Mucking about in the Garden of Life

Yesterday, we sat quietly and listened to words truly worth hearing from Scripture--about death, life, resurrection...and then Madison's tiny body was taken to the limousine for its ride to the cemetery as we blew bubbles and watched them drift skyward past the cross.

Madison was not disposed of, for she was a real person to her parents, her family; while another child could be aborted at the juncture in time at which Madison was born and never given any credence as a human being, Madison was gifted with parents who wanted her, who cared desperately for her, and a family who could afford to treat her, post-mortem, like a five-week-old baby instead of a mistake. For this they are to be commended.

There is a woman in San Diego who is known to law enforcement around the state. She has volunteered for some time to take the bodies of the babies who are discovered abandoned and dead. She names each one and then buries each of them with the honor of a name and a headstone...simply because she so deeply believes that just because these children were not counted by their parents as important, these children, just as much as Madison, were real people who deserve a name and a person to care for them--at least enough to give them decent burial. For this, she has been often commended. But she doesn't do it for the commendation. She even won a substanatial sum from the lottery--but she took it, not as money to play with, but as God's gift which made her able tocontinue to do her work of naming and burying the abandoned. This is the heart of God expressed in a world that would just as soon dump the helpless, at either end of life, into the dumpster if they become too problematic.

Bumper sticker seen today: "Life begins at conception--and ends at Planned Parenthood."

We have, for two generations now, made it relatively easy to get rid of unwanted pregnancies. They are, of course, not babies, for to call them by that name would make us uncomfortable. And certainly, we don't want to be made uncomfortable at any cost. But apart from any moral upbraiding, simply a passing acquaintance with embryology is enough to convince any reasonable person that you're simply killing someone too little to protest. By the time most women think they might be pregnant, there is already a heartbeat. There is sucking, swallowing and excreting going on before most girls have brought it up to their boyfriends that they have missed periods.

But the blame lies not with the girls or the babies, or even the boys who get them pregnant and then move on: if there is blame to lay, it is with the callousness of heart of the people who saw the chance to make enormous profits through the political, social and economic programs that surround the outfall of Roe vs. Wade. This is the same sort of callousness that declared loudly in the sixties that changing all of the rules would mean that they could say they won the game. But over time it became obvious that the game played on too long, that the rules were not quite so changeable...yet over and over, they cried, "But we won! We WON!" believing that saying would make it so.

The callous hearts (what is Rich Mullins' line?-- "who are afraid of being left by those we love/and who get hardened in the hurt") ...didn't start out that way; no, they began as tender-hearted as Madison, as the little Joshuas and Elijahs and Samanthas who've died and yet been named by a stranger. So the ultimate culprit, of course, is the enemy of our souls, who loves to find that place where a wound can be made, where it can fester into bitterness that then harden into an agenda that makes the wounded one feel as if it might heal the hurt. But then it never does; the wound is incurable without the application of grace.

Callous hearts are deceived hearts. and there is no moral high ground here, for we are all deceived, and moving from deception to reality is not something we ourselves accomplish: it is all of grace. So in honor of little Madison, in honor of those little nameless ones, take some time tonight to pray for a callous heart you know. They are everywhere and they need prayer, grace and perhaps permission from the less-callous to admit that it's OK to weep over the abandonments they've caused as well as the abandonments they've suffered.

"Whatever you've done to the least of these my brothers, you've done to Me."