Tag Archives: Self-sacrifice

News

Where to get help if you have a selfish, absent or abusive mother or father

11/22/2019 Wintery Knight 9 Comments

Today, I want to say something this article about lambs in Scotland, written by Sheila Walsh in the The Stream.

She writes:

I am very fond of sheep. I grew up on the west coast of Scotland with sheep all around me, field after field of white wool and incessant crying when things seemed a little off.

[…]Of all the lessons I have learned from these defenseless, gentle animals, the most profound is the most painful. Every now and then, a ewe will give birth to a lamb and immediately reject it. Sometimes the lamb is rejected because they are one of twins and the mother doesn’t have enough milk or she is old and frankly quite tired of the whole business. They call those lambs, bummer lambs.

Unless the shepherd intervenes, that lamb will die. So the shepherd will take that little lost one into his home and hand feed it from a bottle and keep it warm by the fire. He will wrap it up warm and hold it close enough to hear a heartbeat. When the lamb is strong the shepherd will place it back in the field with the rest of the flock.

“Off you go now, you can do this, I’m right here.”

The most beautiful sight to see is when the shepherd approaches his flock in the morning and calls them out, “Sheep, sheep, sheep!”

The first to run to him are the bummer lambs because they know his voice. It’s not that they are more loved — it’s just that they believe it.

I am so grateful that Christ calls himself the Good Shepherd.

“He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. After he has gathered his own flock, he walks ahead of them, and they follow him because they know his voice.” (John 10:3-4 NLT)

My older brother and I grew up with a mother who was very much focused on her career and earning and saving money for her retirement. We were both stuck in daycare very early after being born, so that she could go back to work right away. (Me after 6 weeks) My older brother has shown the ill effects of our parents (especially our mother) not having any plan for us, especially morally and spiritually. He dropped out of college after failing his first year, never had a career. Although he has normal intelligence and mental health, he never could stick in any real job.

Although there were early warning signs when his grades started to drop in Grade 5, my parents never took responsibility to make a plan to solve it. Oh, they would yell and scream at him at report card time, but just for a day or two, and after that, nothing constructive. My brother decided that he could just ride out the flak my parents gave him on report card night, and keep going with his plan of having fun and being popular. My parents just forgot about it until the next report card day, because they did not want to be distracted from their careers, hobbies and retirement planning. When dispensing rewards, my brother was always given the same as me, despite our different levels of achievement. And my parents considered this equal dispensation of rewards regardless of performance to be a great virtue, and excellent parenting.

I had the exact same upbringing as my older brother. He actually did pretty well until Grade 5 just like me, but then our paths diverged. From Grade 5 on, his grades deterioriated. He got tired of having to study and he was more interested in the opinions of his peers and conforming to popular culture. In my case, from Grade 5 on, my grades were always high-90s. I remember taking the same classes as he did, in the same high school, with the same teachers. He got a 44 in data processing, I got a 96 with the same teacher and won the award for the entire grade. Every class I went to, the teachers would speak fondly of my older brother – he was a nice guy, very popular with his peers, good at sports. But not a very good student. How was it that I was winning awards when he had scored so poorly. Was I really his brother? How could we be so different?

The difference is that in Grade 5, he got a Gideon’s New Testament and he read it and he didn’t put it into practice, and in Grade 5, I got a Gideon’s New Testament and I read it twice and I did put it into practice. That was the difference. I had the awareness of the moral law (i.e.- wisdom) that allowed me to judge my parents and judge my peers and judge my teachers and stand alone. When you cannot rely on anyone to lead you, be able to judge when others mistreat you is very important. That is what allows you to maintain appropriate boundaries and minimize the influence of friends and family who are teaching you self-destructive behaviors. Awareness of the moral law is what allows you to stop trying to please people who do not want what is best for you. On the other hand, God is always willing to give you wisdom if you ask Him for it, and you can find out all about him because he has left plenty of evidence concerning his existence and character for you to find. It is in knowing God as he really is that you can find your sense of value, purpose and meaning. The God of the New Testament is the God of people who are lost and need a Savior.

