:: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell ::

:: Thursday, March 13, 2003 ::

I just want to extend some thoughts from yesterday's post on the inability to heal in this life. When I say the thing about Jesus... I know He has the power to heal us, the power to do anything.  BUT He had the power to heal me of my illness and save my child's life, and He didn't choose to do that.  So I know from personal experience that wanting God to do something has no ultimate bearing on what He will or will not do. 

After working in a funeral home for a few years, I saw grieving mothers that would tear your heart out.  Some of them were Christians.  I think that actually complicated the death for them in a way that secular moms didn't have to deal with.  There wasn't the same sense of betrayal in those subscribing to chaos.  Of course, the secular folks had no Author to lean on and no hope for reunion in the future.  If I'm wrong, may God correct me, but I think that, in this life, merely wanting Jesus to heal you isn't going to do the trick.  I suspect a lot of women have already experienced a variation of "healing" simply because they convinced themselves that abortion was no big deal. 

I have a friend who lost three children in abortions. When she first told me, I asked her how she was coping. She was confused by the question. It had been years, and her attitude seemed to be: "What's there to cope with?" I have to admit, I was kind of disturbed/alienated, but I chalked our difference of emotion and perception to the difference in our pregnancy situations. Later she couldn't say if she personally regretted losing the children, but she wanted to tell her story at the Silent No More expose because of her religious conviction. When someone there handed her a rose she immediately dissolved into desperate tears and muttered to me in an unexpected panic, "I haven't dealt with it, I haven't dealt with it. I never have!" All these years she just stuffed it.

Now this is where I'm going to really anger some of my own people... but if some women can convince themselves that the most monumental deal in their entire lives was no big deal at all, then what is to stop someone from doing the same thing with Jesus?  I mean, He's JESUS, yes.  But is it logical to expect that Jesus work to heal every mother's heart of a child lost to abortion when He doesn't work that way with anything else on earth? On this plane, is there some sort of 100% malady-healing rate that I don't know about?  Or in terms of Jesus, is there a higher rate of post-abortion healing than there is cancer healing?  Is healing moms of aborted children His exceptional cause? I mean, it just doesn't make sense. 

The reader may not agree, but I think a lot of people actually use Christ as they use any other coping mechanism.  This doesn't mean that I don't believe in Christ, because I absolutely do.  This doesn't mean that I believe Christ isn't omnipotent, because He absolutely is.  It doesn't even mean that I don't believe that some can experience miraculous healing from God, because they do.  What I contend is that some people don't heal from a broken heart caused by the gruesome death of someone they love. 

When Gramma and Grampa (see: Mom and Dad) were dying of cancer one right after the other, I never asked for their healing and they both croaked like a couple of gigged frogs.  I sometimes wondered if I had not asked and therefore not received. So when I was pregnant, I was a human "rosary".  I'm not Catholic. I only mean to say that I prayed endlessly for hours a day for months.  My prayers were desperate; my soul cried out in anguish. My pleas of desperation, in a way, remind me of my prayers today.  But guess what. He didn't save my child or fix my pathetic body then, and He is not doing it now.  I am not healed of the physical impairment that happened as a result of the abortion, anymore than I am healed of the emotional result: a heart that breaks for a child who was slaughtered like a barnyard animal. I still have the disease that was NOT the result of any choice I made. My body is defective. My heart is working just fine.

Although I don't subscribe to Nye's fetal pain transference theory, he is right about what could very potentially be a nascent child's experience during abortion.  Like many of the surviving relatives of the 9/11 victims, I haven't neglected to wonder what the final moments of my loved one's life entailed.  It is agonizing. What's so confusing? Do the math: dead, murdered baby=brokenhearted mom.

I don't ache because I think I should; the ache is naturally, unconsciously present. It doesn't go away for wanting it to. God has instilled the species with the nature to continue.  Acting against that nature by destroying our young naturally results in a deep conflict. 

If I cut off my hand, the skin will eventually scar and grow over the stump, but I will never have a hand again.  I will not be able to undertake the activities that absolutely require two hands no matter how crafty I get at using my feet or how much I want to (or how much faith I have in God).  Some things are a done deal. If God had wanted it to be otherwise, humans would regenerate appendages like seastars; little babies would come crawling out of bell jars. They don't.

So while I deeply believe that Jesus can comfort us and even heals some of us, on this earth, He doesn't remove the consequences of being human or the aftermath of the choices we make.  Let me break it down Barney style for those who still insist I am rejecting Christ:

The consequence of being human is that at some point my body may get sick.  The consequence of aborting a child I value is the death of a child I value.  The consequence of the death of a child I value is grief over the child's experience and my own experience of the rest of my life without the child.  That hurts. That is the reality, and on this earth, God has not taken my consequences away.

A plea to the group of people I sincerely love and most identify with: "pro-lifers"...
Pray for my living child's immunity from the experience of being raised by the grieving mother of his aborted sibling. Pray for my comfort if you must. But stop demanding that I heal. Stop invalidating my relationship with Christ if I don't respond in an expected way. Stop trying to be comfortable at my expense. Just throw your arm around me and let the way abortion took my child suck as badly as it does. Never lend any credibility to the myth that abortion isn't as massively negative as it really is "because God forgives and makes everything all better." If that's the way it worked down here, there would be no SICLE Cell.

SICLECell@hotmail.com

:: ashli 10:54 AM # ::
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