By Judie Brown
Saint Vincent de Paul once wrote, “I have been sent not only to love God, but also to make men love Him. It is not enough to love God if my neighbor does not love Him.”
As missionaries in a broken world, we understand that these words of Saint Vincent resound in a way that we could never have imagined just a few short decades ago. And yet here we are. Though the times require us to be fervent, they also remind us to keep in mind this sage advice: “You will catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar.”
These days are very retro to seniors such as me, as we see the same organizations taking the same evil steps to perpetuate the culture of death.
For example, we learned that Planned Parenthood is working with a Los Angeles area high school to reduce teen pregnancies “through the distribution of birth control, pregnancy testing, and, of course, offering advice to teens who may find themselves pregnant and looking for direction.”
In other words, through propaganda, pilling, and killing, Planned Parenthood is allegedly educating.
In a similar situation we learn that because of the abortion pill, thousands of women have gone to the emergency room. Despite this, the state of California is suing to stop abortion pill reversals from taking place. The same state that salivates over aborting children is claiming that abortion pill reversal practices have no supporting scientific evidence. California apparently refuses to acknowledge the solid evidence behind the work of the entire abortion pill rescue network. No surprise there; instead we see a slew of dead babies who might well be saved if some would clear the scales from their eyes and confront truth rather than agendas.
Nearly 40 years ago American Life League was exposing the errors residing beneath the political cover provided to school-based sex clinics, but few paid attention. And today that human resolve is even worse than it was then because human beings are wedded to quick-fix solutions to mask their own sexual forays.
These various examples of a failure to resolve to always do what is just in the eyes of God remind me of a line from John Steinbeck’s famous Grapes of Wrath: “Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.”
Steinbeck wrote those words in 1939, yet they provoke me to wonder what he would write about the sad situation we face today.
While we are not caught up in an actual ravaging dust storm, we are victims of a sexually deviant culture that creates a wasteland of victims far greater than any dust storm ever could.
This human condition is addressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (#385), which says:
God is infinitely good and all his works are good. Yet no one can escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil. Where does evil come from? “I sought whence evil comes and there was no solution,” said St. Augustine, and his own painful quest would only be resolved by his conversion to the living God. For “the mystery of lawlessness” is clarified only in the light of the “mystery of our religion.”
In the light of Christ, our human resolve to be His alone becomes a light in the darkness that others can follow if only they have the humility to do so. Our task is to be resolved in that challenge, and today is a perfect day to begin.
In Matthew 6:33-34 Christ tell us, “Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on God’s saving justice, and all these other things will be given you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow: tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Human resolve is rooted in focusing human hearts on the kingdom of God. We can be beacons of His truth as we sing, “We are the light of the world; may our light shine before men.”