“Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them” (Matthew 6:25(b)-26(a)). What a direct and powerful introduction for us. Remove fear and replace it with faith that the God who created us is a God who knows how to take care of us in our daily needs. This is particularly important for us as believers. It is also a message to bring to a needy, broken world.
A man once came to see me and he had nine children. I knew he had nine children because he brought all nine of them. He was Cambodian. He and his wife walked in with all their nine kids and he said, “My oldest is 15 and now my wife tells me that she is 15 weeks pregnant. There is no way I can feed 10 children. She has got to have an abortion.” My sense is that this is a pretty good man. And to be honest with you, I started to think if I was in his situation, I would have panicked somewhere around five or six children. He has already got nine children! My immediate assessment is that this is a good man who is frightened. He does not know God or the Bible. He does not have many resources here in the United States either.
I looked over to his wife and she was heavily burdened. She could not speak English. She just looked like she had a deep, deep weight upon her. So we sat down together and I listened to all of their situations. He said, “I just can not afford ten children.” And I thought to myself, how am I gonna help him see the truth? It is not about nine or ten, it is about whether he can believe that God can and will help him.
Finally, I said, “Okay, I think I know the solution to your problem. You say that you can’t afford ten children.” He said, “That’s right.” I replied with, “Well, I have your solution. You should terminate the 15 year old.” He looked at me a little bit surprised and he said, “Well, I can’t do that.” I just sat there and waited for a response. He turned to his wife and translated my advice to her, and we all sat there looking at each other waiting for the advice to sink in.
He then turned to me and said, “No, I can’t do that. You just can’t kill your children to save money.” This was the opportunity I was waiting for and I replied to him, “Well, that’s true. But you have ten children and you are only here now discussing with me which child you want to destroy in order to save the most money. I am just trying to be helpful.” In this light and humorous way, I was really trying to help him see the obvious fact that his unborn child, like his 15 year old, was human.He got it very quickly. He turned back to his wife and said, “We can’t have an abortion. There is no difference. We can’t kill our children.” She turned to me and the tears just began to roll down her face. I said to myself at that moment, “Don’t ever forget this woman.”
When you save a baby, you are saving women and their sense of motherhood. This was a woman who came to America to start a whole new life and had laid down her life in order for her children to obtain a better life. An abortion would have destroyed her. It would have killed the baby, obviously, and utterly destroyed their marriage. After this abortion had been averted, I was able to offer them some practical assistance.
A church had collected some baby diapers at a diaper drive and I said, “Look, this is just a sign that God knows how to help you. A few things today, a few things tomorrow. Every day God will begin to show you how he can provide. We, the Church of Jesus Christ, are willing to help you find God’s provision for your lives.”
That baby lived, and I never forgot that story. It is a situation where we were able to replace fear and turning to the wrong person for salvation with faith that if God knows how to take care of the birds, he knows how to take care of us because we are more valuable than birds. This is the testimony that we get to offer in this world. I am a living testimony to the fact that these situations provide us with the opportunity to see people cross from death over to life.