By Judie Brown
The essence of working to defend those who cannot defend themselves is our faith. Each person who toils in this vineyard relies on the power of God, even though at times we do not experience His peace but rather the frustrations of our human condition. The truth is, without His grace we could not sprinkle His garden with good works and would instead be sowers of weeds.
If this sounds a bit far-fetched to you, look at the headlines on any given day.
The jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial is deadlocked. One wonders how that can be when the woman killed her three children in cold blood! We are left speechless and praying for justice in this case.
In another disturbing headline, pop star Olivia Rodrigo raised $20 million to benefit the abortion cartel, specifically Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and National Women’s Law Center, “an organization that ‘defends’ the ‘freedoms’ of the LGBT community through ‘culture change.’”
On the matter of the abortion pill, the US Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, led by Senator Bill Cassidy, published a report entitled “Mifepristone without Guardrails: An Investigation into How Chemical Abortion Drug Makers Are Putting Mothers and Babies at Risk.” This report “found that around 8,200 abortion pill prescribers have been certified so far.” Most of these are not physicians but pharmacies and various types of clinicians. This could well be defined as abortion at any cost, as long as the result is more dead babies.
Incredibly, the culture of death is in full swing and growing every day.
This is why it is so important for us to be girded in the Truth—in Christ. When Saint Paul was preparing to leave the Colossians, he told them:
For even if I am absent in the flesh, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing as I observe your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. So, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in Him, rooted in Him and built upon Him and established in the faith as you were taught, bounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one captivate you with an empty, seductive philosophy according to human tradition, according to the elemental powers of the world and not according to Christ.
These words provided assurance to his fellow Christians during that time, and they continue to provide each of us with the salve of peace, even during times of great trial. When all else fails, we are assured that Christ will never depart from us and that He loves us more in our infirmities than we could ever imagine.
We are never so empty as when we forget that He is the source of our hope, life, and love. This is vitally important to those of us who struggle against the culture of death, and it’s why reflections on the crucified Christ bring us closer to Him, especially in our hours of need.
Dominican A. G. Sertillanges wrote in What Jesus Saw from the Cross:
We may understand how the cross can have been called a “bed of terror,” and how the contemplation of Jesus suffering this torment has made the mystics cry out with pity. Love is ingenious in constructing its scenes; and the lover reproduces with tormenting fidelity every spasm of his suffering beloved. It was surely a mystic who inserted in the hymn Vexilla Regis [Soldiers of the King] those supplications to the cross which show how clearly the essential feature of that torture has been understood. . . . “Bend thy branches, mighty tree, relax the body strained upon thee; be thy natural: rigour softened, that the members of the sovereign King may rest more lightly on thy wood!” These words are the protest of a tender heart; they are the answer to the plaint of the Crucified spoken through the mouth of the prophet: “I am poured out like water and all my bones are scattered . . . for many dogs have encompassed me . . . they have dug my hands and feet. They have numbered all my bones.”
May we never lose sight of the love Christ has for His children, in every hour and in every circumstance. And may we never forget that this phrase is true for each of us: Jesus died for me!