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.
"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.
Although I stood to fight for LIFE with the pro-life officer who valued all human lives equally, clinic workers and the unborn, I was battling fear when I thought of returning to my prayer post by the driveway the coming Tuesday. I hoped the clinic workers knew that I was there praying for God to bless them, not strike them dead.
Being the child of a pro-love activist, part of a family on a mission to pray together for an abortion doctor by name, Isaac had long been brainstorming possible solutions to abortion in his own heart and mind. He really wanted to find a way to convince the Doctor to stop choosing abortion.
At the end of those rusty rectangles, the old blue tile shone white. It was the one place on the floor that the color was entirely gone. I caught my breathe as I considered the one man who had literally worn off the floor by standing there so many times, terminating tiny hearts. I thought of the violence inflicted on thousands of wombs, pried opened there. These were the marks left by the same doctor whose name was written on my bookmark, the one I prayed for by name! His entire career and most of his life had already been spent, dedicated to this work.
It was this boy who sought God so faithfully for the Doctor that was urging me onward. “Mom, we should pray every day. Can we pray every day?” All of the reasons going to the abortion clinic every day seemed impossible, crazy exhausting (especially now that I was pregnant) and unreasonable flooded my mind, yet I didn’t want to discourage Isaac’s eager heart.
When I look at the box, I remember what it’s like to be caught waiting in a stuck place, a laboring place wondering how things could ever be turned from death to life. I remember that in the midst of the broken, the painful, the imperfect, the Lord is present, patiently painting a picture of His heart that is ready to step in. His timing and ways mysterious and flawless, he will set us free.
Call me a dreamer, but I have awoken with a belief that true human equality should begin when a human’s measurable life begins, at conception. We can build a society that no longer obligates and encourages medical professionals to wield instruments to inflict death within a woman’s womb, by extending legal protection to the preborn, the hidden people group. Call me a dreamer, but I look expectantly for the day when we seek to gather and acknowledge all the tears. They speak louder than all my words and dreams could dare to. The tears help us find the courage to heal, the courage to reach out to all trapped by the lie that abortion is a solution. I will not be content to abandon a single soul captive to abortion. Call me a dreamer, but I believe that we can, and we will, begin to build a pro-love society—one choice at a time.
A Long 40 Days With a Sleepy Disciple 