“God can help us find new meanings to old stories.”
This evening, I was prompted to flip open my journal I kept from my eating disorder Inpatient Treatment facility. (The one that was the basis for my book, Bloom). And the very first line of the page I flipped to, from Day 23, was exactly that:
God can help us find new meanings to old stories.
Boy, how true that has been in my life.
But that’s not where my mind initially went.
Instead, it went to Simone Biles.
You see, just a couple days ago, she made big time waves in the news — not because she pulled out of the Olympics, nor that she ended up with a bronze metal on beam — but rather, a very jarring Instagram post about…abortion and foster care.
Biles, a Catholic, posted this on Instagram:
And if you cannot read all the small print, here are her comments, verbatim:
“I already know this is going to start the biggest argument & may even lose followers BUT. I’m very much pro-choice. Your body. Your choice. Also for everyone gonna say ‘just put it up for adoption’ [12 eye roll emojis] it’s not that easy & coming from someone who was in the foster care system TRUST me. Foster care system is broken & it’s TOUGH, especially on the kids & young adults who age out. [And] adoption is expensive…I’m just saying. And don’e even come at me if you couldn’t keep a mask on or refused to wear one.“
Now look, I’m not going to sit here and try and comment on what Biles went through during her time in the foster care system. I cannot speak to her pain. I cannot speak to her trauma. I cannot and I will not. She says it is broken, and I believe her. There is a giant need for improvement in the foster care and adoption industries, that is a known fact.
But to simply write off a child’s chance at life, saying – the child is better off to be killed in the womb, than put into the foster care/adoption system…it is just so sad to me.
So incredibly sad.
But I don’t want to sit here and pass judgement on Simone Biles and the trauma she’s sadly endured.
I want to go back to that little one liner from my inpatient journal:
God can help us with new meanings to old stories.
You see, when I look at Simone’s “old story” – yes, it is absolutely terrible and heartbreaking that she had to experience, first hand, the brokenness of the foster care system. BUT, look at how she overcame. She triumphed over that adversity, and went on to become arguably the best female gymnast in the history of the sport!
She is an overcomer! She rose up from the ashes of her past and prevailed!
That is a new meaning to her old story, that I pray that one day she can come to see and appreciate.
Because right now, the meaning that she’s living with is: abort the children so they don’t have to suffer through the broken foster care system like I did.
Oh how that must hurt God’s heart.
I pray that God change her heart, like He changed mine.
You see, for many, many, many years, I carried around so much shame and guilt and anger that I had to endure that traumatic season of anorexia in my past.
Friends, that season… it was as though I was living in hell. I lost my friends, my health, my faith, my future, my dreams, my relationships and at 78 pounds, I nearly lost my life.
And I just couldn’t let those feelings go. I was dragging around this ball-and-chain of resentment and shame.
It was the meaning I had attached and solidified in my mind for my story.
It wasn’t until I handed it over to God, for Him to redeem and make new, and help me find a new meaning to it.
Now, after much prayer and healing, I can truly say that I am grateful for the lessons I had to learn the hard way.
Not that I’m thankful for the anorexia, per se – but I now fully appreciate how those trials and traumas shaped me into the woman I am today, and have set my life on the path He intended for me, and have given me a meaningful opportunity to help others.
I am grateful for His saving power, rescuing me, redeeming me, and setting me free.
My second chance I have so generously been blessed with is the new meaning He helped me see.
And that’s what I pray for Simone Biles.
“This is what the Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.” Ez 37:5
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46 responses to “Simone Biles: New Meanings to Old Stories”
Thank you for being a good role model.
Thanks JB! What a kind thing to say! Hugs and love xox
You are very graciously welcome BBB! You are a great person to be kind to. Hugs and love back.
FYI
By Garry Wills
Mr. Wills is the author of more than 50 books on Catholicism, the history of Christianity, and American history and politics.
What is the worst crime a society can commit? Some people (I among them) would say the Holocaust, the cold methodical murder of six million people just for being Jews.
