July 06, 2022
Episode #153
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When approaching difficult or controversial subjects, is there a particular mindset that Christians should cling to as they interact with others about these troubling topics? David and Karen Mains offer some suggestions worth considering.
Episode Transcript
Karen: So, we’re not coming down in this podcast recommending where our listeners should take a stand on the abortion issue pro or con. But we’re wanting them to change as much as they can to an attitude of being careful about their approach to the person who’s on the other side of the issue.
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David: Karen, our Supreme Court’s recent decision to reverse Roe versus Wade has resulted in further tension and even sharper divisions in our land and in our churches.
Karen: And because people have strong feelings on both sides of this abortion issue, some religious leaders have chosen to remain quiet on the topic. Others are confident that they have the mind of the Lord on the issue.
David: We are opting to share some of our thoughts knowing ahead of time that they won’t satisfy everyone.
Karen: But we would be honored if you would just be open to hearing this out.
Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.
David: Karen, several years back, you and I counted up the number of countries either one or both of us have visited. Do you remember the total we came up with?
Karen: I think it was 55 countries of the world.
David: It’s a lot of countries.
Karen: A lot of countries. A lot of travel.
David: Most of our travels were kingdom related in one way or another so we weren’t exactly staying in five star hotels.
Karen: That’s sort of understating.
David: My very first out of the country experience of going somewhere was to Haiti, one of the poorest countries one can imagine.
Karen: And that was before we were even married, right? So, I traveled around the world. This invitation came from Food for the Hungry. It was for you. Food for the Hungry is a faith-based relief and development organization. You were subsumed with radio broadcasting. We had a radio broadcast every day, six days a week. So, you said “I can’t go but take Karen. She’s the writer in the family.” And that’s how that trip came about for me. I have a lot of memories from that trip but one that stands out in my mind that it’s appropriate to the abortion discussion this day that kept coming back as I was listening to commentary and different sides of this issue. We were in Kenya. This was the Food for the Hungry trip. And as I said, it was around the world. I was gone for I think six or seven or eight weeks. Do you remember?
David: Yeah, I was father and mother both.
Karen: Valiant man for little kids. Oh my gosh, David, you were fabulous. We were in a refugee camp. I think it was in Kenya and there was a woman who had a baby. I can see her clearly. Now we couldn’t possibly have been talking together so there must have been an interpreter there, but I was admiring her child. And she was in this refugee camp, and she looked at me and said, “Do you want my baby?” It wasn’t because she didn’t love the child, I don’t believe. It was because she did not know how she was going to tend to cope with or raise this child. And probably had watched many children starve to death. So, that stands out in my mind because it came out of a place of such extraordinary need. As we traveled around the world, this one little incident has been amplified in many, many places.
David: I think, Karen, that I have been to India seven or eight times. I’ve lost track. Pictures are still in my mind of the children who beg. You run into it just about wherever you go in India. I can conjure up almost so that I could smell them. The smell of the slums, the slums are incredible. You can’t believe what they’re like until you get into them.
Karen: Yeah, and a lot of people do travel overseas. Although at the last I checked, only 30% of Americans have passports. So, we’re under-traveled and I don’t think you can really be educated until you’ve traveled around the world. But our trips, as you said before, were not touristic. We were going with faith-based relief and development organizations that were showing us their work and how they dealt with the plight of these populations all over the world.
David: I admire those people, whether they’re government people or ministry people. I remember, Karen, a trip to Venezuela and Colombia and we went so far into the interior that you couldn’t tell which country you were in anymore. We were going to film some there. Another mission group had asked us if we would be willing to. And we flew by single plane and then went by, actually there were dugouts.
Karen: Dugout canoes, yeah, you were right, it was dugout canoes.
David: When we finally got to the village where we were going to, nobody was there. They had all gone turtle egg hunting. So, it was a different world. Schedules didn’t mean the same to them as it did to others.
Karen: No communication systems.
David: Karen, you’ve been in countries in Asia. I remember the trip to Kazakhstan. You’re talking about a different world than the one we live in here in the States.
Karen: One of the things that happens when you travel with people who are involved in missions or in relief and development is you come back with ideas of how perhaps you could help. We were in Kenya, I believe it was, and meeting with women who were from the Kibera slums. This is one of the largest slums in all of Africa.
David: Unbelievable. Yes, it’s massive.
