Chapter 3: Wonderfully Made
The other night I lay in bed watching the PBS channel. An award-winning show called Life’s Greatest Miracle came on, offering an inside look into the hidden world of the conception of a baby and its development inside the womb. Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson amazed me with his camera work as his tiny lens followed a million sperm into the wide, dark cavity of a woman’s body.
The tiny sperm, their tails wriggling and heads bobbing, found themselves in thick gelatin, at which point the narrator intoned, “They are immediately in peril. The vagina is acidic; so they must escape, or die. Even in a healthy man, 60 percent of the sperm are less than perfect —like this one with two tails. For these guys, the journey is over. But what about the rest? What are the chances that one tiny sperm will reach and fertilize the egg? Sperm are often portrayed as brave little warriors fighting their way through a hostile environment in order to conquer the egg. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Next, I learned the egg definitely has a say in how things proceed. Apparently for most of the month, the cervix is shut tightly and clogged with a thick layer of mucous to keep out bacteria. But for a short time, for a few days a month around ovulation, the mucous becomes watery and forms tiny channels in which the sperm can swim through the cervix. My mouth dropped in wonder.
Once inside the uterus, the sperm still remain six inches from their goal, the egg. It’ll be a two-day swim for them through all sorts of obstacles. The camera followed them as far as the opening to the fallopian tube. The sperm huddled at the base of the huge, hollow, forbidding cylinder. “How are they going to get up that?” I wondered aloud. The next image showed strings of mucous — a response of the fallopian tube to the change in uterine chemistry — resulting in little “highways” on which the sperm could continue their trek.
Halfway up the fallopian tube, more obstacles waited. I stared breathless, gripped by one thought: There’s no way the sperm and egg are ever going to meet. No way will a baby come out of this alive. Even when the egg and sperm finally met — no easy feat — there was a long way to go before the fertilized egg could survive the 50 percent rate of failure. In one quick action, the egg sent out a chemical to harden its shell, permitting no other sperm to pass through. Next, it began the long process of expelling half its chromosomes into a small pouch. After that, many steps had to take place before the tiny zygote — a one-celled embryo — would begin dividing.
By the time the embryo reached a recognizable stage, I had given up. I had surrendered. I simply could not comprehend it all, let alone process it. I kept repeating Psalm 139:14, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” The awesome timing of each stage of development, and how one process perfectly influenced another with all its enzymes and proteins, was, well . . . just as the PBS special was titled. It was the greatest miracle.
David the psalmist never had the benefit of intrauterine photography or a degree in biochemistry, but no one could say it better than he did in Psalm 139:15 – 17: “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!”
By the way, the sperm and egg did make it. And so did the baby. When the camera focused on the pregnant mother in the delivery room, I almost gasped along with her. I realized I was about to witness a real birth. First, you could see a tiny patch of hair, and then the rounded top of the baby’s head; after more groans and pushing from the mother, there appeared the face, all red and smeared with blood and mucous. A doctor’s hands gently turned the baby’s head until one shoulder popped out, then the other. The next instant, the baby’s body slipped out in a gush of fluid and flesh. Suddenly I found myself crying and laughing at the same time, stunned that such a tiny infant had not only survived, but survived whole and healthy, from head to toe. I kept shaking my head and enjoying the rush from the miraculous journey I had just witnessed — a nine-month journey crammed into a one-hour PBS special.
Thousands, maybe millions of things could have gone wrong in that nine months, but everything — absolutely everything — went right. And not just for this one child, but for most of the 266 babies born into the world each minute.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made.
JONI
As the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first and technology explodes around us, the Bible becomes more relevant every day. Especially the beginning of the Bible.
Christians believe that God gave us the Bible for all times, to teach us what to believe and how to live. He knew the challenges and problems we would face — not just as individuals but as nations and cultures and as one human race. He laid down principles that would enable us to understand and to do right.
