L’ Chaim!

 November 30, 2020

Joy almost leapt off the screen. An abortion-minded woman had come into the pregnancy center where our daughter is the Executive Director, but by the time she left, she had decided to keep her baby. Jessie excitedly shared the good news because doesn’t usually happen this way; the victories in this business are small, the disappointments great. It is tragic that so many precious lives have been thrown away in this country since 1973. I'm glad this won't be one of them. This thing we call life which we value so greatly and guard so jealously is not treasured by all. The genocide we call abortion has claimed nearly 60 million lives, legally I might add. It's impossible to turn on the news without hearing of someone whose life has been snuffed out by someone else who valued the high of a drug or the approval of friends more than life. There seems to be no shortage of young men and women who value jihad more than life, willing to kill indiscriminately, even blowing themselves up for the cause. Not everyone values life. 

Seeing life as precious is really a Christian thing. We see it as the breath of God himself, something to be treasured because it is a gift from his hand. It is quite mysterious. I've watched the breath of life leave the body more times than I like to remember, most recently—my mother—and it never ceases to amaze me how one moment there is life, and the next, there is not. The difference between a person and a corpse is this fleeting thing we call life. We know when it's there and when it's not; we can prolong it or shorten it, but what is it, really? Is it merely electrical impulses in the brain, the heart pumping blood through arteries and veins, lungs inhaling and exhaling precious oxygen? Whatever we can explain medically or scientifically, life itself is still a mystery. One moment there are two cells-egg and sperm-the next, they unite and immediately something begins to happen as that newly fertilized egg begins to divide. At the other end, we stand around a hospital bed, anxious and fearful yet hopeful until that last exhalation. Something has happened, and we weep.

The Creed says "I believe in Jesus Christ...who was conceived by the Holy Spirit..." This is a theological as well as a biological statement, neither of which is fully amenable to explanation. Biologically, how do we explain normal conception, let alone this one? Theologically, it flows naturally from the Biblical understanding that sin infected all of humanity through Adam, the male. Being conceived by the Holy Spirit means that God bypassed the sin connection, so that Jesus didn't have the same flawed spiritual genetics that have been passed on to the rest of humankind. I cannot say I understand it, but I can say I understand what it means: God in Christ has entered this human life by the slenderest of threads—that of conception—in order to redeem mankind from the curse of sin.

In our COVID-obsessed world, we hear every day how many people died from it; it is certainly a tragedy, but many of the same people who hang on every sad COVID enumeration think nothing of the far more numerous innocent victims of our nation’s infant genocide. Our Jewish brothers and sisters who experienced lawful genocide in the Holocaust have an appreciation for life that the rest of us often miss, as they joyfully sing, “L’ Chaim!” “To Life!”