I received an e-mail from a minister that heads up a coalition of professional clergy and Christian leaders prayer group that I belong to. In his message he referred to Genesis 32:27 when God asked Jacob “What is your name?” Of course, God knew who Jacob was, but he wanted Jacob to realize just who he was himself, and come to terms with who he was himself as a person, and that he had become someone who was deceiving himself and more when he stole his brother’s birthright. Rather than accept responsibility for his actions, he sided with evil and rationalized things away.
This message got me to think about our society today and the abandonment of the culture of life. It is so sad and incredibly tragic that someone can rationalize away the responsibility of carrying a new life to term, deceiving themselves that their own needs far outweigh that of the innocent life that they helped to create. It is even sadder and more tragic that there are people who would gladly raise that innocent child as their own, but the mother would rather take the life of her child than let someone else raise it. I cringe to think about:
The lives of the unborn whose parents are told the child may have an abnormality, and don’t think the child is worth being born; and
The attitude of people that think the circumstances of conception, such as rape or incest, mean that the innocent child is somehow not deserving of life, yet the violent perpetrator is; and
The people who want to prematurely end the lives of the elderly or infirm because they are no longer “productive”, and no longer deserve to live.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Just how did our identities as human beings get stolen? Just when was the moment in time that our humanity was compromised to rationalize away our responsibility and compassion for life? We’ve allowed our morality to crumble away and our ethics to be put aside to satisfy our own needs….anything to make things easy for us.
If God were to ask us our name today, would we be able to tell Him who we are? Would we say that WE don’t do those things…it is somebody else? And if He said that “whatsoever you do for the least of My brothers, you do unto ME”, would we be able to say that we did all that we could?
I tend to get emotional around the holidays. I lost my 18 year old sister to cancer at Christmas time in 1981, and it is hard not to think about. However, my sister had a chance at life that wasn’t taken away from her by my parents before birth. Even if abortion had been legal when my mom was pregnant, if my parents knew that my sister would die young, they would never have given up the life of my sister even if she had lived only 18 seconds instead of 18 years. That is the way things were, should be now, and should always be. That’s the way God intended it. The miracle of the birth of His Son celebrated on Christmas reminds us of that.
Let’s work together to take back our “stolen” identity as humans from the evil that helped to rationalize it away. I know we can do it, if we stand united for life. Our work goes on….
For Life,
Denise Leipold
Executive Director
wyandotcountyrightolife 