Sharing Love, Exchanging Ideas

“Why are you here? Are you protesting?”

It’s a question I’ve gotten a few times since the start of this spring’s 40 Days for Life campaign. I suppose it’s a matter of semantics to most people, but I like to point out that no, we’re not protesting, at least not in the traditional sense. We are not protesters, but prayer volunteers, in the parlance of 40 Days for Life. The rest of the year, we might be referred to as prayer warriors, at least that’s how the Pro-Life Action League’s fantastic Life Witness Prayer Book refers to us, though I can understand why we don’t use that term during the campaign. We know we’re fighting powers and principalities, but those in the secular world has a hard time wrapping their brain around that one.

Don't hate me because I'm awesome.

Which is fine, because it took me a little while to wrap my brain around it, too. There was a bit of a learning curve for not getting personally offended and angry when someone reacts poorly to our presence. I had to learn to respond to angry people with compassion rather than a heated argument. In my nerdier moments, I like to think about it like we’re in the Matrix and we never know when a normal looking person passing by is suddenly going to be taken over by Agent Smith.

Whoa!

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to imply these people are possessed or infested or anything like that (not that it doesn’t happen, but it’s so rare). What I mean is that they are not the enemy. Rather, they are haunted by a past abortion-related wound and need our love, not our retorts. Abortion is as much their enemy as it is ours; they just don’t realize it yet.

But we here at Prayer for Life at Division and LaSalle would be remiss in letting you think that all our contact with passers-by is negative. In fact, this year I’ve had far more positive reactions from people than negative ones! It’s probably because I’ve been taking more morning and early afternoon weekday hours, rather than evening and weekend hours. There are quite a few regulars who offer me a “God bless!” or “Thanks for being here!” as they pass, and even one van that claps and hollers, “Yay, pro-life!” every Sunday morning.

The concerned friend

And then there was one sunny midday last week when a young man came out of Planned Parenthood and asked to sit on one of the vigil stools. He was waiting for a friend and preferred to be outside on the gorgeous, if windy, spring day, rather than inside the clinic. As we chatted, I discovered he and his wife (newlyweds!) had been helping out a younger woman who is from an abusive family situation, already has one child (his wife was baby-sitting at home while they were at the clinic), and had become pregnant again. That day, she’d come for a post-abortion check-up. Though it was too late to save this young woman from the pain of an abortion, I told him about the local crisis pregnancy center (and gave him a brochure), explaining that they could refer her to post-abortion counseling if she ever needed it. When I mentioned that many women engage in self-destructive behavior after an abortion, he mentioned that she had a history of cutting. I encouraged him to continue, with his wife, to be a good friend to this young woman, because she would need their love and support. We talked for a while, about school and jobs and other normal things, and I hope he left knowing that we prayer volunteers are normal people with normal lives who care about women and babies and just want to make sure people know about the help that is out there.

The academic

Shortly before this young man left with his friend, another man, a PhD candidate at my graduate school alma mater, stopped by and asked about our motivations for being out there. As a secularist, he seemed genuinely excited to have come across someone who, having a PhD in genetics as I do, could discuss the issue of abortion from a scientific and secular perspective, though I certainly made sure to point out that the campaign was driven by prayer. Our discussion did not revolve around whether or not abortion was right or wrong. He mentioned he had two children and he said he respected my stance that it was wrong to take a life. His concerns mostly stemmed from his time spent in China doing research. He completely agreed with me that their one-child policy was ruthless and wrong, but he felt their economy and standard of living would actually improve with the decline in their population, with labor shortfalls being made up for by increased mechanization. Meanwhile, I pointed out that other economists predicted their economy would stagnate. We also discussed how all people need to do more to help people in need. His view was that people are crummy by nature and charity needs to be enforced by the state, while I argued that enforced “charity” is no longer charity and that it desensitizes people to their responsibility to care for others, and that putting the state in charge creates large bureaucracies that waste resources and are poorly equipped to meet the specific needs of individuals, while private charity based on the principle of subsidiarity could do more, better, with less. Ultimately, he concluded that he was just too cynical to see my way working and I told him not to worry: I was pretty cynical in graduate school, too.

It's hard not to be cynical when your soul is being crushed for years on end.

It’s easy to start to flinch when people come up and ask you what you are doing, but both of these interactions were pleasant (though the former was tinged with sadness). As prayer volunteers, we have an opportunity be witness to the love of Jesus in many situations, and we get to meet all sorts of people we would have otherwise never crossed paths with. It’s truly a blessing to be out here!