EDITED TO UPDATE: On January 22, 2019, New York governor Andrew Cuomo passed a law legalizing abortion up until birth. I have re-shared this post to address this current development. Replace “Planned Parenthood” in this article with “New York City” and the discussion remains valid.
For an example of just one of the slippery slope consequences, consider reading this post about a heartbreaking event that occurred in Colorado:
I huddled under the umbrella, shivering violently against the cold. Or maybe it was the oppression that still lingered beneath the soggy soil under my feet. As the tour guide spoke, I ingested his words, trying to fully comprehend the horror of it all. But of course, I can’t comprehend it. I’m only seeing pictures.
But still, I felt the ghosts whispering a haunting refrain in that place, and I knew that the oppression lingers for a reason.
It poured rain the day I visited Dachau, which felt right. I can’t really imagine the sun ever shining over those graveled walkways, glinting off the barbed wire fencing that once coursed with electricity and served as a quick death for martyred souls. I can’t fathom the dichotomy between a lovely spring day with birds singing joyfully over the ovens that burned thousands and thousand of bodies.
Can beauty and evil really coexist like that?
But I know that they can – of course they can. It happens every day. Beauty and evil intermingle, clouding our eyes and veiling the horrors around us. But sometimes, I think we have to see the evil in the rain to truly understand the depth and depravity.
I wasn’t going to write about Planned Parenthood and those videos that have been released. So many other people have written about it, and I’ve already said my piece on abortion.
I didn’t want to talk about it again. I didn’t even want to watch the videos, because I can picture the horror in my mind, and that felt like enough.
But then I remembered Dachau, and I remembered that sometimes you have to see it up close, in the rain. Sometimes you have to get your feet dirty as you trod into the dark places. Only then can you truly get a glimpse of the horror.
Yesterday, I watched the fourth released video – the one that took us a little bit further. I walked into the lab and watched as body parts were sifted in a petri dish. It was the same way I shuffled parts aside in ninth grade when I had to dissect a frog.
Here’s the heart.
Here’s the liver.
But these weren’t frog parts. They were human. I saw intact hands, tiny fingers raised in surrender, pulled violently from the safety of the womb.
I saw a fully formed leg. Little eyes that would never see the light of a summer day. Mangled and torn, the evidence of abortion screamed at me, and I felt my stomach churn the same way I did when I stepped into the oven room at Dachau. And then I heard the exclamation of the lab technician:
“It’s a boy! It’s another boy!”
I stopped the video there because the weight of it all felt too great. It was like standing in the freezing rain and hearing the stories of the men who were tortured ruthlessly, viciously, violently, all because they bore the label “Jew.”
It wasn’t a “clump of cells.” It was a boy. A little boy who would have bounded with little-boy energy. He would have eaten dirt and played with bugs, fallen and skinned his knees, and probably been too rough when he got excited. He would have hated baths and brushing his teeth, and probably would have given the best hugs.
HE was a BOY. He was real – a human being.
The city of Dachau was remote during the World War II era. This made hiding thousands of people there easier. But still, there were residents living outside the gates. Good German citizens, without the stigma of a forbidden religion, lived and worked just on the other side of evil.
Did they wonder about the smoke that billowed from the trees day and night? Did they question the emaciated men and women who arrived by train and trudged into the shelter of the nearby woods? Did they know and pretend they didn’t? And do I blame them?
Speaking out would most certainly have had ramifications. It was better to keep your head down and pretend you didn’t see.
Friends, we can’t keep our heads down anymore. We’ve been escorted directly into the furnace. We can’t pretend it isn’t there. This has to go beyond the legality of what Planned Parenthood is doing. We must get to the very heart of the issue.
Abortion is murder.
I say this with a bit of a cringe, because I know it cuts deep. It’s a blatant statement, and it may make some of you feel judged or alienated. Maybe you’ve experienced abortion, and these statements cut to the quick. Hear my heart on this: I do not condemn you as a person. I condemn a society who told you there was no other way.
As I write this, the clouds hang heavy over my house. It’s been raining steadily for almost two weeks now, and once again I’m reminded that sometimes the horror is better seen and experienced underneath the weeping sky. We can’t pretend it isn’t happening – we can’t pretend we don’t know.
And what do we do?
This is the trickiest part of the equation, isn’t it? But it doesn’t have to be. There are Crisis Pregnancy Centers popping up all over the United States. These are safe havens where young, scared women can go when an unplanned pregnancy leaves them feeling lost.
Let’s start here.
Call your local Crisis Pregnancy Center and ask them what they need. How can you help? What can you provide? And then spread the word. Let’s give young women a chance to get top care, solid counseling, and the ability to choose life for their unborn children. Let’s stop telling them they have no other choice but to abort.
Let’s give them the choice of life.
