Late last fall, Lighthouse Trails released Roger Oakland’s apologetics biography, Let There Be Light. We call this book an apologetics biography because interwoven in the pages of Roger’s life as an evolutionist-turned-creationist is a defense of the Gospel and a contending for the biblical Christian faith, addressing several vital issues (for example: the emerging church, road to Rome, Calvary Chapel, abortion, evolution, and the New Age). The book is an emotional and hard-hitting read as many of our readers who have already read the book have been telling us. One of the reasons we believe the response is so strong is that those reading it are resonating with Roger’s struggle to get other Christians, including pastors, to take his warnings seriously. Some of the people who have contacted us have expressed their own frustrations and struggles in trying to get their families, friends, colleagues, and pastors to take heed to their exhortations about watching out for spiritual deception.
Below is an excerpt from the book. This episode took place prior to Roger becoming a Christian. Also, click here to see the first 13 pages of the book, including Table of Contents and Prologue. Also this excerpt from another chapter is available to read.
(from Chapter 7 of Let There Be Light by Roger Oakland)
My head rolled woozily on my shoulders. I squinted, clumsily trying to insert the house key into the lock of the front door. It was three o’clock in the morning and all I wanted to do was to get inside and slip into bed unnoticed. As I struggled with the lock, I was unaware that I was making enough noise to wake the dead. To my horror, the door suddenly flew open, and I was confronted by the angry face of my wife. A sick, sinking feeling rose in my stomach.
“Where have you been?” she pleaded, her voice heavy with emotion and exhaustion. “Don’t you have any consideration for me?”
I noticed how red-rimmed her eyes looked. I tried to form some words of apology, but my dull brain wouldn’t cooperate with my mouth. As I flopped down onto the living-room couch, Myrna broke into a flood of tears.
“Can’t you see what’s happening to us? There’s nothing left between us anymore. You don’t even care if I exist. All you can think about is yourself.”
I raised my hand to try and stem her tide of hostility. “Calm . . . calm down,” I said, desperately trying to gather my thoughts. “Let’s just go to bed. Everything will be okay tomorrow.”
Myrna, however, would not let me off the hook that easily.
“No, it’s not going to be okay,” she shouted. “I tried to go to sleep tonight, but I couldn’t. This was the one night I wanted you to be at home so I could talk to you. And now you come in like this. There’s no use talking to you now.”
“What do you want to talk about? Let’s talk about it right now. What is it that’s bothering you?” Desperately I tried to focus my mind.
Myrna worked as a nurse at the obstetrics department at the University of Saskatchewan Hospital. She was employed in the delivery suite where the majority of her work dealt with delivering babies. The ward was also used for performing abortions. Over the past few weeks, a number of nurses had asked to be transferred to another department because they didn’t want to assist in the abortions. This same issue had troubled Myrna as well, but she had not publicly protested her feelings. In previous discussions, I had told her not to worry about it. As far as I was concerned, she should have no moral reservations because “abortion was not a moral issue.”
However, on this particular day, a heartbreaking scenario had taken place. An abortion that had been performed by saline procedure had resulted in a baby being aborted while it was still alive. The baby was then placed in an incubator along with the other premature infants in the hospital, where it quickly died. Seeing this whole procedure had created an emotional dilemma, causing Myrna to lie awake, constantly rehashing the issue. She had desperately wanted to talk with me about it. I, of course, had spent the whole evening at a bar, solving the problems of the world.
“Myrna, we’ve talked about this in the past,” I said, trying to form my words in a cohesive manner. “I wish you wouldn’t become so emotionally distraught over such a minor issue. A fetus, while it’s developing in the womb, isn’t even human. It’s just a blob of cells undergoing division.”
Myrna had punched one of my sensitive buttons. Her words had triggered me to explode with one of my well-prepared, pro-abortion speeches.
For the past several years, I had been involved in developing a teaching aid to help students comprehend the process of cell division. As an instructor, it became apparent to me that students at the university level did not understand some of the most basic concepts of biology, one of which was mitosis or cell division. In order to help them comprehend the details regarding this very basic process necessary to the perpetuation of life, I had designed a teaching kit to visually illustrate mitosis.
At a recent biology show at the university, I had prepared a display designed to demonstrate how cell division was essential to the development of life from a single cell through to the fully developed embryo. For the latter stages of the development of the embryo, I had obtained some human embryos from the University Hospital that had been preserved in formaldehyde. I had proudly displayed these specimens in order to draw attention to the display and to demonstrate that the human embryo is a product of cell division.
“The fetus that died in the incubator was no different from the embryos I display in the pickle jars,” I growled impatiently. “So forget about this nonsense and let’s go to bed.”
Myrna looked at me with frightened eyes, wondering if I was even human anymore. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was in a deep sleep. But for Myrna, the conversation about the saline abortion and my behavior that night was just one more wedge of separation between the two of us. The chasm was becoming wider by the day. Would there ever be a way to bridge it? (Excerpt from Let There Be Light by Roger Oakland) For other Lighthouse Trails excerpts and sample chapters of other LT books, click here for sample chapters, and click here for excerpts.