But some Catholics and evangelicals say they know of an even greater crime — the deliberate killing of untold millions of unborn babies by abortion. They have determined that a fetus is a person and abortion is therefore murder. This is a crime of such magnitude that some Catholic bishops are trying to deny the reception of Holy Communion by the president of the United States for not working to prevent it.
No one told Dante that this was the worst crime, or he would have put abortionists, not Judas, in the deepest frozen depths of his Inferno. But in fact he does not put abortionists anywhere in the eight fiery tiers above the deepest one of his Hell.
This is not a singular omission. No one told \”Matthew\” or \”Mark\” or \”Luke\” or \”John\” or Paul, or any other New Testament author, that he should condemn this sin of all sins. Nor did any author of the Old Testament raise this alarm, with the result that we do not have Moses or Jesus on record as opposing abortion. Nor did any of the major definitive creeds.
Even major figures of religious history do not tell us that the fetus is a person. St. Augustine says he searched Scripture trying but failing to find out when in the procreative process personal life begins. But St. Thomas Aquinas knew. Aristotle told him — that it came at or near childbirth, after an earlier stage of having a nutritive soul (like plant life), which developed into an animal soul, at last receiving a rational soul. Thomas kept Aristotle’s biology, just adding that God himself infuses the soul into the body at some unspecified time during the last stage of this process. In other words, the fetus in its long pre-rational life is not a human being.
In 1930, Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Casti Connubii, forbade all ways to prevent procreation, lumping them together with the condemnation of Onan, who prevents his widowed sister-in-law from childbirth by coitus interruptus. But the Vatican was embarrassed by scholars who noted that what was attacked there was a violation of the duty of Levirate marriage, to continue his brother’s line. The Vatican has never again tried to connect abortion with Scripture. The best comment on the pope’s disastrous \”church teaching\” came via Alexander Woollcott, who said of Dorothy Parker: \”Of her birds, I remember only an untidy canary whom she named Onan for reasons which will not escape those who know their Scriptures.\”
The religious opponents of abortion think that the human person actually antedates the Aristotelian scheme, dating it from \”conception\” (when the semen fertilizes the ovum). But the Catholic theologian Bernard Häring points out that at least half of the fertilized eggs fail to achieve \”nidation\” — adherence to the uterus — making nature and nature’s God guilty of a greater \”holocaust\” of unborn babies than abortion accounts for, if the fertilized ovum is a \”baby.\”
The opponents of abortion who call themselves \”pro-life\” make any form of human life, even pre-nidation ova, sacred. But my clipped fingernails or trimmed hairs are human life. They are not canine hair. The cult of the fetus goes even farther down the path of nonsense. This cult, which began as far back as the 1950s, led to debate over whether, in a pregnancy crisis, the life of the fetus should be preferred to that of the mother.
In her brilliant book \”Policing the Womb,\” Michele Goodwin records how state legislatures are now inventing a new crime, \”feticide.\” Does a pregnant woman’s smoking or drinking endanger the fetus in her? Haul her into court and convict her of attempted feticide. Bring doctors in to testify against her.
This new cult of the fetus was not observed in the long history of the bishops’ own church. When my wife and I were in England in the 1960s, her doctor there said she was at severe risk of a miscarriage and consigned her to immobility in bed. I did not know what my Catholic Church prescribed about treatment of a miscarried baby, if that should occur. I went to John Henry Newman’s Oratory fathers, where I had been attending Mass, and asked what I should do in that event. They looked puzzled and said the hospital should handle that.
I found, in later questions, that the church did not prescribe or recommend baptizing a miscarriage as if it were a full human being, nor giving it last rites, nor burying it in consecrated ground. My Catholic grandmother, Rose Collins, had three or four miscarriages, but told me she did not worry about how the discharges were disposed of — she had four living children to care for.
