The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 12 – Baroness Caroline Cox

Episode 12: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

Dr. Jeff interviews Baroness Caroline Cox, a member of the British House of Lords and an internationally renowned humanitarian. Baroness Cox discusses her work as a voice for the voiceless, providing aid through her organization, HART, to oppressed peoples in conflict zones like Nigeria, Sudan, Armenia, and Burma. She details the growing threat of militant Islamism, distinguishing it from Islam, and shares harrowing stories of the atrocities committed.

She also recounts her past battles against totalitarian Marxist ideology as a professor at North London Polytechnic, linking those experiences to current cultural trends. Finally, she speaks about her legislative efforts in the House of Lords, including fighting for the rights of Muslim women in the UK, and offers a Christian perspective on responding to suffering by being present in love, which she terms “living in the sacrament of the present moment.”

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. It’s Dr. Jeff. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. Today’s guest is Baroness Caroline Cox, and she’s perfectly demonstrating in this program how worldview changes everything. Baroness Cox is a member of the British House of Lords. This is the first time we’ve ever had somebody from the British House of Lords on this show. So I’m a little bit nervous about it, but I got to tell you, this lady is amazing.

She is an internationally renowned humanitarian. She has traveled the world to every hostile country and area that you can think of she’s been shot at. She had her life at risk to bring aid and comfort to oppressed peoples and to bring to light human rights tragedies that are taking place in our world as we speak. This is a conversation you absolutely won’t want to miss, especially when Baroness Cox shares what people today can do to live differently in light of Jesus’ truth. Baroness Caroline Cox, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Baroness Caroline Cox (01:15):
Thank you so much. It’s a joy to be here with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:18):
I am not sure I’ve ever had a conversation with a Baroness before. How does one even get to be a Baroness?

Baroness Caroline Cox (01:25):
Well, it’s a good question. I was the first Baroness I’d ever met. I always thought I’m a nurse and a social scientist by intention and a Baroness by astonishment. And as I said, first Baroness I’d ever met, it’s quite a shock. You wake up in the morning and see a Baroness looking at yourself out of the bathroom mirror. And you’ve got to adjust it.

So I ask God how I use this great privilege because being a Baroness means you get appointed to the British House of Lords, which is like a Senate and bicameral parliament. And the idea came very clearly to speak in parliament is a wonderful place to be a voice for those whose voices are not heard or who don’t have a voice. So I use my role in the House of Lords to be a voice for the voiceless. And I established my own small little not-for-profit or charity precisely to fulfill that remit.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:15):
And I want to emphasize that you are an internationally renowned humanitarian. You have literally traveled the world. Every country where there is evil taking place, even North Korea, you have been there. You have risked your life you’ve been shot at. You brought aid to people and you’ve brought light to human rights tragedies around the world. You have had been an extraordinary voice for the voiceless and thank you for everything that you have done.

Baroness Caroline Cox (02:52):
Well, it’s a great privilege to be with our partners on front lines of faith and freedom. It’s our essential principle in heart that we work with and for local partners. They are the people who do the work, who lead their communities. We don’t go in and tell them what we’re going to do. We give them the dignity of choice and we choose our partners because they’re the people who are largely unreached by other major aid organizations.

For two reasons, either because they don’t get permission from their governments, because if they’re oppressing someone, they won’t get permission. So it means we spend quite a bit of our time crossing borders illegally, a little bit informally, but it’s important to be there with the people who are trapped. And then other people may not go for security reasons because there often are war zones or post-conflict zones.

(03:39):
But because we work with partners, they’re indigenous. They’re there anyway. It may be dangerous visiting them. They’re the heroes and heroines on the front lines of faith and freedom.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:49):
Yeah. Yeah. I want to get into some of those stories because they’re fascinating experiences that we need to hear. And we want to also hear what is the frontline now? What does this battle look like? I mean, in the United States, most of our listeners are in the United States, but there are people listening from 40 or so different countries as well. We think a lot about our religious freedom because of our Constitution in the States, but international religious freedom is at risk in these times.

Baroness Caroline Cox (04:23):
Very much so. As you work with partners who often don’t have a voice because they’re suffering oppression and persecution. And the countries we currently work with are valiant partners. They are wonderful people. Our Nigeria, thousands of Christians have been killed in recent years. It’s not covered on the British TV or radar screens at all. We work in Sudan and South Sudan and a little territory between the two called Abier.

