"from the womb to the tomb"

I am pro-life - as I've heard it said, "from the womb, to the tomb."

We live in a world that, by and large, doesn't value human life - that much is glaringly obvious. We allow the murder of the unborn in the name of "healthcare," we support the extermination of the elderly and term it the "right to die," we don't care for those who are ill, and we treat those around us like crap.

Basically, if a human life isn't "useful" to us in some supposedly tangible way, we can throw that person away. If they're "unplanned," gravely ill, or elderly, poor, in any way unable to care for themselves, or if we can find some arbitrary reason to dislike them, we can somehow absolve ourselves of the obligation to protect them, defend their human dignity, take care of them, love them. We see people who are in desperate need of help, or who are falling into despair and simply need someone to help them get their hope back, and we allow ourselves to say, "Oh, someone else will take care of them."

But if not us, then who?

No, it's not easy. But anyone who has ever truly loved knows that love is not easy. And God does not ask us to only do easy things. He asks us to do things that are difficult - to forgive, to love, to take care of those in need of our help - at any age, and for any reason. The God-given dignity of the human person is not something we can put in a box, to be brought out whenever it suits us, only for the "right" kind of people.

Yet we live in a secularist culture that does not value God - and if it does not value God, how can it value the God-given dignity of the human person? The short answer is that it can't. When we devalue God, devaluing human life is never far behind, whether it's devaluing of life in: the unplanned pregnancy, the terminally ill cancer patient, the elderly, immigrants, the mentally ill, the poor, the persecuted -- all those whom Christ called "the least of these." We've seen it in history, over and over again, from Communist Russia to Nazi Germany to Cambodia to Bosnia to Africa to our own neighborhoods, and of course, with abortion. Genocide. Murder.

God loves all of his children - as we recall this week, to the point of death itself. Therein is our example, which offers us an incredible challenge - to love all others as God has loved us.

+peace, and all good!!