I stood in my office with the door closed, holding my phone tightly. Staring out the window at the people walking the streets several stories below me, I wondered how many of them had almost been aborted…or survived an abortion…or even knew that one of their parents never wanted them to be born. I thought about my life and everything I had done. I spun through the Rolodex of memories in my brain: the good, the bad, and the ugly. My beautiful childhood memories, specific choices I made and the consequences that followed, the friends I have, the job I love, the family that I miss because I live so far from them. None of it would exist if my relative had never been born. That thought hit me hard.
The person on the other end of the line said to me, "You know you wouldn't be here if they had been aborted." "I know," I responded, "That's a crazy thought." My day started out totally normal until I received the phone call that made my world stop for just one second. Hearing the word "abortion" associated with one of my closest relatives completely personalized the whole abortion debate for me. While the news hit me hard suddenly, I actually didn't think too much about it. I went about my day like nothing had changed.
You'll notice in the title of this article I said: "could have been aborted." What I mean by "could have been" is that my relative wasn't wanted by one of their parents. But God had other plans. My relative was carried to full term, born a healthy baby, and has lived a full and successful life. That's the thing about abortion: Humans think they know what's best, we think we have control, but God has other plans…perfect plans that humans don't have the ability to meddle with.
When I got back to my apartment that night, I thought about the phone call that took place earlier that day. The phone call I wasn't expecting and certainly had no way of foreseeing. It changed my thinking in ways I didn't realize at first. I started appreciating all the little things. It sounds cheesy, but it's true. Everything I did seemed special. Every move I made suddenly had purpose and meaning. I think it's because I now knew that all of this would not have been if one of my relative's parents hadn't chosen life. If both of them wanted to get rid of the baby, my relative never would have seen the light of day.
All of this came to a head for me when I attended a pre-screening of Unplanned. Go see that movie. It is well worth your time and money. During one of the abortion scenes, all I could think was: "This could have happened to my relative." But God had other plans; plans that cannot be thwarted because He is God and we are not. He knows what's best and we do not. Receiving the news about my relative wasn't easy to hear or process, but it only reinforced God's goodness in my life.
