Beyond Those Walls

Yesterday I read account upon account about women and young girls who died IN abortion clinics (not back alleys) during or after abortions.  I awakened this morning thinking about how concientious our society is becoming about fitness and healthy eating...and yet some women so determined to eat and exercise are willing to turn themselves over into the hands of individuals who murder unborn children!!  Then I wrote the following story.  Although this is a story of my own creation, I venture to say that it is not far from the truth of many of the true accounts I read yesterday...you know, the ones you never read about in the daily news.

The room is cold, so very cold.  Taryn asks the nurse for a blanket.  No reply.  No blanket.  The clock ticking on the wall is the only sound other than muffled voices down the long corridor on the other side of the door.  Her body shudders visibly from the increasing coldness of the room and she pulls the indecent, thin gown closer.  About an hour later she hears footsteps approaching the door.  The nurse enters pushing an IV pole bearing a bag of fluid.  Without a word, she takes Taryn’s arm and proceeds to insert the IV.  After four failures and excruciating pain for Taryn, the nurse is finally satisfied that the needle is in place.  Then, pulling a syringe out of her pocket, the nurse inserts the contents into one of the joints of the IV line and leaves the room.  Although slipping into a drug-induced sleep, waves of panic begin crashing in and Taryn cries out, “No!  No!  Help me, I’ve changed my mind!”  No one hears…or listens.

“What muscle is this exercise toning?” Tony asks with a grin.  “And when are we going to have time for anything other than your incessant exercise and training!?”  Taryn pauses to admire his handsome face that she found ever so much handsomer with that crooked grin.

“This is to keep the hamstring muscles in shape, Mr. Fitness!”  She replies with mock exaggeration pointing to the bag of potato chips he was munching on.  “This to which you refer to as ‘incessant exercise’ is the key to success for such a rigorous event!  When the Triathlon is over, we will have nothing but time…at least until I have to start preparing for the marathon in March.”  Now it was her turn to smirk. 

The phone rang and Taryn grabbed it with excessive urgency and flipped it open.  “Hello…yes, this is Taryn.  What?  Are you sure?  Maybe we should run that through again!  But…thank you.”  With obvious distress on her face, she flipped the phone shut.  Tony was watching her intently.  He opened his mouth to ask, but she nodded her head affirmatively. 

“Okay, okay…let’s be calm and rational.  This is no big deal anymore.  I mean, it’s not as if we are living in centuries past.  This can be dealt with quickly.  I can be up and back to training in no more than two weeks and the triathlon is in six weeks.”  Taryn was looking at Tony, but it was really herself she was talking to.

“I don’t know, Taryn.  I mean…I know I agreed before, but now it’s real and it just doesn’t seem right to me.  It kinda scares me, ya know?”  Tony hesitated.  “I mean, for you and the baby.  It just doesn’t seem right.  How do we know what really goes on in those places…I mean, can you really trust people who…kill babies?”

With vehement denial Taryn shouted, “Tissue!  Not a baby!  You can’t change your mind now!  It’s my body and my choice!  Women have fought for over a century to have a right to their own body and I won’t let you make the choice for me!  What about me?  What about the triathlon and marathon that I have been working so hard for?  Ever think of that?  No!  It’s only you that you think about!”

Tony walked toward her.  “Taryn, I Love you and I will Love our baby.  You can still do the triathlons and marathons.”

“No.”  She stated flatly.  “You just don’t understand that to have a baby at this time in my life would be like death to me…dying to the drone and drudgery of domesticity.  No.”  With this, she bolted out the door and up the road. 

There was a soft breeze that barely moved the new spring leaves in a tantalizing manner that always thrilled Taryn to the core of her being.  Tony sat down next to the fresh mound of dirt and stared at the headstone.  Taryn’s parents approached him and he looked up into their grieving faces with his own.  “I begged her not to…I would have…I did…I wanted to be a father…” 

Taryn’s mother dropped to her knees beside him taking his face in her hands.  “We know, Tony.  We know.” 