It was the anniversary of when I was there last, when there was a massacre in which a lot of the Dinka Christians were slaughtered by the Arab Maseria. And we were there when the bodies were still burning in their hearts. Absolute heartbreak. And we worked with people in the little Armenian enclave called which is historically Armenian, but Starling with this cut and sort of divine rule tactics, cut it off from Armenia and put it into Azerbaijan.

(05:20):
It is historically Armenian. There are churches going back to the fourth century there, and a war exploded in October in which Azerbaijan carried out ferocious military assaults against the Armenians. They used illegal weapons like smirk and cluster bombs against civilians, which you should not use by international law. They had 4,000 Syrian jihadists fighting alongside them recruited by Turkey. And it was a horrendous, horrendous war, thousands died. And they took photographs, and this was one of the most poignant things.

When they captured prisoners, they would mutilate, they would torture, they’d humiliate, and they would sometimes behead. And they took sides very often on the prisoner’s phones and sent those pictures back to their families. I mean, absolute nightmare scenario. And they won’t release the prisoners. They’ve still got now against international conventions. That needs a lot of prayer. And our partner we have there, they are amazingly spiritual, wonderful people. We also work in Syria and we also work in Burma.

(06:27):
We call it Burma, not Mayamar, because our local partners prefer that. Everyone’s heard of the Rahenga and they are suffering. And I don’t anyway belittle that, but we work with the ones you don’t hear about. With the Shahn, who are Buddhists, we work with people of any faith. The Bible, the biblical mandate is heal the sick, speak for the oppressed, not just the Christian.

So we speak for Muslims and Buddhists as well as Christians, but the Shahn are suffering horrifically. And so on the Eastern border are the Katrin and the Karen. And so we work there. So we do work with people you may not hear about because at home they’re not on television screens, but they’re suffering. It’s intense and large scale.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:07):
And what everybody who’s watching or listening needs to understand, the things you’re talking about are happening right now. This is 21st century reality. This isn’t something from a manmade famine in the 1930s or even further back. These are the things that are happening now. The worldview conflict is not just a nice little thing of ideas, but there are lives at stake.

Baroness Caroline Cox (07:39):
Well, their lives are being lost in huge numbers. And one of the reasons for that is the growth of militant Islamism. Now, that’s not Islam. I mean, I’m friends with many Muslims. I work with the Muslim Women’s Advisory Council here in Britain where they suffer from Sharia law, but Islamism is the kind of ideology of Isis, of Al-Qaeda, and that is ferocious and it is growing. In Nigeria, where we do a lot of work where thousands have been killed, Christians and some Muslims who won’t convert to Islamism, they now have ISIS, it’s called Israel, ISIS for West Africa province.

And that’s spreading now into Bikina Faso, it’s Mozambique, and it is growing very fast, but it’s also very much at work in other parts of the world. So this is something we need to care about, deeply and pray about because it’s not Islam. Islam itself is many wonderful people, but it is this very severe growth of militant Islamism and the Jehadists and their brutal policies and practices.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:45):
Help us understand that a little bit, Caroline, because I think in the States, when people hear Muslim, they on the one hand hear, “Oh, my neighbor is Muslim.” But then they also hear these people who are also called Muslim are the ones doing all of the terrorist activities and oppressing people in Syria and other places. Help us understand the difference between Muslim and Islamist in the way you’re using that term.

Baroness Caroline Cox (09:19):
Well, thank you. It’s a very, very important distinction, and I always make that distinction when I speak. If I talk about Muslims, I talk about people whom I know very well. I work with the Muslim women’s advisory council in Britain because Muslim women are suffering here from the application of Sharia law and they don’t get a religious marriage and the man can just divorce them by saying I divorce you three times and left with no rights and so on. So Muslims, many of them are delightful, lovely people.

So I work with them here in the UK. It’s a very good book by Raheel Raza, Canadian, called the ABC of Islamism, and it’s the difference between Islam and Islamism. It’s well worth reading. Islamism is the ideology that has developed, which justifies often totally in contradiction to the Quran, a very, very hard line, very, very tough form of their interpretation of Islamism, which means you may kill the Kufias and very often they undertake military offenses in the name of Islamism.

(10:24):
And when they attack villages in Nigeria where we do a lot of work, they were coming, shouting. And they carry out atrocities, which, there may be other causes for conflict in Nigeria, like climate change and shortage of land, but the atrocities they perpetrate, not justified by that.

