Does God make mistakes?
The Christian answer is, no, God doesn’t make mistakes. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect. God does not forget to carry the two, and God does not make junk.
A couple of weeks ago I heard Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” for the first time, except I was driving so I couldn’t really hear it. I could hear the word “mistakes” and it kept standing out from the rest of the song, so afterward I looked up the lyrics. (Thank you, Google. Back when I was a kid, you had to buy the album and hope the lyrics were printed.)
This is what she’s singing on the chorus:
I’m beautiful in my way
‘Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way
The song en toto is an anthem of self-love: there’s nothing wrong with me, and therefore you should find nothing wrong with me either.
Okay, so…no. No for a few reasons, the first of which being that while God makes no mistakes, that doesn’t mean humans don’t. We can foul up our development enough that we diverge from being the people God intended. People, made in the image and likeness of God, can indeed become lousy people.
Lady Gaga herself must believe this because (get this) she’s contstantly agitating for expanded acceptance for homosexuality, and if you believe differently, she asserts you’re ignorant or wrong. So I guess we’re not all perfect in our way, since she’s trying to change many of us.
But more importantly, and this is the reason I’m writing here: I spent some time googling around, and Lady Gaga seems to be pro-abortion. While I wasn’t able to find a quote from her in either direction, she has a line of condoms with the proceeds going directly to Planned Parenthood.
So God makes no mistakes…except for the times God makes a mistake and you conceive.
Or the times God makes a mistake and you conceive a baby with Down Syndrome. Or your baby has a birth defect.
People talk about the radical empowering message of this song (Whitney Houston did it too, but whatever, every generation thinks they’ve found the radical empowering message of humanity) but do they mean it?
Ask them. The next time someone says something like this, ask if they’d abort a baby with anencephaly. Or abort a baby with Down Syndrome. Ask if they underwent prenatal testing with a mind for terminating pregnancies if the baby didn’t pass all the tests.
If they tell you they believe parents have the right to do this, smile and say, “Then you’re saying God does make mistakes, and we have the right to correct Him.”
They won’t like that. Well, I don’t like it either.
My daughter died two hours after birth of an incurable, fatal birth defect. We carried her for 20 weeks knowing she would die. She was a blessing to us and the daughter we needed to have. She was not a mistake.