He stood on the corner in front of the abortion clinic waiting, as he’d peaceably done every Friday the past three years.  Perhaps he could save another one today…for Taryn and his child.  There was nothing left to do.

Mercy, Not Murder??

Last summer I was collecting signatures for a petition opposing obama “care.”  I had stopped by a local establishment where I am well known.  One of the women there asked me what I opposed most about the health “care” bill to which I replied, “The unprecedented tax-payer forced funding for unabated murder of the unborn and mandated euthanasia “training” for the aging.”

After a few moments, she stated, “I can’t sign that.  I have seen and read too much about child abuse and see too many elderly people wasting away in nursing homes.”

As I stood there absorbing her response, my mind quickly associated it with the memories of the abuse I had suffered as a child.  Without realizing it, (knowing nothing of my childhood), she just told me that it had been better for me to have been murdered in the womb.  In one fell swoop; this woman wiped out (at least in her own supposed pro-choice mind) every ounce of value attributed to my life by my Creator Who formed my inward parts in the womb.  In so doing, she also wiped out the lives (and their God-given value) of thirty-one others whose lives had never been but for mine! 

Like a sponge, she has absorbed the propaganda of a “new” kind of “mercy”.  She is known throughout our community as a very benevolent person.  She gives to the poor and warms a spot on the pew twice each week.  Her husband, children, and neighbors adore her. 

How does one dole out benevolence with one hand and then financially support murder of the unborn, elderly, and infirm on the other?  Sadly, this woman represents millions throughout the world aboard the runaway train they call “New Mercy,” which stands on the grounds that choice is good…at least for a few.

Reasonable Recourse?

By God's design, all human life has value from conception.  By the decree of some individuals, the unborn child has not yet attained viability or value and is readily dispensable unless the “right” person has decided that the child’s life has value.  For the so-called "unwanted child," abortion is a reasonable recourse. 

And so we stand with the blood of millions of unborn children dripping from our hands while marching and holding signs that say “No More War!”  Is it just me, or is there something very backward about this?   How is it that we can speak with passionate anger regarding horrific, violent, and tortuous crimes committed against individuals, yet ignore the dismembering, burning brutalities being committed against the unborn?

How on earth can we expect people to stop the killing that goes on throughout our world if we continue to murder tiny, innocent, unborn people???  How can we teach that every race and ethnic group has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when we rob the most innocent of all humans those very same things??  The answer is simple…we can’t.  As long as we are willing to let the slaughter of babies go on in our [sometimes] clean little clinics, the slaughter will go on everywhere else because committing such an atrocity sears the conscience.  If no value is attributed to the life of unborn children, one cannot expect value to be attributed to any life at all.

Following is a something I wrote about my own experience.  I pray it will touch the hearts of all who read. 

Reasonable Recourse?

I watched from a distance as my daughter raised her hand and gently pushed her sandy blonde hair from her face.  For twenty-seven of her nearly thirty years I had watched her special way of doing this.  She possessed such gentleness even as early as the age of three and her eyes always sparkled with life that drew many to her.  Hers was a life the world had deemed unworthy and would have brought to an abrupt end through abortion, had they been allowed.  She reached down to lift the youngest of her six children, another child the world deemed unworthy to live.  As they stood there hugging with the sunlight on their hair, my thoughts drifted to the days of God’s intervention on their behalf.

With a resolute look of doom on her face, the doctor led me into her office to give me the news.  Judging by her demeanor, I thought she was about to tell me I had only weeks to live.  All in one breath she stated my “condition” as well as, according to her, the only reasonable recourse, “You’re pregnant.  I have already made the necessary calls to arrange for an abortion.”  I was just barely sixteen. 

I stared at her for a moment with a grin on my face as I absorbed her first words.  Then, as I realized what she was suggesting as “treatment” for my “condition,” I told her with all the courage I could muster up that I could never do such a thing.  In response to what she felt was an extremely immature and selfish decision on my part, she slammed her desk with the palm of her hand for emphasis and through gritted teeth said, “This is NOT a doll you are carrying!  This is a baby, a REAL baby! 

