when love gives way to life

My apathy, it drives me to tears. And on this day, when I find myself standing in the gap for a life, I feel my own small insufficiency keenly. This story is so big—one can get lost in the midst. Yet over all is my Father, the Lamb who died, and the Spirit who breathes life into dry bones.

This world is a dangerous place, and more die all around us than we dream. The risk is extreme, yet what can we do but press on? He hides the twists and turns form our view in His mercy, for all we really need to know is that we’re going home, and as Edwards said, “not one of His rivers fail.”

The comfort of being a dry old Calvinist in times like these is that my hope can never fade. I am held in the palm of the God who sovereignly elected, called, and now preserves.

As I speak to unbelievers, plead for an unborn child, I know that here too, I am helpless. He uses, but should they also be His, He will not leave them to my inarticulate powerlessness any more than He leaves me to my own fickle heart. Over all He stands, dispenses, and rules.

"Who has spoken and it came to pass,

 unless the Lord has commanded it?

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High

that good and bad come?"

- Lamentations 3:37-38

He awakens me to love, and this will not let me go.

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Sometimes there are no words.

Sometimes the most fitting expression of the heart are the tears that blur the vision. We live by faith on this earth, not sight, but sometimes we are given a glimpse of His work, pushing the boundaries which will one day give way entirely when He returns.

There are days when, instead of reading a book about John’s apocalyptic vision you actually witness, in some small part, the kingdom arriving, the enemy of souls being pushed back.

How do you respond, what do you say or think or feel when you and the mercy of God are all that stand between an unborn child and the grave? You know His mercy is the only thing that can spare, yet there you are, all the same. What was it He said? “Where I am, there my servants will be also.” Usually we get the order backwards.

What is required of a soldier who finds themselves on the physical front lines between life an death? We are all too familiar (we think) with the spiritual war that rages, but we forget that Adam ate a real fruit, that Christ was beaten with a Roman whip, that the road to Emmaus wasn’t three feet above the dust of Palestine. Heaven and hell meet on this earth even now, for we live in between the ages, surrounded by immortal souls destined for heaven or hell.

The last three days have been surreal, to say the least. It began with a trip to the abortion clinic, where I was deeply convicted and confronted by the pride and selfishness of my own heart. The place is so raw; one either remains calloused, or comes apart somehow.

One woman came, disheveled, weeping, bleak. She left twice, and the second time I gave her my number, sincerely offering my help, but little expecting anything to come from it. She called a few hours later, saying she had changed her mind, and she thought she should go through with killing her child. And in that moment, I knew without the shadow of a doubt that I was not enough. Sometimes there’s just no fooling yourself.

I cried out for the Spirit to take action, and I picked up my Bible to read where I had been about to write an essay.

The hours since then have been a blur of texting, phone calls, prayers, and giving a ride to a counselor. At this moment, I trust, Noble is safe inside his mother’s womb.

It is this which has left me speechless. That God answered prayer and moved a heart like a stream of water. That I now have an ultrasound picture on my phone of a baby that was almost murdered. That I saw joy on the face of a woman who had been without all hope an hour before.

I’ll never forget seeing her smile for the first time. Watching her obvious delight as she told me of her other four children. Hearing her words as she turned to look in my eyes and thanked me for being there, cause she didn’t know where she would have ended up—what she would have done.

I couldn’t do a thing all the way home except weep. This was nothing less than the hand of my Father from beginning to end; I just happened to get to see it. I have been used, I have been humbled, and I am in awe. Life out of death is a thing that undoes a person.

“See now that I, even I, am he,

and there is no god beside me;

I kill and I make alive;

I wound and I heal;

and there is none that can deliver out of my hand."

-Deuteronomy 32:39