Book Review: Like Always

LIKE ALWAYS

by Robert Elmer

(WaterBrook Press; 978-1-4000-7165-4; PB; 308 pages)

"You wish Will didn't have to worry so much, and that it was just like it always was when our kids played together and we had barbecues on the back patio and Easter egg hunts in the Abells' backyard." (p. 224)

For Merit Sullivan how can life ever be Like Always when her husband Will trades his secure job of a lifetime in the Bay area for a dream to operate a rundown resort in the wilderness of Idaho? When her son Michael returns from Iraq an emotionally wounded stranger? When she finds out in one day that she's pregnant and has an aggressive form of leukemia?

Suddenly Merit is alone in holding onto a tiny life that puts her own at greater risk. Never spiritually strong, Will is struggling to support her and leans on the pastor of the local church. Her estranged sister Sydney, a cat-loving vegetarian New Ager, attacks men in general, Will in particular, and the church for Merit's decision to keep the baby and put off treatment. Michael and her two young daughters seesaw between hope and despair.

Merit finds help and friendship in young Stephanie Unruh, the local pastor's daughter. So does Michael.

After someone leaks Merit's story, the national press descends on Kokanee Cove. Life is certainly not like it always was. But does God have something better in mind?

Rita Fedrizzi, a forty-one-year old Italian woman who found she was pregnant and had cancer at the same time, inspired Robert Elmer to write Like Always. Fedrizzi rejected cancer treatment in order to give life to her baby.

Elmer takes us through the emotions and thinking of Merit, Will, Sydney and those around them. He describes the conflict, the pain, the misunderstandings, and the passions aroused by Merit's decision in a moving tale of courage, love, and selflessness. The author portrays the characters so realistically in their challenges, hopes, and fears that I found thoughts of them pursuing me throughout the day. Readers will not want to put this story down until they complete the journey with Merit and Will.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. However, I did have one problem. The story alludes to a time of intimacy between Will and Merit the end of April being responsible for her pregnancy. But the baby is not born until Easter. This makes an eleven-month pregnancy. Other than this timing problem, it's a thoughtful, tender love story of a woman for her unexpected child, a husband for his wife, and two estranged sisters for one another. The timing does not change the issues involved.

Readers of tender heart may expect to shed a few tears.

Reviewed by Debbie W. Wilson, a human rights advocate, speaker, and author of Christy Award-winning thriller Tiger in the Shadows. Her weekly prayer list for the persecuted church can be found on the home page of Bound Together Ministries.

The Pretty Picture and the Not So Pretty

Today I saw a 4D ultrasound image of our unborn granddaughter. Her eyes were closed. Her nose is shaped like her big brother's. Her cheeks and lips remind me of her mamma's. She has been growing for five months and is due to be born on her great-grandfather's birthday, a birthday gift that will please him pink.

If her parents believed differently this precious child could be killed any of the nine months inside her mother's womb. If the Supreme Court had not upheld the Congressional ban on partial birth abortion, she would be eligible to die a grisly death that we cannot legally inflict on the worst of murderers.

After partially delivering the baby, the abortionist plunges scissors into the skull to kill it or crushes the skull. It makes me shudder every time I think of it.

But it doesn't make the Democratic candidates for president shudder. Instead they shudder that the Supreme Court would prevent this horrendous procedure.

John Edwards wrote on his website:

I could not disagree more strongly with today's Supreme Court decision. The ban upheld by the Court is an ill-considered and sweeping prohibition that does not even take account for serious threats to the health of individual women.

What John Edwards does not take into account is that "serious threats to the health of individual women" do not require the killing of the baby in the last few months when the little one can live outside the mother's womb. If the mother did not want her, she could be put up for adoption. The judges did take into account that no legitimate health needs of the mother requires the killing of a late-term baby, especially not in such a grisly way. Do you think it's legal to do this to unborn puppies and kittens? Imagine if this had been done to known terrorists in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo! But to an unborn baby? It's important to John Edwards that this method of killing a child be available to women!

How about Barak Obama? Compared to Edwards, he's the model of reason and smoothness, isn't he? Not this time. On his website, he writes:

I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women.

And Hillary Clinton? Being a woman and a mother, having carried a daughter to term, having felt the butterfly kisses of her baby's movements, Chelsea's hiccoughs, and midnight calisthenics, surely she'll oppose the grisly procedure!

Don't count on it!

Mrs. Clinton writes on her website:

This decision marks a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman's right to choose and recognized the importance of women's health. Today's decision blatantly defies the Court's recent decision in 2000 striking down a state partial-birth abortion law because of its failure to provide an exception for the health of the mother. As the Supreme Court recognized in Roe v. Wade in 1973, this issue is complex and highly personal; the rights and lives of women must be taken into account. It is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that I warned against when I opposed the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.

