This post is deeply personal and emotionally charged. And probably the first time I've ever written an entry and posted it all in the same go. Enough caveats.
Abortion was never my issue.
It wasn't at the top of the my list in things I considered pivotal in my voting decisions. I spent awhile mulling over a woman's right to privacy, a "zone of privacy" in the constitution, and whether it should be a federal, state or local issue. I could debate you easily on my position about being "whole life" rather than just "pro life" and caring for the unborn better once outside the womb, how it's rubbed me the wrong way that conservatives defund sex education and anything that resembles welfare but may result in fewer unwanted pregnancies. Still true, and good things.
In my mind I knew I classified abortion itself as wrong. But the way I treated it was as if it was either a non issue, or lamentable.
For my entire life I've kept this issue at arm's length because it never affected me or anyone I knew personally.
Until tonight...
When it hit me like a punch in the stomach while I was falling asleep...the crushing weight and despair of finally, FINALLY realizing that this most certainly affects someone I know personally. My Best Friend, my Father, my Savior, my Redeemer, the One who called me out of death into life...His heart breaks for the murder of the unborn.
I normally hesitate to make statements like the one I'm about to make. Experience is really subjective and easily tainted by emotion. You all can't feel what I felt, so there's no way to verify it, and you may not give a damn. Fine.
But God lets us emote for a reason, and I think something I just experienced is evidence, or at least a manifestation, of how He can use our emotions in a Godly way--to connect us with His heart:
I honestly feel like God allowed me to participate in His sorrow for a moment. And it broke. my. heart.
I wept, y'all. I don't just randomly start crying over stuff I don't care much about. There was absolutely no reason for it to come when and how it did.
I was struck with images in my mind of babies being mostly delivered and having their skulls stabbed and brains sucked out. Even just typing that sentence fills my eyes with tears and makes me want to scream.
Just so....angry. Deep in my bones. At humanity. At sin. At my ugliness and pretension that previously boiled this down to a matter of personal politics rather than ethics. I can't believe how stupid I've been. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. I'm wrong a lot.
What a tremendous, despicable game the enemy is playing. What deep, dark sludge we wade in...that we live in the height of civilized society, equipped with every resource imaginable to be educating people about abstinence and safe(r) sex, have families with the means to be able to financially support and care for moms with unwanted pregnancies and take in their unwanted babies and children, have excellent medical care, have flexible education systems so that moms don't have to be doomed to welfare and a lifelong struggle to find vocational success because they're single moms...
and we've built such a monument to human selfishness at its pinnacle that we allow citizens to participate in something so barbaric and inhumane.
I didn't get it. I was wrong, and I'm sorry.
How in the WORLD have we allowed this to be legal???
