May We Never Forget: Remembering 9-11

We lost the number of Americans that day that we lose every day in America. We watched with horror as executives who had gone to work that morning jumped out of buildings. As the staging area of a hotel between the Twin Towers collapsed, the lives of more than forty firefighters were lost. Brave Americans on a flight laid down their own lives to take down a plane headed toward the Capitol.

The corporate office where one of my sisters commuted was located there. She stayed in that hotel. She texted us to say that she was safe. She lost colleagues that day. We lost more than two thousand Americans that day.

That was a tragedy inflicted by enemies much like the Japanese in WWII. And they made clear that our way of life - including our economic and political system - were their targets. They declared war on us. "May we never forget" became the motto.

Twenty-five years later that same belief system has been elected into office of that same city. Those who would destroy our way of life are getting into office through the political system they intend to destroy. They are getting rich through the economic system they plan to collapse. 

But enough about them. Let's talk about us.

More Americans lose their lives every day than we lost on 911. They are not working in offices and jumping out of buildings. They are resting peacefully sucking their thumbs waiting to be born.

They can feel joy and pain. They have their whole lives ahead of them - their first love, their first kiss, and children of their own. They will try to get away from abortion instruments already in the first trimester. They have faces and personalities. They will want to be firefighters and executives working in an office building someday. They are the same people we would care about if they were older.

The number of people we grieved that day is the number of people we grieve every day. Maybe we couldn't stop 9/11 from happening. We can stop the 9/11 happening every day that is taking away from us the lives of our own children, the next generation of Americans, more than two thousand minds and hearts who would contribute accomplishments and dreams of their own.

For those women who have lost children through no fault of your own, my heart goes out to you. And for those women and men who have lost children because you chose to lose them - however much you knew or didn't know before making that decision, my heart goes out to you, too. Please don't hear this as condemnation. Hear this as an invitation.

Our children are not our enemy; they are our future. We need to stop assaulting them, abusing them, torturing and killing them. We need to start aspiring to adulthood ourselves where the pinnacle of maturity is evidenced not by pride and self-actualization but by love. A love marked by compassion, not a lust for sex.

Women have a right to bodily autonomy. No one has a right to a woman's body without her consent. The time for her decision making is when she chooses to engage in activity that she knows can lead to pregnancy. If it is that important that she not be pregnant, it is that important that she not engage in activity known to cause pregnancy. Most abortions are preventable by women exerting their own bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom before they choose reproductive activity.

Statistics tell us that 9 out of 10 women paying for the murder of their children are single, so they shouldn't be having sex in the first place. The Bible calls fornication and adultery sin. It's among those sins we are to repent and turn away from when we follow Christ. Yet more than 50% of women getting abortions are churchgoers.

Birth control is not the answer. Self-control is. More than 50% of women paying to end their pregnancies were using birth control at the time they got pregnant.

Despite what our public schools teach children, we are not animals distinguishable only by an opposable thumb. We do not have to be slaves to our hormones. We are to overcome lust. Our minds can decide on the actions we will take based on the consequences we want and the moral of our character.

Killing children is unnecessary. It's every bit as tragic as the one day in our history when our enemies rammed planes into our symbols of economic prosperity and political autonomy. Every day, we participate with the enemy of our souls to destroy the lives of more than two thousand children and inflict pain to their mothers because we allow abortion to remain legal.

Like those firefighters, we are called to rush into the flames and the rubble. From basic biology textbooks to medical schools and seminaries, we need to retrain our thinking and reframe our words.

We can offer services through pregnancy centers so that every woman has the opportunity and resources necessary to be a mother. We can stand on sidewalks to pray and offer women options other than the death camps. We can speak from pulpits the truth from Scripture and God's call to us to rescue those being dragged to slaughter. And we can change the law.

We can end this massive tragedy. We do it through our vote for those who will take a stand on behalf of our youngest and most vulnerable children in the laws they put forward. And we do it when we collect signatures to get an initiative onto the ballot to change our state Constitution.

If everyone who talks about how bad abortion is would put feet to their words, this would be over yesterday. Until then, we keep growing momentum. Those who have worked before cannot give up and can invite others to care as much about the least of these as we care about the brilliant minds of those whose lives we lost that fateful day on 9/11/2001.

Alan Jackson - Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning) (Live / Audio)