Most Americans look at this terrible procedure and wonder how you can justify it. The baby has committed no crime. Yet it is sentenced to a death not allowed to the grossest mass murderer. And partial birth abortion's defenders would scream the loudest against it if Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or Ted Bundy had been put to death this way!

But you see abortion is not about babies. Baby is a four-letter word to liberals. Babies interfere with a woman's availability for sex. Pregnancy can be a deterrent to having fun with a married man or a one-night stand with someone who doesn't want commitments.

Think I'm making this up?

Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist who wrote "the most important book of the decade" according to Congresswoman Bella Abzug, said in that book, Right-Wing Women,

It was the brake that pregnancy put on (obscenity for intercourse) that made abortion a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s.... The decriminalization of abortion...would make women absolutely accessible, absolutely "free." The sexual revolution in order to work, required that abortion be available to men on demand. Getting laid was at stake. (94-94)

You see, to liberal politicians who pride themselves on civil rights and compassion, abortion isn't about babies. It's about sex. It's about having fun without visible consequences. It's not about the next time a baby loses its life to a pair of scissors; it's about the next time someone wants to "get laid" without consequence or responsibility.

And then, that may not be the only reason they support abortion. There's always campaign contributions from Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry to consider.

I feel dirty now. I think I'll look at my unborn granddaughter's picture and try to guess what name her parents have chosen to surprise us all.

Debbie W. Wilson

Debbie W. Wilson is a human rights advocate, speaker, and author of Christy Award-winning thriller Tiger in the Shadows. Her weekly prayer list for the persecuted church can be found on the home page of Bound Together Ministries.

A Question of Morality

We live in strange times.

This past week Coach Tony Dungy of the 2007 Superbowl Champion Indianapolis Colts spoke to a family group promoting marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Also last week former Vice-president Al Gore testified before the Senate on global warming. He refused to take a pledge to curtail some of his private jet use or to lower the use of energy to what the average American uses. One of his four homes uses several thousand dollars worth of energy per month. However, in his book and Oscar-winning documentary, he urges average Americans to cut back on their energy use.

One of these men was praised as a great moral leader. The other was attacked. Which was praised?

Vice-president Al Gore.

In spite of Gore's using twenty times the energy of the average American, Gore's praisers in the Senate could not gush enough about his moral leadership.

When Tony Dungy gently and kindly advocated "families the Lord's way," some homosexual groups lied about what he said. They claimed he attacked them, though he made very clear that he was demeaning no one.

"Morality" used to mean living a good life. It meant hard work, sincerity, honesty, kindness, using decent language, caring for one's family, compassion on the poor and weak, revering God, and not having sex outside of marriage.

Now many in the media and politics would change the meaning of morality. They want you to believe that it's moral to recycle, but it's not moral to say sex should be reserved for marriage. It's moral to take the bus, but it's not moral to show an ultrasound of her baby to a woman considering abortion. It's moral to protest against war with tyrants like Saddam or Al-Qaeda, but it's not moral to protest the war on the unborn.

Why is this?

Morality makes claims on us. It requires us to do what's right rather than what's easy. It requires character of us and sometimes self-denial.

The elites, those with power, celebrity or money, have never been good at self-denial. Whether you go back to the pharaohs, the kings of the Old Testament, the empires of Europe or today's Hollywood and governmental elite, self-denial has never been their strong suit. What applies to others should not apply to them. They are better and deserve better than the rest of us lowly peons.

You see morality in the western world has been based on the Ten Commandments. Elitists tend to think of them as restricting their liberties, as those "Thou shalt nots." But not too many years ago most people recognized them as the bulwarks of our law and society.

Each of God's laws protects the weak and innocent. Let's look at two. "Thou shalt not kill" helps people respect the right to life of the elderly man living alone, of the teenage girl out on the street, of the unborn child. The strong who can protect themselves and the wealthy who can pay for protection don't need the sixth commandment the way the poor, the weak, or the innocent do. The strong and wealthy are in a position to provide for themselves better than the rest of us. Most of us depend on society to uphold this standard, God's standard, for our safety. When people ignore God's law, society becomes dangerous. Life becomes negotiable if you have the money or power. The strong and powerful no longer look out for the safety of others unless it's convenient to them. The weak and insignificant suffer most.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery" channels our powerful sexual passions to marriage and keeps them there. How does it benefit us? It bonds a man and a woman together for life, giving each security, intimacy, and love. This provides a father in the home committed to his wife and to his children. Children who have the discipline, guidance, and protection of both parents are less likely to become violent, to engage in drugs or promiscuity. They have a better chance of establishing themselves for a good life.

Some claim that not everyone keeps these laws so they aren't good. Yet don't we know from the evidence of molested children, abandoned lovers, and abused elderly that the more people who follow God's laws the better?

