not a potential person. It is what it is: a being with a personal nature, and for that reason, it has essential properties that include capacities for personal expression, rational thought, and moral agency. The maturation of these capacities are perfections of its nature, and thus, contrary to what Giubilini and Minerva claim, the human fetus can be wronged even before it can know it has been wronged."  

Rhetological Fallacies

Tulip tree in Ann Arbor

Here is a nice chart of Rhetological Fallacies (errors and manipulations of rhetorical and logical thinking). These are also called Informal Logical Fallacies (Hurley), or Fallacies of Irrelevant Premises and Fallacies of Unacceptable Premises (Vaughn).

After-Birth Abortion (Killing Newborn Babies)

The nytimes just linked me to The Journal of Medical Ethics, which published a paper entitled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" Here is the paper's Abstract.

Abstract

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

But...  fetuses and newborns are "persons." See here.

How could anyone think like this? For some history, see atheist Peter Singer's famous and chilling "Taking Life: Humans." Here's some Singer:

"The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics - not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant - disabled or not - has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time."

The authors of the Medical Ethics article, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, are atheists and utilitarians. Utilitarianism is "a philosophical outlook that denies that anything has intrinsic moral worth and views morality in terms of maximising overall ‘happiness’, where such happiness is measured in terms such as that of increasing pleasure, decreasing pain or ensuring satisfaction of individuals’ preferences. It is a theory that is often logical in some abstract way, but it is rarely rational within the framework of actually lived human lives." (From here.)

The last quote was from Kenan Malik's response to Giubilini and Minerva. Malik goes on to say:

"A cell created by a fusion of egg and sperm is (if we ignore the possibility of cloning) a necessary condition of being a human being. It is not a sufficient condition. A human being is created in the long journey from being a single invisible cell to becoming a self-conscious moral agent. That change does not happen at any one instant, but slowly and over time, so that, almost imperceptibly, a qualitatively different being is created. But while this is a process, and there is no point at which a ‘non-human’ becomes a ‘human’, or a ‘non-person’ becomes a ‘person’, there are moral boundaries that mark qualitative shifts. Birth is one of those boundaries."

False, I think. See again Francis Beckwith on the illogic of this position. The conceptus is both a necessary and sufficient condition for being a full-fledged human being.

Newborn Baby Pronounced Dead, Placed in a Hospital Freezer, and Comes to Life 12 Hours Later

Who doesn't love stories like this one?

• Luz Veron was born weighing 1 pound, 12 ounces.
• This baby was born on April 3, three months early, and had no vital signs, hospital director Dr. Jose Luis Meirino told CNN.
• The gynecologist on hand didn't find any signs of life, so he passed the baby to a neonatal doctor who also didn't find vital signs, Meirino said.
• The doctors observed the baby for a while, and only then, pronounced her dead.
• The hospital then followed protocol. Two morgue workers then put her body inside a little wooden coffin and placed it in the freezer. "Up to that point, there were still no vital signs," the hospital director said.
• That night, the baby's mother wanted to see her little girl one more time. Hospital officials allowed the couple to visit the baby in the hospital morgue around 10 p.m., Mrs. Veron said. As many as 12 hours had passed since the baby had been declared dead.
• "They put the coffin on top of a stretcher and we looked for a little crowbar to open it because it was nailed shut," Veron told a local television station. "It was nailed shut. I put the crowbar in there and started prying. I took a breath and took the lid off."
• The mother approached the baby's body, touched her hand, and heard a cry, she told CNN.
  She jumped back. "It's my imagination, it's my imagination," she repeated.
• The baby was alive, and crying.
• Mrs. Veron's brother-in-law rushed the baby back to the neonatal ward. He clutched her close to his chest for warmth. She felt like an ice-cold bottle against his body, the relative told Veron.
  "I can't explain what happened. Only that God has performed a miracle," Veron said.
• "Today is the eighth day of my daughter's resurrection," the girl's father, Fabian Veron, told CNN Wednesday.
• The parents named her Luz Milagros, the Spanish words for "Light" and "Miracles."
• Watch the CNN video report here.

That's what happened.

From this point on your worldview will take over.

Register Now for Our 2012 Green Lake Conference

2012 Green Lake Holy Spirit Conference

Ignite the Fire!!! Make plans NOW to attend our annual Green Lake Holy Spirit Conference. It will revolutionize your life!! June 23-29, 2012 Green Lake Conference Center (glcc.org) What would it be like to experience and demonstrate a naturally supernatural lifestyle, to walk in Jesus’ love and healing power today? It is possible! Let it begin at the amazing Green Lake Holy Spirit Conference! Five days to recharge in the presence of the Lord, ignite the fires of passion, and activate the ultimate power source, the Holy Spirit, in your life. Life-transforming, biblically balanced teaching, rest and relaxation in a beautiful setting, excellent programs for children and youth make it an unforgettable experience for all ages! Keynote Speakers include: Dr. JP Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology; Pastor Philip Mantofa, Mega-church Pastor and International Christian Leader from Indonesia; and Darren Wilson, Founder and CEO of Wanderlust Productions. (See LINK to speaker bio & pictures). Other speakers include Dr. Lee Spitzer, Executive Minister of the American Baptist Churches of New Jersey; Annie Dieslberg, Director of NightLight outreach in Bangkok, Thailand; Dr. John Piippo, Pastor at Redeemer Fellowship Church in Monroe, MI; and Dr. Clayton Ford, Pastor of La Jolla Christian Fellowship and National Chair of Holy Spirit Renewal Ministries. Conference Dates: June 23-June 29, 2012 Our conference begins at the Green Lake Conference Center (glcc.org) with Sunday morning worship at 9am, June 24 and ends with Communion at 9:30pm Thursday evening, June 28. Most people will arrive at Green Lake on Saturday evening June 23 and leave Green Lake on Friday morning June 29. Registration: Please register for our conference online at our hsrm.org website if at all possible. Click on the Conference link, scroll down, and then click on Register. After filling out the registration forms for each person coming to the conference, go back and click on the Conference link, then scroll down to Pay Green Lake Fees. Use PayPal to pay your registration cost ($50 for an individual or $75 for family (parents and kids ages 18 and under). Day rates are: $20 per individual per day; $35 per family, per day. If you do not have access to a computer, please register by sending a check for $50 per individual or $75 per family (parents and kids ages 18 and under), along with your name, full mailing address, and phone numbers to HSRM, c/o Richard Baldwin, 148 Winghurst Blvd, Orlando, FL 32828 . Day rates are: $20 per individual per day and $35 per family, per day. (NOTE: For Housing and meals accommodations, see below) If you have any questions, please email claytonford@sbcglobal.net This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call Clay Ford at 858-909-0201 or Richard Baldwin at 407-371-0247. Please register as soon as possible - it's a great help to our registrars if you do. Thanks! Housing and Food Accommodations: Housing and meals costs are separate from the conference registration fees. For Green Lake housing accommodations and meal plans, please call Guest Services, Green Lake Conference Center at 1-920-294-3323. Pastors and Denominational Leaders Scholarships Partial Available: First-time attending senior/lead pastors and denominational leaders and their families may apply for partial scholarships to this conference -- please contact HSRM Chair Dr. Clay Ford at claytonford@sbcglobal.net This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 858-909-0201 (home office) or 619-495-0818 (cell) for more information.