Politically Correct

Support for Lauren Daigle

/ jpound / Leave a comment

I ask you to pray for and support in whatever way the Lord may direct you, Lauren Daigle. She has been unjustly targeted by the Mayor or New Orleans, Mayor Cantrell, for being in the right place at the right time. Lauren was out riding her bike, socially distanced, when someone asked her to sing a song at an open air gathering. Let me repeat, not an enclosed space, but an open air gathering. The mayor seems to think she should be punished and denied the invitation to sing in a NO New Year’s celebration.

On Thursday afternoon, singer Laure Daigle responded to the mayor’s request for her to be excluded from the New Year’s Eve festivities.

Lauren Daigle’s full statement can be read below.

I love the city of New Orleans. Its music, culture and creative people are unlike any other, and its rich history should be celebrated.  That is what my work within the city has always focused on – my deep desire to see New Orleans and its music scene flourish.

Continue reading →

Finding Faith in an Iranian Prison

/ jpound / 3 Comments

In January 1982, Marina Nemat, then just sixteen years old, was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death for political crimes.

Until then, her life in Tehran had centered around school, summer parties at the lake, and her crush on Andre, the young man she had met at church.

But when math and history were subordinated to the study of the Koran and political propaganda, Marina protested. Her teacher replied, “If you don’t like it, leave.” She did, and, to her surprise, other students followed. Soon she was arrested with hundreds of other youths who had dared to speak out, and they were taken to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Two guards interrogated her. One beat her into unconsciousness; the other, Ali, fell in love with her. Sentenced to death for refusing to give up the names of her friends, she was minutes from being executed when Ali, using his family connections to Ayatollah Khomeini, plucked her from the firing squad and had her sentence reduced to life in prison.

But he exacted a shocking price for saving her life — with a dizzying combination of terror and tenderness, he asked her to marry him and abandon her Christian faith for Islam. If she didn’t, he would see to it that her family was harmed.

She spent the next two years as a prisoner of the state, and of the man who held her life, and her family’s lives, in his hands. Her search for emotional redemption envelops her jailers, her husband and his family, and the country of her birth — each of whom she grants the greatest gift of all: forgiveness.

New York, You Made My Heart Sink

/ jpound / Leave a comment

Before we moved to Nashville seven years ago, we lived five years in what I still believe is the greatest city in the world—New York, New York. I am indebted to NYC, and to the church I served for that season, for much of who I am as a minister today. Although I am still a work in process, this great city and thoughtful church broadened my horizons and deepened my understanding of what it means to follow the whole Jesus and the whole Scripture, into the whole world, the whole time. As my former NYC church’s motto states, “The gospel changes everything.”

The gospel changed ME in NYC, in part by helping me understand more fully the moral imperative to do justly and love mercy, to give witness to your love for God by loving your neighbor as yourself. It was at my NYC church that the Lord opened my eyes more widely to the notion that “pro life” must always be a comprehensive position, never merely selective. We preached that according to Scripture, human life begins at conception and ends at death. Therefore, an unborn child and, say, my mother who is currently suffering from Alzheimer’s, are due as much honor and dignity and advocacy and fierce protection as an asylum seeker or refugee, a victim of racism or trafficking, or for that matter a film star, a Pulitzer winning author, or a United States President. Being pro-life is never less than pro-infant…yet it is also much more.

Any self-proclaimed “pro-lifer” who speaks for the unborn but stands indifferent toward the desperate conditions that tempt many women to consider desperate decisions, is only partially pro-life. Like the New Testament Pharisees, she or he will place burdens on others’ backs, but won’t lift a finger to help bear the burden.

That’s not pro-life.

Last week, the state of New York decided in the name of “freedom” and “choice” and women’s empowerment to make sanctioned, and in some circles even celebrated and cheered, decisions that have the effect of (a) stripping some infants of their ability to continue living, and (b) permit medical professionals to perform acts of lethal, bone-breaking, skull-crushing, blood-gushing violence against said infants. (I am tempted to replace that last sentence with something more gentle and less graphic…but should I?).

Read more here.

Scott Saul’s blog.