What do you say?
For two alternatives to Planned Parenthood in the Tampa area, look at:
The baby’s cries pierced through the walls for the third night in a row. Just when we hit a stride in her sleeping patterns, she enters a new growth spurt and the nighttime feedings start again.
I’m weary. So weary.
I stumbled to her room and lifted her from her bed. Her warm, doughy cheek pressed into my neck, and the moment was everything I could hope it would be, except for the fact that it was two in the morning.
Yawning, I stuck the bottle in her waiting mouth and leaned my head back, mind running through the laundry list of things that needed to be done once the sun made her way high up into the sky.
So much.There’s so much to do. On any given day, I’m not sure how it is I manage to accomplish all the tasks in front of me. And for all that I manage to get done, it seems I forget half as much. I’m forever a step behind in life.
I stumbled back to bed and fell onto my pillow, and before I knew it the alarm jarred me, yet again, from my slumber. I had work to do, but first.
First.
I’m trying to dig into my Bible before I open my computer. I’m not always good at it. Some days, the pull of work is just too strong. But on this morning, I pulled out my Bible and started reading. I landed in Proverbs and flipped to Proverbs 31.
This passage of scripture both inspires and baffles me. How does she do it, this Proverbs 31 woman? I know that this wasn’t the picture of a single woman, but rather the composite of a woman. But still. I’m forever dropping the ball, and I don’t even have to sew my children’s clothes from woolen materials!
But on this morning it hit me. As I read through this passage for the hundredth (thousandth? millionth?) time, my mind wandered back to the Maasai women in Tanzania. I thought of the hut built by a woman’s hand, and the village of women who birth the babies and raise the children, kill and prepare the food. What strength they possessed.
Then my mind drifted to the stories of the German women who picked up shovels and rebuilt their cities after the war. And the women of America who entered the factories and kept the country running while our men fought.
I thought of the Ukrainian girls and women sent to slave labor camps, forced to build artillery for the enemy.
And then I thought of my own mom, faithfully raising and loving two children. I thought of her bringing in her sister’s kids because that’s what family does, even when it’s hard. I thought of the way she flew half way across the world to stay with my children for eight days so that I could have an adventure.
Photo by Tammy Labuda: TammyLabudaPhotography.com
And I read Proverbs 31 again with hot tears dripping from my eyes because it finally hit me.
Proverbs 31 isn’t the story of one woman, nor is it a composite of all the things I should be.
Proverbs 31 is the story of women – of womanhood. It is everything that we are, the collective whole of us. It is the strength that God knit into the very fiber of a woman’s heart.
This is the strength that carries a woman through back breaking labor, through childbirth and child rearing, through midnight feedings, never ending schedules, and days that stretch into nights with little or no opportunity to rest.
This is the strength that gets a mother through the year-long deployment of her soldier husband. It’s the strength that allows a woman to get up each morning and dig her heels into all that life has to offer – the good and the bad.
Proverbs 31 isn’t the unattainable goal of womanhood. Oh, no.
Proverbs 31 is a celebration of all that God has made us to be.
Sweet friend, are you weary tonight? Do you feel like you’re failing at every turn? Does life feel like it’s just a little too much?
Take heart, dear friend. He has knit into you a strength that cannot be explained. It can only be lived, one step, one day at a time.
You, dear woman, are stronger than you think.
“She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.
She speaks with wisdom and faithful instruction is on her tongue.”
I walked timidly into the chiropractor’s office. I don’t like chiropractors. Allowing someone to grab my head and twist it until my neck pops like a roll of bubble wrap makes my stomach get all twisty. I know these people are trained, and I’ve never actually heard of a chiropractor twisting someone’s head right off their body.
But what if it happened, and I was the one on the table?!
I went yesterday, though, because the day before I threw out my back. Because apparently I am an old lady now, and that’s what happens to old ladies who bend over and try to pick up a heavy baby.
Lift with the legs, not with the back!
So I think it was obvious to the people in the office that I was feeling a little nervous. I’m guessing the tip off came when I told the assistant, “I’m super nervous about this.”
She led me to a nearby room and had me lay on a water bed. But this was no ordinary water bed. It was a hydrotherapy water bed, heated to 100 degrees, then turned on to pulsate every bit of nervousness straight out of my body.
For twenty minutes I laid in the dark room while the water beat my muscles into submission, and I think I met Jesus there. When she walked back in and flipped on the lights, I felt momentarily offended. Why would anyone ever tell you to stop laying on a hydrotherapy bed?!
I’m kind of holding out hope that heaven will be equipped with hydrotherapy beds.
By the time I saw the doctor, I was ready to let him pull and pop and crack and maneuver everything around until I felt the tension lessen on my lower back, and I walked out having experienced both the good and the bad of an adjustment. And together they worked to free me of the pain that had threatened to push me down.