That does not mean that we can expect to look up cloning or genetics in a concordance and find a Bible text that talks about these new ideas. Some people conclude that therefore God does not care what we do about these new technologies. They remind us of the woman who didn’t want to see a psychiatrist because no psychiatrists appear in the Bible. “What about dentists?” answered her friend. “Don’t you go to see them, either?”
In fact, the continuing relevance of the Bible depends on its not going into endless detail and giving all the particulars. If it did that for people in Old Testament times, how could it still speak to us in the twenty-first century?
The Bible therefore emphasizes the foundation stones of truth, the basic ideas that set the framework for our understanding of human life and its challenges. It sets out broad principles. And nowhere does it do so more effectively or relevantly than when it comes to biotech. If you want to understand how God looks at biotech, get into the beginning of the book of Genesis — and stay there.
The reason is actually very simple. What is biotech all about? In this book, we are looking at it, chapter by chapter, piece by piece — its threats, its promise. It can seem complicated. But back of all that, it remains remarkably simple. Biotech is about what it means to be human, to be “one of us.” It’s about techniques that enable us to “do” things to ourselves and to others, good and bad; and every one of them assumes a certain view of what it means to be one of us, or it assumes that it does not matter (in other words, that we don’t know or care who we are). Christians know what others in our culture have forgotten: the secret of who we are. That’s why we are uniquely placed to help our society decide how to handle biotech and its challenges. It’s also why Christians should not find it difficult to get their bearings on the moral issues in this debate.
If the biotech agenda is all about what it means to be human, so is Genesis, and the beginning of Genesis especially. In Genesis we find the keys to our understanding of what it means to be human, to be made by God, to be serving him in his world. And side-by-side with learning what it means to be human, we learn what humans were made to do. These are enormous questions, but in principle they are also simple — and that is how they are laid out for us in the Bible. We need to grasp the simplicity of their truth, then work out in detail how to apply them to the amazingly complex and fast-changing questions that confront us at the start of the twenty-first century.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?
At the heart of every culture lies its idea of what it means to be “one of us.” That is nowhere truer than in our culture, which for many hundreds of years has been governed by the assumptions of the Christian worldview. For all its many failings, Western culture owes a huge debt to the key Christian idea of the unique dignity of the individual. That idea, of course, did not fall from space. It drew on the best thinking of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. But its origins lie in Genesis chapter 1 and its baseline that God made man, male and female, in his image.
Were that statement not in the Bible, it would be blasphemous! We get used to the words, but they have cataclysmic implications. Elsewhere in Genesis 1 we read of God making the various “kinds” of animals and birds and sea creatures. They reproduce “after their kind.” The implication is that humankind is made “after God’s kind.” We are made within the confines of space and time to image — to mirror, to model — the nature of God.
That decides our view of human nature. All human beings are created equal, and equally precious, in the sight of God. Moreover, if we ask the question, central to so many bioethics issues — “When does life begin?” or “Is this really human life?” — we have a crystal-clear answer. What human life bears the image of God? All human life. Every member of our species, Homo sapiens, are image bearers of God and thus reflect the dignity of God. That is the basic reason Christians believe all human life to be “sacred” — a word that means inviolable, to be protected, and a word that reminds us that the root of this “sacredness” lies in God. And that is true of every human being — however young or old, sick or healthy, deformed, handicapped, or limited in whatever way.
Human dignity, and the fact that all members of our species share in that dignity, is our starting point for the Christian understanding of what it means to be human. Much of the debate about medicine and bioethics in the past generation has focused on this single question. It lies behind every discussion of abortion and euthanasia and it sheds a startling light on so many of the biotech debates that have focused on whether very early human life is “human” at all, even though from fertilization (or cloning) the early embryo is undeniably 100 percent a member of Homo sapiens. It would, of course, be very convenient if the earliest and tiniest humans could be said not to be human. But it’s a fraud, and the biology textbooks are clear: fertilization marks the beginning of the life of a new individual member of any mammal species, and that includes us.
