What love is not...

“It doesn't please the religious people, who try to force their lies and beliefs on you to control you and take away your freedom and happiness. I love sex and I'm not going to let someone's beliefs in a religion stop me from being me and being happy. Belief in religion doesn't define who we are. WE do. Do what makes you feel good and makes you happy. This is what free will is for… Self Happiness.”
–Anonymous comment from the web

My nephew just had his first birthday, and as most parents do, Micah got his own piece of birthday cake with 2 inches of blue frosting of which he LOVED and ate most of (leaving the rest on his face). He was SO happy. As far as he was concerned he could sit there and eat blue frosting the rest of his life! This may sound extreme, but what if we let him. What if our love for Micah basically boiled down to seeing him happy all the time and we just fed him frosting for the rest of his life. He would be excited and elated (probably from the sugar) for the first day, but then his body would begin shutting down and that very thing that brought him such joy and happiness would begin destroying him physically and emotionally. My sister would be arrested for child abuse and neglect, and her defense would stand as, “I wanted to make him happy! What’s wrong with just letting my child be happy?”

Funny thing however, human happiness does not equal love. God is love but God is so many other things (Justice, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Mighty, Righteous, All Powerful) that make His expression of love true and pure; If he did not love his people he would in fact set no boundaries and allow us to destroy ourselves through our own lusts and desires… to feed off of the blue icing of this world until we died of malnourishment… to continue thinking if we just eat more then we’ll finally be satisfied… If people were TRULY honest they would admit (as we all can) that the most lonely, unhappy, despairing moments in their lives have come when they selfishly pursued their own desires and ran over anything and anyone that stood in the way. Families ripped apart by a husband/ father’s unfaithfulness, a child’s innocence forever taken by a molester or pornography, a teen’s early death due to drugs and alcohol, suicide or a life left in shattered diseased pieces from homosexuality…. They are all the desires of this world and some appear more inherently evil than others, but I argue that they are all equally destructive and rest in the core statement of the pursuit of happiness.

This unfortunately is the world we live in today and it is nothing new. There may be different stories, but the lies are still the same, and the arguments when you strip them down have few components. I suggest those components can be found in this statement: “My purpose in this life is to make me happy and those I like happy and anyone getting in the way of this purpose does not care about me and what I want; therefore they do not love me.”

What a tragic distorted picture this world has created of ‘love’ … What a misconception we posses as to what true happiness is… Where did we buy into the lie that love equals happiness?
Now please don’t read this and think… okay, love equals unhappiness and misery? That is not true. I argue that happiness ought not be your goal because WE (and I do include myself) cannot be trusted to know what would truly bring us happiness. It is only in the pursuit of the heart of God will we find that happiness was only ever meant to be a byproduct of a relationship with Him… not the main pursuit. In Him, you’ll find the answers. In Him, you’ll find the real purpose for being alive and in Him, you’ll find the acceptance you’ve been trying to grab from every delusion offered on this earth and in Him and only Him will you understand and experience happiness.

God gives boundaries not because they are “religious control devices” or because He doesn’t wish you to be happy; He gives them because we are children in pursuit of the blue icing most of the time when He wishes we’d turn our head and see the feast He’s prepared. Sadness is what I feel when I read the above quote because some of us can see the feast, but if we do not love as God is teaching us then how will we show them the table too? Heck, I WOULDN’T pick an angry snarling mob over blue icing, are you kidding!? The desires of our hearts cannot be trusted and understanding that is the first step toward understanding full surrender to the greater love found through God, and then and only then will we begin to see a glimpse of happiness.

“Sometimes I thank God, for unanswered prayers…just because He may not answer, doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” – Garth Brooks

Freedom of Choice Act

As you may or may not be aware, the Congress reconvenes in January with the new President in tow, there is a certain piece of legislation that is pending that has many Americans passing petitions, blogging constantly, and holding rallies in the expected American fashion. The bill is called the “Freedom of Choice Act,” aka FOCA. It concerns abortion and the rights of women concerning the termination of pregnancy.