I’ll just give one example, if I may, I could multiply it many times over. When I was last in Nigeria, in the middle belt, I met a lovely, lovely lady. We wept together. The jihadists, not all Fulanis are jihadists. It’s a big tribe, but there, and they attacked this village and this lady with a little six year old daughter tried to run away, but they got surrounded by the Islamist Fulani and they attacked the mom with a machete. I saw her scars.

And then they said, “Your little daughter would like to suck her mother’s finger.” So they cut off her forefinger. She passed out and when she came round, her little daughter was lying next to her, dead, killed, with a mother’s finger stuck in her mouth. Now sadly, I could multiply those stories many, many times over. That is nothing in the name of Islam. That is the form of Islamism, which is brutal and unscrupulous and is sweeping across many parts of the world. So it’s something we really need to pray about and Nigeria is really under threat from Islamism.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:48):
And you mentioned briefly that this threat has even expanded now to the UK that you’re seeing. You’re seeing this because, the application of Sharia law, which is a set of laws largely agreed upon by Muslim clerics that apply the principles from the Quran to life, in spite of what the constitution says. So they’re essentially asking to have a separate form of law set up. And the point that you have made is that the victims of this are women largely. Can you expand a little bit on what that means?

Baroness Caroline Cox (12:28):
Yes, certainly make two quick points. One is that if you actually study the Quran, the Quran says that if you move to another country, you should accept and abide by the laws of that country. So they’re actually not being true to the Quran or to Islam when they become Islamists. Now the situation in Britain, we’ve had some terror attacks on Islamist, which we have read about in the newspapers, things on Tarbridge and so on.

But there is this other form of Islam, which maybe it’s not violent in its approach, but it certainly causes a lot of suffering because their interpretation of Islam interprets Sharia law as a situation where the man can divorce his wife just by saying, “I divorced it three times and she is divorced.” And unless she’s had a legally registered marriage, which gives her the civil rights you would have in the UK law, she is left absolutely destitute with nothing.

(13:21):
They come to me in tears. One came to me suicidal. Another came to me, she’d had a divorce through the post and she went to Imam, he said, “Yeah, they’re divorced.” And they are left in a terrible situation. So we are working with Muslim women’s advisory council and with other people who care about women’s rights and freedom of speech to try to ensure that all religious marriages are legally registered and that would give the women the legal protection they need.

We’re having a great battle with it, I may say, with the government. I’ve had nine private members’ bills in a row each year, and so far we haven’t made much progress, but there is a growing, shall I say, support for this. And I just hope and pray that this protection for women will come because at the moment, what they go through would make our suffragettes turn in their graves.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:10):
Yeah. It’s a little bit hard coming from an American perspective to understand the battle there because in the United States, you would have recourse. If you have been married, there are a lot of ways to show that you have been married aside from having a certificate of marriage, but this is different in the UK. Why are you getting so much resistance? What’s going on there with the UK government?

Baroness Caroline Cox (14:36):
Well, that’s the thing you have to ask the UK government. I ask them frequently. The moment they have executed an investigation, the law reform investigation, and we watch this space with great interest and great concern because even some more hard line Islamic countries like Pakistan, they will recognize or they will require a religious marriage to be legally registered. So other Muslim countries can do it. I don’t actually quite see why we in the UK can’t bring that in. So it’s one of the battles we’re currently facing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:09):
Okay. Okay. Wow. Well, I’d love to hear a little bit more about that and some of the things that we can do perhaps. But also, I don’t want to just completely change the subject here, but you’ve been battling against bad worldviews and how they are influencing society since your very first appointment as a professor at North London Polytechnic and you taught sociology and you discovered what, while you were there?

Baroness Caroline Cox (15:44):
Well, I’d been nursing and I had to come out of nursing because I had TP at the kidney and that knocked me out of clinical nursing. So I then did my degrees in social sciences because I was very wired. I’m very old. I’m in my 80s, so I’m talking about history. But I talk about when I was nursing, there was very little concern for the patient as a person. They talk about the coroner in the fourth bell on the left. And I really wanted patients to be seen as people with their own cultures, their own communities and so on.

So I wrote a couple of books on sociology for nurses and edited books on sociology for medical education, et cetera. But that got me the word of sociology. And I found myself at the polytechnic of North London. And I must say, I was not prepared for what hit me. I became, initially, a lecturer, but very quickly became head of the department of sociology in the political north London. Out of about 20 faculty or academic staff, 16 of the communist party or further.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:36):
Wow. Out of 20, 16?

