I can’t count the times that I’ve looked into the hurting, haunting eyes of a grieving friend asking that question. How could a loving God allow my baby to die? How could a loving God allow my child to get cancer? How could a loving God let my daddy feel so alone that he would take his own life?
Most of the time, about all I can do is silently share their pain because, while I have a few ideas I’ve gleaned from reading the Bible, I sometimes have a hard time understanding that, myself. Who can grasp why life deals so harshly with some of its kindest creatures? Who can speak for God? I try to help everyone as much as I can, but I’m fully aware that my presence is my greatest gift to them because I do not know the mind of God and cannot explain all that He does or allows.
But today, not being able to fully understand or explain God doesn’t trouble me as much as it did yesterday — because today I realize that I can’t even understand what people do.
How can loving people be so happy to pass laws allowing them to kill their unborn children? In a state where more than 25% of all pregnancies are already ended by abortion, New York officials in this photo seem so delighted to sign legislation granting them permission to legally kill even more.
How can loving people be so mean that they hide from trusting, and mostly young, women who are often trapped in the most desperate and frightening moments in their lives, the emotional pain that too often remains with abortion-victim moms the rest of their lives?
Abortion has many victims beside the unborn baby. But the mom is the one I hurt for.
How can loving people not tell her that for the rest of her life she’ll look for her baby in the faces of those who would be about the same age as hers if it had lived? How can they not tell her about all the nights she will lie awake wondering what if if she chooses to have an abortion?
I can tell you about sitting at lunch with a group that included a lady who ran a troubled pregnancy hotline. She had just received a call from the family of a woman she had been counseling for the past several days. The young woman was struggling with whether or not to abort her child. But the call on the hotline today was from a family member informing the counselor that the woman who had been calling was actually in her late forties and had aborted a child more than twenty years ago. She would occasionally makes these calls, the family said, as if she was trying to figure out a way to do things all over.
Then there was the lady who occasionally called me. The conversation was always the same. She’d had an abortion when she was a teenager and she felt that God wouldn’t forgive her and that she couldn’t forgive herself. I assured her that God would gladly forgive her. I prayed with her, read the scriptures to her. So did lots of other preachers, I found out later. But she never found peace. One afternoon, I was the chaplain on call when the police found a body in a rundown motel room. They asked me to come and help notify the family. It was her. Poisoned by alcohol, still trying to get past a choice she had made almost thirty years prior.
The defenders of abortion tell us they are doing a favor for people whose children would not be able to survive outside the womb or who would suffer from severe challenges if born. Ask them if they would be willing to change the laws to limit abortions to only those cases and you’ll quickly learn that this is simply the emotional drum they beat because their goal is not to see only healthy babies born. I know you don’t want to believe it, but there are people (and governments) who actually profit from the business of killing unborn children. If seeing only healthy children born was the goal of abortion advocates, it would be easy to connect with the estimated two million families on adoption waiting lists. Currently, for every family getting to adopt a child, thirty-five more families remain on waiting lists. How kind and loving people can encourage killing babies instead of letting them be adopted is another question I can’t answer.
New York isn’t the only state pushing an abortion agenda, but their leaders have intentionally grabbed the headlines and are bursting with pride over what they’ve accomplished. Why? I can’t begin to explain.
In the United States, 700 women die each year during pregnancy or while giving birth. Seven hundred. During those same twelve months, more than 600,000 children die by abortion. Six hundred thousand. In New York, that first number should shrink to zero now. But I wouldn’t suggest holding your breath. As a matter of fact, I’ll be very surprised if any change is noted – except for more abortions performed.
If the state of New York is serious about women’s health, they can start by asking why 26,000 females die each year because of alcohol abuse. If they lowered that number by only three percent, they’d save more female lives than are lost in troubled pregnancies and childbirth — and they wouldn’t have to kill any babies to do it. But they won’t. And, unfortunately, that’s one thing I can explain.
You don’t know how a loving God can allow such suffering in the world? I’ve stopped wondering about what God allows. I’m trying to figure out why humans find such pleasure in inflicting pain and sorrow on others.
