My mom has a little card tucked in the light switch plate on her wall. It reads, “DO NOT KILL ME. I Oppose Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.” There are two more magnets with the same message on her fridge. For real.
I think they were up there for quite a long while before I actually took more than a moment’s notice of them.
A few Sundays ago they stood out to me for the first time. I pointed to the one on the wall and kind of laughed, like, “That’s funny!” Within a second or two, I was more like, “That’s really not funny. Why in the River Styx do you feel the need to have that posted on your wall??!”
My mother has a note on her wall politely requesting that no one kills her!
I don’t believe that she walks around in fear that someone will sneak in and murder her. There is no great preoccupying threat looming over her head every day. She is happy and joyful. It is, even worse, just something taken for granted, something she considers a reality of the times, something she should keep posted … just in case. Like the earthquake kits we once filled up with water and Spam to tuck away, just in case. She just feels a need to state it: DO NOT KILL ME.
The reality of what that means hit me. Those cards are the realization and fulfillment of our times. I’m sure many of her friends and family would grin patronizingly and think they were cute and ridiculous. But those of us who know, those of us who have heard, or witnessed first-hand, the stories that aren’t posted on CBC, or that get somehow lost (read: censored away) on social media, know that it absolutely isn’t ridiculous in any way.
Does anyone else feel like they are living in the midst of madness? Sometimes I scroll through Facebook or hear conversations while I watch my son’s baseball game, and I feel like the Savage from Brave New World, who doesn’t belong, whose eyes bulge from his head as he hears what people are talking about (and seem convinced of). He watches them, brainwashed and desperate for their government-provided tranquilizers, and questions the system graciously enforced upon them, the propaganda they drink up like soothing water, repeating it to themselves and anyone around them at risk of rebellious thoughts. They feel better once they have given themselves over to the twilight zone of social order. If they do not, they are branded as neither kind, calm, nor safe. So, is it just me, or can anyone else relate? Maybe I’m just crazy.
I looked at that note on the wall and thought, “The same people who have given my mother reason to tack it there are the ones we believe, trust, and obey, without question.”
We obediently take every news report, every accusation, every claim, every direction and order from the very people we, at least some of us, instinctively know are the biggest threats to our very freedoms and lives. They are the biggest haters of our Church and our God, without denial. They publicly mock us, defund, and discredit us. Yet we gratefully repeat their little catchphrases about which lives matter and which lives don’t, about which lives are hateful, and which are posing threats to society for not conforming and doing as they’re told. We so very easily become suspicious of those who question or decide differently.
When people say that they are ashamed of their faith, of Jesus Christ, because Justin Trudeau told them to be so, it’s almost too funny. So funny that I could cry. Health ministers who promote the murder of babies, and Justin Trudeau who funds, applauds, and celebrates … these are our elected moral guides.
I’m not sure why I’m even writing this. I guess it just builds up sometimes. I don’t think my thoughts will change anyone’s mind, that they’ll suddenly see things the way I do. I guess I just feel a need to type it out loud: I refuse the spirit of this world! I refuse to be told what to think, what to believe, who to hate, or what to do to myself and my children.
The people I do not trust and who are diametrically opposed to everything I believe and love as truth will NOT dictate to me what I should be doing, believing, and loving. I do not choose the world and its offer of belonging. I choose Christ.