Baroness Caroline Cox (16:41):
16 out of 20. Yeah. And I was one of the four that wasn’t. And my definition of higher education is freedom to pursue the truth in any way which fits the academic criteria, the academic integrity through the truth. Theirs was a hard line totalitarian domination.

And I remember some of my lovely students who came to me in tears. One had recently lost her husband, actually she came from the states in the metro in New York and she wrote an essay on the family in the kind of normal sociological style in a seminar and the lecturer called her bourgeois bag and ripped it up in front of everybody. Wow.

And so at teaching level, it was abusive, but then they got aggressive. They had big demonstrations. And the one that really got me angry and began to see the significance of what they stood for the lies they stood for was that there’s going to be the appointment of a new director of the polytechnic.

(17:39):
And he was a guy who fought at the Battle of Arnold in World War II. So a lot of his friends were killed facing and fighting the Nazis. He’d worked in what was Northern Rodisha and, nearly being kicked out because he helped black students, but they didn’t want him because he wasn’t one of them.

And so they began this massive campaign in which they used the words racist, fascist, racist, vascist, but I knew he was neither, the reasons I just give them. And they had big demonstrations outside the college and you had to walk through with a lot of tactile hindrance and so on. And then they had a board put up on what would be allowed to be taught by the socialist collective the day. It had nothing to do with what students were paying to study. It was Marxism in the third world, et cetera, et cetera.

(18:23):
And they had bands of vigilantes who’d go around to breakup classes, which didn’t adhere to the allowed agenda for the day. And I was teaching criminology at the time, quite appropriate. And I had a lovely group of tweets about to take London university exams in a few weeks time. They were desperate for their seminar. And I said, “Of course we can have our seminar, but you do realize we like to get broken up, don’t you? It’s very desperate. We don’t mind university exams.”

(18:47):
So we found a seminar room, I sat myself across the door and began teaching and about 20 minutes into that, this great bang on the door. I opened it a quarter of an inch and they said, “What’s going on in here?” And I said, “This is a BSC sociology criminology seminar. It’s what the students have paid to study. It’s what I’m paid to teach and I should continue teaching it. And if you want to stop us, you’re going to have to knock me off my chair. If I get hurt, I’ll see your call to account.”

And I banged the door, shouted as loud as I could in a quarter minute. And they shouted, “Will we bat deary?” Well, we had a moral victory because we did continue at the hour. Then they came back and they did indeed knock me off my chair and they were subjected to, those very good students, to half an hour of vitriolic verbal abuse.

(19:32):
Wow. And all this was on a false claim. The director was not, Nazi was not a fascist. So he was not a fascist and he died fighting fascism and he wasn’t a racist. Anyhow, the light at the end of the tunnel, sort of, at the beginning of the next academic year, the guy who led the assault came to see me and said, “Would you mind being my academic tutor this year?” And I said, “Tony, I’d love to. I love living dangerously.” Anyhow, he had a laugh about it.

And we had one-to-one tutorials in the third year and after a few weeks he said to me, “Caroline, forgive my language here, but we’re in the real world.” He said, “It takes a hell of a lot of courage to ask to have you as a tutor.” He said, “All the third year students would like to, but most damned ask because they’re afraid of what the other staff will do to them.” But this was a guy who’d served below decks on oil tankers for seven years. That’s not a soft life.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:24):
Wow.

Baroness Caroline Cox (20:25):
And for him to say it takes a lot of courage shows a degree of intimidation in a place like that at that time.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:32):
Yeah.

Baroness Caroline Cox (20:35):
So just very quickly, just a visual picture. I wrote a book called Rape of Reason: The Corruptional Politics with two colleagues, but the front of the book, the cover is the breakup very sad of a graduation ceremony. They should be happy times when families get together. It’s being held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, part of the festival halls on the South Bank in London. And the photo on the front of the book is hundreds of students in their head of the ceremony, just kicking the backs, ripping up all the programs, just destroying the ceremony. I mean, it was that brutal.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:06):
This makes the battles that our students face on university campuses and the states pale by comparison, but it does seem that we are headed in the direction where mobs get to control what is going on and professors just bend over backwards to accommodate them because they have essentially the same convictions that we need to overthrow capitalist society, we need to overthrow the family, we need to overthrow the government, we need to overthrow the church and so forth.

