Castaway

“ Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. ”

Scattered across the landscape of America's highway shoulders one may find a variety of things discarded from moving vehicles: food bags and empty soda cups, hubcaps, pieces of broken furniture, key rings, ball caps, children's toys. It's just the junk blown out of car windows, truck beds or thrown by thoughtless motorists. We woke up to this back in the 1950s and instituted the “ Keep America Beautiful ” campaign, where “ Don't be a Litterbug ” became a familiar slogan. Today, businesses and churches sponsor the clean up of highway shoulders, piling huge orange trash bags of discarded castaways ready to haul to the dump. But stuff keeps showing up out there.

A castaway means what it says: something thrown out because it was counted worthless. St. Paul uses the word once. He says he runs like an Olympic athlete, fights like a prizefighter in bringing the Gospel to as many people as time and grace allow him. He doesn't just sit down and settle for good enough. He doesn't let his body get lazy or fat, but keeps self-disciplined. He does this, he says, so that after he has preached to many others, he might not be a castaway . The word castaway means rejected, worthless, or unapproved . His concern is that he must be obedient to God's call on his life, so in the end his life will be acceptable to God and not thrown away.

Rejection is an awful feeling. The kids pick teams and one by one the captains look at you, then move on and choose another kid. The line up is complete, the teams are even, there is one odd kid and it's you. Sorry, you can't play. Nobody chose you.

You ask her out and she accepts, to your surprise. You dream of her falling in love with you, of romantic evenings spent together, and you sigh. She isn't there when you go to pick her up. She went out with another boy who called at the last minute. You're alone tonight, buddy: rejected.

You have been waiting to go to work, and it's late in the day. Nobody chose you, so you've waited around, hoping for some scrap of charity…

Many people feel it, live it, and incorporate it as part of the definition of who they are. “I'm the middle child. Nobody pays any attention to me.” But there is a greater feeling of rejection, of being castaways, that has reached a societal plane. We may all feel it, live like it, define all people so, if we think so. Castaways : rubbish on the trash heap of deep space. I've seen it in the eyes of a generation. Empty lives , they seem to live, g enerating joy by getting drunk and leaving their beer bottles everywhere . It's not true that they're worthless. They have great worth. But the better part of a generation grew up believing they were not worth anything, that they were de facto orphans. How did it happen?

The scientific answer is, well, junk science . Our kids have all been taught that they are products of evolution. There is no God, only natural forces: impersonal, blind, unfeeling, random acts of matter and energy that just happened to make Earth and its life forms. It just happened that humanoids rose up above the other apes to succeed as the planet's highest form of life. It could have been otherwise, and it may be better on some other planet. Someday, we might all annihilate ourselves in some cataclysm of greed and hatred. It will probably happen. So, what is life worth? What are you worth? What does anything matter?

This teaching is not just the California Public School system norm for science, but it is the message of educational television, the echoes of rock music, the assumption of our entire society. Christians try to teach otherwise, or offer that evolution is only a theory, but are greeted rudely and asked to sit down and shut up. Mankind is not a creation of any god, they insist. For us to say so it to discriminate against anyone who doesn't believe it. And thus far, the church has let itself be sat down and shut up. The price of our acquiescence is a generation of castaways.

The message is underscored by an acceptance of such societal immorality and evil that would never have been tolerated in an age when most people saw us as being made in the image of God. Planned Parenthood now teaches sex education in Chico schools. They are teaching your kids that sex is good and acceptable for them at any age. They are taught to use contraceptive methods, to practice so-called “safe sex.” Since the commencement of Planned Parenthood's presence in Chico schools, the abortion rate at Planned Parenthood has risen by 40%. Kids are not supposed to have sex. Kids can't understand the cost of their mistakes. Kids having kids leads to kids killing kids. But it's okay, because it's safe and legal.

1 million teenagers become pregnant each year in America. Over half of them abort their babies. California has the highest abortion rate per capita in the U.S., and thus has more abortions than any state, over 300,000 a year. About 1/3 of those are tax paid through MediCal. 43% of all American women will have had at least 1 abortion by the time they reach 45 years of age. Of the 45 million abortions in America since the Roe v Wade decision 32 years ago (yesterday,) 1% were for pregnancies caused by rape or incest, less than 1% were medically necessary to save a woman's life. All others were because a baby wouldn't be welcome right now. A castaway generation learns early to castaway the next generation. No one who is inconvenient is worth feeding, is worthy of love.

No mistake, now. The baby aborted is a human life. Surgical abortions don't happen until the 6 th week of pregnancy. Most happen by the 12 th week. During that entire time, the baby is so well developed that she has a heartbeat, brainwaves, hands, fingers, feet and toes. All organs are present. She is only dependent on her mother's body, not a part of it; their blood streams never mix. A living human life begins at conception, with a complete set of chromosomes and a genetic pattern that will produce an adult human being, unless they are cast away.

If you are just an accident in space, a life form that freakishly rose out of some primordial ooze, then I guess it doesn't really matter. Some lives make it, some don't. Survival of the wanted. It's all random anyway, so what does it matter? But I can't think such a dismal thought. With such thinking, it's no wonder so many people are depressed. And no wonder some will turn to manmade gods, mysticism and witchcraft and nature worship —trying to inject some meaning into being a castaway.

Tom Hanks did a movie recently by that name, Castaway . I didn't like it, but it illustrated the process of believing you are junk, your life is meaningless, and you must invent a god of your own. Hanks is the only survivor of a plane crash in the Pacific and the sole inhabitant of a deserted island. He goes slightly nuts and cherishes a soccer ball that floated ashore, so much that he gives it a face and hair and worships it. If you can't believe in Almighty God, your Creator, you will make a god your size to worship. You were made to have meaning, even if you have to invent the meaning yourself.

So, is our faith in Christ, in God, an invention, something we come to believe in order to comfort ourselves in our existential despair? Do you think God abandoned us here, on this deserted planet, because He didn't like us and thought us worthless and rejected? Was it because He wasn't powerful enough to save us? He knows that we can feel that way sometimes. He knew it so well that Christ was born to us, rejected human beings. And we found it necessary to reject Him too. “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” Isaiah 53:3 If we were only to understand, it is we who have rejected God . And being a God who made us in His image, He made us free to determine if we would love Him or cast Him away. We cast His Son away, crucified Him, left Him dead and ran scared to our homes amid the earthquake and the darkness. Jesus commented, “Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?” Matthew 21:42

A better picture of God's judgment couldn't be painted than that of Jeremiah, at the time of Judah's captivity and exile: “Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the Lord hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath. For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the Lord: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it. And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.” Jeremiah 7:29-31

The Jews had practice sorcery and witchcraft, pagan rituals in the Temple. They had joined the practices of their pagan neighbors and offered their babies to be burned as sacrifices to appease the gods of man's devising. If human life has any meaning, we must find it in the Person of Almighty God, who made us with a purpose and who gave us the ability to value Him and value ourselves and each other. If any human being is called junk or castaway, we devalue ourselves, and we reject the God who sent His Son to die for all mankind. Every life is sacred, every life is valid, every life is worthy to be lived. It may end in damnation: that's God's business. It may end by hanging or bullets or disease or old age, but we are not to end any life thoughtlessly. Lest we ourselves become castaways, we must do better with the lives we have been given, and with the lives with which we have been entrusted to value. God loves each one. God's love is cause enough to live a better life and to not become a castaway.

PFH+