“You’re having
another boy?! So sorry!”
“Ah, that’s too
bad. You were probably wishing that you were going to have a
girl.”
My wife and I
just found out that our fourth child-to-be-born, Lord willing,
is our fourth son. (Another little baby of ours died in a
miscarriage last spring before we could learn if he or she was a
he or she.) We happily made the news public, but much more
often than not, the reactions were the ones that I cited for you
above…which are verbatim quotations.
It’s now your
turn to guess whose mouths uttered these words. If you guessed,
“your friendly neighborhood NARAL lobbyist?” you would have to
guess again. If you tried, “your non-believing co-workers?” you
would have an oh-and-two count against you. I’ll give you a
hint: pro-life friends and acquaintances….Go ahead, take one
more swing at it. “Pro-life friends and acquaintances?” Yes,
you got it! Nice hit! (How did you ever make the connection?)
Now, if you have
more children than the national norm, or if you have adopted
interracially, or if you have a child with Down’s syndrome, then
you hit the ball out of the park on the first swing. It did not
take you three guesses, because you’ve heard these kinds of
comments—and much more unkind ones—from pro-life friends and
acquaintances, and probably from family, too. When my wife and
I told people that we were pregnant again just three months
after the birth of our first son, one pro-life (I’ll just say
“relative”) relative expressed dismay at the news. “Again? So
soon? Are you sure that you are ready for another?”
Believe it or
not, I am not writing this to vent. But these
recent puzzling statements from pro-life friends and
acquaintances spurred me finally to sit down and write on a
subject that has been on my mind for quite some time. I have
long been trying to answer the question: Why are we having
children?
The most typical
positive answer to that question—you hear it from well-meaning
people all the time—is not satisfying to me. Worse, it has a
dark undertone that those who love the precious gift of life
should not be imparting: “Children give you so much joy.” You
should have children, many will opine, because they can bring
you joy. Okay, but by the same logic, you should not
have children if you think that they will not bring you
joy. I actually agree with the second statement if you
are not married and not pregnant: if you don’t see children as
gifts from God, then you should remain celibate and
childless…and fifty feet away from any child.
The tragedy of
our nation is that, more than three thousand times every day,
the maxim “you should not have children if you think that they
will not bring you joy” is used against a child who is already
alive. And, as I see it, anytime that you answer the query as
to why you’ve had children with, “Because they’ve brought us so
much happiness,” you are reinforcing the popular cultural notion
that a child is nothing more than a pawn in the grand game to
maximize your own personal pleasures.
My wife and I
share the good news of our pregnancies right away: when there
is a double blue line on the pee-stick, Verizon stock goes up.
Invariably, people then ask us, “Do you want a boy or a girl?”
I didn’t know there were M and F boxes on the pee-stick to check
off! My response to that question has always been (and I do try
to say this gently), “I don’t know if our baby is a boy or a
girl, so I am not going to wish that he or she is something that
he or she might not be.”
“But don’t you
wish that you were having a girl?” You might as well ask me,
“Don’t you wish that Joshua [our oldest—now 6] was a girl?”
“Again? So
soon? Are you sure that you are ready for another?” Um, dear
______ of mine, the baby is already here.
What kind of
question is that?! (Venting.) What are you trying to say? If
we aren’t ready, then…what? Your question sounds
like the hook in the sales pitch at the other end of
1-800-PlanPar.
Well, what about
Psalm 127:4 – 5a? “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so
are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose
quiver is full of them….” Picturing all those millions of
little spermatozoa darting their way towards the egg, I can’t
help but think that God’s use of the word “arrows’ for children
was an attempt at reproductive humor. (And a very good joke,
too! I might add. Not a good idea to heckle the Creator.)
Still, even in this Biblical passage I don’t find it being
taught that you should have children in order to be
personally blessed. But if you do have children, then you will
be blessed…as long as, according to the first verse of that same
chapter, the Lord builds the house. Otherwise, they labor in
vain who build it.
Okay, I’ve done a
lot of criticizing (yeah, yeah, it is venting) but have
not offered anything constructive. Why are we having
children? Yes, children do bring a lot of joy and happiness but
also great doses of pain and frustration. (Undoubtedly, God
rides the very same emotional roller coaster when He deals with
me day in and day out.) Here’s my answer: it’s a missionary
work. We create heathens, and then we try to save them. (More
accurately, we participate in their creation, and we participate
in their sanctification.) So, my answer is for Christians
only: we have children in order to populate heaven. What joy
there will be for every believer who is welcomed by the Savior
into eternal bliss! And the more who will experience such
eternal peace and happiness, the better.
This missionary
work has an earthly benefit as well. The children of believers
are workers in training to redeem the culture. We need more
godly hands on deck to right a ship that is sinking rapidly. In
Genesis 1, the Lord commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and
multiply, and then He re-issued that same order to Noah and his
sons in Genesis 9. We have a temporal charge with eternal
consequences.
If you’re not a
believer, then I cannot give you an honest philosophical reason
to start having children. However, if you are pregnant,
then you shall not murder. That commandment applies to you even
if you live in rebellion against God’s Word.
So, I have
answered my question, finally, but there is an additional
implication to my answer: the pro-life message cannot be shared
devoid of the Gospel. I find it intellectually dishonest to try
to convince someone to believe or behave in a way that is
totally contrary to his or her worldview. A very wide variety
of pro-life strategies are valid, in my opinion, but if the good
news of Christ’s work on the cross is absent from your pro-life
apologetic, then you are building your pro-life house on sinking
sand.
April 14, 2011
