By Dave Andrusko
As anyone who has read NRL News Today for more than a week knows, it doesn’t take much to inspire me to race to the keyboard. It’s amazing where any pro-lifer can find inspiration. It sometimes seems as if you need barely open your eyes to find signs that point the way.
In case you think otherwise, you don’t need great peripheral vision—the ability to detects objects and movement outside of what you’re looking at directly. Rather just a glance here and there is all that’s required to find still another wonderful way of understanding what it is we fight for.
True story. Sometime back, a friend and I were talking about the church she attends which is not far from where my wife and I live. Having been myself reared in a Lutheran Church, I took a peak at the church’s webpage.
The pastor’s page quoted an old story, author unknown, titled, “Coopxration” and then went to explain how that applies to every member of his congregation.
Well, the lesson applies just as well to every member of our Movement. Let’s see how.
The anonymous author of “Coopxration” tells us how he’d used an old typewriter that worked quite well except for one key. Whenever he hit “e,” he’d always get “x.”
Thus, the first paragraph reads
“This is a fairly old typxwritxr, but it works quitx wxll xxcxpt for onx of thx kxys. I’vx wishxd many timxs that it workxd pxrfxctly. It’s trux that thxrx arx forty-onx kxys that function wxll xnough, but just onx kxy not working makxs a diffxrxncx.”
The local pastor wisely commented
While each key of a keyboard is unique and individual, by itself it remains one letter. Only when used together with all the other keys will a word, a phrase, a sentence and paragraph communicate a message.
I draw one direct lesson from this for our Movement and another that comes when we take this story in a different direction.
First, every member of our grassroots army matters.
Every member’s labors act as a force multiplier, meaning our collective work is greater than the sum of the thousands and thousands of individual contributions. Working in unison we communicate a message of love, compassion, and a refusal to accept either/or answers to crisis pregnancies. We live by a commitment to both/and, not either/or.
But second, there are no “broken keys” in the human family. When we judge by age or level of dependency or degree of “perfection,” we place the vulnerable in great peril. We open the door to atrocities, such as abortion on demand and a willingness to treat abortion survivors as annoyances rather than as babies who survived a murderous gauntlet.
Like many of you, I move in a number of volunteer circles. I never, ever fail to be amazed how often volunteers assume their contribution is “no big deal.” But when multiplied by tens or hundreds or thousands or even millions of other good-hearted souls, the impact is incalculable.
“Volunteer power”–the selfless contributions of people just like the ones reading this post–explains why we can defeat the armies of death. They have a bounty of resources at their disposal and billionaires such as George Soros to fund their campaigns.
What do the babies have? You.
A final thought. Nothing, absolutely nothing, more clearly divides the membership of the pro- and anti-life forces than whether they are convinced that every single human life matters.
Pro-abortionists, to put it mildly, are incredulous at the idea that in a world of 8.2 billion people, any one individual life could possibly matters. That is why they remain infatuated with population control and are so casual about using coercion to accomplish their aims.
By contrast pro-lifers are driven, sustained, and motivated by the sure knowledge that were there 50 billion people, every last one would be of infinite significance.
Thank goodness for all that you do. Thank goodness that you know there are no broken keys in the human family.