Wednesday, January 23, 2013
| My Cup is Half Full By Mark Pickup  | At my sickest times with chronic, degenerative disease, when I was virtually bedridden and at my lowest point, I fleetingly wondered why I was born. What was the purpose of my life? After all, I have been sick for nearly half of my life-a life that started with such promise only to have that promise snatched away in early adulthood, or so it sometimes seemed. Then I think of Christ's words, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." The truth behind Advent [and Lent] is love. Had Christ not been born, He could not have died to settle the problem of sin and humanity's alienation from God. Through His resurrection, a new dimension of human existence opened to all who believe in Him. Illness and disability spanning most of my adult life awakened my dull heart that was unresponsive except to the most basic and obvious spiritual principles. My life has become a strange paradox: My body is increasingly deadened by disease while my heart has been stirred awake by it. Poverty of spirit is a blessed thing. [ Click here to read more. ] | | | |
| HEADLINES |  |
 Obama inauguration speech: 'We the people'
means 'government'
Washington Times
Our 44th president, Barack Hussein Obama, gave a powerful, moving inaugural speech as he once again publicly assumed the reins of power. His soaring rhetoric drew upon values that America holds most sacred: freedom, God, and country. And then he discarded them as out-of-date. He deftly inserted this Orwellian paradox: "Fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." At the very time he elevated his audience with skillfully chosen rhetoric, Obama proclaimed his vision of a political system in which the government controls every aspect of people's lives. He obviously plans to deliver the fundamental transformation of America he promised----this time without the constraints of reelection. |
|  Denver archbishop: I became pro-life after stumbling on the body of an aborted baby
LifeSiteNews
The newly installed Catholic archbishop of Denver, Colorado, is renowned for his strong pro-life activism, and now we know why. To mark the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Archbishop
Samuel Aquila has penned a surprisingly personal pastoral letter in which he recounts two disturbing encounters he had with abortion while studying medicine
in college----encounters that he says made him pro-life. Archbishop Aquila explains that when he went to college in the late 1960s, he wasn't practicing his faith. He spent the first three years working as a hospital orderly and helping in the emergency room. "When I began the job, I hadn't thought much about human suffering, or about human dignity," he wrote. However, that all changed one day when the future archbishop walked into a surgical unit, soon after abortion laws had begun to become more lax. "I walked into an outer room and in the sink, unattended, was the body of small unborn child who had been aborted," said Aquila. "I remember being stunned. I remember thinking that I had to baptize that child." But, says the archbishop, that experience wasn't as disturbing as his second encounter with abortion. |
|  Why is Planned Parenthood abandoning choice?
Human Events
Last week America's abortion giant Planned Parenthood announced that it will be moving away from the slogan "choice" as a way to describe killing a child in the womb. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards told a press briefing that abortion is "complicated" and that the "pro-choice" label was unacceptably limiting. That's the spin. Here's the truth: The term has become a political loser. Today more Americans know the science of the developing child and the reality of what abortion does to her and to her mother, and increasingly they refuse to cloak themselves in the propaganda that the abortion industry pushes. Thanks to technology, parents can see the development of their children with their own eyes.
I watched the fluttery pulse of my daughter's heartbeat during an early obstetric ultrasound at just four weeks' development. The ultrasound most parents see at 20 weeks' gestation lets them watch their child clasping his hands, sucking his thumbs, yawning, stretching, even smiling. |
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