Since corporations and scientists have a growing interest in making embryos for experiments and medical treatments, it is vital to be clear at this point. And the Bible supports the commonsense view that for some members of our species to be special, all must be special. If we find it hard to imagine that a tiny embryo bears God’s image, we need to do two things.
First, we should remind ourselves of what we know about genetics. Though the embryo may be very tiny, from fertilization it is a highly complex, self-organizing system.
Second, we need to remind ourselves of what we know about the incarnation. Jesus became human at the moment Mary’s egg became miraculously fertilized. At one point in his life, Jesus was an embryo. So Christians can have no doubt that the tiniest human being is a person in God’s image.
The fact that God took human form in Jesus sheds unique light on the significance of being human. Human nature is so uniquely special that it is the kind of being that God can take for himself. The incarnation is what theologians call a “mystery,” but that does not mean we can make no sense of it. Rather, it means we cannot entirely grasp it, can understand it only in part. By becoming human after making human nature in his image, God has twice placed his stamp on human dignity. And having taken on human nature in first-century Palestine, he has not given it up. Many believers do not realize that after his resurrection and ascension, Jesus did not abandon his human form. In the words of the creed, he “sat down on the right hand of God” — he took once more his glorious place as the Son of God in heaven, yet he retained his human nature alongside the divine. It would be hard to imagine any more startling way of underscoring the dignity of human nature than the belief that the Jesus we meet in glory will still have the glorified body he had on earth — still have human nature alongside the nature of God.
What does it mean to be human? To be human is to be made in the image of God, to bear unique dignity. And every human being — every member of our species — possesses that dignity. That is the starting point.
Why God Put Us Here
Genesis 1 does not stop there. It goes on to set out the two basic purposes for which God put his human creatures on the earth: the task of procreation (“fill the earth”) and the task of dominion (“and subdue it”).
Of course, this “dominion” is not limited to the activities spelled out in Genesis 1 (“rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air”). This is a perfect example of the key fact we already discussed: the Bible addresses the culture of its day, and at the same time lays down lasting principles for all cultures. The basic principle remains the same, whether applied to primitive ancient culture or the complex technological culture of today. Just as the list in Genesis 1 covers the various aspects of the life of an agricultural society, so we need to survey the parallel aspects of our very different experience. We are called to have dominion over government, the arts, the media, the life of the corporate world, the university — and science and technology.
Made in His Image — To Have Dominion
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
GENESIS 1:26 – 28
Neither does the “procreation” task refer merely to the begetting and conception of children, but rather to their nurture in families and giving in marriage so that the human race continues and the earth is filled. Plainly, not all people have children; some are infertile, others remain single and childless. But the task given to humankind as a whole is clear. It is especially important to note that this task is set out quite separately from the “dominion” task. On the one hand, we are to procreate and fill the earth; on the other, we are to have dominion.
One reason why biotechnology is so challenging lies in the fact that it involves them both; in the words of Genesis 1, the filling of the earth and dominion over it. They come together, since technology — our means of making things — is used to help or replace sexual procreation. Here we find one cause of those problems: the turning of human procreation into a project in the exercise of our “dominion” over the earth.
SO WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
Technology does not need to be “high-tech.” A spade or a hammer is still technology, just like a computer or the space shuttle. Technology is what humans use to carry out their “dominion” task — everything from tools they place in their hands to make their arms longer and their muscles more effective, to the complex machines produced by the ingenuity of thousands of thinkers and craftsmen over many generations.
Technology is technology. Yet technology is not simply neutral.
Most technologies can be used for good and evil purposes, though they may have a tendency in one direction rather than the other. A hammer can be used to knock nails into boards to make a house or to smash someone’s head on a dark night. A computer can help run a church, a business, a terrorist cell, or a police state.
Take the example of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which we address further in a later chapter. This procedure uses genetics to screen embryos used during in vitro fertilization before they are implanted, the purpose of which is to decide if they should live or die. In vitro fertilization, as we have seen, springs the embryo and the process of fertilization from both the protection and the unknowns of the womb, and gives knowledge and options and opportunities that can lead to unethical actions.
