My Mother Chose Life

By Contributing Writer, Tina Entz

I watch the sun shine through her auburn hair as she tips back her head in laughter.  She is six now.  Can it really be that something so life changing happened six years ago already?  One evening I was rocking a sweet little one to sleep and the very next morning I was on my death-bed.  The Lord preserved my life and the road of witnessing Him protecting the  life within me, against all odds, began.

Though I did not understand the Lord’s plan or reasons at the time, I cannot imagine my life without her fiery perseverance and precious dimples to melt away my heart.  I cannot take my eyes off of her.  As I watch her, I remember.  I remember God’s faithfulness.  I remember His mercies.  I remember how He carried me and my unborn child.

The following words are not my own, they are my mother’s.  It is her story.  And mine.  It is about a choice she made almost 35 years ago now, and my similar choice 6 years ago.  And the beauty that has followed.

 

 Reasonable Recourse?

I watched from a distance as my daughter raised her hand and gently pushed her sandy blonde hair from her face.  For twenty-seven of her nearly thirty years I had watched her special way of doing this.  She possessed such gentleness even as early as the age of three and her eyes always sparkled with life that drew many to her.

Hers was a life the world had deemed unworthy and would have brought to an abrupt end through abortion, had they been allowed. 

She reached down to lift the youngest of her six children, another child the world deemed unworthy to live.  As they stood there hugging with the sunlight on their hair, my thoughts drifted to the days of God’s intervention on their behalf.

With a resolute look of doom on her face, the doctor led me into her office to give me the news.  Judging by her demeanor, I thought she was about to tell me I had only weeks to live.  All in one breath she stated my “condition” as well as, according to her, the only reasonable recourse, “You’re pregnant.  I have already made the necessary calls to arrange for an abortion.”  I was just barely sixteen.

I stared at her for a moment with a grin on my face as I absorbed her first words.  Then, as I realized what she was suggesting as “treatment” for my “condition,” I told her with all the courage I could muster up that I could never do such a thing.  In response to what she felt was an extremely immature and selfish decision on my part, she slammed her desk with the palm of her hand for emphasis and gritted her teeth.

“This is NOT a doll you are carrying!  This is a baby, a REAL baby!  You have no business being a parent at your age!” 

She continued ranting as I stood up and backed out of the room frightened that she might somehow be capable of forcing me to kill my child.

As my pregnancy progressed, I continued to be verbally assaulted by those who felt murdering my child was the only “unselfish” option I had.  How strange it all was to me.  Sometimes, I found myself hurting deeply for those who kept pressuring me to change my mind and I prayed for them.  I didn’t engage in arguments regarding this life God was forming inside of my body because I knew I was right.  I deeply Loved my child and my arms ached to hold her.  I spent many nights standing by the empty crib longing for her birth.  I was poor, but I knew God would provide.  Just one week following my seventeenth birthday, she was born.

Twenty-seven years later, my daughter, the mother of five, became deathly ill following a bite by a brown recluse spider.  Just as we all thought the end had come, the Lord showed us again that He is Sovereign over life and it was not yet her time.  Soon thereafter, she realized that she was again pregnant and the hand of darkness made another grab at God’s creation.  Again, that hand was thwarted.  There were those who thought carrying this child was foolish, as she was still a long ways away from full recovery, but she went on in faith knowing the Creator of life could be fully trusted.

The laughter of my grandchildren brought me back to the moment.  I again enjoyed my view from a distance as my daughter and her six children played in the grass.  Such wonderful blessings I’d been given!

A car moving up the driveway sent the children into excited shrills of, “Daddy’s home!  Daddy’s home!” while they and my daughter ran to greet him.  I watched contentedly as they wrapped around one another and chattered excitedly.  My daughter turned and looked at me with that beautiful smile and the telling glow of her seventh child on her face.

I ponder these and many other moments and shudder to think what the hand of darkness would have blotted out had it the power to do so.  My heart weeps as I consider the millions upon which that hand of darkness has closed as our world errantly follows “My will be done.”

I pray with tears of compassion for those who have had abortions, as this is truly a wound to the soul healed only by repentance and the salve of God’s blessed forgiveness.  I pray also that the world would see that each life is a creation of God from conception.  My family is but one shining example of God’s glorious power.

Related posts: