Honoring My Husband on His Birthday

Hello, I have hijacked Aaron's blog to honor him for his birthday.

Today is the 31st birthday of my dear husband, Philip Aaron Levi Mayfield.

Aaron, I am so grateful that God created you and made me your wife. What a tremendous joy and privilege it is to be married to you and to have children with you. I know you better than anyone. I see you behind closed doors, which is when people really show their true colors. You are real and genuine. The godly, loving, generous, faithful man you appear to be is the man I see when no one else is looking. There are a million things I can list about your character that I love but I will narrow it down to three.

Your love for God: You want to really know God and grow in your relationship with him. You love to study his word. You want others to know Him as you do and to experience the joy you have from having a personal relationship with Him through His son, Jesus.

Your love others: You will sacrifice anything to show love, care, kindness, and compassion to others. You truly care for others more than yourself. You rejoice with those who are rejoicing and weep with those that are weeping. People matter to you. You remember all the little details that are important to them. You show tough love too, challenging people on the tough issues to help them grow. Anyone can win friends with flattery, but true friends speak the truth.

Your love for your family: You love me like Christ loves the church, by laying your life down for me daily and giving and sacrificing of yourself. You adore your wife when I am not adorable. You constantly express your gratitude for all I do to care for our family. You never complain when the house is a mess and you don't have even one clean pair of socks. You love being a father to Judah and Judson. You love playing with them and always have time for them, not neglecting them to have time for yourself. But you don't just stop at the fun stuff. You take your roll as a father very seriously and realize that you are accountable to God for raising future men. You are faithful to God's word in discipline and teaching God's word to your children, even now when many would think a young child's comprehension is too minimal.

Aaron, I know you are not perfect and you need God's grace every day for your sin, weaknesses, and failures, but thank you for your love and faithfulness to God. Thank you for trusting in Jesus every day for his free gift of grace poured out to you by dying on the cross for your sins. I know you would be the first to say that it is only by his grace and strength that you are the man that I commend with these words.

And God thank you for saving Aaron and for your faithfulness to him.

In Christ,

Holly Ruth Mayfield

Sexual Roulette and intended consequences

Anthony Esolen gives an interesting analogy to the language of "reducing unwanted pregnancies". He writes:

Let us suppose I have a fancy revolver with twenty chambers. Suppose that we put one bullet in the revolver, in one of the chambers. Suppose also that I and my pal enjoy the frisson of terror and risk that rushes up our spines when we spin the chambers and hold the revolver to our friend's head and pull the trigger. Of course, I do not want to kill my friend, and he does not want to kill me. But we are both willing to incur the risk of death to have that spasm of fright and glee. Now, it won't do to compare our actions to those of, say, a bridge-painter, who knows when he climbs up his ladder that there is a measurable chance that he will fall to his death (it is, I'm told, one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and therefore fabulously well remunerated). That is because the purpose of a ladder is that it be climbed, not that it be fallen from, whereas the very purpose of a gun is to shoot a bullet.

Suppose that my friend and I play this game of American Roulette once a year, on one of our birthdays. Now suppose that my friend's number comes up, and I shoot him through the head. By law, and by the moral philosophy that undergirds the law, I do not get to plead that I did not intend his death. Perhaps I did not want him to die, but I certainly did intend the chance that he would die: I intentionally used a weapon against him, a weapon whose purpose it is to kill, and I used it in a way that would ensure his death, if the right chamber came up. It would be up to judge and jury to assess the correct punishment in my case, but as a matter of fact I am a murderer.

Except in the case of rape, there are no "unintended pregnancies," none. There are plenty of women who do not want to be pregnant, and plenty of men who do not want them to be pregnant, but in all those cases the pregnancies are the results of intentional actions of a sort that have pregnancy as their perfectly natural and perfectly predictable consequence. Contraception does not change the nature of the act itself; indeed, it makes the actors more keenly aware that what they are doing is the sort of thing that makes babies, since otherwise they would not go so far out of their way (donning or inserting into the body uncomfortable devices, or flooding the system with pregnancy-mimicking hormones) to thwart the body's natural functions. The "problem" in the case of Sexual Roulette is not that the body fails, but that it succeeds.

So the pregnancies are the result of intention. The problem is that the children are not wanted, and that is a very different thing. For the question we should immediately ask is not, "How do we dispose of this child we do not want?" but "What is wrong with us that we do not want this child?"

Read the whole thing.

(HT: James Grant, via Z)

No, Mr. President, killing is killing no matter what we call it

It's a magnificent thing: The only newly-originating life in the universe that comes in the image of God is Man. The only newly-originating life in the universe that lasts forever is Man.

This is an awesome thing.

And, as everyone knows, that reverence is not shared by our new President, over whom we have rejoiced.

He is trapped and blind in a culture of deceit. On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, he released this statement,

We are reminded that this decision not only protects women's health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters.

To which I say:

• No, Mr. President, you are not protecting women; you are authorizing the destruction of 500,000 little women every year.
• No, Mr. President, you are not protecting reproductive freedom; you are authorizing the destruction of freedom for one million little human beings every year.
• No, Mr. President, killing our children is killing our children no matter how many times you call it a private family matter. You may say it is a private family matter over and over and over, and still they are dead. And we killed them. And you, would have it remain legal.

Mr. President, some of us wept for joy at your inauguration. And we pledge that we will pray for you.

We have hope in our sovereign God.

(From the sermon: "The Baby in My Arms Leaped for Joy.")

A Preacher and an Atheist walk into a bar...

COLLISION - 13 min VIMEO Exclusive Sneak Peak from Collision Movie on Vimeo.

Neither poverty nor riches

"Two things I ask of you;
deny them not to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you
and say, 'Who is the LORD?'
or lest I be poor and steal
and profane the name of my God." - Proverbs 30:7-9

What a crazy prayer, right? Give me only what I need, no more, no less. Help me to stay dependent on you. This so goes against my ideas of, 'put enough away in case of emergencies', because surely there's wisdom there. How to balance this? God provided for the Israelites manna each day, only what they needed for the day, in order to show them each day that it was He who provides for them. I heard a pastor say that this is like telling God you want to live paycheck to paycheck.

God provides for me, it's not my employer, my customers, the government, but God. It is to him I will look in hard economic times, when business isn't going well, when I lose my job, when I feel compelled to give away the money I had saved to help someone else who doesn't have enough for today.

Am I willing to do hard things, to put myself, my family, in a place where God has to provide or else we're in trouble? I say willing, because maybe that is what God is calling me to and maybe it's not. But maybe, just maybe, he's not calling me to store away as much as I can (or go buy that new must have...whatever) while my brother wonders if, not what, but if he is going to eat today.

Everything we have belongs to the Lord. Everything we have must be "on the table" for God to use as he deems. He has given it to me, he can take it away. How can I best steward that which the Lord has given me? What has he called me to buy, to spend, to save, to give?

What's Easter about?

From St Helen's Church


THAT'S EASTER Life to Death from St Helen’s Church on Vimeo.

On the historical reliability of the resurrection


THAT'S EASTER Death to Life from St Helen’s Church on Vimeo.

(HT: BTW)

Call His name