Karen: Absolutely massive and they had no work. The plight is just beyond Americans’ comprehension. So, we set up what we called the Global Bag Project. We figured out that the woman I was working with, who was an African woman, but aligned with the mission organization I had gone with. She could travel to Ghana on a bus. So, she would go and choose all kinds of beautiful fabrics and buy fabrics and then bring them back. And we started the Global Bag Project where the women from the Kibera slums, in Kenya then, would come to the sewing room and this was on the campus of that school where we were located. Then we taught them how to sew. It was a really darling thing because when they reached a certain level of seamstress facility, they would receive certificates. Now many of them couldn’t read. Many of them had never gone through grade school.
And so, to receive an educational certificate of this kind made them so proud. And David, they went to their sewing machines, and they sewed similar garments. These were their graduation dresses. And I have a picture of the Global Bag Project women.
So, then our role was to come home and to distribute and sell these bags in the states or wherever we could sell them. So that we would make money then to continue the Global Bag Project. So that was something we set up for women who were extremely poor. And it was a great pride that they were able to make money, pay for their children’s education. It was so satisfactory to help them help themselves. It was a wonderful thing.
David: Many stories coming to mind Karen. It’s obviously Africa. I was in Nigeria which is the largest country population-wise in Africa. I was up in the area where the Boko Haram had kidnapped those schoolgirls. And through that area, very poor people for the most part. And again, you’re just aware that America has been blessed beyond measure.
Karen: One of the amazing experiences I had was I was on the Medical Ambassadors International Board because of all my travels, I think. Basically, my qualifications for being on that board was that I was not afraid to talk in a room full of powerful men. And I was talking with one of the women who had been a public health nurse in California. And there was a system that taught the women’s cycle of life there from birth to death really.
She and I were chatting about it, previous to the board meeting starting. And I walked into the board meeting, and I said, “Gentlemen, do you know what we’re sitting on here?” And explained what the women’s cycle of life is. To their great credit, they picked up on it right away. Voted to hire someone who was an expertise in community health. And we did that. And she launched the Women’s Cycle of Life, this whole program of teaching women what their bodies were all about. How to have pregnancy, safe pregnant, blah, blah, blah, blah. How to be healthy. Went all around the world. So, I didn’t take it all around the world, but I was the one who got it started which is really exciting to me.
David: I think I should probably also say, Karen, that we spent 10 years early marriage in the near west side of the city of Chicago, church planting. We were like two and a half blocks from where the Black Panther shootout was which people have heard of. We were in that area.
Karen: And that side of the city went up in flames during the race riots after Dr. Martin Luther King’s death.
David: So, we understand poverty. In fact, if you talk with us, are you pro-life, are you pro-choice, we’re kind of pro-poor. Well, you’re seeing the inequity of the world and we’ve felt the heartbeat of people who have so little. That’s always a part of who we are. It’s just impossible not to say, “Okay, what’s going to happen to the poor people when this new ruling now that has come down?” And we still haven’t said where we are. We are pro-life in every sense of the word and we’re also pro-poor, every sense of word. And we’re seeing these as complicated things to just rattle off a little title.
Pro-poor is not even an option, but it’s still the poor people are affected. And so, we hear those things, and we try to process it all. We are opposed to killing, period. And we are especially opposed to killing the defenseless, and that has to include children. So, we’re pro-life and even probably more pro-life than most people think, but we’re more than pro-life.
Karen: All this background we’ve taken time to give brings us to an extraordinary compassionate position when these difficult discussions go on. And I can’t take a hard line on either side because I know what many, many people are facing when they have unwanted pregnancies or pregnancies where they have too many children. It’s not an academic issue with them. Around the world, many women don’t even know how their bodies function and not really aware how you get pregnant sometimes, you know. Which is amazing, unbelievable. Yeah.
David: But it’s true.
Karen: So, we’re bringing that worldview, that exposure to what we hope is a much more compassionate approach to the pro-life discussions, which are angry and heated and often are in divisive today. What we want people to do is to learn to listen to their opponent. Someone who’s on the other side of the discussion or the argument to pay attention to them, say, “Where are you coming from? How did you get here? I want to hear what you have to say.” More than slip into the argumentative kind of dialogue that we’re seeing today.
David: Let me put into a sentence. I struggle with this one. Okay?
Rather than feeling the need to always give final answers to difficult questions, sometimes Christ’s followers would be wise to copy his example of simply asking relevant questions or telling helpful stories. Now, I want to give an illustration of that. Okay?
