Salty, shiny and dusty!!!

Growing up in a convent school, we were taught that abortion is wrong. But that's all we ever heard about being pro life. So it's easy to assume that's all there is to it.

Over the years, having faced infertility and caring for our elders who couldn't care for themselves, God Himself has taught us so much more about being pro life:

1. God is the Author of Life (Acts 3:15) And only He has the moral authority as Creator (not creation) to decide the natural beginning and natural ending of human life created in His image and likeness.

I am not God. 

I can't create life. 

And I can't decide when human life ends.

 It's not just the five year long frustration of being unable to conceive that brought me to accept this. It's also the day my doctor told me that nothing else is working with me, so it's time to do IVF. We had already done our research and so I knew that it was fine to assist natural reproduction but definitely not to replace it by dissociating the sexual act from the reproductive act. I looked my doctor in the eye and told him I wanted to receive children as a gift from my God not have them manufactured into existence for me. And we calmly walked away from the clinic knowing we would never have biological children because we chose to follow God instead. 

We knew that God was calling us to be salty: to preserve what was still good in our world by saying NO to the convenient evil of artificial reproduction and/or surrogacy and choosing the much harder option of adoption. The children we then received from God and the outpouring of blessings upon our family far outweighed the cost of never having children who share our genes.

2. Observing the long queues for adoption, fertility treatment and admissions for top schools, we can see that a lot of people want to have children and give them the best life they can afford. And as a society, we want that for them too. Enough to even rent women's wombs as production units in surrogacy. As a society we seem to be saying we want children no matter what the financial, social and moral cost. 

Then what happens to those children? They too will grow old and end up so unwanted at the other end of life??! How are the same humans once regarded as so precious as children now so discarded when they are no longer young and useful??!! How are so many elders so easily shunted out of their homes so their inheritors can take their share while their elders are still alive??!! Why are our old age homes full and brimming yet so many flats of those who own multiple homes available for rent??!! 

God's word is clear: He wants His followers to care for our elders when they can no longer care for themselves. (1 Timothy 5:3-8). We knew that God was calling us to be shiny: letting God's light shine bright as we cared for 6 of our elders at great personal cost but not disowning them when they needed us the most.

3. In rejecting IVF, choosing adoption twice and caring for 6 elders through multiple cataract surgeries, falls, hip replacement surgery, cancer, dementias and Alzheimers, we not only became salty and shiny but we became very dusty. 

We could never ever have done any of this in our own strength. 

Not when we started out 23 years ago, not now. It was only possible because we followed our Lord Jesus so closely, staying one step behind Him all the way, so close that the dust of his sandals covered our entire beings. 

You cannot be pro-life in your own wisdom, strength or moral authority. 

Only Jesus can do it through you.