You mentioned that you wrote a book about it and that I know that book was covered in the newspapers and that enabled you to kind of turn the tables and bring change to the university. Have I got that about right?

Baroness Caroline Cox (21:57):
No, you haven’t. The book went on the record definitely and it was covered in the times environment leading newspapers and so on. And a lot of people appreciated it, but we still face totalitarianism in different forms. And one of the reasons why I and my colleagues wrote that book is we could see the seeds being sewn for future developments.

And as head of department in a minority, I would attend staff meetings, but of course they were in the majority. They would always decree who would get against the same states, but the first and the upper seconds are top level degrees and always those who were loyals would get the top degrees. And then they would decide in a staff meeting what jobs those students would take. And they were told they had to go in the media, they were told they had to go into teacher education, they were told they had to go into social work and so on.

(22:45):
So these deeply, deeply committed Marxists were allocated with good degrees to go into key points of information and education for the future. And I could just see us reaping the whirlwind and that’s part of the whirlwind we’re reaping. And it’s one of the reasons why we wrote the book because we could see what would unfold and it certainly is coming back big time. And it’s very worrying.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:10):
Yeah. Well, we’re seeing it here in the States. I think 70 some percent of young adults, millennials said that they would vote for socialist to be the president of the United States. There’s a lot of fondness, even in the church.

At Summit Ministries, we’ve studied a lot of church going, born again, Christian young people, and I think it was the figure was 83%, something like that, are either strongly in favor of or somewhat in favor of principles that we outline that are Marxist, that they know to be Marxists and they agree with them anyway, where they should be refuting them. So I know we have our battles cut out for us here and your experience has been really enlightening.

Baroness Caroline Cox (24:00):
Well, as it’s deeply disturbing, it takes a lot of courage for Christians to speak out in that context. And I had one very bright, very good student and I actually transferred to another university because he was suffering so much in the context of politics in North London, but he had the courage to speak out. And unless we speak out, we’ve never changed anything.

And I think there are quite a lot of people out there who are equivocal. They don’t really quite know what’s at stake. And I think they knew what’s at stake and they knew that other people would support them in fighting for truth, fighting for freedom of speech. It’s so important. We’re losing freedom of speech really seriously, and that’s the essence of democracy. If more people would speak out, then I think more people would speak out, and we could perhaps stem the tide, but it’s just so important to do that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:50):
Yeah. So even if you feel like you’re the only one, you need to be the one to step forward. What would you say, Caroline, is take us from that experience standing up against the Marxists at the university to the opportunity you have now as a member of the British House of Lords to address these huge issues in the UK and around the world.

Baroness Caroline Cox (25:21):
Well, we have to speak the truth and speak for truth and justice. Well, there’s a number of times when I have actually gone out quite on a limb. There was a time, it’s different in Britain from you, but we do have compulsive religious education in our schools. And there was a time away back in the late ’80s when it went very much in the other direction, religion was negated, denigrated, alternative ideologies were taught, et cetera, et cetera. And I wanted to bring an amendment to an education bill, which would require that the main essential religion to be taught would be our Judeo-Christian tradition.

You could teach others, certainly you need to understand Islam, you need to understand Hinduism, Buddhism and so on, but the main tenet would be to maintain an awareness and understanding of our spiritual heritage and a lot of problems with that and moved amendments and I think the chief was heard saying, “I have to make sure that Lady Cox and all her rubbish amendments come on late at night and you can’t vote.” You have to be audacious because I was speaking late at night and I had some supporters, Lord Douglas Hume was one of our supporters who was well known.

(26:41):
And anyway, it was late at night and I was putting my amendment and late at night, you are meant to withdraw it. And I had said, “Go on, move it, move it. ” And I said, “Unprecedented.” So I moved it late at night when it was not a full house. So the house had immediately been called to an end and recess and came back on Monday morning to face a pretty hostile house.

You never ever do that. You do not state that there’s no one to vote. The house has to be called into adjournment. So I came back on Monday morning, my feet didn’t stay on the ground until I was ejected into the Chief Whips office who rampaged at me and said, “You ruined our parliamentary schedule.” I said, “Rubbish Bertie, I haven’t done any of the kind.” But he was not pleased with me.

(27:31):
And then I went into a fairly cold house and one of our bishops here bishops in the house awards was there and a Muslim had actually phoned me over the weekend and said, “I support what you’re doing completely because we believe in freedom of speech and freedom of truth and so on and respecting of faith.” So I was able to stand up in front of the house and report that. I had this message in Muslim from one of London’s biggest mosques and he was encouraging our amendment and I looked at the Bishop’s bench. I said, “Whether our bishops could be heard doing the same thing.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:05):
Wow.

