Two Decades
By Hans Zeiger (02/22/05)
It is my twentieth birthday. When I became an American two decades ago at 9:33 in the evening, Tacoma General Hospital, I was a survivor of abortion. Every child born in those days, and in the twelve years prior and in all the years since, has been a survivor. If ever birth cries were justified, mine were. I had much to mourn.
Of course, I knew nothing of abortion at that hour. But I knew something of hell. As the soul is cut off from God, I was born from the womb into a world of bright lights and dark sins. Already, I was a dying person in a dying world. This is not light trivia; it is not philosophical speculation; it is neither theory nor the tired tenet of a few Puritans who came to America. The realization that we are dying is the inescapable requisite to living. Dare we think that this is Heaven, as we prosperous Americans are wont to do, we pledge ourselves to hell. And we know that hell exists before we know of Heaven, because we are miserable in our earliest moments, but the world sends in false comforters to allay our fears and to have us forget hell and Heaven.
Beneath the flash and flesh of MTV and VH1 and People and Rolling Stone, whispers the voice of a philosopher. He is the same fellow who thought that we should have been aborted. Products only of circumstances, highly evolved animals, we bear no responsibility. Trapped within our environment, we have no freedom. The age defines us, says the philosopher. And he concludes, “You have no soul.”
But man does have a soul, and if he is made as a child to understand himself as a soul, he cannot long abide the intellectual who tells him, “You have no soul.” It is to say that a man does not exist. And if an individual cannot live in invisibility, neither can a whole society of individuals long endure invisibility. A society’s institutions and ideals must be illuminated in such a way that the individuals of that society may be enabled to discover what is God and what is man. Deprived of spiritual visibility, a people must fall in blindness.
And yet, in the brief and profound recesses of our soul, when something like the voice of God comes softly and still, hearkening us to something grand and lovely, we entertain in our mind, if only for a split second, a longing for Heaven. We wish to take part in something bigger than ourselves – bigger than our circumstantial environment – something so amazing and so satisfying that instead of sapping our energies, feeds to us a ceaseless flow of passion and purpose that in turn may be shared with the world around us. Neither free will nor determinism rules the fulfilled heart; God does.
In the early hours of this morning, I turned to Psalm 39, where David prays for reality. “Lord, make me to know my end, and what is the measure of my days, that I may know how frail I am. Indeed, You have made my days as handbreadths, and my age is as nothing before You; certainly every man at his best state is but a vapor.”
For certain, there is nothing best about this earthen vessel. That I could be redeemed by God indicates a mercy so rich and mighty and powerful and deep that it could save any lesser sinner. For whether there is anyone whose sins have been able to exceed mine in hideousness during a period of twenty years I doubt.
But worthy is the Lamb. Jesus saved me from death; that is my message for life. Compared to the eternal hope of rebirth, my twentieth birthday is a trifling and negligible occurrence. If anything, it marks progress toward the joyous opening convocation of heaven.
It is a blessing to know the insignificance of insignificant things, for only then we can begin to know what few things are truly important and permanent. Salvation is a thing of such significance. I don’t know what hour I was born again, but that doesn’t matter, for a spiritual birthday is not something to be commemorated annually. We should celebrate daily.
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