The Catholic Church no longer claims that opposition to abortion is scriptural. It is not a religious issue. It is called a matter of natural law, which should be discernible by natural reason. Yet as the Catholic judge John T. Noonan said, the most recognized experts on natural law, in universities, human rights organizations, medical and psychological bodies, do not generally oppose abortion. Nor, according to polls, do a majority of American citizens, even Catholic citizens. Some women of my own extended family have had abortions and still consider themselves Catholics. President Biden seems to be on their side, as is Pope Francis. This, of course, does not affect the American bishops. They hate this pope and this president anyway.
I appreciate you joining the conversation and sharing your thoughts. Hugs and love xox
I rarely respond to another’s reply but felt I must. Please know I am responding only to the points you have shared and I value your right to have made them. May God’s blessings be upon you.
“God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us,” according to St. Augustine (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1847).
This quotation from Augustine has been used by the Catholic Church to express the fact that salvation demands consent because God never forces himself on someone against his will.
Everyone is left to choose between taking God at His own Word. Or not. For example, “Thou shalt not kill.” For me I have not yet found anywhere in Scripture, and certainly not mentioned by any well-written author, a description of this commandment based on God’s or the Catholic Church’s continuation on this commandment….”Solely based on the value YOU afford the life.”
Which is why I find it extremely curious that there are more protections in place, supported and justified for (the) unborn animal, as opposed to that of (an) unborn human being. *See the Bald & Golden Eagle Protection Act. (Where you will discover even their feathers are protected.) You will not see any “justification” regarding the unborn eagle, developing safely in its shell; as “just a clump of cells” or as a mere “yoke,” anywhere in this act. Or any other animal protection act to the likes of this one. But instead, simply written, “egg thereof.” And yet, this egg has value. This egg thereof has rights. This egg is protected. And both the believer and unbeliever alike applaud this protection. (Rightfully, so.)
Also, to the point of “Policing the Womb” and “feticide” I (again) merely reference the same protection act afforded the Bald & Golden Eagle’s breeding rights. *Please see: “”Disturb” means: “to agitate or bother a bald or golden eagle to a degree that causes, or is likely to cause, based on the best scientific information available, 1) injury to an eagle, 2) a decrease in its productivity, by substantially interfering with normal breeding, feeding, or sheltering behavior, or 3) nest abandonment, by substantially interfering with normal breeding…” Sounds like policing. Sounds like protection from “feticide” on behalf of the Bald & Golden Eagle. Yet, still the applause continues. (Rightfully, so.)
Should a person be caught tampering or fatally destroying a Bald & Golden Eagle’s egg Animal Rights activists would tar & feather those involved. Garry Wills might write a book about them too. And both the destruction or tampering with the development of a Bald & Golden Eagle’s egg(s) are punishable by law. *A violation of the Act can result in a fine of $100,000 ($200,000 for organizations), imprisonment for one year, or both, for a first offense. Penalties increase substantially for additional offenses, and a second violation of this Act is a felony.
Yet, here we are debating the value of an unborn child based on “natural law (or is it reason?) And what the most recognized experts in universities, human rights organizations, medical and psychological bodies, who do not generally oppose abortion have to say? Lest we forget, according to polls, do a majority of American citizens, even Catholic citizens. And respectfully, those who have had abortions and still consider themselves Catholics. Best of all President Biden who seems to be in agreeance…”
For me it all boils down to an egg. And I believe God does not make preferences. He has shown me no where in Scripture that he has attached a more greater value to that of (the) egg of a Golden & Bald Eagle than to that of (a) human person. And certainly no lesser.
For THAT I applaud Caralyn for the courage to write on her own story of Salvation & how with a little prayer others will be called to reach for the same.
Hugs & Blessings….
Wow, I didn’t hear about her comments on the foster care system. So very sad, I hope the Lord will touch her heart. All of this discord is why I haven’t watched any Olympics programming. I find it no longer honorable to view on different levels.