Technologies can take on a sinister character with values of their own. Genetic information may have legitimate purposes (for example, enabling someone to have timely treatment for a genetic disorder or enabling a couple who may be carrying defective genes to be counseled about whether they should have children). Yet genetic information threatens to overwhelm the dignity and the freedom of the individual either because it is known to others (such as insurers, employers, and government), or simply to themselves and the families (giving years of anxiety before a late-onset condition, for example). At the private level, “good” genetic information can be as damaging as “bad.” The 1997 movie Gattaca is so good because it shows this well. Two of the film’s characters suffer because of their good genes: Jerome had managed to win only an Olympic silver medal, when his genes predicted a gold; and Anton, for all his expensive, genetically planned birth, ended up a “mere” policeman.
Technology, to be good, must serve the “dominion” command by enabling men and women to “subdue” the earth, and yet to do so in a manner that underscores the dignity of humankind and a stewardship-oriented view of the rest of nature.
THE BABEL PRINCIPLE
The first eleven chapters of Genesis include many extraordinary stories, but they all form part of one story: how God made the earth and set human beings and other creatures on it, and how God’s human creatures disobeyed him. Through a series of narratives — all the way from the “fall” when Adam and Eve first disobey, to the call of Abraham that begins the story of Israel and the main narrative of the Old Testament — sin and judgment and grace get woven together to set the stage for the later story of humankind.
In the story of the ancient world, from the entry of sin at the fall until the flood brings it to an end and a new beginning, we read of two key events. They set out the two basic aspects to sin and its possibilities.
First, Cain commits the first great crime in history by murdering his brother, Abel. In this violent act, the children of Adam and Eve fall victim to the vicious power of sin. Their parents had been expelled from the paradise of Eden; and, soon after, we find one son dead and the other a killer. This precious thing, human life — life made in the image of God — is subject to the whim of humankind. In this first case of sibling rivalry, murder sets the stage for the compounding of sin as one chapter follows the last. This sorry history culminates in the great flood, where God’s judgment on human violence leads to the near extinction of the human race and a gracious, fresh start that echoes the creation story itself.
Yet in the middle of the “covenant” with Noah — the first explicit covenant setting out the relationship between God and humankind — we find the first announcement of the penalty for the sin of murder. And it links us back to Genesis 1 and the kind of being that God had made his human creature to be. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man” (Genesis 9:6).
The first great sin of homicide gets handled with grace. Cain receives a special “mark” intended to protect him even as he lives under the judgment of God. Ultimately the violence grows and spreads until it brings on the vast judgment of the flood that almost ends the life of the world. God regrets making humankind, but in grace he gives the people made in his image a new beginning. They get a fresh start full of love, complete with a promise from God that he will never again send another worldwide flood. “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (Genesis 8:22). Yet even at this new beginning we see that sin has not been washed away (think of the perverse story of Noah’s drunkenness) — and we hear the somber institution of the death penalty for the crime of murder.
The First Murder
Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”
GENESIS 4:8 – 10
This takes us straight into the questions raised by bioethics. Early in the debate, the key issues focus on the sanctity of life, which have been challenged in abortion and euthanasia, as well as in subtler issues, such as organ transplants and the definition of death. The taking of human life, whether by homicide or by defining “human life” so as to exclude certain human beings (like the unborn and the elderly) from the dignity shared by the rest of the human race, is nothing but the sin of Cain.
Second, the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 describes the first great social act of human sin after the fall recounted in Genesis 3. Almost every children’s Sunday school in the nation has a poster of the Tower of Babel somewhere on its classroom walls. We can easily imagine ourselves into the life of those men and women who devoted all their mental, financial, and physical energies to the construction of this greatest of ancient buildings. We feel struck with horror as we read that they intended it as a monument to themselves — so they could “make a name” for themselves apart from God. And we feel perplexed as well as awed by the judgment that it brought on them: the “confusion of tongues” that dispersed the early human race and destroyed the capacity to freely collaborate, leaving men and women humbled and divided.
