We seem to live in an era when a thing is gauged, not by the principle of right or wrong, but by the principle of justification if there is something else worse.
She was panic-stricken. She had made the decision to have sex without benefit of marriage. She was to have a child! She would not keep it. Secrecy demanded she do her best to conceal the pregnancy and secretly dispose of the infant. What was she to do?
Her solution was to deliver the child, wrap it and take it to a religious institution. She placed it on or near the front steps and hid across the street in a clump of shrubbery. She watched until the door opened and the infant was discovered. Then she left.
Before long, she was identified as the mother and charged with the proper crimes – abandonment of a child, harm to a child, etc. Her case had come to trial and the “Letters to the Editor” and talk show formats were loaded with interested folk who expressed their opinions. I was surprised that many expressed the thought that since she had cared enough to monitor the abandonment, she should be excused. “She didn’t wrap the child in a plastic bag and throw it into the dumpster,” one said. “She didn’t try to flush the child down the drain,” said another, referring to another case that had national notoriety, the case were the young mother delivered at a restroom at a Junior-Senior Prom and returned to the dance! Overlooked in the smoke was the fact, she had abdicated her responsibility as a parent – a responsibility every parent has and can not evade.
The apostle, Paul, wrote, “For we are not bold to number or compare ourselves with certain of them that commend themselves: but they themselves, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves with themselves, are without understanding.” (I Corinthians 10:12) The standard by which all our actions will be judged has nothing to do with what others are doing. Our parenting can be better than average and still defective. Our dedication to God can be in the upper ten percent and still not adequate. I Corinthians 10 conclude with the last verse: “For not he that commendeth himself is approved, but whom the Lord commendeth.”
