They Told Me There Would Be a Hand Basket
When will humans stop attempting to play God?
They Told Me There Would Be a Hand Basket
As I am packing away our Easter decorations and baskets until next year, I was thinking about the tradition my Momma handed to me, and I to my oldest daughter’s who are momma’s now.
My Momma did not buy Easter baskets. She built them.
Every year, the same hand basket reappeared—the one that had always been mine—transformed. She filled it herself, deliberately, with trinkets and treats chosen specifically for me: a small jewelry box, a hair ribbon, a tiny perfume, a Cadbury Crème Egg tucked just so. Then she wrapped the whole thing in iridescent cellophane and tied it at the top of the handle with a wide grosgrain ribbon, the kind that holds a bow with authority.
It was so perfectly assembled that I couldn’t bring myself to open it.
While my sister tore through hers—chocolates scattered, Easter grass shed across the carpet, toys liberated immediately—I would sit beside mine and simply look at it. If I found a small gap in the cellophane, I would ease my hand in carefully, take one thing, and leave everything else exactly as she had arranged it.
That basket was not a container. It was a statement.
A statement of care that is visible. That someone who loves you so completely, notices what you love. And curates an Easter basket just for you.
The Other Handbasket
There is another kind of handbasket.
“Going to hell in a handbasket.”
By the late 1800s, the phrase had settled into something familiar: things moving in the wrong direction, and quickly. PDQ, as my fourth-grade teacher used to say. “Pretty Daaaarn Quick,” she’d answer, just barely holding back what she really meant.
I am looking around at the world and feeling it’s going straight to hell in a handbasket PDQ with a lot of know-it-alls trying to play God.
Of course, people have attempted to play or outplay God since…forever. It’s just a bit on the nose these days.
Nope, I’m not talking about war. Or protests. Or the lying media. I am talking about the unadulterated attempt at interfering with things that do not belong to us.
We are editing the genome. Engineering the weather. Designing consciousness. Negotiating death.
And doing it all with a confidence that would have looked, to any generation before us, either magnificent… or insane. I’m going with insane.
We have developed extraordinary power over life. And almost no shared understanding of what a life is actually worth.
Who Gets to Measure What a Life Is Worth
I don’t have to answer that question in theory.
I live it.
My husband and I have eight children. It’s the lens through which I see everything.
Some are gifted. Some struggle. Some are quiet, observant, and reserved. Some are bold, loud, natural leaders (we are honing our bossiness into leadership over here; some days are harder than others). Every one of them is different.
Every one of them is whole. Beautiful. A creation.
And every one of them matters, not because they are perfect, but because they are not.
I have anxiety. Depression. I am a trauma and abuse survivor. And I know, without a doubt, that I love deeper because of what I’ve walked through. People say that I have helped them, by sharing my story.
My husband carries a truckload full of trauma-filled rucksacks from war. And still—he doesn’t hate the world. He loves it more. His stories of cultures I once might have shunned as much as tossing the baby with the bathwater, those stories have taught me the beauty of a people on the other side of the world.
These are not defects. These are the places where depth is formed.
History agrees with me by the way.
Einstein struggled in school. I’m pretty sure I read where he was dyslexic. It has been quoted somewhere that he was a difficult student. Einstein didn’t simply tweak physics. He basically told humanity, “Your common sense? Cute. Completely wrong.” Then he gave us the unsettling realization that reality isn’t fixed or intuitive, but flexible, relative, and far stranger than our instincts can handle.
Beethoven lost his hearing. That paired with his intense personality and falling hard for the wrong woman, he gave us proof that human suffering can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into something so beautiful it outlives us all.
Helen Keller lived in a world without sight or sound. In her day, it would have been termed “deaf, dumb, blind, and mute”. She gave us proof that a human mind and spirit can break through almost unimaginable isolation and still reshape the world with clarity, conviction, and stubborn, defiant hope.
They were not mistakes.
They were human beings whose lives carried weight and meaning—not because they were optimized, but because they weren’t.
So when I hear talk about improving the human blueprint, I don’t hear progress.
I hear a quiet question underneath it all:
Which lives are worth keeping? And who the hell thinks they have the authority to decide?
Three “Playing God” Arenas
Before Life Begins
We are already answering that question.
Through IVF, genetic screening, and emerging gene editing technologies, we are selecting between possible lives, deciding which embryos are given the chance to continue, and which are not.
