The Lord God took Abram outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so,” he added, “shall your descendants be.”
Abram put his faith in the LORD, who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.
He then said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land as a possession.”
“O Lord GOD,” he asked, “how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
He answered him, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”
Abram brought him all these, split them in two, and placed each half opposite the other; but the birds he did not cut up. Birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses, but Abram stayed with them.
As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram, and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him. When the sun had set and it was dark, there appeared a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, which passed between those pieces.
It was on that occasion that the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates.”
REFLECTION
We are entering our second week in Lent and we may or not be keeping up with the things we established we'll be doing or giving up on Ash Wednesday.
On the first reading we see how God promises Abram a descendance as numerous as the stars. This was then considered a great blessing. Nowadays society shuns child-bearing and applauds those who decide not to have children in order to "save the planet".
I've seen several vlogs and reels from women that laud the freedom and joy of being childless. Same for DINK couples (double income-no kids). However, these are people that gravitate under 35. After that age fertility drops, and for those who are single, the dating pool starts transforming into a wading pool.
We see children as a commodity and not a blessing. As a right from an adult to choose to have a child, or not. And not the other way around: the right of a child to have a mother and a father.
We have heard ad nauseum how abortion is murder. But what about surrogacy and IVF?
IVF though as noble as it might seem to help a childless couple conceive, it brings so many wrongs: the father has to engage in self-pleasure, maybe even watching adult films in order to produce a sample for the lab. The mother has to go through series of painful injections to generate multiple eggs that have to be harvested from her "at the right time". Conception happens in a lab and not in the marital embrace. Babies are created and frozen until the mother is ready to carry them. Several embryos are implanted, some unfortunately don't make it. The ones left over are either destroyed (murdered), frozen indefinitely at a whopping cost of $800 annually, or used for "medical research".
And how about surrogacy? Anybody that "owns" a frozen embryo can "rent a womb" and have this baby or babies implanted in this woman. It is a contract where she will carry and bond with this child and then surrender the baby at the end of the pregnancy. Many times affluent people make these contracts with women from undeveloped countries where they are in great need of money. This is basically a form of biological colonialism, exploiting the poor for our own benefit.
We need to turn our hearts towards God, and not towards ourselves. Pray with us the Prayer for the Nascent Babies to end the horror of abortion in the world. And for Jesus to change our hearts so we can love each other as we should, especially the most vulnerable amongst us.
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