Rather than undermining freedom, morality—God's law God's way—undergirds freedom for the ordinary, the innocent, the poor, and the weak.

Debbie W. Wilson

Debbie W. Wilson is a human rights advocate, speaker, and author of Christy Award-winning thriller Tiger in the Shadows. Her weekly prayer list for the persecuted church can be found on the home page of Bound Together Ministries.

The Value of a Sparrow

"What was that about?" my six-and-a-half-year-old daughter asked.

"Shhh. Let me hear the news," I answered, hoping she would forget.

She didn't. They don't forget the things you wish they would.

After the news ended, she said, "What was that story about the boy?"

I told her that a little boy had been kidnapped and killed by bad men. Neighbors had found his body.

A week or two ago she questioned me about a news story in which a man flew his plane with his eight-year-old daughter in it into his ex-mother-in-law's house in revenge on his ex-wife. These stories about the murders of children are too common.

I try to think back to what my mother told us about similar stories, but I can't remember hearing any. In our little town even a break-in was big bad news. Most people went to bed with their doors unlocked. Children left to play in the neighborhood after breakfast and returned for lunch and supper. If my brother or I got into trouble, my mother knew before we even reached home or definitely within twenty-four hours.

What has happened?

We could credit it to many things: the breakdown of the family, the breakdown of the community, rejection of Judeo/Christian values, the fact that most children no longer learn religious values weekly in a church or synagogue, the absence of mothers in the home during the day, and the increase of pornography.

But we shouldn't leave out the devaluing of life caused by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion declared the unborn child was not a person under the law. It allowed him or her to be disposed of like a piece of trash. It took away the influence of the child's father in deciding whether that unborn child survives or dies.

Those legal precedents had enormous social consequences. Suddenly the father was less of a father than a sperm donor. The child became a financial burden to the man if he didn't have a commitment to the mother. He had to support the kid without being involved in the decision of whether the child lived or died.

Now many men no longer receive pressure by the community to marry the mother and form a family. They no longer have to grow up, become responsible, and do the right thing. Hence we find many men who are still children at 30, leeching off whichever woman will support them and her offspring.

Because these men no longer have a commitment to their children with the woman whom they made them, many of them felt no real bond with the children they lived with. Instead, in some cases, access to the kids became part of the bargain to keep the man in the home.

As for the children themselves, if they could be disposed of so easily before birth, how precious are they really? They become tools for pleasure, tools for profit with pornography or prostitution, tools for revenge or control.

Child abuse has increased with this devaluation.

Our attitudes toward children have changed in the past forty years. With that change, we changed our actions, but God's attitudes have not changed. He says that "the very hairs of your head are numbered." He says that those who harm one of these little ones would be better off if they had a millstone tied around their necks and were tossed into the river. He sees them as his reward to parents, as examples of His image, as teachers of how to enter heaven.

Christ says, "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows."

When the toddler is fussy, the teenager is arguing, or the baby isn't planned, it's easy to forget how much God loves each one of them. We need to step back and see them through His eyes, to see their potential, their uniqueness, and their value to God. He cherishes them.

And so should we.

Debbie W. Wilson

Debbie W. Wilson is a human rights advocate, speaker, and author of Christy Award-winning thriller Tiger in the Shadows. Her weekly prayer list for the persecuted church can be found on the home page of Bound Together Ministries.

The Party of Death

At last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference, controversial conservative commentator Ann Coulter said, "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards."

She later said that it was a joke. She wouldn't insult gays by comparing them to Edwards.

Both conservatives and liberals are attacking her loudly.

A few days earlier HBO's Bill Maher said on Real Time, "I'm just saying that if he (Vice President Dick Cheney) did die, other people, more people would live. That's a fact."

When Barney Frank commented that some people were saying that the bomb that killed numerous people in Afghanistan but missed Cheney was wasted, Maher said, "That's a funny joke."

Would he have thought it was a funny joke if said about some Democratic congressman or senator or someone running for the presidency? If Coulter's comments were out of line, why wasn't everyone as incensed about Maher's calling for the death of the current vice president? Unless it's because the Democratic Party has become so entrenched as the party of death that it isn't even controversial?

Death as a solution is nothing new to the Democratic Party. It was their answer to runaway slaves in the 1800s. If the slave tried to escape, beating, branding, selling into the living death of being sent "down the river," or killing were common answers to the problem.

At the threat of Abraham Lincoln's being elected and putting a stop to the expansion of slavery, they cried for the death of the union and tried to kill it.

From Reconstruction into the Civil Rights period, the Ku Klux Klan kept the Negro in line. One former Ku Klux Klansman holds high office in the Senate, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Lynching was the answer to the "uppity" Negro who stepped out to assume independent manhood. The leading opponents of civil rights were Democratic governors and senators in the South.

