How do we make sense of medical decisions from a godly perspective—which procedures should we pursue, and which shouldn’t we?
The Red Pyramid world around us seems full of contrasts and contradictions until we remember the desperation to live in a body in a material world in this time only. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid pregnancy or abort a living unborn person and others spend as much trying to get pregnant, save an unborn person, or adopt a child. Near the end of life, some people want every means and measure taken to preserve their life, no matter the expense while others hope for an early, quick death. What underlies all these is the natural human desire for happiness—as much happiness as much of the time as possible. For some people, pregnancy and childbearing brings happiness, but for others it seems like an ominous threat. For some the thought of dying young is terrifying while at the same time the thought of living into old age without one’s full capacity to pursue happiness is just as daunting. In this world, people are simply doing the best they can, as far as they know.
A three-dimensional Green V worldview provides quite a different perspective and guiding principle. First, we are essentially an eternal soul, now regenerated in the image of Christ, loved comprehensibly by Him and thus a source of love and care for others. We love and care for others by way of our body, an extension of our essence yet integral. We are, soul and body, animated by the Holy Spirit. As citizens of the kingdom of heaven, we are stewards and ambassadors—caretakers of the life God gives and through that life, caretakers of the lives God gives others. We are stewards, not owners, and we live eternally. Thus, we look at all questions of medical care as just that—how do we best care for one another as God would? We support nature as God’s on-going creative work. Every living person, from conception until their soul passes on is entrusted to us and is the substance, purpose, and joy of our life—especially when challenging. We cannot act against a life, either by abortion or euthanasia, not by withholding needed care because of the expense nor of over-spending for care that is reducing rather than supporting a person’s quality of life (note that in this model, a dying person can still be just as much a servant of others as the others who care for that person). Even when a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother, we do all we can to preserve the lives of both. If we must deliver a fetus so young that it cannot live outside the womb, we do so for the sake of the mother and accept that we could not preserve the physical life of the child, comforted by the fact that the life of the child has been and remains safe with its Creator and Redeemer since conception.
No matter what age, no matter what condition or situation, as stewards of God’s creation we support and promote life in the fullest sense of the word, body and soul for time and eternity, under the atoning work of Christ and as souls regenerated in His image.