Thursday, Apr. 15, 2004 - 7:20 a.m.

Is it any wonder?

I was at the campus library earlier this week completing some my assignments that I cannot do on the computer at home, when I opened the Vertical File with posters in it. To my great shock, there were the pictures that took me out of my complacency years ago. Aborted babies stared up at me from plastic lined pails, tiny heads, arms, legs and other body parts lay there in red gore pictured side by side with a little one cradled in the palm of the doctor who fought to save her and succeeded, two tiny feet no bigger than the head of a thumbtack were displayed between the fingers of another doctor, a tiny human being suspended in a clear sac as big as a quail egg. The sac glistened like a giant tear drop, and it reminded me of You, Who see every one of these little innocent ones.

The scales fell from my eyes when I saw those pictures years ago. I no longer sit silently by when the topic is mentioned. I am not a marcher or a picketer, but I can speak in defense of them. What is the solution? I am not wise enough to lay one out, but I know You are and already have the final solution laid out. Is there any turning back for our land? I doubt it.

At another library the other day, I was searching for books to read that didn't carry the danger of the more recent ones put into the adult stacks. I was in the Jr. High section where there seemed to be lots with topics that interested me, not merely boy meets girl. I opened a science fiction along the lines of going back in time to the middle ages and started scanning it, and, before I knew it, was in the middle of a steamy casual sex scene. I quietly put it back on the shelves. I had already learned it was fruitless to show it to a librarian. This is our culture and change can only come one person at a time, from the inside out.

That change came to me. I started thinking about the progression of the world since I was the age that section of books was aimed for. I remember the turned down pages, and the furtive group readings in my school of a dog-eared copy of Grace Metalious' Peyton Place. In retrospect, that seems only slightly tawdry in the light of what I saw in the book last week. No wonder we can kill babies by the millions with no compunction, no wonder we can watch as men 'marry' men, and women 'marry' women. We've had a long rope and we are hanging ourselves very well, and in a way, we who do not 'do such things' carry as much responsibility as the doers do. Help us, Father.

EE's devotional

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