Lindsay Clancy is Opening Eyes

Paul says something really interesting in Titus 2, that is being highlighted by the Lindsay Clancy trial. He says among other things that women need to be taught how to love their children,

“3 the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things— 4 that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children,...” (Tit. 2:3-4).

There are a lot of amazing mothers. I am surrounded by many of them in my family, social network and church environments. Incredible women, doing incredible things for their children and families.

If you are surrounded by such women, you might find Paul’s statement, here, that women need to be taught how to love their children, to be strange. But the Lindsay Clancy trial has, once again, shown us that Paul had a supernatural insight into human nature for both men and women. He was not seeking to simply repeat cultural ideas, but rather to convey transcendent truths. Transcendent truths that we ignore at our own peril.

If the culture of the home is broken enough, for long enough, you will have an increasing number of women in society who will support a woman like Lindsay Clancy, as we have all just seen, to our horror. The abortion numbers should have told us this problem existed. If that did not, abortion up to birth should have told us this. But people were so uninterested in hearing this, that it took the evil of a woman blaming her depression for pre-meditated murder to remind us that women need to be taught to love their husbands and children, just like men need to be taught to love their wives.

People forget that Paul lived and wrote in a day where a woman who really did not want her kids could dump them in the forest to let them die of exposure. Something which was common in ancient Rome, Greece and other societies in that day. Or she and her husband could sell unwanted children into slavery; something which also happened. Or they could simply put their children under the authority of a slave or other servant to be raised, trained, and brought up, barely even engaging with them. These are just some of the evils that were accepted.

These things sound unconscionable in our day and age, though many parents have moved back closer to doing the third one through the schooling system. But the support for Clancy amongst a too large subset of women shows us the old pagan ways could easily come back, if society lets them.

Paul knew that a young mother needed the guidance of older, experienced women, especially her family and Christian family, to help her get through the harder stages of pregnancy. He did not know the term post-partum depression, and he did not have children of his own. But he had supernatural insight into the kind of healthy structures a young woman needed around her to get through pregnancy well.

Praise God, for the women I know doing this. May God use the clear nature of Lindsay Clancy’s evil to wake up more people to the way our society has been heading.