SHE IS GONE

SHE IS GONE

I have written about her earlier. The story has been in the news for months. It was not difficult for me to decide which course of action was most appropriate to the child. The bottom line is, she is gone.

She is no longer in B.C. She may soon be out of the news entirely. At three years of age, she is having to learn to live with the shock, the anguish of loss, the fear, the mistrust, the daily changes. She is gone, gone from foster parents who loved her so much that they applied to adopt her, and MCFD flew her to Ontario to be adopted into a Caucasian family in which the girl's two siblings live. She did not know them and had never seen them. 

Little attempt has been made here to understand a culture, the Métis culture, because that is the girl's birth heritage. Does it matter? Of course it does. It does in every other avenue of Canadian life and law and societal correctness. Yet in her case, with her life, that culture has been minimized and we have another instance of bureaucratic initiative misjudging what is truly in the best benefit of the child. Isn't our history full enough with the bad burden of young lives plucked from families and shipped off to a residential schools or to out of province non-aboriginal families and even over the border into the United States? Did we have to repeat this again with this little girl? No we did not.

I will talk about her a lot over the next weeks but first I want you to see her, well, you can't really, because there is a ban on such publication, but what is permitted, I can offer here. Furthermore, I am providing links to new websites that tell her story very well from the viewpoint of the loving foster family who miss her.

In subsequent pieces you will be shocked again, perhaps outraged by what our government has done.

CULTURE IS OUR CONTEXT AND WE CAN LIVE IN IT

The most essential ingredients of the Christian message bump against our culture causing friction and marginalizing Christians in the minds of the secular or non religious crowd. Christian views are trivialized, identified with the political right and all that comes with that and in this modest sense Christians are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.

We are each born into a culture and that culture does become part of who we are. Even if one is born and raised within an Amish community, one is acculturated. Oh the outside culture identified with the world has been avoided but one is resident within a culture nonetheless. So for most of us, culture is the TV we watch, the stores in which we shop, the place of our employment, the school we attend and the students with whom we hang out. The culture is all around us and we also contribute to making it ourselves. Culture is our context.

GPS Application

So if a preacher is going to be a relevant communicator, he cannot ignore the culture within which his listeners and he live each day. And even if he has managed to discipline himself to avoid some of the culture’s influences, he must understand that his listeners may be highly affected by what they have seen, heard and read. The preacher must not ignore the world because the Bible is relevant to the events of this culture. Cultural relevance is bringing God’s Word to bear upon the lives of people. When listeners catch on to the right now-ness of scripture for what’s going on with them, it can become transformational.