In striking contrast to Cain and Abel and the moral causes of the flood, this story focuses not on violence but on something very different. Indeed, by contrast with this story, Cain’s homicide seems tawdry and crass. This is sin of another order. We see no violence here, no sexual immorality, no worship of “false gods” — nothing gross. We simply witness a building project — one of two great technology projects of the ancient world described for us in the book of Genesis. It may perplex us that it could have the significance given to it in Genesis. It actually helps that it does perplex us, because then we are prepared for our problem in assessing the technologies of our own day, as well as their often hidden significance: hidden from those who develop them; hidden also from believers as they observe and seek to make sense of what is happening. But not hidden from God!
The Tower of Babel
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
GENESIS 11:1 – 9
Is Genesis telling us that technology as such is bad? Is it wrong to seek to extend our powers by either simple or complex means? Does such a pursuit insult God and deny our dependence on him? The Bible, as usual, provides its own answer.
We find not one great technology project in the book of Genesis, but two. Already we have discussed the significance of the flood as God’s judgment on the spreading violence that began with the killing of Abel. This story dominates the early part of the book of Genesis, spanning three chapters and leading into the covenant with Noah. Yet from another perspective, the story of the flood is actually the story of the ark!
The ark is the first great technology project of the ancient world. The building of the ark, also prominently featured on Sunday school classroom walls, is described in far more detail than the building of the tower. Like the tower, we generally treat it as something for children! Yet as we seek to gain a biblical perspective on the explosive power of technology to change our culture and even ourselves, this is where we need to start.
One of the two great technology projects in Genesis symbolized humankind’s rebellion against God and received his massive judgment. The other was a gift of God to humankind, to rescue the human race from the consequences of their own sin. Babel symbolized worldwide rebellion against God and humankind’s sinful determination to use technology to go his own way; the ark represented God-honoring technology given to preserve the life that God had given. The contrast couldn’t be stronger.
Technology can have a special value. The Babel principle represents rebellious technology, intended to enable humans to take over from God. It led to the scattering of the nations and the curse of enmity and division that has plagued the world ever since. Yet thousands of years later, in a form that could never before have been imagined, we see the Babel bug returning. Human technology has grown so potent that we think we have no need of God; it claims powers over our own species that will enable us to recreate ourselves in our own image.
That takes us back to Genesis 1 again, and also Genesis 3.
THE ROOT OF HUMAN SIN
At one level, the sin of Adam and Eve (that we call the “fall”) occurred simply enough: Eve took and then they both ate a piece of fruit from a tree that God had explicitly told them not to eat. At another level, of course, what they did was as profound in its evil as it is hard to explain. Because in taking the fruit — in doing that one thing God had told them not to do — they declared their independence from God and placed both their own judgment and the authority of the Devil above him. This was no incidental act of disobedience; it was a declaration of war.
So it is no surprise that God responded in equal measure. He had issued a severe threat: “When you eat of it you will surely die.” The punishment represented a more profound version of the threat: expulsion from the garden and the presence of God, ultimate mortality, and disorder of every kind, both within the creation and between the subhuman creation and humankind. All this and more gets spelled out in Genesis 3.
At heart, the fall challenged the authority of God and proudly declared human self-sufficiency. It rapidly led to family rivalry, the first homicide, and the wider violence that led to the judgment of the flood and God’s institution of the death penalty as part of the new world order. Yet the blasphemy of killing someone made in God’s image flows from the declaration of independence that came first.
The apostle Paul writes about Jesus in Philippians 2. In a famous hymn of praise that doubles as one of the deepest statements of theology in the Bible, the apostle speaks about Jesus’ laying aside his privileges in heaven and voluntarily coming to earth, all the way to the cross, for us. In one telling phrase that directly compares him to Adam, Paul writes that Jesus “did not count equality with God something to be grasped.” He makes two points at the same time.
