The Value of Human Life: Miranda Lambert

Thou shalt not kill...

Exodus 20:13 

 

Country singers these days, especially some of the women, seem to be having trouble understanding their responsibility as role models in our celebrity culture.  Little girls and young women look up to their favorite celebrities, particularly singers.  As a teacher of high school kids, I constantly hear about this singer or that - their music, their antics, and their core message.

Miranda Lambert, wife of Blake Shelton of The Voice fame, loves to portray a "bad girl" persona in her music, as witnessed in her Fastest Girl in Town single.  In the song, White Liar,  she castigates a boyfriend who lies about his affairs - then ends the tune by revealing that she has also been lying - and cheating.

 

On her hit album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Lambert's song about an abusive boyfriend, Gunpowder and Lead, has her "going home to load my shotgun, wait by the door and light a cigarette.  He wants a fight, well now he's got one..." The clear inference here is that if the abuser comes through the door, she will shoot him - all in self-defense, of course.  The video for her hit song, Kerosene, shows her dropping a trail of kerosene from her boyfriend's house clear through town.  Apparently the boyfriend is in bed with another, and she is going to light the kerosene trail and blow the two cheaters into the hereafter.

What kind of messages are these artists sending to their young fans:  Playing fast and loose, lying, cheating and revenge are acceptable ways to live life and take care of problems?  These artists may not want to think about the influence their music and videos have on the young people who watch them, but the parents of those kids sure need to be wary.  Country music used to be some of the cleanest music around, but those days appear to be coming to an end.

The Value of Human Life: A Man and a Dog

Be strong and very courageous...

Joshua 1:7

 

Somewhere in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, tonight, a mother is hugging her two daughters, and thanking God for a 27-year-old man named Adam and a Labrador retriever/husky mix dog named Rocky.  A family outing on Easter Sunday would have been a tragedy if not for this unlikely pair of heroes.

Two sisters, ages 9 and 10, were tobogganing in a riverside park when their sled went too far and ended up on the ice.  When the girls tried to get back to shore, the ice broke and the older girl went into the water.  Adam and his dog were walking on a nearby bridge and heard the screams.  When they reached the river, both girls were in the water.  He was able to pull the younger girl up onto the ice, but could not reach the older one.  The 10-year-old was being carried downstream, her head bobbing in and out of the icy water.

As he tried to get closer to her, the ice gave way, tumbling Adam and Rocky into the river.  Adam pushed the dog back up on the ice and then used the dog and the leash to pull himself up.  Right at this point would be the time when some people would have said, "Hey, I did my best - my dog and I don't need to die today," and would have turned back.  Not this man.  

 

Running further down river to where the girl was, Adam urged his dog to get back in the river while he held on firmly to the leash.  The dog jumped in right next to the child, who got both hands on Rocky's leash. Adam called the dog, and he swam back to his master, getting close enough for him to grab both the dog's collar and the girls arm and drag them away from the water's edge.

It goes without saying that things would have gone very differently if Adam and Rocky had not been willing to come down off that bridge on Sunday.  They could have ignored the screams and simply walked away.  But Adam saw two defenseless little girls - two human lives that were about to be snuffed out, and he wasn't about to let it happen without a fight.

The Value of Human Life: Sell Your Kids?

Children are a gift from the LORD; they are a reward from him.

Psalm 127:3

 

Our family was really poor when the children were little.  Our first-born had catastrophic heart defects, and we were in debt up to our eyeballs before she was a year old.  My husband graduated from college and went straight into construction in order to put food on the table.  Those first few years were a real struggle, and there were many times when I despaired of ever being able to have a comfortable home life.  We dreamed up all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes, each of which we ultimately abandoned, but one thing we never contemplated was making money off of our children.

An Oklahoma woman was arrested for contacting a woman on Facebook and offering to sell her kids.  The 22-year-old mother has a 2-year-old and a 10-month-old.  She offered the toddler for $1,000, or the two children together for $4,000.  The woman she approached with this proposition informed the state's Department of Human Services, who contacted police.  After her arrest, she admitted that she needed the money to bail her latest boyfriend out of jail.

Across every level of society, the value of a human life has steadily eroded over the years.  In many areas of the world, the only human life that is precious is "my" life - everyone else is expendable.  For this woman, her lover (who may or may not be the father of her children) is more important than her kids. 

I am certainly overjoyed that the mother was caught before she could carry out this scheme, otherwise who knows where those children might be?  Considering she was trying to hock them on social media, she probably wasn't too concerned about the quality of the buyer.  Hopefully there is a set of loving grandparents (or a compassionate foster home) that can provide the security and love that those children desperately need.