As I drove home, all relaxed and happy, I thought about those twenty minutes on the hydro bed and how utterly at peace I felt. My back didn’t hurt, there were no sounds of children or phone messages begging for my attention. It was quiet, save for the hum of the machine that coaxed out all the knots.
It dawned on me that I haven’t had enough of those moments lately. I haven’t taken enough time to sit still, to close my eyes, to simply relax. Yes, it would help me slip away and recharge if I had my own hydrotherapy bed (and don’t think I haven’t already priced them), but since that’s not an option, I need to come up with another solution.
I’ve felt creatively parched lately. A traveling husband, busy schedules, and little time alone to sit and think left me all knotted up. I sit down to write and the words feel locked, the characters muddled, the stories choppy and incomplete. I try to remember the most basic of tasks, and it’s like someone turns a jack hammer on in my head.
And don’t even get me started on the assignments that teachers are sending home right now. Torture, pure torture. The kids bring home the same predictable homework all year long, and then the last month of school we change it up and play Spelling Bingo, and Living History projects are due?
*bangs head against wall*
But isn’t that the nature of motherhood? It’s like walking into the unknown, your back all tied in knots. And you have to take all the stress and the frustration to the Lord, surrendering control so that He can loosen a few joints.
Sometimes the loosening feels like a hydrotherapy bed with the Lord offering refreshment through a quick nap, an unexpected play date, or a few moments alone to clear your head.
And other days, you’re not afforded the opportunity to slip away, so you surrender your control to Him, and He loosens the joints for you. You trust that He knows what’s best, and you try to resist pushing back against Him as He makes the necessary adjustments in your heart.
It’s a loose metaphor, I know. But it’s working for me today, and maybe it’ll work for you? Maybe you’re tired, weary as the end of the year push threatens to undo you. Maybe you can’t step away, so you simply need to lean into the Lord and let Him adjust the frustration and fatigue out of your spirit.
Or maybe you just need to buy yourself a hydrotherapy bed.
Happy weekend, everyone! I’m praying it’s a relaxing and sweet time for you all!
Three years ago today, my feet were caked with the red dirt of Tanzania. On May 7, 2012, I wrote this post and it is still, to this day, my most shared post. It’s been read thousands of times over the last three years, and of course it has because the message is universal.
People need Hope. They crave and long to know that Hope is alive, and indeed it really is.
Hope is Slow may be the most important blog post I will ever write. This is the message that carried me through the terminated adoption of 2013. It is the message that carried us through the cancer diagnosis of 2014. And it carries us now in 2015, with the unique and pressing challenges of our present.
Hope is Slow. But it is alive.
I’m thankful for the reminder today.
***
As we ambled back up the rutted dirt path it finally happened. I knew the emotions would take over at some point, but I honestly didn’t expect to be so overwhelmed my second day here. On both sides, children scrambled about watching us with bold curiosity.
“How do you handle seeing this all the time?” I asked Shaun as we stepped gingerly over a stream of muddy water flowing through the red soil. My throat burned and eyes watered as the images of the family we just visited ran through my mind. It wasn’t the condition of their home that left me so affected, though the small, concrete structure that housed two adults and nine children did leave me a bit shocked.
The situation this family lives in is dire in more ways than just physical. There was a hollow emptiness in the eyes of the mother that struck me. A desperation in the grandmother’s voice that tore through me. Abandoned and alone, these women now work only when they can and pray for daily bread in the most literal sense.
Currently, two of this young mother’s five children are being served by Compassion – twins, Doto and Kuluwa. One is sponsored, the other is still waiting. They were all quiet, eyes downcast, shy. When asked what she hopes for her children, this mother replies, “I hope that they can grow up and do business so that they can take care of me.”
Doto is sponsored. Her twin brother, Kuluwa is not.
I left this home with a quivering chin. “How do you see this all the time and not feel overwhelmed?” I asked. “It just all seems so much, like it’s impossible to ever meet all the needs.”
He walked up to me after church and grabbed my hand.
“I would really like to sing with you,” he said. He looked at me with kind eyes, and his hand trembled slightly inside of mine. “My wife and I are moving in a couple of weeks. Can we make this happen soon?”
Of course, I immediately said yes. Mr. David has been a kind, gentle presence inside our church home since our family first began attending. Always quick with a crooked smile, and a wink of the eye, I’d been immediately drawn to his tender spirit.
Parkinson’s Disease has slowed Mr. David down in recent years. But it has not weakened his spirit, nor has it diminished his love of music.
When I readily agreed, Mr. David smiled. “Good. I’d like to sing ‘I’ve Just Seen Jesus.’ Have you heard it?”