For me, Christianity was a simple matter of being willing to go along with what was true, and not insisting on having fun or conforming to peer expectations. The essential characteristic of my faith, in contrast to my older brother’s lack of faith, was this – I did not mind being different, so long as I never lost a debate about what was true. My obedience to Christ has never been conditional on things going my way, on being liked, or anything like that. The only thing that mattered was being factually correct. It never bothered me what other people were doing, or what other people expected me to do, so long as I was acting on what I knew to be true. And God helped me to find out what was true by motivating me to study, and leading me to him with good evidence, and good mentors. Thanks to Jesus’ death on the cross, the mistakes I made early did not count against me, and they never will. Jesus’ death on the cross gives me the imputed righteousness that I need to stand before God holy and blameless. This is what allows me to keep learning and keep trying no matter how much I fail on any given day.

How has this affected me? Well, this is the second thing I wanted to say about the bummer lamb analogy. Since I was a victim of this hands-off, me-first style of parenting, it’s caused me to be extra sensitive about being a good spiritual leader to others in the same predicament. The people I mentor can see it in the way that I treat them . I treat them the opposite of the way that my older brother and I were treated. I care what people read. I care what courses they choose. I care what they eat. I care how they feel. I care about their finances. I care about their plans to serve God. I care about their romantic relationships. I care whether they get recognition for doing good. I care whether their life is going in the right direction. One person I mentored who once considered taking her own life wrote to me when she graduated from a STEM program, and she said this: “I wish you could have been here at my graduation. My parents only paid for this degree. You were the one who got me through it”. We have never met in person, but she is going to continue to make a huge difference for Christ and His Kingdom going forward.

I think when you have been a bummer lamb, you are extra careful to make decisions that will enable you to be a good shepherd to other lambs. Being a good shepherd does not mean being pious, spiritual, mystical, etc. Being a good shepherd does not mean making the lambs feel good about making bad decisions. Being a good shepherd means understanding what God has done to lead you, and then reflecting that love back to others in practical, self-sacrificial actions that solve actual real-world problems for other people who want to know and serve God. If you are about to jump off a cliff, the last thing you need is someone with no wisdom or experience telling you that God is OK with you doing whatever feels good to you. What you need is someone practical and competent to give you good advice, however much that advice may make you feel bad, or block your pursuit of fun.

One of my friends proof-read the draft of this post and told me that it made her think of 2 Cor 1:3-5:

³Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,

⁴who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

⁵For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.“

Nothing else I do in life matters to me as much as taking care of the people I mentor, especially the ones who are lost and lacking guidance and care. I have good health, good education, good career, and great finances. But by far the most important thing I do is following the example of the Shepherd by caring for other lambs.

Commentary

Why I admire people in the armed forces more than famous entertainers

11/10/2019 Wintery Knight 9 Comments

I’ve noticed that many Christians can tell me a lot about famous entertainers. It doesn’t matter if it’s singers, musicians, actors, athletes, etc., they seem to know details of their biographies, achievements, etc. And it doesn’t really matter if those people are Christians, or whether they have performed actions consistent with a Christian worldview in their private lives.

Anyway, speaking for myself, I mostly admire two kinds of people. The first kind is the kind I blog about here all the time: Christian scholars engage non-Christians intellectually using logic and evidence. The second kind, as you can tell from my reading list, is people who distinguish themselves in conflict with those who oppose the principles and policies that allow me to live out my Christian life. And I am especially interested when people who are fighting evil (imperialists, Nazis, socialists, communists, leftists, etc.) exhibit Christ-like character in risking their lives to save others, or in giving their lives to save others.

Lt. Walt Chewning charges unto burning F-6F Hellcat to save trapped pilot

Anyway, today is November 10th, so I have a war story to tell you that happened on November 10th, 1943.

