As a child, I firmly believed that every human being is willed and created by God.
But there were challenges to this belief throughout my teenage years, as I learned more about the world, and just how horrible human beings could be to each other. Namely I learned about the existence of rape, and the worst of all, incest.
How can a good God allow such horrors to be done to people?
How can a good God permit people to commit such horrors, when they once were little wispy haired toddlers that just wanted the joy of splashing in puddles and eating applesauce?
That is something I still do not have the answer to. Other than I know that God suffers with every human's suffering.
Then the arguments for abortion came, and I had to make sense of it. How could a woman who was raped carry the rapist's child? How can a girl carry a child conceived in incest?
The question is like a punch to the gut. Its horrible. But its edges are blurry. From a burning hot core to each layer emanating from it, retroactively absolving all abortions.
But lets go to the core, because at the heart of the core is where the real question is.
Peeling pack the layers to the white hot core, let us observe the most outward layer of "non-ideal" conceptions. Adultery.
Adultery is a betrayal, to the beloved, to the children, to the God you sword the oath to.
But there is a difference between an act, and the fruit that God makes from it. As Joseph being sold into slavery, but then saving all of Egypt and his own family too. What men meant for evil, God making good out of. That doesn't mean it was right to lie to their father, and sell their brother. Doesn't mean it was right for Potiphar's wife to lie and get an innocent man locked up for sexual assault for years and years. Didn't mean the ropes, the beating, the slaveblock, the lack of trial and unending years of incarceration were illusory or really not a big deal. They were terrible. But God brought good out of it.
Adultery is a betrayal that God sees as such a big deal that He even prescribed death penalty for it. Then He spared that woman telling her "Go and sin no more", and took the death penalty on himself, to pay her debt. Adultery, like all our sins, cost him blood and slow suffocation on the cross. God does not minimize adultery, or the suffering that it causes all those betrayed. And yet. He sometimes conceives a child even in the midst of that sin, an innocent and holy child, given to the undeserving, as undeserving as we were when He gave us baby Jesus.
Because God brings good out of even our worst sins. He saved Egypt and Israel. This did not mean that Joseph's brothers did the right thing to beat and strip their brother and sell him to a slave cartel.
And that holy child, conceived in adultery, is from God, is pure innocent good, like the Christ Child coming to a screwed up and undeserving world.
Or to that holy child, conceived in a petri dish by scientists making money or trying to create a clone army (as I think will probably happen). That child is not the property of the scientist who sinned so greatly in exploiting human life. The situation of that's child conception was sin, but God breathed the life and soul into that little zygote, struggling in the petri-dish, with all the other zygotes, as the scientist randomly picks one to sell, leaving the others to be experimented on. God who called Jacob's name, called the names of each of those little ones in the dish, the names only He knows. And He has breathed souls into them, and they are His.
Now, concerning rape. This is worse, because it is not just betrayal, but a violation, a blasphemy on what sex was created to be. Instead of vulnerable love, there is violent devouring. By the time the question of aborting the pregnancy comes up, the woman has gotten away from the violator. She is deeply traumatized, and needs help, and then finds there is a human growing inside of her. How do we comfort her, how do we make this horrific situation right? We treat the child like it is the rape, or at least, the rapists spawn. If we can just delete the "rapists child", it will be on some level, as if we are erasing part of the rape. But are we? No one would say, that if a man has 2 yr old child, and then goes out and rapes a woman, the woman's family may find and kill his 2 yr old child in revenge. But as long as we cannot see the child, as long as it's face is hidden from our eyes, we can feel it is purely the "spawn" of another human, that must be erased.
And then the blasphemy of love gets kicked up a notch, in cases of incest, which is an abomination before God. This, because it is a blasphemy of all that makes life worth living, is too much to think about. Even thinking about it feels like breathing in smoke, we want to break a window and get out. We want to help get the girl out of the situation as soon as possible, forget it as soon as possible, and act as if it had never been. And abortion seems the fast way, to make it as if it had never been.
But that's desperate lie, as we desperately claw about for a solution.
You can't undo the horror of rape or incest.
You can't undo it by killing a small human. That sacrifice is not enough to undo that great an evil. Only the blood of a God can wash that away.
Violated women have lived through the "solution" of abortion, and described it as the second rape. Abortion cannot undo the horror that has happened.
We hate that.
We rage that there is no way to make it as if it never had been.
The little one is not the abomination. The abomination has happened. The little one is the like the Holy Child, sent to a screwed up horrific world. We may ask God what the hell is he thinking, sending a child to a deeply traumatized girl, to gestate for 9 months!?
I don't know. I have asked Him. He has his reasons.
All I know is sometimes healing comes in strange ways.
I remember watching a video about a girl in Africa, 13 years old, kidnapped, abused and impregnated by the LRA. She was rescued, gave birth to a little girl. She named her Grace. I wish I remembered the name of that documentary.
But I remember the face of that child-Saint smiling, holding her little Grace. Her eyes looking at us, over her little Grace's shoulder, through the screen into us. She spoke of forgiveness.
She must have even forgiven God.
