Brett's Two Cents

Hello, everyone. This week I read a poignant interview with a young mom that’s left me thinking ever since. This woman is a professor at Oxford, happily married, two children. In the middle of her third pregnancy, she and her husband were given some devastating news: the little girl growing in her womb was afflicted with a “lethal skeletal abnormality,” and would almost certainly die at birth, or soon thereafter.
 
Despite her strong Christian convictions, this woman found herself being persuaded by the medical staff, her colleagues, and even her own self-protectiveness to
consider terminating the pregnancy. “I told myself,” she says, “this is a medical emergency demanding a swift medical response. What shook me to the core was the phenomenal force of this self-protective instinct and I knew, even with my strong principles that I was capable in the extremity of shock, grief, and confusion of aborting my child and doing so feeling that this was the best way forward for me, for this child, and for my family.”
 
Interestingly, what ultimately changed her mind was not a principle, but a prayer. In her words:
 

“Principles, however good, were not (on their own) enough to carry me as a grieving individual through a pregnancy that would end in heartbreak and the possibility of watching my child die in pain. . . When it came to something so unthinkable that impacted my own life so deeply and directly, reasoned principles were in actual fact by no means as powerful . . . a motivation for action as I had assumed them to be.
 
I realized, it is eminently possible to believe strongly in a principle and yet to react in ways that are complex and even contradictory, especially when we are afraid. I needed not only principle but also hope. What changed the situation for me was a desperate prayer. I find it difficult to describe our experience, but as Paul and I prayed we felt as if God was asking us a question: ‘Here is a sick and dying child:  will you love her for me?’ [Suddenly], our situation no longer seemed… a matter of ethical decision making.  Rather we were drawn by an exquisite and gentle love — the love of a relational God for a vulnerable person that He had entrusted into our care.”

 
“Here is a sick and dying child: will you love her for me?” What an extraordinary question. May all of us learn to see one another as God sees, and so be drawn ourselves into His “exquisite and gentle love”. . . .