She’ll Never Be

She’ll never be an artist, cradling a brush in once-chubby fingers grown slender and strong as she’s honed her craft.

She’ll never be a writer, weaving worlds with her words, capturing the everyday and transforming it into splashes of glory upon the page.

She’ll never be a doctor, wielding the power of life and death in her hands, carrying healing and hope into each new birthing room and bedside vigil.

She’ll never be a gardener, harvesting her yield and tilling soil to begin anew, crumbling clods of earth between callused yet tender fingers.

She’ll never be a mama, caressing sleep-flushed cheeks, kissing away bruises and heartaches, snuggling her babies close before bravely choking back tears and launching her brood from her nest.

For all the things she might’ve been — countless sacred possibilities — have been ripped away, stolen by the very voices who boast so loudly about others’ “rights” and “choices.”

Don’t you see? 

We’ve robbed her of becoming …

WE have — “we, the people” — who have too long allowed this cancer to churn at our core, swallowing up the lives of the next generation, and the souls of this one.

We have turned our backs, hardened our hearts, stopped up our ears before the soundless, strangling cry of the unborn. Hundreds, thousands, millions … the relentless count ticks on like the absence of heartbeats: eerily silent, forever stilled.

Their blood is on our hands, the blood of the discarded, the disregarded, the destroyed. We have all been complicit in their deaths. Despite our virulent arguments, “one nation, under God” we remain: one nation, alike under His judgment.

But there is still hope …

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength,” so says the sovereign Lord in Isaiah 30:15. But let us not be like the wayward nation of Israel, to whom this promise was originally addressed, for He goes on to say, “… but you would have none of it.”

No, let us stare our sin head-on and be chastened by its immensity. Let us weep at the stark reality of this immeasurable loss. And let us, as one nation, bow our heads and hearts before the holy God above, begging His forgiveness for our part in this culture of death. 

We may not have wielded the knife. We may not have entered the clinic, or convinced someone else to. Yet with our silence, we have ensured hers.

She,  who we considered an inconvenience, a danger, a regret. She — a living, breathing, wonder-woven child of God — who we conveniently labeled a cluster of cells, dismissed as a nonentity, rejected as a hindrance best hushed up and forgotten.

She’ll never be a dancer — child of starry eyes and springing curls — twirling through the twilight haze in quest of fireflies just beyond her fingertips …

… as long as we refuse to see her as the little girl she would have been, she will never be.