Grow A Spine

In many trips around the world, traveling every continent, I have seen “the good, the bad, the ugly”. My first travel to communist China, just after the reopening by President Nixon, I was late to go with a plane load of doctors and lawyers, mostly from New York City, as a representative of doctors, also as the New York based “Shelters for Children”. China had changed much on my subsequent trips, but on that first trip, I went to a Chinese hospital and in the surgical amphitheater, saw the most horrible sight a human being could observe: prisoners strapped to tables- their mouths and eyes taped shut, and they opened down the mid-section, their organs being transplanted to other patients on tables. The entire communist system of hospital care would make an Alfred Hitchcock movie seem tame.

Never sign an organ donor card. Between the time that hospital personnel stop their life saving procedures, there is a nebulous time where only God can make the decision. It is in this matter of seconds that “The Giver of Life” may decide that it is not yet your time to go. More times than people would suspect, vital signs have brought back to life those thought dead. Recently, it was reported that a man carried his newborn baby home thinking that the child was dead- as he had been told by the hospital- just to discover, at home, that the baby was very much alive.

Literature is replete with accounts of such blessings, fauna, even the human body, are spectacular in their resistance to death. This in some ways supports Darwin's “Survival of the Fittest”. An elderly black funeral home director told me he had been surprised many times by bodies brought from the hospital that were not dead. It is a surprise that there is a large market for organs, not documented or publicized; I do believe that in many cases, death is hastened by the monetary gain of organ retrieval. We know that in some parts of the world, organs retrieval, even from those still alive, to raise money for the survival of families. The leading cause of suicide in India is the that of farmers who, battling water shortages, can no longer survive and provide for families. One will often sell a kidney. If a family is willing to sell a child, as is done with girls, we can understand why the selling of organs, before and after death, is comprehensible. In 2007, there was a total of 28,931 organ transplants in the United States alone- including heart, lung, kidney, pancreas, and liver. There is only so much that a man can do, but there is no limit to what God can do. In life, and certainly before death, we desperately need what god can do.

I realize this is a narcissistic, naval gazing generation, most only interested in “me”. The words concerned and shame are lost words in most vocabularies. We do what we do because we believe what we believe. In a time of political correctness, most do not have the spine to stand up against evil. So, evil continues to thrive because good men do nothing. Even pro-choice individuals consider abortion birth control. In 1995, 60% of those polled in America considered themselves “pro-choice”. In a recent poll, for the first time in history, 51% of those polled are “pro-life”. Having just elected the first pro-abortion President and Congress, it is a direct shame on the Catholic church that 70% of the elected are Catholic; and yet 54% of Catholics voted for Obama. We have stopped expecting Christian virtue from Protestants and even Baptists, but we do expect better from the most pro-life denomination in the world, the Catholic church. Most so-called Christians, like to pick and choose what they believe- cafeteria Catholics, buffet Baptists; only the spirit of God can open blinded eyes of the present world. The apostle Paul's traveling companion, Demas, is mentioned three times in the New Testament; the last time, Paul said, “Demas has forsaken me, loving this present world” (2 Timothy 4:10).

God help the so-called “Christians” who have forsaken him for the love of this present world. Five times in the New Testament, Jesus has said, “Be of good cheer”. We know that our redemption draws near and we shall leave behind, those who have joy within themselves, and are spineless.

To show how spineless this nation is, how evil has taken over right under our noses. The gnostic, ”anything goes”, ”all you need is love” church. Houston, Texas, fourth largest city in America, has a lesbian mayor, the largest abortion center outside of communist China, yet two evangelical churches have a total of 65,000 members, plus 831 baptist churches. Are the church people in Houston, Texas and around the world, so deaf they cannot hear God talking to them?