The Deaf Girl

Philip Yancey writes of a girl raised by deaf parents. When she desired to shut them out of her life, she would simply close her eyes.

Of course, this action would make her parents feel angry; they could only communicate with her through signing.

Yancey concluded, “As I think of that young girl, her eyelids sealed tight against the frantic hand motions of her parents, I get a picture of how God must feel when I shut him out.”

Ouch! How many times do I shut God out?

The Butterfly

Recently, re-reading RUMORS OF ANOTHER WORLD by Philip Yancey, I came across a story he shared from Annie Dillard. She tells of experiments conducted by entomologists’ (bug doctors) using butterflies.

The entomologists would take a male butterfly and place before him a painted cardboard imitation of a female butterfly. In repeated experiments, the male butterfly would, with great gusto, mount the cardboard replica. And he would not cease mounting it. In the meantime, a real-life female butterfly would be nearby, opening and closing her wings to gain the male’s attention. But he would not look.

I think pornography is doing something very similar to humans.

When a Commode Becomes a Temple

Philip Yancey gave me chills in his book, REACHING FOR THE INVISIBLE GOD. He told of a Cambodian man testifying at an international conference on evangelism. The man had been placed in a concentration camp by the Pol Pot regime.

When asked what he resented most about the camp, he replied, “Even more than deprivation of food, even more than the torture, I resented having no time to meet with God. There were guards yelling at us, forcing us to work, work, work.” Yet, this prisoner was convinced his death was imminent. Thus, he desired to spend time each day with God in preparation, but it was to no avail.

Then, he observed that the camp’s guards could get no one to volunteer to clean the cesspits. Who wanted to root himself in the raw sewage? So, the man volunteered for the horrible job.

At the conference, he enthralled his audience with these words, “No one ever interrupted me and I could do my work at a leisurely pace. Even in those stinking depths, I could look up and see blue sky. I could praise God that I survived another day. I could commune with God undisturbed and pray for my friends and relatives all around me. That became for me a glorious time of meeting with God.”

Here was a man who desired to commune with God so much, a de facto gigantic commode became for him, a temple.