“The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
– John 10:10

The idea of being pro-life has become wrapped up in a debate of abortion, but I’ve always felt that being pro-life was the ultimate result of being a follower of Christ.

What is pro-life anyway?

Towards the end of the trip, the group split up and walked to houses to hand out bags of food and to pray with members of the household. Cecil, Chad, Emily, and I went on one last food donation to a family that lived near the church. During his prayer for the young mother, a woman with many kids and little else, Cecil said many good things which I can’t remember now.

And then, at the end of the prayer, he said “thank you, Jesus, for her life.”

I would not be surprised to hear Christians who consider themselves pro-life to also find themselves in discussion on the excessive numbers of children and young mothers and mouths to feed. With compassion and love, we might find ourselves suggesting ways to efficiently bring the excess of birth into a more financially stable realm. I found myself participating in a discussion on birth control and such issues one night.

“Do they have access to birth control?” one team member asked. It was a valid question, since the talk leading up to it was on how a married couple from the community we were working in did not want any more children, leaving us wondering exactly how that would be accomplished realistically. They are a very loving family, and it is not as if any of us were even considering anything that would remotely suggest anything that wasn’t pro-life.

But again, what is pro-life? Is preventing a life, even if it saves a child from an existence in misery and poverty, pro-life?

It seems to be a larger concept than just an interpretation of abortion or of controlling the number of lives brought into a world in which I, a Westerner with a limited understanding of the storehouses and blessings and plans of God, deem a nuisance at best and irresponsible at worst.

I suppose at some point, if this were a discussion with live people in real time in which I didn’t have the floor like I do here in this post, the talk might cut me off before I could get to the end and could veer off onto tangents of unwed mothers, women having children to trap men, families with children with different fathers, families already stretched to their limits and not able to support more mouths to feed, the need for education on reproduction and responsibility and all the things we call our obsessive need to control the size of our own families for convenience sake — it could easily go that way. That, however, is exactly that: tangential.

This is not that discussion.

This is, instead, about trying to understand what it is to truly be pro-life, to be in support and love and understanding of the value of all life free of judgment and logic. It is about seeing value in life beyond the limits of financial feasibility, beyond the limits of productiveness, beyond the limits of my definition of what is a “good” life, and what kind of life should be allowed to grow dim and die or to never even start out of “compassion’s” sake.

“Thank you, Jesus, for her life.”

“Thank you, Jesus, for this life.”
“Thank you, Jesus, for my life.”
“Thank you, Jesus, for your life.”

So Jesus has come that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

Abundant life.

I used to think of that in terms of existing life being lived to the fullest, but I wonder if it doesn’t also have another meaning: that life itself should be in abundance.

Jesus is the life. Not a life, but the life. The law of the spirit of life in Jesus that frees me from sin and death.

He gives life to our mortal bodies, it says in Romans 8:11, and so I start to see that being pro-life is all-encompassing, something that completely changes how I view everything: that a view of life should extend far beyond the mortality and reality of this cursed earth. That only considering how a life will start, exist, and wane as a mortal is not a view of life at all. That I must understand a love of His life, the giver of all life, not stopped or started by a pill or a decision or an accountant’s view of how things ought to balance out when it comes time to feed and clothe.

Do I thank Jesus for the lives that seem unnecessary or burdensome? Do I inwardly groan and judge when I hear another baby has been born to a woman who can’t support it, or do I give praise for new life? Do I thank Jesus for the possibility of more life or do I think of logical ways to curb it so that things are more manageable according to my own understanding of the laws of human limitation?

So I was standing there, my hands at my side, praying along with Cecil, hearing him simply thank Jesus for her life while not dwelling on the apparent unfair trappings of it, realizing that I hadn’t been thanking God for such lives, but rather focusing my spiritual energy on the fruitless debate of why my life seemed better and how God could be so unfair and if it wouldn’t be better if He’d show some mercy and stop bringing children into this kind of world.

Pro-life is something I’ve not yet come in to, I now understand.