Then came abortion. The Democratic Party leaders are to the man (and woman), pro-aborts. They've never found a method of killing the unborn too gruesome to support, including partial birth abortion in which the baby is partially delivered. Then scissors are stuck into the child's brain to kill it. The abortionist delivers the dead baby and throws it away. The Democratic Party leadership, on the whole, has voted time and time again to oppose any limitations on partial birth abortion.

Many in the pro-life movement have warned that the abortion mentality would spread and it has. It has increasingly spread to handicapped infants born in hospitals. The solution to the problem is to let the handicapped die.

Nor has it stopped with the death of the infant handicapped. Remember Terri Schiavo, the young brain-damaged woman who was ordered starved to death. The Democratic Party was outraged when Republicans in Congress tried to intervene on the side of life for Terri and the parents who wanted to care for her.

Several years ago a Democratic governor in Colorado said, "It's the duty of the elderly to die and get out of the way." Since then several states have passed legislation allowing the elderly to be put to death at their request.

In the last few years Democratic spokesmen, media personalities, and celebrities have written books and produced films that have called for the assassination of President George W. Bush, Vice-president Dick Cheney, and Senator Jesse Helms and his entire family. They voiced hopes that former Attorney General John Ashcroft would die of a serious illness and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife would feed him so much high-cholesterol food that he would die from it.

Congressman John Murtha has called for our troops having supplies, training, and equipment denied to them which would mean more deaths of our soldiers and of the Iraqi people.

What has happened to the Democratic Party? Some Democrats have laughed these verbal assaults off. Rarely have we heard the Democrats attack their own or demand more civility as the Republicans have done. But many rank-and-file Democrats have wondered where the party of FDR and JFK went. It started out as a party which supported earning its bread at the sweat of another man's brow. Its position has evolved to earning its votes by draining the blood from another man's heart.

Debbie W. Wilson

Debbie W. Wilson is a human rights advocate, speaker, and author of Christy Award-winning thriller Tiger in the Shadows. Her weekly prayer list for the persecuted church can be found on the home page of Bound Together Ministries.

Go Down, John the Baptist

The images of slaves and the yearning of the spirituals have not left me from Ken Burns' documentary, The Civil War. We didn't watch the whole thing but those images and sounds linger yet. So mournful as they pleaded to God for freedom.

The thought struck me at the time that God could not have heard those prayers and pleas year after year, left those people in the horrors of slavery, and remained a just God. His justice, His mercy, and His love demanded an answer. That answer was a civil war in which "every drop of blood drawn with the lash ...(was) paid by another drawn by the sword."

It is the end of February, Black History month. Today when we hear those beautiful spirituals, we realize that many of them arose from broken hearts of ruptured families, broken bodies of those beaten by the lash, and courageous spirits who refused to remain slaves. They passed the messages of freedom on through spirituals. "Go Down, Moses" heralded Harriet Tubman's courageous rescues. "Follow the Drinking Gourd" guided many to freedom after they learned the song.

Yet today we look at another attack on African-Americans. However, this attack destroys the future of African-Americans by killing off future generations. It is the tragedy of abortion on the black community, expedited by Planned Parenthood and its abortion clinics conveniently placed in black communities.

Peggy Harshorn of Heartbeat International "points out that black women represent 12 percent of the female population in the country but have one-third of all abortions. For every five African American women that get pregnant three will have abortions." (Ertelt, Steven, "African-Americans Lament Lack of Blacks in Pro-Life Movement," LifeNews.com, Feb. 1, 2006)

In 2004 in New York City, over 29,000 black babies were born. In that same year,
nearly 40,000 black babies died at the hands of abortionists. I'm not a great researcher or a statistician, but I can't help wondering how that compares to the number of African-American slaves killed in any one year in the inhuman crossings from Africa or due to the whips and the lynchings.

A Moses can't go and pull those babies to life and freedom from their mother's wombs. What we need now is a John the Baptist to turn the hearts of the fathers and mothers back to their children.

A line from the film Amistad has always stood out to me. John Quincy Adams asks the young lawyer defending the Amistad Africans. "What is their story? He who tells the best story wins."

We need poets and writers who can tell the story of the unborn of every race to stir our imaginations to their plight as Harriet Beecher Stowe did for slaves with Uncle Tom's Cabin. And we need musicians to reach us with their voices and give the struggle of the unborn a voice that breaks our hearts with the yearning for life.

Debbie W. Wilson

Debbie W. Wilson is a human rights advocate, speaker, and author of Christy Award-winning thriller Tiger in the Shadows. Her weekly prayer list for the persecuted church can be found on the home page of Bound Together Ministries.