Light

Time for more of it

For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. John 3:20

I watched Schindler’s List. I could hardly stand it. As my husband observed, it’s too close.

One of my theories of people’s blindness to truth in our current crisis is the inability to conceive and believe that such evil exists. Even in the movie, the Polish Jews who had already been forced from their homes, lived in and then forcefully evacuated from a ghetto, and faced cruel conditions in a work camp still refused to believe circulating stories about gas chambers. “It’s ridiculous. I don’t believe it” is an exact quote in the movie. We now know those unimaginable horrors were indeed true.

There are innumerable evil deeds of the last two-plus years that need to be exposed. How indeed do we move people from denial to belief? A cognitive expert my husband recently interacted with asserts it is in the hearing of stories.

I’ve had two stories worth listening to sent to me recently, facilitated in their telling by the same podcaster, nurse Colette Martin.

The first story is that of a woman hospitalized for covid-19 who attributes her survival to alternative treatment snuck into her against hospital protocol. Being privy to many a text from hospitalized covid-19 patients (some of whom did not survive), I can vouch for a lot of her experience. Much of what has gone on in hospitals during this crisis, as patients have been separated from the protective eyes of family and friends, is simply horrific.

The second story is that of Dr. Meredith Grembowicz, a pediatrician who was fired for expressing the “wrong” opinions on early treatment and novel vaccine technology. Dr. Grembowicz is one of the pediatric specialists who participated in our Global Covid Summit pediatric declaration. I wish her story was unique. On one of our first Zoom calls organized to craft this declaration, most of the participating pediatric specialists had similar stories. Interestingly, many also had personal or family stories of living under communism that motivated their participation.

We timed our pediatric declaration to precede the FDA’s consideration of the now-approved emergency use authorization of novel genetic products in children aged 6 months to 5 years. Having lost all confidence that institutions formed to protect us still do, we nevertheless desired to get a message to pediatricians and parents to protect children. The story of the travesty of a clinical trial used to justify the FDA’s decision is also worth hearing.

There were many different players in the true story that is the Holocaust. There were victims. There were perpetrators. There were cowards that went along with the perpetrators. There were those who turned a blind eye because they weren’t personally affected. There were heroes.

Oskar Schindler did not set out to be a hero. He was an incredibly morally flawed businessman who saw a money-making opportunity employing Jews desperate for “essential” employment that allowed them to work and trade goods outside the ghetto. The movie portrays that he was not too bothered about their unjust treatment until he witnessed Jews being killed during the purging of the Warsaw Ghetto. All his actions after that moment meet the definition of Biblically shrewd (Matthew 10:16, Luke 16:8).

If you or your friends or family have yet to be affected by hospitalization or death, or inability to get treatment that you need, or vaccine injury, I’m thrilled for your good fortune and pray it does not come to you. I do not, however, want you to remain in your blind ignorance. People are suffering and dying around you. It is past time for evil deeds to come to light, and more heroes to step into their roles.

Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not be partakers with them; for you were formerly darkness, but now you are Light in the Lord; walk as children of Light (for the fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light. Ephesians 5:6-13