Mt. Vernon, the home of George Washington is worth a visit. The estate is in a gorgeous setting. Unfortunately, it was swarmed with school children when I was there so I didn’t get to see and enjoy as I might have liked. If you are going, I’d recommend you call and inquire as to whether there are days that are better or worse in terms of crowds and school buses. Apparently we picked a festival day marketed to school kids.

I’d recommend you rent a car and drive from Washington. We took a Grayline tour and that was more expensive than if we’d have rented. Plus, I really would like to spend some time bumping around old-town Alexandria. It looked like a place I’d have enjoyed.

Particularly recommend you visit Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria. It’s worth the visit. Very interesting in terms of architecture and history.

Today I toured the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I know it happened, yet it seems unreal. It is incomprehensible that humans created in God’s image could unleash such unspeakable horror on fellow human beings. Yet it goes on today.

For me the most moving part of the Museum was the small section about the murder of children who were mentally retarded or handicapped in someway; killed all in the name of “reducing suffering.” But they weren’t suffering. They just couldn’t do algebra. They were ordered killed because they were considered less.

I took my girls aside for a talk. We talked about how God made people in His image, about how they aren’t less because they are different, or even because they ARE mentally or physically less. We talked about how it is our responsibility to take care of them, to watch out for them.

There are two significant things happening in the culture today that seemed to come from the Nazi playbook.

First, the healthcare bill being debated in Congress has a provision for a death panel of some sort—-a team of people who reportedly would have authority to decide who was worthy of additional health care and who was too old, or too sick, or in some way…….less. I don’t pretend to understand all that goes into the healthcare debate, and I certainly believe we need to pay attention to this issue as a country. The system is broken. But I blanche at the thought that a “committee of the enlightened” would be given authority to decide who is worthy of more care, or less care because they are deemed more or less worthy. That is just inherently wrong.

Second, as I stood looking at pictures of naked children moments before they were killed, and at one physician posing over the surgical table holding the dead body of a sacrificed child he was preparing to cut open and explore in the name of science, I couldn’t help but have a gut reaction about the decisions we allow in America today for innocents to be killed. Abortion is simply wrong. Politicians say it should be rare but legal. I think that is doublespeak designed to placate both sides from men and women who either don’t know the truth or are afraid to speak it. It is our responsibility to protect the innocents, including those who haven’t yet drawn a breath. The Bible says that God knows them in their mother’s womb and there He knits them together. John, the cousin of Jesus is reported to have leapt in the womb of his mother at the announcement that Mary was pregnant with the Savior.

I don’t know everything about this issue. There are complexities. There are women who should have never gotten pregnant. There are babies destined to be born into adverse circumstances. But the notion that women can kill their babies because it’s not a convenient time in their life to have a child is just inherently wrong. I know some will say its about a woman’s right to her body,  and I agree that a woman has a right to her body, to keep her knees closed. But her rights end where exercising them deprives that baby of its right to life. God is knitting him in his mother’s womb, and what God has knit together let no man rend asunder.

I know that many of the people lauded so grandly for donating to the Holocaust Museum are also supportive of abortion rights. And, I just don’t get it. It’s wrong. How can an advanced nation like ours memorialize the horror of the Holocaust while simultaneously allowing it in our midst? I just don’t get it. It’s wrong. And I’m clear on that. If you think otherwise, you simple need to change your mind.

Observations from Washington, D.C.

“Our inability to deal with unpleasantness in life all goes back to the invention of the flush toilet.” That was the thesis of a great book entitled The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, a Milford, MI funeral director. Lynch notes that in the old days when people died, their family took care of preparing the body at home, and that the unpleasantness of death was buffered by preparing the  loved one’s body for burial. Life included death. 

With the advent of the flush toilet, came a shift in the human psyche, Lynch posits. The flush toilet got rid of life’s unpleasantness with the push of a lever, and thus began the softening of our ability to deal with the many unpleasantries that are part and parcel to the human experience.

People laugh, or look at me weirdly when I tell that story. However, I think Lynch is on to something. I grew up around a funeral home; drawn their by a young lass with whom I was smitten. My first kiss came on the doorstep of a funeral home. Didn’t seem weird to me. She was very much alive! Through the years I occasionally helped to move a body or to deliver the daily dead to another town. I remember when the congressman I’d grown up hearing about as a hometown hero came home in a casket. We opened it and found that when they prepared bodies in Washington D.C. they posed them with their heads turned to face out of the casket. I remember watching as Gary (the funeral director and father of the lass) grabbed the congressman’s head and proceeded to turn his neck until he was facing the direction that dead people were supposed to face in our little town.

I grew up on the farm, and value the lessons I learned there greatly. Death, life, sex, hard-work, economics, it was all there on the farm. It created in me a “rootedness” and a sense of “balance” and understanding of the rhythms of life that I value greatly and am attempting to pass on to my kids through the same farm experiences. But my learning didn’t end on the farm, and it extended past the funeral home. I remember being a Medical Explorer at Cox Hospital when I was 16 years old. Suddenly I was thrust into the delivery room with wailing mommas seeing things I’d never seen before. I remember standing by the bedside of an elderly woman as she took her last breathe. All of these things mixed into the milieu that was my growing up and that have served me well as a pastor, an advisor and counselor, a teacher, a Dad and friend.

So, why do I bring this all up? Unpleasantness, that’s why. In soft America we’ll go far to avoid unpleasantness. We lie and don’t tell the truth to each other because it’s more comfortable to tell the lie than to risk the outburst that the truth might elicit. We tolerate underperformance from our peers and disobedience from our kids because we value faux peace over the clarity and accomplishment that truth and discipline would produce. We don’t fight for truth, because the fight is unpleasant. Case in point: I heard a guy from Minneapolis today on CNN talking about how wars can’t be won, so we shouldn’t fight them because the costs are so high. Hmmm. Let’s think about that a moment. If we used his logic we’d still pay allegiance to the King of England, Obama would likely be a slave instead of the President, and all of Europe would be under control of Hitler’s offspring. Detestable as it is, I think there’s a place and a time for the unpleasantness of war. And confrontation. And moral absolutes.

My house has seven flush toilets. I wouldn’t take for my indoor plumbing. I’m infinitely glad there’s no chamber pot under our bed. But I’m not afraid of unpleasantness. When I know it is lurking, I seek it out so that it can be resolved.

Embrace the unpleasantness. Make the best of it. Learn to deal with it. If you need help, take a look in the toilet. But don’t forget to flush.