In Luke chapter 10, this is a passage that everybody knows pretty quickly when you get into what it is. Jesus is approached by an expert in the law and the man asks what must be done to inherit eternal life. Now, that’s a setup question for a minister. And Jesus was a minister in every sense of the word, but he doesn’t answer the question. No, instead he asks a question of his own. He says, what is written in the law? How do you read it? What’s your interpretation?
Karen: It’s your interpretation. This is lovely, isn’t it? Yeah.
David: And the man says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And Jesus says you’ve answered correctly. Do this and you will live.” But the scripture says, this is the guy who asked the question, a lawyer. Okay. So, you’ve got to picture the guy in your mind. He wanting to justify himself, ask, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus tells a story. That’s the story of the good Samaritan, the priest and the Levites passing by this man in terrible need.
Karen: He’s been beaten. He has, and he’s set upon by robbers and left by the side of the road to die probably.
David: And then comes along the Samaritan who is a despised individual by the Jewish people. So had a little sting to the story. And the expert in the law, he replies to Jesus’ question of which one of those do you think was the good neighbor? And he says, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Karen: The man who had been beaten.
David: Yeah. And then Jesus says, “So you go and do likewise.” So, it’s an interesting exchange and it’s based on asking questions and telling stories. And I think Karen, in terms of our approach to all these things to say, let’s listen, let’s ask questions and let’s tell our stories. And that’s what I tried to do when I said, “Okay, how do we start this program?”
Our story is it would been given huge exposure to the underbelly of the world. So many, many different places and realizing how incredibly advantaged we are. And also, we are able to say we understand to a certain degree the poor people of this land. We understand why they’re underprivileged in so many ways. We don’t ignore them. We can’t ignore them. We’ve been exposed to so much. But in the process of all of that, it makes certain decisions where we’re asked, “What is your position?” Makes them very extremely hard to answer because they’re complicated.
Karen: So, we’re not coming down in this podcast recommending where our listeners should take a stand on the abortion issue pro or con. But we’re wanting them to change as much as they can to an attitude of being careful about their approach to the person who’s on the other side of the issue.
I mean, we’ve seen the angry signs and the people facing one another and shouting and yelling at one another. A Christian who is in the midst of this difficult kind of conversation has another kind of value that needs to be appropriated. And that’s the value that Christ has had. And it was caring for the lawyer with his perhaps tricky question and the person that lawyer really was deep down in his heart. And then beginning to ask questions.
I took a study of all four Gospels one time in my life, but I wrote out every single question that Christ asked in the scriptures in those Gospels, those four books of the Bible. And I had a page and a half of questions. So, one of the ways we deflect anger and hostility is by saying to people, “Tell me where you’re coming from.”
And just the fact that you want to hear, not as a trick question, but you’re really interested in who they are and where they’re coming from and why they are coming from deflects that hostility so many times. And that’s I think the technique that Jesus was using here.
David: Jesus, he’s unpacked it if you put it that way in a beautiful way. A couple of chapters earlier, this is Luke chapter four, and it’s at the very beginning of the ministry of our Lord.
“Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, which had been the place where he had brought up. And on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue as was his custom. And he stood up to read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And so, he’s announcing who he is. But he’s a champion of the underprivileged. He’s the one who is concerned about the poor.
Karen: And wanting us to do the same.
David: Yeah. Well, he’s setting the example.
Karen: Yeah, setting the example.
David: So that’s where we are. It doesn’t solve anything.
Karen: It’s an attitude if we begin to practice this. Now, the discussion in the States here on abortion is very heated, but it does impact the poor in ways that we don’t understand it. And one of the things that I did that I would suggest that people do is just do an internet search. Look up how many black women die in childbirth as compared to those of us who have great hospitalization and insurance to pay for medical care. And then at least when the abortion question arises in those communities, we have more of a feeling for why and hopefully a more of a tenderness and an understanding of the things that are driving those sorts of decisions.
David: It’s hard, isn’t it?
Karen: Yeah, it’s very hard. This is a really difficult topic. So, we’ve tried to impact how we impose upon ourselves compassion in these areas where we are forced to take a side against another side.
David: Hopefully people are still listening. Hopefully they say “That’s helpful.”
Karen: I hope so.
David: And if that’s the case, then we’re grateful.
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