Lieutenant (later Lieutenant Commander) Walter Lewis Chewning of Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, steps on the burning fuel tank of an F6F-3 Hellcat flown by Ensign (later Lieutenant) Byron Milton Johnson of Potter, Nebraska to effect a successful rescue of the pilot on November 10, 1943. Johnson had flown out to USS Enterprise from Barbers Point, Hawaii, enroute to Makin Atoll in the Gilberts to support the United States Army invasion, which occurred on November 20, 1943. The afternoon of November 10, Johnson took off in F6F Hellcat Number 30 for a routine training exercise. He immediately developed engine trouble and requested an emergency landing. He was waved off three times as he struggled to maintain control, but his tail hook caught the third arresting gear wire, and Johnson’s Hellcat was slammed into the deck, coming to rest in the port catwalk. The plane came to rest on its external belly fuel tank, which started to leak. As the engine vibrated horribly as the propeller bent itself on the deck, sparks ignited the fuel. The hard landing had jammed Johnson’s canopy closed, shearing the retaining pin; he could not exit the plane. Chewning, who had joined the ship October 2, 1943 as Enterprise new catapult officer, scrambled out of the catwalk and came through the smoke. Stepping on the burning belly tank, he forced open the canopy and pulled Johnson to safety.

He received the two highest non-combat medals available:

Chewning was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his actions.

He was a well-educated and accomplished person before joining the Navy:

Chewning played soccer and Lacrosse at Cornell while studying Mechanical Engineering, breaking his rib and left ankle in one game. He graduated in 1936 and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Navy in January 1941. He was the assistant to the Chief Engineer at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before joining USS Enterprise. He served as Enterprise’s catapult officer until December 1944, when he transferred to Dutch Harbor Naval Air Station in Alaska as ordinance officer. Chewning served in the Navy until December 1949; he also was awarded the Bronze Star. After the war he assisted research and development for various aeronautical companies, the United States Air Force, and the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Motion picture film of the crash, taken from Enterprise’s bridge, was shown as part of the television program “Victory at Sea” on January 25, 1953. Chewning and Johnson gave interviews to several newspapers about the accident after the program aired.

You can see a video clip of the rescue here, from 5:35 to 6:00. I found a colorized version of the picture above here:

This image was colourized from the original by Paul Reynolds.

What I thought was interesting about Chewning was how he had everything going for him in terms of his education and career, but he chose to join the Navy anyway, in order to defend his country from Japanese imperialism. Those who understand how the Japanese treated prisoners and conquered peoples will know which side of that conflict was good, and which side was evil. Chewning wasn’t some sort of loser who took risks for fun and thrills. It had to be a risk where the prize was worth the risk. And he had the humility to consider others better than himself, so that their life was worth the risking of his own. Many people on the secular left who like to talk about how generous, compassionate and virtuous they are are unable to make moral judgments against evils like Japanese imperialism – much less take self-sacrificial action against them.

I just think that it’s important for young Christians to have the right kind of heroes. The heroes who are promoted to young Christians by the cultural elites are not usually the right role models. And there is a reason for that. The secular leftists don’t want young Christians to be emulating people who excel according to the standards of the Christian worldview. We are in a religion where self-sacrificial love is the centerpiece. Taking trouble on yourself for someone else. Doing your job, when it goes against your own self-interest. Let’s not allow a bunch of godless socialist celebrities to pick and choose who we hold in high regard.

News

Toxic masculinity: Heroic Chick-Fil-A employee jumps through drive-through window

06/29/2019 Wintery Knight 10 Comments

Chick-Fil-A manager asks customers to pray for sick employee

In America today, there is widespread opposition to male nature. Male aggression should be suppressed by the state. Weapons like guns or knives should be banned by the state. Public schools should discourage men from being masculine. When women are mistreated by the immoral men they freely choose, it shows that all men are immoral. Are men good for anything?

Here’s a story of a good man using a weapon to protect a little child, as reported in the Daily Wire.

Excerpt:

On Wednesday, a teenage boy working at a Chick-fil-A in Flowery Branch, Georgia, looked through the drive-thru window and noticed that a 6-year-old boy in a car in the drive-thru lane was choking. Not wasting a second, Logan Simmons jumped through the drive-thru window and ran to the car, where he found the mother of the boy begging for someone to help her save her child from being choked by a seatbelt that had gotten tangled around his neck. Simmons said later, “You could see he was turning red and losing pigmentation in his face … I just jumped out the window and ran straight down to the car. I think it was the quickest option. It was right there and I saw the other car right there.”

The quick-thinking Simmons yanked out his pocketknife and cut the young child free. After the incident, Simmons recalled, “I’m still kind of shocked right now myself that all this has happened.”