First, Jesus was the genuine “equal” of God the Father, yet he chose to set aside that equality and voluntarily subject himself to taking human form, even to willingly accepting death on the cross. Not like Adam! That’s the second point. Adam had no right to equality with God, and yet he “grasped” at it. Jesus laid aside what was his by right, in order to undo the fall precipitated by Adam’s rebellion. In the chapters following Genesis 3, we follow the sad story of Adam’s “grasping” at equality with God, leading to one terrible deed after another.
Yet grasping at equality with God is nowhere as clear as at Babel. For here the leaders of the world come together and make a common purpose: to make a name for themselves, to use their technology to “grasp equality with God.” Their great monument does not bear the label Soli Deo Gloria (to the glory of God alone); it exalts themselves alone and bears only their own name.
President George W. Bush on Science and Ethics
Science has set before us decisions of immense consequence. We can pursue medical research with a clear sense of moral purpose or we can travel without an ethical compass into a world we could live to regret.
CLONING SPEECH, WHITE HOUSE, 2002
The Babel principle returns whenever humankind decides to exploit the God-given gifts of skill and strength and the plentiful resources of God’s world to achieve power through technology. Every previous opportunity that humankind has faced to employ our skills to challenge the authority of God, from Babel on, has helped only to pave the way for the greatest challenge. That challenge comes not in the form of killing and destruction, from the crime of Cain to the wide-scale violence that brought the flood to the atrocities of Rwanda and Bosnia. Rather, it is the subtler and most sinister challenge of all: the threat, first, to turn the process of human procreation into a feat of manufacturing; and second (and worse yet), to seize the place of God the Creator in designing and redesigning human nature itself. That is the final embodiment of the sinful challenge to God: to use “our” technology to displace him; to make a name for ourselves in this, his world; to let loose the Babel principle in the technology of today, in which the principle remains unchanged and yet the propensity for evil grows infinitely greater.
THE ARK OR THE TOWER?
We need to honor God and each other — those are the clear lessons of the early chapters of the Bible. Whatever we do must remain focused both on him and on us. If once we separate ourselves from him — behave as if he were not there — using our skills and his gifts will destroy us. If, however, we use our talents to act as productive stewards in his world, with one eye on human dignity and the other on the God who stands behind it, we do well.
The question we face when we look at the biotech century ahead of us must always be: Is this the ark, God-given technology for our good? Or is it the tower, a symbol of our rebellion and something that will surely bring disaster on us?
“Why am I living? What’s my purpose?” Not many have the guts to say it out loud, but lots of us think it. A slew of self-help books, midday talk shows, and one-hour counseling services offer to help us find meaning in life. Sometimes the purpose is hard to pin down in this quick-fix, fast-paced, no-deposit-no-return culture. Everything’s so external. Disposable. Even people for whom there seems no “purpose” in living.
Consider Ryan, born with Crouzon’s syndrome. The deformity eventually left him paralyzed, unable to speak, blind, and virtually deaf. He also needs a feeding tube in order to eat. That’s a lot of baggage attached to a child! It’s more baggage when you realize Ryan has outlived statistics and is now a young man in his twenties. If life’s largest questions have answers for him, then there are answers for us all.
I met Ryan when his father, Doug Mazza, president of Joni and Friends, took me to his son’s “graduation” from a special school. I watched Doug beam with pride as Ryan was wheeled into the gymnasium in a gown and cap. Afterward, Doug sat next to his son, kerker-derking his hat, talking and teasing, and giving Ryan good-natured hugs. This was one proud dad! Every once in a while Ryan lifted his head and smiled. At least, it seemed he was smiling.
“Is Ryan able to hear you?” I asked.
“For sure,” Doug answered. “He knows it’s me. When he whines, I’ll press my cheek against him and talk in his ear. He knows it’s me, don’t cha, buddy?” he said, tousling his son’s hair.