I pray that too, John. Thanks for sharing your heart. I haven’t watched any of the olympics either. Glad you stopped by, friend. Hugs and love xox
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Caralyn you continue to impress with your ability to pray for those who have lost their way in their belief. Your faith shines through in all you say. I too would pray that someday Ms Biles would understand the opportunity for her to be an example of how someone can overcome obstacles rather than be a supporter of those who choose to take a life. Of course without a personal relationship with Jesus as your Savior that goal may be beyond reach. Thank you for your recovery your enduring faith and your willingness to witness. Truly Caralyn you are a blessing. John
Thank you John, I appreciate your kind words. Yes – joining you in that prayer. God is truly good! Hugs and love xox
Great topic and as usual very well thought out and commented on. Yes ma’am, we are not here to judge; you are correct, we need to continue to pray for her and everyone that supports and/or is involved in abortion. We should pray for a change of heart for all involved and affected. This is one of my “daily intentions” in daily Mass. Thank you for your well prepared and thought provoking articles. God bless you. Hugs and Love 🤗 & ❤️
Thank you so much HJ for sharing your thoughts on this. Amen – not to judge but to love and pray for one another! Joining you in that prayer!! Hugs and love xox
I studied logic and debate in college and taught courses about process and thinking accurately and clearly. You hit on it well here; as closely linked as abortion, adoption, and foster care, they are separate points of understanding. Each should be evaluated individually and not used as a justification for a decision on a separate, if socially linked issue.
The point is to slow down one’s thinking and not jump the rails. Abortion is a case in point. There are many words written that often gets people lost. I say knowing the right thing to do is NOT so hard. Doing it might be, but knowing? Not hard if you think honestly.
So – abortion. Is it wrong to end a life? Fetuses are alive. They have been born unintentionally at less than half term and survived as human beings. There are many cases of aborted children surviving the abortion and leading productive lives. I repeat – is it wrong to end a life? Despite what philosophers say, fetuses are human too. Is it wrong to end that life in the womb when we know it can grow to adulthood? Yes, it is wrong. God says we should not murder. A fetus us a human life.
From there, we can address adoption and foster care. They are not about killing or not but caring. They may be doing it badly, so that question becomes what to do, not whether to kill. See? Separate issues.
Simone doesn’t see that yet. Perhaps she will eventually learn how to reason better. She’s still very young, if massively accomplished. See? Unrelated issues again. I hope I’ve made some sense to you and anyone else. Have a great weekend, Caralyn.
That’s such a great point Jeff – jumping the rails never leads to a good place. And so true – linked but separate issues. What to do is precisely the answer – not whether to kill. And I do think there needs to be some amending to that foster care system. Because like you said, it is a system created to CARE for the children – that should be first and foremost. You have absolutely made sense and given me some terrific food for thought! So thank you for that!! You too, Jeff! I hole you and your girls have a wonderful weekend! Hugs and love xox
I “hole” you do too!😊
Great post! It broke my heart when I read her comments. May one day she will see and come to the truth about abortion….
I also liked what you said:”Not that I’m thankful for the anorexia, per se – but I now fully appreciate how those trials and traumas shaped me into the woman I am today, and have set my life on the path He intended for me, and have given me a meaningful opportunity to help others.
As someone who suffers from mental illness….I have come to accept it and realize that God can USE me to help others. He isn’t surprised by anything that we go through. He shapes us despite our trials. He USES those trials to get us to draw closer to Him
Thank you Leigh, yeah it definitely broke mine too. And thank you for your kind words. Amen – God will use everything for good, I fully believe that. Amen! Hugs and love xox
Truth beautifully stated. Good article.
Marcy
Thank you so much Marcy! I appreciate that! Hugs and love xox
[…] Simone Biles: New Meanings to Old Stories […]
Thank you Tonya for the link up! Hugs and love xox
It is so good to read your posts because you give me hope for intact Godly morals in your generation. I am so proud of you. Keep up the good work, my beautiful friend. Love you as always!! Hugs!! XO😃❤
Awww thank you Tonya! Gosh what a kind thing to say! I so appreciate your encouraging word. You’re an amazing friend! Love you!! Hugs xox
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I’m curious as to who funded her training? Did she break free of her foster parents in order to get training so she could compete? Who funded her trip to the Olympics? Who allowed her the time to train?