Baroness Caroline Cox (28:07):
Then the Bishop London came up and ran the amendment and it got through, but sometimes you’ve got to be a little bit naughty or a little bit more dangerous because the truth’s got to get out and sometimes bureaucracy and routine will stifle truth, not necessarily intentionally, but sometimes you’ve got to break out of the routine. You’ve got to speak the truth where it’s going to actually matter, speak the truth to power in conviction.

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:37):
That is a hugely important point. I hope that everybody who’s watching or listening to this right now gets the heart of that, that the bureaucracy and the way things are done can cut against the truth. Just, it’s slow walking it. It is one of the terms we use, but that’s really significant. And even in countries that are persecuting believers, much of that persecution is bureaucratic. You need a form to be able to do thus and such, and because you are a Christian, we’re going to make sure you can’t get that form for the next four years or whatever else it is, that the bureaucracy.

Baroness Caroline Cox (29:23):
The heartbreak for treatment of Christians, of Christian women and girls, particularly in countries like Pakistan and India is really, really sad. But it can’t be counted necessarily legitimately, but you have to counter it on fundamental principles of truth and probably the radical essence of law, not its interpretation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:46):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a really significant point that if storm troopers came to your door, you might realize that you’re about to be persecuted, but what about the bureaucrat who just makes it impossible for you to live your life.

Baroness Caroline Cox (30:01):
Exactly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:02):
Yeah. Okay.

Baroness Caroline Cox (30:04):
So we have battles to fight, but battles for truth and freedom and our spiritual and cultural heritage, which are so precious that are being lost at the moment in many parts of the world.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:15):
Yeah. Give us a little insight into how to have that sort of a battle. I know a lot of the young adults, a lot of people watching and listening right now are in their twenties, they’re moving into their career. What can they do? And especially, I’d like for you to tie it into the international humanitarian crises that you’ve mentioned.

Baroness Caroline Cox (30:38):
Well, thank you for a very profound question. I mean, quite often students will say to you, what can we do or how do we put together the challenges confronting because there’s suffering when we have a God of love and so on. And if I may, I’ll just tell you three little quick anecdotes, because I think this is how I got to the answer anyway. And the first is I’ve been taking aid into South Sudan in the previous war when it was absolutely devastated and we had to live in tents. There were huts we lived in. And it was sort of 40 degrees.

And I was sitting outside my tent one evening for some strange reason, I don’t know why. My thoughts went back to how we keep Christmas in Britain. And of course we celebrate Christmas. Of course we celebrate God becoming man and living amongst us, massive celebration. So we go straight from that to new year and new year celebrations and you forget that at the same time Mary was rejoicing at the celebration of Jesus’ birth, Herod was killing a lot of other kids.

(31:36):
And it was tremendous suffering. And if we leave that out, the equation of Christmas, then we actually don’t get meaning, real meaning of Christmas. I mean, evil is real. Evil has always been there as their inherited bit, but poor Herod, it’s inherent. And we have to recognize it is such a thing as evil and be prepared to recognize it and to address it. And then my mind went back, sitting up in my tent in Sudan to Mary at the end of Jesus’ life and how she had to stand at the bottom of the cross while her son was in anguish above her and just stand there in love, but anguish.

And then my thought came to me that, well, maybe it’s part of a Christian’s corning to be prepared to attend whatever suffering or whatever Calvaryes we are called to attend and to be there, possibly feeling helpless as Mary must have felt as we often feel with our brothers and sisters in their anguish and suffering, but at least to be there in love.

(32:34):
And that I think is a fundamental essence that made some sense to me. And then I think, and again, talking with students or others, there’s not a worry about the future. And what am I going to be doing in five years time, 10 years time? And then I’m reminded of the two lines from that hymn. I asked not to see the distancing one step enough for me. And it’s really important to live in the sacrament of the present moment.

Of course, there are times you have to make key decisions. Am I going to university? Am I going to get married? The key decision we have to make, but we’re not expected to be worrying about other things in the future. We expect to make the decisions with God’s guidance and to live in the sacrament at the present moment and give it everything we’ve got. And then finally, as a family, we used to have this, what do you call them, big record, comment.

