Melissa Anderson
My husband is usually a fashion disaster. Mind you I’m not much better, but at least I don’t wear blue plaid pants with a striped brown shirt. He never leaves the house in such disrepair, but he is known to lounge about our home sporting two different kinds of plaid, a shirt unabashedly buttoned incorrectly and two socks that couldn’t be mistaken for a matching pair.
Then I laugh at him. I laugh at him in a way that says, “We’ve been married for more than a decade and you still can’t button your shirt correctly.” It happens the same way every time. He buttons his shirt incorrectly. I laugh. He changes his shirt. One day perhaps he’ll stop buying button down shirts or roll his eyes and walk past my lovingly mocking gaze.
The question is, how much laughter does it take?
The natural inclination when we’re openly mocked is to change. My husband changes his shirt. What about more important matters? What about times when we’re not wrong?
The pro-abortion camp paints pro-lifers as religious zealots, uneducated, unversed in medicine, birth control and family, pushing their moral values on an unwanting world. They laugh. Do we blush? Do we sheepishly change our views? Do we question where we stand?
If you do, don’t. Know that you graciously stand with generations of people in world history who were mocked and who did not blushingly turn away. People who courageously wore the plaid of their times knowing that someone had to take a stand.
William Wilberforce was mocked for a lifetime and, just before his death, witnessed the fruit of his undaunted perseverance for the causes of life and justice. Wilberforce saw the freedom of a people. He saw life.
My point for this blog?
Don’t blush. Don’t change shirts. Wear your plaid undaunted.