hokmah (Hebrew): wisdom

You will never hear the cry of the aborted child.  She cannot speak up for herself; she has been discarded like you would discard an unwanted pair of shoes.  She cannot tell you that she wants to live.  She cannot tell you how she feels or what she thinks.  She is voiceless.

Will no one speak for her?

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” - Albert Einstein

For those who would be willing, let our voices be that of love, which shouts radiantly in a dark, cold world.  It is our love for those who are least which compels us.  We take up their cause just as Christ took up the cause of the broken and hurting.  For to know the Lord is to defend the poor and needy (Jeremiah 22:16).

Let love be our loudspeaker, stepping forward in the greatest of humility and the greatest of courage.  So then, let there be unwavering love for the child, unconditional love for the woman who has made her choice, and unending love for those who hate us because of what we say and do in the name of Jesus.

Right rights?
Abortion rests upon the argument that women have rights to their bodies.  That’s very true.

But what happens when we divorce our rights from our responsibilities?  What happens when we demand and exercise our rights but forsake and disdain our responsibilities?  What happens when a mother demands her rights over the responsibilities to a child or to the father?  What happens when an individual’s rights become dominant over their responsibilities to their community? 

The picture of today is exactly what happens.

The two ideals cannot be separated.  We are responsible to one another because we live in connection with one another.  Our choices and actions will affect the people around us.  Even in our attempts to isolate our actions and “do our own things,” self-centered actions ultimately have hurtful consequences.

­1000 words
I usually include a picture with each post.  I searched images for “abortion” on google, but they were too intense for me.  If you can stomach it, see for yourself what the reality of abortion looks like.

Instead, I’d like to place a picture of the aborted baby later in life as a child.  I’ll do my best.  Here it is.

The Aftermath
“For the wages of sin is death…”  Romans 6:23

Put very simply, sin leaves a path of destruction.  It is never harmless or inconsequential.  While abortion may not harm a woman physically, it inflicts injury on her heart and soul.  Many women have shared their stories of pain and regret on forums and websites in the aftermath of an abortion.  (www.afterabortion.com)  Sin is real, and its aftereffects are real.

But many other women are perfectly fine afterward, you say.  Well, yes, we all have the ability to harden our hearts if we so choose.  Everyone does it, in fact, but in doing so we have wrought ourselves into a worse condition.  We were meant for something so much better.

There is always hope.

His name is Jesus.

While abortion is our attempt to stop another life from coming into the world, Christ gave up his so that we could enter into life.  His motives are clearly different than ours.  Our actions and intents have gone completely in the opposite direction of what he seeks.  Yet hope and healing can still be found in a sovereign and merciful God.  ”For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.”

“Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Hebrews 4:16

Gifts from above
The Christian view of life is that life is a gift.  That life is a precious gift.  And that there is a sanctity belonging to that gift.  Therefore, all of life, but especially human life, should be held in the highest regard.

If life is a gift, it follows that children are also blessings to us.  How can we ever have the notion that children are burdens or even problems in our lives?  If there is a problem, it lies within our situation, or it lies within our hearts, but it is not the unborn child that is the problem.

“Children are a heritage from the LORD,
   offspring a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
   are children born in one’s youth.”
Psalm 127:3-4

We are more than meets the eye.
“Science” has told you that you are not much more than an animal.  It informs you that you are just a physical body, and that there’s no empirical evidence of a soul.  It has claimed that you are just a collection of cells and a product of what your genes have predetermined you to be.  And in all of this, “science” has lied to you and it has failed you. 

“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” C. S. Lewis

You are so much more than “science” has declared.  You are human—created in the image of the living God (Genesis 1:27).  Unlike animals, you have the ability to reason.  Unlike machines, you have the capacity for emotions and free will.  Unlike any creature or anything else in the universe, you are unique because you were created having body, mind, heart, and soul.

Even when you were still in the womb, you are more than just a clump of biological atoms.  You are human.

Yes, you get to belong
If any of you has the right to decide who is human and who is not, let him be the first to perform an abortion.

Because Christians view life as beginning from conception, they embrace everyone from that day forward as part of mankind.  From that point on, the individual is seen to have God-given rights, especially to life.

The argument is made that abortion is not killing because the individual is not yet human—or is not yet a person.  In order to follow through with this logic, a line must be drawn from some specific time in which the embryo becomes a person.  Supporters of abortion have drawn their circle of who gets to be a part of the human race and who doesn’t, and it’s not a very big circle.  They declare that millions of babies are not deemed human, and thus not part of our group.  I didn’t realize that this was such an exclusive club.

Does this reasoning sound familiar to anyone?  Weren’t people from Africa considered something less than human and thus used as slaves in the Western world?  Weren’t the Jews considered something less than human and thus tortured and killed in the Holocaust?

I wonder, will future generations look back at our generation with the same astonishment and horror at what we are doing?

I write this series with all due love and respect for anyone and everyone who reads this.  No matter how different your views or vehement your opposition, I say these things humbly and as your servant.  Christ loves you every bit as much as He loves me.  I pray that continually His love would overwhelm us both and never leave us the same.

I’m writing this at a time in which my wife is 8 months pregnant with our first child—his name will be Caleb.  I’ve been with her at all her doctor appointments, and as you can imagine, it has been a journey filled with joy, wonder, excitement, awe, and anticipation.  It has been an eye-opening experience, in which the world is suddenly filled with pregnant women and babies that I never noticed before my own wife got pregnant.

I didn’t realize how fast a baby’s heart beats until we heard Caleb’s at eleven weeks.  I wish you could have heard it because it sounded like he was doing plyometrics in there, and my wife agrees that he must be based on what she’s been feeling every day.  As it turns out, a baby’s heart begins beating just 18-24 days after conception while brain waves can be detected 43 days after.  I also learned that by 7½ weeks, both the hands can be brought together, as can the feet.  By this time, there can be kicking, and the embryo will even jump if startled (www.ehd.org).

Caleb at 11 weeks

As of this moment, I have no idea what Caleb looks like.  I don’t have a clue what his personality quirks are.  I’ve never met him, but my wife and I speak about him as if he’s already present.  To us, he is already here and already a part of the family.  My wife even tells me that she already has a relationship with him.  Is that even possible?  I’d say only moms know the answer to that one.  But the idea runs in the same vein as what we understand through Scripture—God tells us that he knows us before we are even formed in the womb (Jeremiah 1:5).  He already has initiated a relationship with us before we even exist.

What a mystery. 

What a miracle.

If you knew that you are not guaranteed tomorrow…

would you live today differently? 

An unavoidable truth of life is that it will eventually come to an end.  And while many of us probably won’t see that day any time soon, none of us truly knows when our day comes.  No one is granted the assurance that they will have tomorrow.

Life is short, and death waits for us all.  Yet it is death that reminds us that life is a gift.

Some might even call it a fleeting gift—so short lived.  And if we consider the grand timeline of history and eternity, what do our 100 years on earth matter in comparison?  How brief and insignificant our time is compared with thousands and thousands of years.

But it is for this reason we are reminded that each one of our days matters.

Because who knows if we even have tomorrow.

“Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be.
      Remind me that my days are numbered—
      how fleeting my life is.
 You have made my life no longer than the width of my hand.
      My entire lifetime is just a moment to you;
      at best, each of us is but a breath.”
Psalm 39:4-5