by Rod D. Martin
October 18, 2012

Rod, Sherri and AnnabelleAt 3:30 am this morning, we welcomed the very first Martin grandchild, daughter of our son Archer and his practically perfect wife Elizabeth, our beloved Annabelle Elizabeth Martin.

She faces a markedly hostile world. A recent study reported that 98% of the now-rampant sex-selection abortions in China are aimed at exterminating girls. In Afghanistan, when George Bush’s warriors swept the Taliban away, those villains were engaged in one of their favorite “acts of purification”: publicly executing any female who had learned to read. America’s left ignores such atrocities totally, while gravely intoning that Republicans and Christians have declared a “war on women”, by which they chiefly mean that decent people oppose the abortion holocaust that has denuded China of its women and sweet Annabelle’s generation of fully one third of its peers and playmates, as it did her parents’ generation and ours as well.

Oh what a stinging rebuke she can be, to a people which objectifies, subjugates and even mass-murders her fair sex, just because it can. A godly woman, who loves the Lord and seasons her speech with wisdom; who walks humbly and in dignity with an elegance and strength that is never tough; such a one will conquer men and worlds.

It remains to those of us who love her and who have gone before to introduce her to our Savior, to raise her up in His ways, and to impart to her a vision for this world — and other worlds yet unknown — as expansive and glorious and full as His very own. There is much, much to do.

But today we congratulate her precious parents — our children — and take great pride and gratitude in the evidence that they follow their Heavenly Father better than their Earthly fathers before them. And likewise, we rejoice in the birth of one who is already the object of so much joy, and whose little hand we hope to hold through cuts and scrapes and victories both tiny and grand for generations more to come.

Welcome, precious Annabelle. We loved you before you were a thought.