I think I was somewhat unwittingly drafted into the pro-life movement. Not unwillingly. Just unwittingly.

I grew up in a Lutheran Christian household. My parents both agreed they were pro-life. I remember my dad saying a few disparaging things about Roe v. Wade when I was a kid. I would argue they were not passionately pro-life, but they were clear, clear enough for me to notice.

I didn’t rebel against the position. I went off to college at Concordia University Wisconsin nominally “pro-life.” My life experience now teaches me that what that means is that I was really only “anti-abortion.” That was what it meant for me to be “pro-life.” I am not denying that to be pro-life means to be anti-abortion. As the years went by, I came to appreciate that the term, however, means a whole lot more.

Unwittingly, God had conscripted me into a position on life that is much larger than I realized when, during spring break of my Freshman year, I applied to become an employee at Bethesda Lutheran Home in Watertown. I applied as a Residential Aide, one who attended most closely to the daily lives of the residents. Bethesda is widely recognized as a ministry to severely and profoundly cognitively disabled people. I had volunteered there in my Jr. High and High School years. God was probably already whittling away at my sense of what it meant to be pro-life even then. But now I would be teaching people to do basic life skills in order for them to move up to group home living: tying shoes, shaving, dressing, basic health and cleanliness disciplines, schedule maintenance. I think I always loved it. A bad day at Bethesda could be really awful. But a good day was great…and the good days far outnumbered the bad days. I was learning that I was enjoying the chance to work with people. I was learning from them as much as they were probably learning from me. With pride, I like to say that “I am a graduate of Bethesda Lutheran Home.”

These dear people still hold a special place in my heart. Imagine, if you will, working with such marvelous people and then learning, after I became a pastor, that doctors were encouraging mothers to have abortions if there was even a risk that their child might be born with Down Syndrome. The first time I heard this, I must confess I was enraged. I had come to see the people with Down that I had served as tremendous gifts of God. They were so precious to me. It was as if someone had threatened to take away my most precious asset, my wife, my children, my reputation. This level of professional callousness was (and still is) offensive to me.

All life is precious. I cannot for the life of me find it in my heart to view any handicap, any disability, any limiting factor as diminishing one iota from the value of human life. We are not the sum of our strengths or weaknesses. We are people, which means we will always be of immense value to one another. When one person dies, we are always the poorer for it. Darwin, in his infinite wisdom, advised that the handicapped be put to death for the sake of evolution. Do you get it? We live in a culture of death. It is all around us. And it is all justified in the name of progress or evolution

This death-culture is not evolution. It is devolution. It is devilish. But this thinking even invades the nominally pro-life Christian who hasn’t learned yet that to be pro-life is a much larger thing than being anti-abortion.

Case in point: Consider these sorts of statements.

“I’m stopping at two kids. Three will be the death of me.”

“Children are so expensive.”

“We need to build a wall to keep people out.”

“Why should we always be the ones to protect the helpless?” [Witness nearly half a million dead in Aleppo largely thanks to American inaction].

“I love my husband, but if he ever cheats on me he’s gone!”

“I’d rather commit suicide than go through this terminal illness.”

Some of these thoughts are so common that I’ve heard Christians express them, many times over.

God stretched my mind and broadened my horizons by conscripting me so unwittingly into life ministries. He stretched it even further by giving me five biological children, an adopted sixth child, and currently three sisters for whom we are providing foster care. People ask how we do it. Even that question strikes me as lacking a richly pro-life attitude. As long as we have life and breath, we are here for each other.

How far are you willing to be stretched? Are you ready to be pro-life? The world and its death-culture needs something better, from me, from you, from all who call themselves Christians.

I have never attended the pro-life march in D.C., but have always wanted to. When it happens soon, I will be reassessing my commitment to God’s gift of life. I pray you will too.

Lord, grant us all a deepened appreciation of the precious value of life!