In that moment, my heart skipped a beat, because yes, of course I’ve heard the song. I’m a child of the ’80’s, after all. I grew up on Sandi Patty, singing my heart out in the passenger seat, while my mom tried not to cringe behind the wheel.
I mean, I don’t want to brag, but I could pretty much nail ‘Via Dolorosa’ as a nine year old. I was all over it.
But my heart didn’t skip a beat with excitement at the suggestion of this song, but rather trepidation. See, I’m older now, and I’m more aware of the fact that I am not Sandi Patty. I thought of the notes that she hits at the end of that song, and I felt like I might be a little sick. Immediately, fear took hold of me as I imagined myself trying to croak out those high notes into a microphone, and watching everyone seated in front of me cringe the way my mom did behind the wheel of our Buick.
Last Sunday morning, Mr. David and I met early to practice. Again, I felt my heart flutter with nervousness, because I was so focused on the last half of the song – the part where the female vocal is supposed to climb into the rafters and hang out for awhile.
As we ran through the song, though, I found myself less focused on my own short comings (namely that my name isn’t Sandi Patty), and more on the remarkable task that Mr. David faced. Parkinson’s has robbed him of a lot of physical capabilities, and getting the words out quickly enough was a challenge. But the one thing Parkinson’s has not taken from him is his voice. For all my concern about my ability to hit the high notes, I never once doubted his ability to do it.
In the moments leading up to the song, I felt the Lord begin to whisper. It was the gentle, kind admonition that my heart needed.
This morning isn’t about you. It’s not about whether or not you can hit those notes. It’s not about presenting a perfect song to a listening audience.
This morning is about laying your gifts and talents before me in an offering of praise.
Give your voice to me.
I’ve got this.
I heard these words almost as if they’d been spoken audibly, and when it came time to stand in front, the tremor in my spirit was gone. No longer focused on my own shortcomings, I was able to instead focus on the truly remarkable gift that Mr. David shared with all of us.
He stood up there, and despite the physical challenges that threatened to derail him, he opened his mouth and he let the praise bubble out. The words were warbled at times, but it didn’t matter, because his heart was fully present.
By the end of the song, everyone was standing and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Because when we are willing to share our gifts in an act of humble praise, no matter how imperfect they may be, people cannot help but be moved.
I learned something last Sunday. When we offer back our gifts and talents, it’s not about the end result. It’s not about presenting a finished product that is perfectly polished, because perfection doesn’t guarantee impact.
But when we’re willing to offer up our broken praise simply out of a passion for the art, and for the Maker, that is when the greatest offering of praise is presented.
I’ll forever be thankful to Mr. David for teaching me that lesson.
And for fulfilling the secret dream of my 1987 nine-year-old self, which was to be Sandi Patty for a day.
I’m distracted today. We have visitors. The house is a bit of a hot mess. The laundry wants to strangle me in my sleep. And the baby keeps smiling and cooing at me, begging for interaction, which I cannot deny because of this:
See what I mean?
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t document our weekend, or at least the beauty of an unforgettable Easter. We have Lee’s mom with us this Easter, and it is bitter sweet. We miss Herb. We wish he was here with her. All the firsts after someone you love passes away are just so hard.
This is the first Easter. The first visit without him. It’s weighty, and we feel the weight.
But there’s so much in which to rejoice, too. The kids are happy. The baby has teeth, is close to sleeping through the night, and couldn’t get cuter if she tried.
Lee got a new grill and we have so much food in our fridge right now, we won’t need to grocery shop for awhile.
I mean, that’s reason in and of itself to do a happy jig.
And yesterday morning, Landon walked into the bedroom, his brand new Bible clutched in his hands, and he told his dad he wanted to know Jesus. He’s asked questions for months, trying to grasp the weight of Christ’s sacrifice and how that applies to him. He’s told us he believed, and I know that he did.
But yesterday, his faith was made sight.
He arrived at church hours after I did, since I was leading worship, and he grabbed my hand, pulled my face close to his and whispered with a grin, “I asked Jesus in my heart.”
So much pride. Such grace for this freckle-faced little boy of mine. It’s an answer to prayer, and now the prayers continue. Prayers that he will grow in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. Prayers that he will truly grasp who God is for Himself. That his will not be a blind faith, but one in which he really seeks to know God deeply.
There is something so marvelously joyful for a mother to see her children grasp faith and make it their own. There will be trials as they grow, and there will be more testing of the faith. I expect it, and even welcome it. Because I want my children to know God, and to know Him you have to look for Him.
Easter 2015 was special in so many ways – ways that far exceeded the pain of our recent loss. And I couldn’t help hoping that maybe, somehow, Herb got to experience the joy of his grandson’s salvation as all of heaven rejoiced. I don’t know how that works, but there’s comfort in knowing that he may have gotten the ultimate view of yesterday’s joy.
