At our inaugural Assurance Board Meeting in January, I asked our board to spend some time reflecting around the question “Why are you for (pro) life?” Everyone involved at Assurance comes to this organization with a why but I think it is important to always be going back to that question as often as we can. Given our everchanging culture and the numerous challenges and questions that surround how to choose and support the life of the unborn, it is fundamental that we regularly think through why we even hold the position that we do. When we “start with why” and that why is properly aligned with Truth, everything that is a how and a what follows suit.
I provided five different areas where, theologically, philosophically, and practically speaking, pro-life work—from macro-cultural initiatives to client base pregnancy resource center work—finds a fitting and expressive foundation. Over the next several weeks, I’ll post a bit about these areas and how they merge in and out of one another. These areas are creation (what are we?), stewardship (how do we care for the world?), anthropology (what is humanity?), ethics (how should we live?), and restoration (what is everything pointing to?). My hope is that even while we work out our own personal “whys” that collectively we can point to the “whys” that rely not merely on experience but on the same Truth we are all emboldened to.
One thing that is important to say at the forefront of this engagement is simply this: how one sees the world impacts how one lives in and makes choices in the world. We call this simply a “worldview”, which can be compared to a lens of glasses through which we either see things with greater or lesser accuracy. All of us have blurry glasses to some extent. As Paul reminds us, we “see through a glass darkly” (1 Cor 13.12). But at the same time, the renewal of our mind (Rom 12.2) allows us to test all things (Col 2.8) in accordance with the question of ‘human knowledge’ versus ‘revealed knowledge.’ The fundamental question we need to ask is not what does culture say about the life of the unborn but what does God say about the life of the unborn?
One of our jobs at Assurance is to walk with people to a point where they recognize the truth of the sacred life that is inside of them. As C.S. Lewis argues in his Mere Christianity, truth is real and objective even if it can sometimes appear muddy with situations, complex with scenarios, and with emotional and pragmatic difficulty. No one here doubts—and many of our staff, volunteers, and advocates know via experience—the very real and very significant difficulties of unplanned pregnancy. Yet the truth remains as fixed as the relevancy of the God-eyed worldview that we must all seek to emulate in our lives. Our lives should rotate on the axis of Truth.
At the end of this short series, I’ll share a little bit about my personal why and throughout I’ll share some brief snippets of client stories. As became clear during our board meeting, our whys are often a merger of a worldview developed through contemplation and worldview developed through experience. So, while I hope to help undergird a little bit of the why as it connects to the various aspects of society—biology, ethics, responsibility, etc.—I also hope you’ll keep in mind that the “why” of life is most fundamentally a personal experience. Our hope, our prayer, and our plea is not that our clients become convinced of truth intellectually as much as they become infused with the experience of the Truth personally (Jn 14.6). And as I said in the beginning, if this happens all else will follow suit!
