Each time you fill out your paper work, you sign your name ... and it's over, but it’s never really over. Because your days are filled with death, your mind is filled with memories. They come flooding in uninvited, unwanted, awake or asleep, you are their captive, yet you continue on.
I hope that the letter I wrote four years ago speaks to a truth you have kept silent deep within your heart. That you have seen the same tears of the women who choose abortion, even more than I, that you have cried your own tears and desire peace for your own heart even more that I can desire it for you ...
My body had become a trap to us both, his shoulder pressed tightly against my pubic bone. The doctor tugged on Noah as much as she could. Then my mother to realized that this was not normal. Everyone knows that you are not supposed to pull on a baby at that point. Except, this was an emergency.
We had been been swept up in an overwhelming love story. My baby and I had stood in a place to testify to that truth and it had washed over us. My heart longed to hold in my hands the hope I had held in my heart, to lay eyes on the gift the Lord had knit together in love for our family. Yet, I knew the most painfully beautiful challenge was ahead for us both. Giving birth for me. Being born for him.
From the point that my son was able to be terminated, I would stand in praying for God to give birth to something beautiful at 320 Fulton, starting with you, Dr. ------. I will be going away when I give birth to my son. It is with tears that I share with you the significance of his name. His name is Noah.
The letter would be mailed out on the last day of the 40 Days campaign which would fall on 3-20, the address of the clinic. It was then that I felt the address was somehow an important piece to all of this.
God must love all these folks a lot more than I was capable of. I thought Jonah was a jerk, but when I searched inside myself I found that if it were up to me alone I would have abandoned ship long ago. I was tempted to pray, “Please Lord, just let the pregnant lady of the hook now.”
If am stepping to the track please find me. If I am conducting the train, don’t forget me. If I am strapping her down, don’t cast me aside. If I am trying to hide my eyes, show me. If I am throwing stones, stay my arm with true love. If I’m tucked inside a womb scheduled to die, show up for me. If I am shouting that deadly lie, gently refute.
The week before Christmas at the clinic was especially hard. I don’t know why I held this hope that there would be less abortion, but I did. Here this day, it was likely that twenty five babies had been ushered into the arms of The Christmas Baby.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Long 40 Days With a Sleepy Disciple 