I leaned over to say hi to Ryan. I don’t know if he heard me, but I would have sworn I saw a faint smile. He slumped slightly — a sign of fatigue, or of boredom with the cap-and-gown thing. I thought of the many experts who would say, “Take out his feeding tube. He can’t do anything. His life has no meaning, no purpose.” Privately they would surely add the costs involved in his housing, health care, schooling, and more.
I’m glad those people can’t come after Ryan with their court orders and rogue judicial rulings. A lot of other disabled people aren’t so fortunate. They don’t have watchful fathers, like Ryan does. Some of them are not safe in their residential centers. Some have family members who abandon them to the system. No wonder impaired people feel threatened by “you’re-better-off-dead-than-disabled” attitudes. Many in our culture have a fundamental fear — almost a terror — of accidents, injuries, old age, or birth defects. To them, the physical challenges seem so futile. So we run a cost-effective analysis on the strain a boy with Crouzon’s syndrome places on the system to determine if he’s worth the trouble and expense. If the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil — and it is — then a young man like Ryan is exposed and vulnerable.
That’s a lot to counter. So I sat by Ryan and silently prayed that God would speak to him “in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words” (1 Corinthians 2:13). I prayed that Ryan would be strengthened with “power through [God’s] Spirit in [his] inner being” (Ephesians 3:16).
I considered again all the people who would label him a “nonperson.” Who has the right to say such a thing? Where do we find the basis for ascribing value to life? What measuring rod do we use? Is there a supreme authority in this shifting world?
Jesus said in Matthew 16:26, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” A soul is at least worth the wealth of the world. The buck stops — and starts — with the Bible. The Word of God is the sole voice that ascribes value to life — even life with Crouzon’s syndrome. God breathed life into man and thereby permanently stamped his image — and his glory and greatness — on all who would ever draw breath.
This includes Ryan.
If 2 Corinthians 4:17 assures you and me that “our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all,” then it’s also valid for Ryan. If 2 Corinthians 4:16 reminds us that “inwardly we are being renewed day by day,” then it’s true for Ryan. If God “sustain[s] all things by his powerful word,” then it includes Ryan (Hebrews 1:3). That young man with Crouzon’s syndrome has his being — his essence and identity — in God. No wonder then “we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
God’s Spirit expresses truth to Doug’s son, not in audible words, but spiritual words. Inwardly he is being renewed. His troubles are achieving for him an eternal glory. His value is “not on what is seen, but what is unseen.” The Spirit is dynamic, kinetic, active, and powerful — and although we can’t see the Spirit at work in Ryan’s life, it’s happening. We can’t measure God’s work, or quantify it, but it’s real. And spiritual activity imparts value and purpose to that life, no matter how humble the circumstances. Therefore, we cannot regard Ryan — and people like him — from a worldly point of view.
This is what gives Ryan’s life meaning.
When we stand before Jesus, Ryan may end up achieving greater accolades than any of us. Just think: he is perfectly demonstrating — even if by default — gentleness and self-control, the fruit of the Holy Spirit. His life illustrates patience, endurance, and consummate long-suffering. He does not complain or lash out. In fact, when he cries, whether due to pain or fear, Ryan immediately responds to the smallest of loving touches — the brush of a hand on his cheek.
In so doing, Ryan inspires everyone who takes time to sit next to him and feel his courage. And he’s doing it all without lifting a finger, winking an eye, or speaking a word of encouragement. I felt it. I saw it. And I’m the richer for it.
True, he’s not doing much more than being. But that’s God’s problem, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Ryan is a perfect example of Acts 1:8, which says, “You will be my witnesses” (italics mine).
God has his reasons. He has his purposes. He never does things capriciously or decides with the flip of a coin. Ryan’s God — the God of the Bible — our God, your God, is an intentional God, brimming over with motive and mission; and his design for that young man is to simply live, breathe, and encourage others. Others like you . . .
It’s enough to give life meaning and purpose.
JONI