A little after 2:00 a.m. on December 2, Joe and I awoke to the sound of breaking glass. We went downstairs to see what had happened, but everything looked okay. We decided it must have been something outside, so we went back to bed.
Later in the morning, as we were heading to 7:30 Mass, we discovered a chunk of asphalt amidst broken glass on the floor in both the dining room and living room. An envelope was attached to one of the missiles, addressed to Joe Scheidler. The note inside began: “We are crazy, feminist bitches . . .” Clearly it was time to call the police.
A few hours after the police report had been made, I recalled that the Illinois Choice Action Team had held a seminar nearby the evening before to train clinic escorts for the Albany abortuary near the League office, where we regularly pray and counsel. This seemed like a suspicious coincidence, but the police did not think it worth investigating.
A brick through your window is a pretty small price to pay for your beliefs. But there’s no guarantee that that’s where it stops. We are blessed so many people pray for us regularly, and many pro-life friends called to assure us of their prayers after the attack on our home. That’s why we aren’t especially unnerved by this act of vandalism.
In fact, just days afterwards, we had a call from Gilkey Windows. Mike Gilkey is passionately pro-life and as soon as he heard about the vandalism, he wanted to show his solidarity with us personally and with the pro-life movement that the vandals were lashing out against. He offered to replace not only the broken windows, but all the windows in both rooms—an unbelievably generous gift. If we ever had any doubts about taking risks for the sake of life, Mike Gilkey’s generosity sure wiped them away. The new windows are now installed and we love them. I would wholeheartedly recommend that if you need new windows, call Gilkey—great windows from a great pro-life company.
No doubt our vandals hoped that their middle-of-the-night attack would scare us into abandoning our commitment to the pro-life cause. That will never happen. We will continue the fight for life that has defined our past thirty-eight years.
We invite you to join us in praying for the post-abortive women who paid us a visit that December night. It may be that no one else is praying for them, and this whole incident is just God’s way of getting us to take on the task.