There are of course commentaries flying left and right, and many will develop an opinion based upon the knowledge and, perhaps not all wise opinions, of others. I have included a link at the bottom of this blog and encourage you to read the bill (it’s not that long, I promise) and develop your own opinion.

If you expect me to be yet another opinion in which to lean on, I think I’ll keep it to myself for the time being. I thought I would instead try to take an objective approach and lay out the pieces on which this legislation is based.

Here’s a quick glance:

In 1973 the Supreme Court decided the landmark case, Roe vs Wade (410 U.S. 113) in which the court decided to take a balancing approach to the pro-life/ pro-choice argument. The court (and therefore the law in the U.S.) concluded that some of the basic liberties of a citizen of the U.S. were the right to the privacy and control of one’s person and body; therefore, women could terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability. It left to the individual States to decide whether, within their borders, abortion after fetal viability would be allowed… with one exception; if the life of the mother was threatened, the physician and mother would be protected if the decision to abort had to be made in order to save the life of the mother.

(I’d like to make a side note here that this decision was not made lightly; it was 37 pages of historical walking into the origins of the Hippocratic Oath named for the “father of medicine” Hippocrates, through the liberties endowed in the Constitution, and onward to the viability and life of a fetus viewed through the eyes of Augustine and other Christian and non-Christian opinion. I say that simply to educate those that seem to think that nine people sat in a room for a few hours and just came up with this “plan” to allow abortion in the U.S.)

As we know (or perhaps don’t) this debate of abortion is as old as Greek and Roman times, and perhaps even older than that. FOCA’s main argument seems to be that women will have an abortion regardless of its legality or not, and that the government should lift the illegality of it in order to prevent the ill fated conditions that will await these women that seek out other means to obtain an abortion. The bill claims 1,200,000 women a year pre-1973, resorted to illegal abortions and an estimated thousands lost their lives due to those who would eagerly give them what they sought for a price.

Every conclusion, every “fix” has seems to have a flaw. If you ban all abortions, women will lose their lives and husbands lose their wives perhaps because the doctor’s hands are tied in that moment when a decision needs to be made. Those that seek out abortions regardless will not doubt do irreversible damage to themselves, and those who would prey on these women by performing shoddy jobs at best will prosper. On the flip side, by removing all barriers to destroying the life of a fetus, do we take further steps to desensitizing our society as to the value of human life? When we as a society stop valuing human life at any stage, are we just as many societies before us headed straight for destruction?

I have no fixes nor could I waste your time in paragraph after paragraph of the flaws that ensue from all sides of the argument, but I can say this… There may be no solution except perhaps to always remember that most of the women seeking out such an extreme measure are generally very scared and unaware of hope and options that lie outside of abortion. They are most likely unaware of the emotional repercussions that come from this “quick fix”… and we should never be more passionate about the law than we are about loving people. I challenge us all before signing a petition to take a look at what we’re doing to provide a caring place or point of education for these women. We cannot expect the government to correct every grievous wrong the roots of which begin in the heart of man and expand further than state or national borders; the balance of liberty and life should not be found more prominent in our Supreme court than it is in the actions of its people. You go out and develop your own educated opinion.

Link for the bill: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:S.1173:

It's Time

This is the first post for me so I truly expect no one to read it... You don't know me and for all you know I have absolutely nothing either credible or interesting to say. So for this brief moment I'll let you know a little bit about me.

I was born and raised in Chattanooga, TN; I was a bit of a surprise to my parents as they were still living in my grandparent's barn when they brought me home. So for the first year of my life, I lived in a beautiful red barn with pond in my backyard.

I am the oldest of 5 children and am now a proud aunt. I attended the Baylor School of Chattanooga, graduated with a BBA from Belmont University, and am now attending the Nashville School of law for kicks and giggles. (I am absolutely kidding!) I have and continue to work in the Music Business and have for about 8 years; many crazy stories will no doubt flow from these pages due to the interesting characters you meet on such a road. I now work at Indelible Creative Group and love it. Check out the website and my boss, Chris Thomason's blog.

Considering my background in entertainment, my crazy family stories, and my persuit of a law degree, this blog will most likely be one of the most excclectic you read.