Two thoughts and a quote for today. First, the good news. Connie Betz, one of our dedicated sidewalk counselors was at the Planned Parenthood last Saturday morning and flagged down a Hispanic couple. She was able to use our Spanish counseling pamphlets to communicate as they spoke almost no English at all. She spoke with them in the Dominick’s parking lot for a while before they went into PP. After about 20-30 minutes, they came back out and, with what English they had, told Connie that they did not have the abortion and were not going to! Connie said their demeanor was completely changed after they left. They were noticeably upset before going in and on the way out were beaming with joy. Praise God who can overcome any obstacle, including language barriers, to save His little ones!
The Weight of Eternal Destiny
On a not unrelated note, a thought about how we deal with others. Whether we are trying to convince an abortion-bound mother to choose life, talking to our friends, contending for the truth on a blog, or ordering dinner at a restaurant, we must remember the inherent dignity of the person we are talking to. Everyone we talk to is created in the image of God and if we understood the depth of what that meant, we would be more careful with our words. This quote from C.S. Lewis’s excellent essay The Weight of Glory, which I would strongly encourage you to read in its entirety, says it much better than I could. Let’s consider this in the way we deal with one another, both online and in real life.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
