A topic in my thoughts...

Since this is my blog, I guess I'm allowed to get up on my soapbox every once in a while.

Abortion is a topic that's been all over, from politics to local Branch discussions and I want to put in my two cents' worth.
People tend to make the case that abortion is a matter of privacy and choice. It's a woman's body and therefore it is her choice to do what she will with it. No one should be able to tell her what to do, and I get that. No one stops people from doing other things that I find revolting, like tongue rings and the like. That's fine.
My argument against abortion runs along two separate lines, but I think that they both have merit. When someone commits murder, they can't go back and plead that they should be able to choose the consequences of their actions. They used their body how they wanted to. A woman's right to use her body should not be taken from her, but after some three weeks, an abortion doesn't affect her body as much as the baby's. If it just dealt with her body, I could get behind that, but it doesn't. People try to bring agency into the argument, as if it has a place. Moral agency deals with the ability to choose righteousness over evil. Other than those rare situations in which the woman did not have the chance to choose whether or not to get pregnant, the decision to sin was already made when the baby was created. Agency has no bearing on the situation, because it is now gone. Whether or not there is a temporal law in place with regards to abortion, there is already a celestial law in place. If we really want to be helpful in this situation, the best thing we can do is point them toward righteousness again by not having an abortion.
I have made covenant to stand as a witness at all times and in all things, and in all places I may be in, physically or politically I might venture to add, and this is where I stand. God created a law and I have the choice to sustain that law by voting and declaring against abortion, or I can attempt to say that Congress should have power to decide right and wrong over God.
To me, that's the choice you're making. It's not about choice, because the choice will always be there, whether it's legal or illegal (feel free to reference alcohol consumption in Prohibition times). As feelings and desires count for righteousness as do actions, a woman who wants to have an abortion but doesn't, isn't in a much better place spiritually than one who did. At least they won't have to deal with death. Nevertheless, my choice is not to decide what is right or wrong, because God already decided that for me and I know His position.

Stories from Draft...

Alrighty, so it's been a while.

School is going fine, I guess. A lot of the more intelligent kids have gotten a wake-up call that they actually have to study. Fancy that. They are funny as all get out. In an attempt to help them add fractions in an easy manner, I asked, "One quarter and one quarter make...", waiting for the answer one half. To everyone's surprise the shouted answer was, "Two quarters!"
We were making what is called a foldable, where you fold a piece of paper in different ways to make blocks in which to separate information. We folded it in half the long way first, and then folded it into thirds from there to create six blocks. One student, who happened to be the biggest smart-aleck in that class, amazingly said, after unfolding the thirds fold, "I 0nly have three blocks!" Dead serious. I wiggled his paper around and played the magician and opened it again and said, "Mathemagic! Six blocks!" He wasn't too impressed.
I was walking down the hall and this girl seemed to be having trouble opening her locker. When I looked like I was going to come over, she checked again and laughingly announced, "Oh! That's not even my locker!" She's a funny one.

That's enough 8th grade stories for now. More to come...