I have four siblings who were in foster care at one time. I cannot imagine my life without them. My son and his wife adopted one of their foster children and although they are no longer foster parents, due to their special needs child demands, they did for quite some time foster up to three while caring for their birth two and before adopting.
My foster siblings also had horror stories, but I also saw many caring foster families while I worked with special needs children, whose parents did not want to care for them, so to make a blanket statement that foster homes and/or situations are horrid is part and parcel to the mentality of many today and that is to fault and reject those who try to help. Caring for another human being with a ton of baggage is never easy for those fostering and they do come with a ton of baggage or else they would never have been taken from their parents.
Even so to wish herself better not to have been born at all? How on earth did she make it this far?
Well written Caralyn! As usual your blog is true compassionate and thoughtful. I too pray for Simone. She has the power to reach so many people, I hope that she can rethink and repost a more positive position.
It is often in the storms that we finally see Him and learn to trust Him.
Succinctly put, Kat! Succinctly put!
Hey Caralyn, how are you, my friend? It’s been a minute! I always use that idea of “My body, my choice” stuff to fight some current mandates we’ve at present. If that is true for them, then it is true for us to reject some things. I hope you get my logic? Of course, I’m against abortion and all that. But I use their logic to question them on some current issues, if you know what I mean? Wink wink!
Welcome back to New York! Thank you for always speaking up, God bless you.
– Thompson.
This is a great post! I can relate to her story because I lived in fostercare for 13 years, I was put in care at the age of 5 and separated from all my 4 brothers and 2 sisters. I know the fostercare in the UK needs to improve, do not know how it is the US. However, I completely disagree with her comment. A child can still overcome as you said in the post, we can rise from the ashes of the past and be a better person! No doubt Gods heart is broken when people agree with abortion, if it breaks ours, imagine what it does to His heart. Thank you for sharing! God bless
I just love the way you make a point. You are a very skilled writer and story teller. I am blessed in how you honor God in your testimony. Thanks for the encouragement and the little life lessons that speak truth in a loving manner. Praise to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Your blog reflects the heart of our Father. Blessings on you, dear one. c.a.
I applaud your courage to step out into cultural mine fields and speak truth. Not your truth but God’s truth. May God continue to fill you with wisdom and resolve, Caralyn. Your words are deeply needed today.
Oh, how this breaks my heart. I pray that Simone has a change of heart as she matures.
Awesome perspective. And “yes” every conception has a seed of God’s purpose, though it might come in none-traditional ways. I could say, “ I should of aborted my son since his father continues in a life of sin.” But instead, my son is an awesome and Godly young man in spite of his father’s absence and sin. He knows us from the moment of conception! 🙏
Amen
I dont know why she had to write this in the first place, sounds like she wanted the negative attention she was getting to be redirected. Sad she had to pick such a sensitive topic, but guess she had to go for the biggest shock factor.
And a famous successful athelte coming out and saying the foster care system is broken, well it worked out pretty well for her. Laughable really, that she would also make that comment.
I love reading your blog when I get the chance because of your refreshing honesty and how thoughtful and respectful you are. You worded everything perfectly to give your position on a controversial issue. I like how you correlated your tough life experience to that of Simone. Each a journey of pain and recovery as well as triumph. You use good images too. Excellent work Caralyn! 👏
After dealing with clinical depression for 22 years, I can truly say, “Thank You, Lord.” Although I wouldn’t have chosen this path to learn my life lessons, I am grateful for what I have learned. The man I have become as a result of my major depressive disorder is a much better man than I would have been without it.
Caralyn,
I remember, about her not having a support network…
Contrast with a support network, with unconditional love, and who see your achievements (and ‘failures’) as shared.
With such, you will not be alone in a time of need
Powerful story and I am thankful for your recovery through faith in God.
thank you so much 🙂 I appreciate your support, Sherry. Yes! God is good! Hugs and love xox
Good post.
Hey , that has been such a tremendous post to promote the spirit of life and not death . Your testimony is proof to that .
The Word of God is shared so well !