Are you ready for some football!?
Check out these baby Gators (me and my two younger sisters)!
If you ain’t a Gator, you must be Gator Bait!
Haha! I had pom-poms just like these when I was younger:
OK, I’m done – Go Gators!!
Previous posts:
Tim Tebow Saving Himself for Marriage
More on the Super Sophomore and His Super Mom
How ‘Bout that Gator?
What did Tennyson write? “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” T.K. and Deidrea Laux know that is true.
Warning: tissues will be needed for this one (h/t Jill Stanek):
“The only thing Thomas will ever know of this world is love”
What a great gift these parents’ gave to little Thomas. And all was not a loss for them as they were able to know and love their son, if only for a brief time.
Yet, how many other parents of unborn children with similar pre-natal diagnoses choose abortion, never allowing their child or themselves even the chance to experience great love. And this is the great tragedy of these eugenic abortions (and all abortions, really). Besides the loss of life there is a lost opportunity for love. To think outside oneself for the good of the other and for a higher purpose not always easy to understand – even if it means suffering. Said Mother Teresa
love means to be willing to give until it hurts…By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems…Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
World-wide their are over 40 MILLION abortions per year (over 1 million in the U.S.). Unborn children with Down syndrome are killed at a rate of 90%. With such a massive rejection of life and love is it any wonder we cannot achieve peace in the world?
Thank God for people like the Laux’s and their tremendous witness of love! May their example inspire many others to see that, when it comes to love, the reward is always greater than the sacrifice.
Read a letter from Deidrea Laux to Jill Stanek.
related posts:
The Paradox of the Cross
Love Makes Suffering Bearable
The writer/producer of The Butterfly Circus tells me that the film
will be up for *over a year* to be enjoyed at http://www.thedoorpost.com…
It is part of a film competition for The Doorpost Film Project which is a project designed to empower filmmakers who want to bring messages of hope to the world.
This makes me curious to see the other movies in the competition! Voting is open now through September 16. Please click on the picture above to watch and vote for Butterfly Circus. It really is a beautiful film with a beautiful message of hope and the dignity of the human person!
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar – the energetic parents of 18 children on the TLC show “18 Kids and Counting” — announced they are expecting baby number 19, People Magazine reported.
“We are so thrilled,” Michelle Duggar, 42, told the magazine. “We just couldn’t believe it is happening.”
Incidentally, the Duggars oldest child, Joshua, 21, and his wife, Anna, 21, are expecting their first child in October. They will name her Mackynzie Renee. The Duggars’ youngest child, Jordyn-Grace is only 8-months-old.
Related post worth re-visiting: How Can there Be Too Many Children?
At 7 p.m. Central time tonight (Sept. 1) Total Living Network will air the stem cell documentary Lines That Divide with a stem cell discussion/debate to follow. Tune in at this link.
h/t Wesley Smith
For this week’s TOB Tuesday check out Robert Colquhoun’s podcast on Seeking God’s Plan for Love and Life. Says Colquhoun:
The main aim, purpose and meaning of our lives is to love. God calls us to this exceptional challenge to live our lives as a gift for others.
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Colquhoun is a columnist for Catholic Exchange’s Theology of the Body Channel and he blogs at Love Undefiled.
Life with a disability is NOT without value, hope, meaning or purpose. You must watch this film! A few sites that I have seen link to this say it’s only a one day preview – so hurry up! You will not be disappointed.
“The greater the struggle, the more glorious the triumph.”
Film information:
At the height of the Great Depression, the showman of a renowned circus leads his troupe through the devastated American landscape, lifting the spirits of audiences along the way. During their travels they discover a man without limbs at a carnival sideshow, but after an intriguing encounter with the showman he becomes driven to hope against everything he has ever believed. Starring Eduardo Verástegui (Bella), Doug Jones (Pan’s Labyrinth, Fantastic Four) and featuring the debut performance of Nick Vujicic.
Find out more about the man behind the film’s main character, Nick Vujicic, at Life Without Limbs.
**Update: I just went to the website I linked to above and it is still playing the movie, so I don’t think it was a one day only thing.
Related posts:
The Beauty of Human Weakness
People with Disabilities Can Live “Normal” Lives!
Yesterday the daughter of a good friend of mine received the grace of baptism:
“Yay! No more Original Sin!!”
The U.N.’s Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a 98-page report in June offering a universal lesson plan for kids ranging in age from 5-18, an “informed approach to effective sex, relationships” and HIV education that they say is essential for “all young people.”…
The UNESCO report, called “International Guidelines for Sexuality Education,” separates children into four age groups: 5-to-8-year-olds, 9-to-12-year-olds, 12-to-15-year-olds and 15-to-18-year-olds.
Under the U.N.’s voluntary sex-ed regime, kids just 5-8 years old will be told that “touching and rubbing one’s genitals is called masturbation” and that private parts “can feel pleasurable when touched by oneself.”
• Click here to see the report.
By the time they’re 9 years old, they’ll learn about “positive and negative effects of ‘aphrodisiacs,” and wrestle with the ideas of “homophobia, transphobia and abuse of power.”At 12, they’ll learn the “reasons for” abortions — but they’ll already have known about their safety for three years. When they’re 15, they’ll be exposed to direct “advocacy to promote the right to and access to safe abortion.”
At Mass this Sunday we heard from St. Paul:
Brothers and sisters: Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
(Eph 5:21-32)
This passage, the last line in particular, is key to understanding what the Church teaches about sex and marriage. For Catholics, marriage is not just some contract between two people who agree to love each other for life and maybe have a couple of kids. It is a sacrament and a symbol that expresses an eternal reality.
Throughout the Old Testament God’s love for His people is expressed in terms of the love of a bridegroom for His bride (see Is. 62:4-5 for example). And in the book of Revelation (19:7) we hear of the marriage of the Lamb (Christ) to His bride (the Church). The central point of the Theology of the Body is that the body has a language – it speaks – and it is meant to proclaim the “spousal” love of Christ and the Church. And this, St. Paul is telling us, is nowhere more apparent than in the intimate “one flesh union” of husband and wife. Why? To use the words of Christopher West:
In order to be “true to the sign,” the spouses must speak as Christ speaks. Christ gives his body freely (”No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord,” Jn 10:18). He gives his body without reservation (”he loved them to the last,” Jn 13:1). He gives his body faithfully (”I am with you always,” Mt 28:20). And he gives his body fruitfully (”I came that they may have life,” Jn 10:10).
This is the love a couple commits to in marriage. Standing at the altar, the priest or deacon asks them: “Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage? Do you promise to be faithful until death? Do you promise to receive children lovingly from God?” Then, having committed to loving as Christ loves, the couple is meant to incarnate that love in sexual intercourse. In other words, sexual union is meant to be where the words of the wedding vows “become flesh.”
Any sexual act outside of this context is a gross distortion of the eternal reality it is meant to symbolize. Pre-marital sex lacks the faithful commitment of the man and woman, extra-marital affairs break that commitment and same-sex intercourse will never, under any circumstances, be fruitful. Likewise contraception disrupts both the fruitfulness of the marital embrace and, by withholding one’s fertility from the act, is a violation of the total self-gift that spousal intimacy is meant to be.