It is framed as “compassionate”. Preventative and responsible care. Give me a KitKat, please. I need a break.
Let’s be honest, it introduces something you should probably pay attention to:
Hierarchy.
We begin selecting for health. Ability. Intelligence. Preference. And filtering out anything that doesn’t meet the standard.
We are not fully designing human life yet, but we’re sure closer than we have ever been. And we are already deciding which lives are allowed to begin.
At the Beginning of Life
The question of abortion sits here—not as an isolated issue, but as part of the same continuum.
It is framed as freedom. Autonomy. “My body, my choice!”
If you’re offended by this point, perfect. Keep reading. Grab a support stuffy if needed.
At what point does our autonomy extend to deciding whether another human life continues?
I have conceived.
I have carried children who are here, living and breathing and filling my home with noise and life. My body has brought them into this world sometimes peacefully, sometimes urgently, and in one instance, a full code-blue and unmedicated c-section.
And…I have babies waiting for me in heaven. Grace. Micah.
There are nights I still lie awake, quiet tears falling, thinking about them. Wondering what they would look like. Who they would be. And thinking about how I want them to be the second heavenly beings my arms wrap tightly around. After I have jumped into Jesus’ arms and see my Savior face to face.
When ending a life shifts from something unthinkable, to something normal, everything changes. It stops being about crisis and becomes a framework where life itself is conditional.
It’s not the right time. But.. this will ruin my goals. I didn’t expect this. The details vary but the logic does not.
It wasn’t logical to me when I woke up one fall morning at 16 years old so nauseous I couldn’t think… and adults in my life suggested “don’t throw your life away”. Excuse me? No. Actually, get away from me. I am having a baby. And I will still become.
It turned out to be the best surprise gift in the world, against all odds.
She’s now 26, recently stepped away from a successful marketing career, and in the throes of sleepless nights with baby number two.
At the End of Life
And then, at the other end of the same line, we have Medical Aid in Dying. It is spoken about as compassion. I am an empath to the point it can be self-destructive. But empathy and compassion do not give us authority over life and death.
I understand the desire to ease suffering. I truly do. But there is a line here that cannot be softened by language. We were never meant to decide when a life should end. That’s why we arrest murderers.
But, we are already watching the assisted suicide line move. It’s happening in Canada like ordering a Starbucks skinny latte. But, it’s happening in the U.S., too.
In Canada, it began as something very limited, in only specific circumstances. And, as things tend to do, it has expanded—beyond what many people were originally told it would be.
And alongside that expansion, there are real conversations happening—openly questioning whether long-held boundaries, like the requirement that a person be fully dead before organ donation, should remain.
Not hidden conversations, discussed on open platforms. As if the person speaking has any authority. Again, playing God. Even if those ideas are not widely practiced, the fact that they are being seriously considered is a big red flag.And we wonder why we don’t have more organ donors.
The boundary, the no-go zone, the trust in medical ethics, is no longer a fixed point.
The Scale Problem
What happens at the level of an individual life does not stay in a frozen state discarded to be used for who knows what. Or the plastic bucket under an anesthetized woman in stirrups. Or in a tidy cremation box. The logic begins to scale.
If life can be evaluated, ranked, selected, managed, it doesn’t stop at the embryo.
It moves outward. Population becomes something to regulate. Birth rates become something to influence. And children, our most precious and priceless gift, children become variables.
We see it in the propaganda. Children are framed as burdens, costs, obstacles.
We see it in systems. Weather manipulated, environments engineered, data and algorithms used to predict and shape behavior.
Control.
And eventually, nothing is specific anymore. No one is being held as a beautiful creation, no one is being known. Everything becomes abstract, optimized, and managed.
What Remains Real
And then—Easter arrives. The same way it always has. Uninvited. Unmoved. Unconcerned with our ambitions. A quiet reminder that authority over life and death was never ours to begin with.
I spent mine the way I always do. Surrounded by my children. Filling baskets. Cellophane. Grosgrain ribbon. Care. Each handbasket specific. Each one chosen for the person who will receive it.
Because that is the most honest argument I know how to make. Not in theory or policy. But in practice, in the living of life created by God, not a lab or a code.
The world may be going to hell in a handbasket.
But mine will be lined with iridescent cellophane, tied with a proper bow, and filled to the brim with things chosen for the specific, irreplaceable, unoptimizable person who will receive it.
Because that is what’s real.
And it always will be.
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