Forces for good or evil
Earlier this month I dropped everything I was doing to take an 8-day road trip with our eldest child to visit an art school she had her eye on for next year. The school was in Connecticut so, not wanting to drive all the way up there for a visit to just one place, I laid out a route that would include visits to friends and family and would also give us a couple of days to run around in the Big Apple.
If I were to tell you of all our adventures and all God’s providences, it would take more space than a column allows. Suffice it to say that the trip was immensely valuable, visits with friends and family along the way were delightful and God’s provision was evident everywhere.
Of course all those hours on the road were a bit stressful and we were not always as patient and kind with each other’s driving flaws; but that is another story!
Knowing that our last leg of the trip would be a 10-hour drive from Pittsburgh, I begged a dear friend and hostess for the loan of some tapes to listen to. All along our road trip, I had enjoyed musical selections chosen by my daughter and played courtesy of her i-Pod but I wanted something a bit meatier than indie music for that last stretch of highway. 
My friend came through with a series of tapes titled “Saints and Sinners,” a collection of talks given at the annual history conference at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.
The speakers were Doug Wilson, Steve Wilkins and George Grant. I commend to you all any of the history conference tapes/CD’s available from Canon Press.
All of the selections were excellent but one of the most fascinating was the story of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, in a talk given by one of my favorite speakers, George Grant, the pastor of Parish Presbyterian in Franklin, Tenn. I love the way Dr. Grant utilizes the richness of the English language. He is like a living thesaurus in his ability to come up with not just one descriptive word, but a plethora of words, each adding a nuance to one’s understanding.
While hearing Dr. Grant relate the story of Margaret Sanger’s life, I was struck with how her father had affected young Margaret. Back home I did some quick research and found that Dr. Grant put this bio in a book form titled “Killer Angel,” which was happily available on Google books. Reading this book went along nicely with the taped talk. Here are some excerpts from the book which highlight the impact parents have on children. It is a cautionary tale.
Margaret Sanger’s father, Michael Higgins, was a very young soldier in Sherman’s army during that infamous march to the sea when the South was pillaged and wide swaths burned without mercy and with much vindictiveness. Dr. Grant deduces that Michael’s exposure to this evil of man against man was a “cruel and inhuman experience which apparently hardened and embittered him. … Forever afterward he was pathetically stunted, unable to maintain even a modicum of normalcy in his life or relations.”
Michael Higgins, was a “radical free thinker and free-wheeling skeptic whose family suffered greviously from scorn, shame and isolation because of Michael’s sullen improvidence.” Margaret was the 6th of his 11 children. Michael treated his wife and daughters as “virtual slaves.” Sanger later described her home life as “joyless and filled with drudgery and fear.” Margaret grew up in a house where she and her siblings were known as “the devil’s children.” One can easily see how not just the lack of faith but the open derision of faith can damage the soul of children. “As a confirmed skeptic, Michael mocked the sincere religious devotion of most of his neighbors. He openly embraced radicalism, socialism and atheism.”
Margaret’s mother tried to raise all of her children in the faith of the Catholic Church. In her early years, Margaret responded with youthful zeal for the church. But after the death of her her mother while Margaret was a teenager, her young faith could not withstand her father’s constant barrage of cynicism. “By the time Margaret was 17, her passion for Christ had collapsed into a bitter hatred of the church. This malignant malevolence would forever after be her spiritual hallmark.”
Margaret went on to a life that was unfettered in its desire to destroy and undermine marriage, femininity and motherhood. Her legacy, Planned Parenthood, is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent babies all over the world. Her ideas have poisoned an entire culture with twisted notions of what it means to be free and independent from the perceived shackles of faithful marriage and childbearing.
I am certain that even believing wives and mothers have allowed some of her ideas to pervert God’s created order in their lives.
My intial response to this narrative of Margaret Sanger is to wonder what ruin I may already have caused in the lives of my children with my harshness and impatience!
But that is a lie from the enemy, for God’s promises do not hinge on us being perfect mothers and wives. Rather, He tells us He is conforming us and our children in covenant relationship with us and with Him to be more like Christ. Michael Higgins had a terrible life experience during the War Between the States.
But even these circumstances could have been covered with God’s grace. Our own childhoods might have been traumatic. Still, this does not limit God or limit His mercy to us or to our children. His sovereign rule over the hearts of men is all part of His outworking of His grace.
It has been said that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. God has put us in a place of influence in the lives of our children. What we do does affect them. He has charged us to train them up. We see our imperfections only too clearly and we fall on our knees asking for His strength, His joy and His grace. He stands ready to supply all our needs in Christ. May we realize the awesomeness of our task and the awesomeness of our God.
S peaking of culture and how it affects us, there is a film festival Oct. 30 and 31 in Franklin, Tenn., at George Grant’s church just outside Nashville. I try to go to this every year. We have included the details on Page 12. I cannot recommend this festival highly enough for you and your older children. Film is a very powerful medium. It is so very important that we think christianly about what we are watching. The stories are either revolutionary or redemptive. It is difficult at times to tell them apart.
Greg Wilbur and Dr. Grant do an excellent job of helping sort out truth, goodness and beauty in the images before us.
Finally, I want to give an update in the progress of my son with his reading and writing difficulties. His reading has improved markedly with the vision therapy. For that I am very grateful. Writing, however, is still hard for him. What I have realized is that for all these years he has felt like a failure, he has learned his own way of coping. Mostly he would just lie low and hope that no one asked him anything. If a task seemed hard, he would respond emotionally and hope that would get him out of it.
We decided to put him in a rather challenging tutorial this year, believing that I was doing him no favors by accomodating his weaknesses. Rather I wanted to present him with opportunities to step up and do things he has not been able to do before, such as copy math problems, take notes in class and write papers.
The first few weeks were not pretty. However, now we have found somewhat of a routine with the level of work expected. It is still very challenging for both of us in all the work we do together during the week. I am still not sure I did the right thing. I am trusting that God is in this and is teaching us both to trust Him.
That is enough for now.
—JMT