Originally published May 11, 2013
I attended a fundraiser dinner this week for a pregnancy center. I thought I was there for a very different reason than maybe what God had planned, and I still don’t clearly know why He willed it. It was eye opening to say the least. I expected a ministry update of the previous year, goals for the upcoming year, a request for volunteer and monetary support, and even a testimony. And there were all of those things. Then there was a guest speaker. Maybe at this point I should mention that I don’t watch the news, I will typically read headlines or listen to the abridged news updates, but I have always hated watching the news. It causes two reactions within me; I am either heartbroken or angry, and neither is helpful unless they lead to prayer. So wrong or right, I try to skip all the details, and the world’s spin on it, and go straight from headline to prayer. Sometimes the details aren’t even required to produce brokenness or anger anyway. There are topics that just automatically break me. You probably know, from previous posts, that orphans are one, but really any negative headline involving a child will do it.
The guest speaker travels the country sharing her story, therefore it may sound familiar to you. She shared her story of being heavily involved in abortions back in the 70’s and 80’s. She not only worked at a clinic, and described how she was the one the team would call in if the girl was beginning to question whether she should go through with an abortion because she could convince them “every time”; but she was also involved in the campaign of “selling abortions”. She described how they designed a curriculum that began at kindergarten, all the way through to teenage years, because the goal was to “sell enough abortions to be a millionaire”. They decided that this would require girls to have three to five abortions between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. They decided they could meet this goal through the curriculum, alienating the young girls from their parents, buying defective methods of protection and birth control to distribute, and by training those answering the phones as telemarketers. She shared how she had made money off 35,000 abortions. She then shared her story of relinquishing her life to Christ and suddenly noticing the “groups of girls huddled in the corner crying afterwards”. Suddenly as she was brought to meet with girls having doubts in order “to seal the deal”, she found herself telling the girls that they didn’t need to go through with it, that their parents would still love them, and offering to go home with them as support when they told their parents. There was so much more to her story than just this, there were many more details shared of both her work before Christ, and her testimony of her life after meeting Christ.
This is what I know: I know how I felt like I was going to be physically ill the entire time she talked of her work before Jesus came into her life. I know it felt like I got punched in the stomach, and had my heart break at the same time, over those 35,000 children that were never born (and that is a tiny fraction of the worldwide total to date). I know that a member of my own family had been attempted to be convinced to have an abortion by a doctor, because they believed the child would have a disability; and had they gone through with it, a huge (in terms of importance and love) piece of my family would be missing. A piece that I cannot imagine my life without. The doctor was wrong, but even if he hadn’t been it wouldn’t have changed that a piece of my family would be missing.
I know that when God promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars, while our limited human mind thinks of that in terms of a number, God knew each descendant as an individual.
“He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names.”
Psalm 147:4
“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Luke 12:6-7
“Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you”
Jeremiah 1:4-5a
“For you formed my inward parts;you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”
Psalm 139:13-16
I know children whose mothers abandoned them. What if those mothers had decided their baby should not live because they could not, or did not want to, care for them? I know children that would not be here today if that decision had been made differently. The world would be missing even more incredibly special children than it already is.
When we, as humans, play god there are devastating consequences. Eternal consequences.
I know that there are many instances in the Bible where it says that God opened or closed a womb. When a baby is conceived, it is God’s will for it to be conceived. When we, as humans, play god there are devastating consequences. Eternal consequences.
“Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?”
Proverbs 24:11-12
“So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
John 10:7-10
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Ephesians 3:14-19