Like many people, and, for me, increasingly of late, I have sites that I go to for inspiration and wisdom. I went to one today that carried one of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s most famous aphorisms: “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” The other came from Leighton Ford, who for many years alternated with Billy Graham on the weekly broadcast of the Hour of Decision. Ford observed, “God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way.”
You could combine them and go in a hundred different directions. But here’s what they say to me.
First and foremost, in their heart almost everyone knows it’s wrong to take the lives of unborn babies. They don’t have to be instructed—taught—this. They have to be reminded of what their conscience—their inner voice–is already telling them, sometimes in shouts, many times in whispers.
In another less obvious sense, however, they do have to be taught.
The lesson that it is egregiously wrong for the powerful to take the lives of the innocent powerless? No, more often they have to be taught that we can rationalize our way into and out of almost anything, including that somehow abortion is “good” for the baby and “empowering” to the mother.
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I have mulled what Ford wrote countless times in the context of abortion. For me his sage advice is particularly helpful when ministering to women who have aborted.
They need to know that God does love them, in spite of what has happened, what they have done and to whom. But what too often happens is that post-aborted women are weighed down with tons of unresolved guilt and shame. Going the other direction, they can boast (as we reported a woman saying more than once), “I had an abortion last year and it was the best decision of my life.”
God loves these women “too much to leave them that way.”
We need to love them, even when—especially when—they say things that, with rare exceptions, they really don’t mean deep down.
They don’t? How can I possibly say that?
Because if you carefully read the accounts in which women boast about their abortions, or excuse away their abortion, or justify taking their child’s death, most (not all) of the time, it is clear they are trying to muffle the sounds of regret and remorse.
If they weren’t, they would not respond as furiously as they do when you allude to this deep well of hurt.
Abortion is brutal, ugly, and cruel.
You and I know that.
At some level, so, too, do almost all aborted women.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
The post God Loves Us. Which is Another Reason Why It’s Wrong to Kill Unborn Babies appeared first on LifeNews.com.