You have no business being a parent at your age!”  She continued ranting as I stood up and backed out of the room frightened that she might somehow be capable of forcing me to kill my child.

As my pregnancy progressed, I continued to be verbally assaulted by those who felt murdering my child was the only “unselfish” option I had.  How strange it all was to me.  Sometimes, I found myself hurting deeply for those who kept pressuring me to change my mind and I prayed for them.  I didn’t engage in arguments regarding this life God was forming inside of my body because I knew I was right.  I deeply Loved my child and my arms ached to hold her.  I spent many nights standing by the empty crib longing for her birth.  I was poor, but I knew God would provide.  Just one week following my seventeenth birthday, she was born.

Twenty-seven years later, my daughter, the mother of five, became deathly ill following a bite by a brown recluse spider.  Just as we all thought the end had come, the Lord showed us again that He is the Sovereign Giver and Taker of life.  The hand of darkness made another grab at God’s creation and was again thwarted.  Three months later, she was again pregnant. 

The doctors were frustrated that my daughter and her husband would not even consider aborting this child even after they’d been told that my daughter’s body would not likely yet be strong enough to bear this life without giving her own.  They also asserted that the baby would be grossly deformed and/or retarded due to the heavy medications my daughter had been on during her hospitalization.

The laughter of my grandchildren brought me back to the moment.  I again enjoyed my view from a distance as my daughter and her six children played in the grass.  Such wonderful blessings I’d been given! 

A car moving up the driveway sent the children into excited shrills of, “Daddy’s home!  Daddy’s home!” while they and my daughter ran to greet him.  I watched contentedly as they wrapped around one another and chattered excitedly.  My daughter turned and looked at me with that beautiful smile and the telling glow of her seventh child on her face.

I ponder these and many other moments and shudder to think what the hand of darkness would have blotted out had it the power to do so.  My heart weeps as I consider the millions upon which that hand of darkness has closed as our world errantly follows “My will be done.” 

I pray with tears of compassion for those who have had abortions, as this is truly a wound to the soul healed only by repentance and the salve of God’s blessed forgiveness.  I pray also that the world would see that each life is a creation of God from conception.  My family is but one shining example of God’s glorious power. 

The Bookends of Humanity

This morning I awakened with thoughts of the “bookends” of humanity: the unborn and the elderly.  The rest of humanity is pressed between these two ends without whom we would cease to exist.  If we hold no value and have no respect for the beginning and the end of human life, we will have none for the rest, as is evidenced throughout the world today.  Consider this - in the earliest throes of accepting and embracing abortion, the elderly were, for the most part, still respected and honored in their families and society as a whole.  The family came together in the care and nurturing of their aging elders.  As the abortion industry has grown, so has the industry of “care” for the elderly.  It is now considered selfish for one to hope their children will care for them as they age.  In fact, it is quickly becoming a most honorable thing to turn one’s self over to a facility when they can no longer care for themselves or, better yet, to commit suicide [euthanasia] so as to avoid excessive cost and inconvenience to the family and society. 

So, what was once considered precious new life and honorable old age is now inconvenient life on both ends with any value at all being only relative to what the pregnant woman and/or those around her “feel” about the unborn child or how the family members “feel” about their elderly.  Need I expound on where this “relative to feeling” train is headed??

A Time To Speak

I begin this blog with a broken heart for a war that has been waged against the weakest, most vulnerable, and most innocent among us...the unborn.  The word "choice" is used like a shining sword of justice in the battle for rights...but no such sword is offered the life about whom the choice is being made.  How can one say they believe in one's right to choose, yet deny life to the one who cannot cry out, "I choose to live!" 

I pray the Lord will be my guide as I try to present to you the absolute truth that it is never ours to end the lives of the unborn and that, without repentance and change, we will answer for that "choice."

In addition, this blog will address the issues facing the elderly, as their value is also being decreased as time goes on.