Do You Ever Worry? -- A Story From the Sidewalks

Several weeks ago a sweet lady came up to me at church. She always rejoices in the number of saves for the week and comes to encourage me in the work on the sidewalks. She also had a question: "Do you ever worry when you're talking to these moms that the environment that the baby will be born into is going to be very bad? I mean, I would just think about the possible abuse and bad situations this baby is being born into."

To put it mildly, "Yes."

I think about that all the time. There is no way that you can sit with someone for 2 hours and hear all the reasons why they can't have this baby and not really feel in your human heart that they're right - they can't have this baby. It's too hard. It's too dangerous. It's too sad. Yes. I worry about it all the time. But on the sidewalks God often gives you real-life stories to show you that He is God and you are not.

Several months ago L came to the mill and didn't even make it into the parking lot before deciding to come on the mobile ultrasound unit with me. The counseling session was tense (at least for me) for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest concerns was that this was a high-risk pregnancy to begin with for health reasons, not to mention all of the environmental difficulties. The whole time I'm thinking, "I completely understand why she feels like she can't do this." But then she had the free ultrasound that we offer and she just melted. She was so in love with her baby and couldn't get over how "Lil Peanut" was so perfectly formed and so safe inside of her. It was at that moment - not because of anything I had said, just because of what she saw that God had made - that I knew she had made a choice for life.

Ever since that day, she and I have been in touch. She texts me the sweetest things. Just tonight she replied to one of my texts and said, "Love you more."

In the middle of November she texted me to tell me that she had lost the baby. She was nearly 20 weeks along. Just another 4 days or so and that would be termed a still birth. We talked and cried.

A few weeks later I hadn't heard from her in awhile and I texted to make sure she was doing ok. She called me a little later and said, "I just wanted to tell you something. I didn't really know how to tell you in a text but when you texted me earlier I was standing in the bathroom with a handfull of pills just thinking that I could end all this pain. At that moment my daughter was calling for me to help her with something and when I went into the other room I saw my phone vibrating. It was your text. You saved my life and I just stood there and said, 'God, you are good.'"

That is my answer to "do I ever worry about what these babies will be born into?" Yes. You cannot go to the sidewalks without thinking about what a life in this world could mean. But people don't make life. God does. God opened the womb. God spoke, and there was. And God can take it away. God gave L the gift of life for a very short time and then God took it, and that too can be a gift. If L had never been pregnant and had never come to the mill then we wouldn't be friends right now, and no one would have texted and saved her life that day in December. Of course, God saved her life and He didn't need me to do it, but He chose to use me. He is doing much greater things than we can see and so we have to trust Him. We have to let God be God. We have to go to the sidewalks and say, "I don't have all the answers to all of your questions, but I know a God who does. His name is Jesus and He will leave you in awe at what He can do in a life that trusts that what He has said is always and only for good."