Ten Millimeter Bolts
…And Other Obvious Designs
By Ken Laue
The birthday girl with the balloon bouquet made quite a splash climbing onto the middle school bus with her friends.
"My parents never remember my birthday," said the 12-year-old beside me.
It was my first day as an aide on this route and her open comment surprised me.
“That’s unusual,” I said. “What’s their deal?”
“They’re both in their late sixties.”
“They don’t have Alzheimer’s, do they?”
“No, I’m adopted," she said flatly. "They just don’t care.”
“I can’t believe they don’t care. Do they remember their own anniversary, at least?”
“Well, no, but they don’t exactly have an anniversary.”
“What do you mean?”
“My parents are both women.”
"Oh," is all I could manage after rummaging through my razor-sharp brain.
I've led a sheltered life for thirty years in the arms of my church family and can forget how bad people may have it out there. But this is not the only child I've met from a “non-traditional” family who has trouble navigating his or her world.
While not every homosexual “marriage” abuses or neglects the adopted kids, this arrangement does not provide the refuge and reference point for children that God intended when He established marriage between male and female.
There is no doubt that in our current world, the family as an institution is under attack.
Most inmates in our prisons either had no father in the home or had fathers who were abusive or dysfunctional.
Broken homes are beyond question the prevailing malady of our age.
Some things are created by their designers with obvious specific intentions.
Like the tail light housings on my wife’s ’06 Forester. They were designed by Subaru engineers to be removed with a specific tool: a ten-millimeter socket.
This is a metric size. And since my metric sockets were buried in my black-hole-from-outer-space tool kit – and since my American sockets were very handy – and since I was too lazy to dig and hunt for the proper tool – well, naturally tried a substitute.
But none of my handy sockets would do the job without running the risk of stripping out the hex heads on the bolts.
So I ended up wasting a lot more time trying to make it work than I would have in digging for the right tool.
When I finally put in the effort to find the ten millimeter – lo and behold! How easily the housing came off so I could replace Bonnie’s burned-out tail light bulbs!
The proper tool for the job is what the engineers intended for use on needed repairs.
Every backyard mechanic knows that, and a few trained orangutans, too.
But human laziness says if there’s a jackknife in my hand and I need a screwdriver, voilà! The knife becomes a screwdriver. Or a chisel. Or whatever else I need at the moment. Or am I the only bozo out there that does that?
Now it stands to reason, beloved, that whoever designed the human species designed them male and female.
No, sorry: it wasn’t the Big Bang and billions of years. But you can believe that if you want to – just like I believed the wrong kind of socket would take off the ten-millimeter Subaru bolt.
So, now that I’m an expert tail light bulb changer, how about if I offer to change your tail light bulbs? What if I show up bringing my trusty tool kit: an eggbeater, a colander, a blender, and a set of steak knives? The right tool for the right job, right?
Now obviously you or I can study a given bolt and and an assortment of sockets and come to a reasonable conclusion as to what the designers intended.
We can also study human reproductive anatomy (which, if you’re like most students, was the one and only time you paid attention in biology class) and likewise conclude there was one design intended by that Engineer. That’s God, for those of you in Rio Linda.
The physical design of male and female plumbing is of course only the beginning of the blueprint. The Bible makes it clear that God intended marriage and family as the exclusive expression of sexual design. If I tell you that gay, lesbian and transgender lifestyles are not part of the plan, I may be branded a hate-monger or bigot in the U.S., or get arrested for hate speech in Canada or other ultra-left-leaning countries.
But that ten-millimeter bolt ain’t comin’ off, friend, without the right tool; and sexual relationships don’t function properly outside of the Master Designer’s intent.
So there it is, straight up. Go call the thought police and tell them to come get me.
No, that doesn’t absolve us from the Christian obligation to love people caught up in “alternate lifestyles,” but we don’t have to agree with their choices, either.
The Bible says that God loves marriage. A faithful bride and a faithful groom, in a lifetime commitment to faithfulness, is a picture of Jesus Christ’s relationship with His church. That is, all of those who have been redeemed by their faith in Him and their faithfulness to Him. One text that sheds light on this is found in chapters 21 and 22 of Revelation.
It stands to reason that counterfeit relationships take away from the honor and dignity of this picture.
If you want an idea of just how much God gets bugged by sexual relationships outside of the parameters of godly marriage, just take a look at Revelation 21:8.
God loves the institution of marriage but hates divorce or any other thing that works against marriage. Malachi chapter 2 is a good treatise on this subject. Some of that has to do with the profaning of His honor, and some of it no doubt relates to the destruction of peoples’ lives that results from damaged families.
But God says in Malachi 4:5-6 that He will restore the family, and specifically the broken relationships between fathers and children, before He returns. Otherwise, he would have to strike the earth with a curse.
That’s how seriously He takes His design for sexuality, marriage, and the family. He accepts no substitutes.