(33:26):
Anyhow, we had a lovely record and it was songs, The Berms of St. John of the Cross. And there’s one which our family loved and they often would sing, especially at difficult times. I’m not going to sing it, but it’s, what will you wish you’d done when you die? What will you wish you had done? Give all you can, love all you can. That’s what you wish you had done.

And when it comes to there, it won’t really matter which car you bought or whether you won a golf match or a tennis match. What’s really going to matter is give all you can, love all you can. That’s what you’re really glad you did. And so my message really is to trust all to God, to live in the sacrament of the present moment, and to be prepared to attend or participate in whatever suffering God calls us to engage with.

(34:12):
And some of that will take courage. And some of it means maybe, not necessarily all like it is for us going into the conflict zones, but going into challenging areas of tragedy. And that I think is the Christian calling, whatever form it takes. It may be a hospice down the road. And it doesn’t mean you’ve got to travel to the conflict zones, but there is suffering. And I think the more we engage in love, then we could do that when we’re dying.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:41):
I am so filled with the power of what you’re saying right now. I usually don’t get emotional when we’re having these conversations, but that term that you used, the sacrament of the present moment is so incredibly powerful. I’m going to hang on to that. It reminds me, a lot of people think I want to be a witness for Christ, but the word witness means with-ness. It is to be a witness to suffering is part of what God has called us to do. Wow. Baroness Caroline Cox.

Baroness Caroline Cox (35:23):
Sorry?

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:25):
Thank you so much, Baroness Cox, thank you for being with us on the Dr. Jeff Show today.

Baroness Caroline Cox (35:31):
Well, it’s a huge privilege and thank you for letting me share the pain and the passion and the privilege of making a little bit of a difference. Thank you so much.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:39):
How can people stay in touch with you if they’re interested in knowing more about your work and your organization?

Baroness Caroline Cox (35:45):
Well, if they want to look up our website, I often forget it because I didn’t look at my own website, but I’ll tell you what the website is. The organization called Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, which is called.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:56):
Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust. Okay.

Baroness Caroline Cox (35:59):
Which gets to heart. H-A-R-T.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:01):
H-A-R-T.

Baroness Caroline Cox (36:03):
And our website is www.hart-uk.org.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:11):
Okay.

Baroness Caroline Cox (36:12):
www.hart-uk.org.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:16):
Perfect.

Baroness Caroline Cox (36:17):
And we’d love it to be in touch. And if you want to be in touch, my email may be on there. I’d love to hear from you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:22):
Okay.

Baroness Caroline Cox (36:23):
Or I can just give you my email if you want. You want to be in touch. If that’s allowed. Is that allowed?

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:27):
It’s allowed. Sure.

Baroness Caroline Cox (36:29):
I’m good at breaking rules, as you notice. It’s all in lowercase. And it’s caroline.cox@hart-uk.org. Okay. So if anyone wants to follow up on anything or any questions or challenges, or don’t like what I’ve said, I believe in freedom of speech.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:51):
That is wonderful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your willingness to share that with us. So grateful to have you on the show today.

Baroness Caroline Cox (36:58):
Well, thank you for putting up with me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:01):
Thank you for joining us on the Dr. Jeff Show today. This interview with Baroness Caroline Cox was truly life changing. I will never forget her use of this term, the sacredness of the present moment. We get so focused on all of these things that we think are going to be really important and we’re missing what is most important in the world, that we have the opportunity to be a witness for Christ by being a witness to the suffering that our brothers and sisters around the world are experiencing.

We need to be people who stand up for the truth. And I hope that you’ve been encouraged by seeing this lady who had everything to lose by standing up for the truth in all of her high positions, but she did it anyway and she can be a light to the rising generation. Thank you for joining today.

Ryan Dobson (37:53):
Hi, everyone. I’m Ryan Dobson from the Rebel Parenting Podcast. When my parents, Jim and Shirley Dobson sent me to the Summit Ministries Worldview Conference when I was 17, we had no idea the impact it would have on my life. It changed me so much in two short weeks. I’ve returned every summer for 34 years. This summer, your student can attend an in- person conference. That’s right, in person.

Summit Ministry’s Worldview Conference challenges students ages 16 to 24 to think deeper about their convictions and their faith by engaging with today’s top worldview thinkers and apologists. Can you imagine in person with other students learning about the Christian worldview? If not, they can attend Summit’s virtual experience and it’s amazing. Change your students’ life forever by partnering with Summit Ministries Worldview Conference today. Find out more by clicking the link in the show notes.