Simmons’ mother Teri told WSBTV, “He’d been home for a couple of hours and he said nonchalantly, ‘I saved a kid’s life today,’ and I was like ‘What?’” She added, “I’m amazed he didn’t panic. As his mother, I would have panicked. I’d be running around going, ‘Oh my gosh! What do we do?’”

An hour after the incident, the boy’s mother called Simmons and thanked him.

Christians should always be different, and this isn’t the first time a Chick-Fil-A employee has seized the moment to express their Christian convictions through actions:

Behold:

Simmons’ actions are characteristic of Chick-fil-A employees; The Daily Wire reported in late August 2017 that a female manager at a Houston Chick-fil-A sent a boat to help an elderly couple to save their possessions in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey…

In June 2018, a video showed a Chick-fil-A employee running after a customer who had driven away without their order.

In May 2019, The Daily Wire reported that employees at an East Ridge, Tennessee, restaurant helped a customer change a flat tire on his truck after it broke down in the drive-thru lane.

I think it’s significant that he was carrying a knife. Young men should always carry something sharp, just so that they are prepared for challenges like this. Although in the UK, a state run by secular leftist feminists, carrying a knife like that would be illegal. Because law-abiding men cannot be trusted to use weapons responsibly in the secular left UK.

Here’s the video of him jumping through the drive-through window:

So, initially, I wanted to go on a rant about how masculinity is shamed by feminist elites. But I have been thinking about how pastors portray Christianity in American society, and I wanted to say something about that instead.

Acting on moral convictions

First point is about how secular leftists don’t risk themselves for others, because they think they only have one life, and the purpose of that life is their own happiness. A secular leftist kills an unborn child in order to continue his or her own happiness. There’s no higher objective moral law to override selfishness. Why rock the boat of societal expectations to save someone else? After all, unborn babies aren’t going to praise you for saving them, but you’ll get a lot of praise from powerful people if you support sexual irresponsibility and murdering innocent children. Just like you would get a lot of praise from slave-owners for defending slavery.

Bottom-up Christianity

Christianity used to be understood in a more masculine way. Following Christ used to mean training your character and making practical decisions.

Character: Christians trained their character by setting boundaries on themselves to avoid sinning. The futher back you stood from sin, e.g. – not drinking AT ALL, not having sex AT ALL, not gambling AT ALL, not wasting money on fun AT ALL, the easier it was for you to take action that the people around you didn’t have the moral certainty to take. After all, a person who drinks, pursues recreational sex, etc. is focused on their own desires. Desire is poison. The more you take action to satisfy your desires, the less sensitive you become with the needs of people around you. The more you worry about making non-Christians approve of you, the less you are able to take bold actions that reflect your own Christian convictions. Bold moral actions come from the discipline you build up from thousands of unseen actions to be self-controlled.

Today, Christians treat God as a cosmic butler and supernatural gumball machine. Who sets the overall direction of a Christian life? Well, each person does, through their feelings. God “leads” them to do whatever they really feel like doing. I have met women who felt led to divorce their husbands or have extra marital affairs. Why? Because Christianity isn’t about self-denial and self-sacrifice. It’s about living your best life now. God doesn’t speak to you through the words of the Bible. He speaks to you through your feelings. And his job is to make your feelings-driven desires “work out”. Instead of being sober, chaste, prudent, self-controlled and frugal, you need to take reckless actions in order to produce feelings of happiness and exhilaration. Zip-lining! Travel! Skydiving! Surfing! Shacking up with an atheist. Living in New York City and paying $2500 in rent.

Be moral, Be practical, Be ready

Being moral means focusing on holiness. Say no to things that make you feel good in the moment. Say no to drinking and recreational sex. Say no to getting the approval of non-Christian friends.Don’t let the culture set your priorities for you.

And I want Christians to be more practical. Instead of treating Christianity as a cosmic fire brigade that rushes out to save you from the messes you make with reckless hedonism, instead do boring things that work. Cultivate skills that can be used to help others. Don’t spend money on fun. Study hard degrees. Be a good steward of your money. Give to other Christians who run enterprises that serve the Lord.

WINTERY KNIGHT

Tag Archives: Self-sacrifice

Where to get help if you have a selfish, absent or abusive mother or father

Why I admire people in the armed forces more than famous entertainers