In late November 2019, my wife and I saw the movie, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Arguably one of the best movies of 2019, it stars Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, the host of the popular PBS program Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood, which aired from 1968 through 2001.
As Nehemiah and his people begin to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls they face mockery, a conspiracy from their enemies, and discouragement, fear and exhaustion.
In Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” the dialogue between the ghost of Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge is most enlightening. As Scrooge protests Marley’s intervention, he declares that Marley “was always a good man of business,” to which Marley responds: “Business! . . . Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business: charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business.” The feverish materialism of the Christmas season seems to side with Scrooge’s miserly greed, not Marley’s redeemed perspective.
Nehemiah, a strategic leader, was a man of prayer—prayers of adoration, confession and petition; and a man who fired straight-arrow prayers to God.
In 1947 C.S. Lewis published The Abolition of Man, in which he charted the “negation of human dignity in the name of progress.” He lived long enough to see the accuracy of his assessment: “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.” Historian Joseph Loconte of King’s College speaks of “an echo of another era of medical innovation amid moral ambiguity.”
The historical background of the Exile to Babylon, which began in 586 BC, and the return to Jerusalem, which began in 539 BC, provide the context for Nehemiah’s request of the Persian king Artaxerxes.
As Paul closes his epistle to the Colossians, he emphasizes the centrality of prayer and a life of wisdom.
A pro-life position involves consistency and an adherence to the value of human life at any stage in its development. Humans are valuable because they bear God’s image, which means both a fetus or a 90-year old are of infinite worth and value to God—and therefore to us. Fighting for pro-life consistency means fighting for children who need love and care, whether in the womb or as an infant. For that reason many evangelical Christians devote their lives to foster care, adoption and “similar services to vulnerable children.
