Reminders

Yesterday marked the 41st annual March for Life.  As usual, the good Lord gave us a chance at redemptive suffering, this year sending ridiculously cold weather.  For a few weeks, I had been promising friends, former classmates, and former colleagues that I would find them in DC.  And I awoke Wednesday morning with day two of a cold -- the stage where standing up made me dizzy.  I took a sick day against the frigid outdoors and curled up with a cup of herbal tea.

The Captain and I had planned on going to the March together but without a group -- a couple of free radicals, wandering in and out of the pro-life masses.  I had just resigned myself to not going and missing all those cool people when the Captain told me that he was planning on heading into work if I was staying in.

With friends as my motivation and the Captain as my excuse, I bundled into a many-layered ball of purple fluff, with a scarf up to the apples of my cheeks and hat and hood pulled over my eyebrows.  As it turned out, almost everyone at the March was bundled up in a similar fashion, or with sunglasses or ski goggles fighting the bright sun.  This, combined with my reluctance to remove my gloves to use my phone, made it difficult to find people.  I tried standing on a bench to peruse the sea of signs... which only made my head spin more.

To make a long story short, we found no one and had as near to a solitary March as two people can in the midst of several hundred thousand fellow protesters.  In the end, I found myself rather disappointed and caught myself wondering, Why did we bother to come?

Thankfully, I recognized and rebuked this attitude.  God was using our solitude as a reminder: the March for Life isn't about friends, or reunions, or who you know.  It isn't about finding former roommates or showing off DC.

It is about the fact that people are dying and our society has given it a legal and cultural stamp of approval.
And until that changes, I need to be my tiny part in letting this nation and this world know that abortion is evil.

And until that changes, I need to be my tiny part of a generation that will not be silent until life triumphs.

And until that changes, I need to offer my tiny bit of redemptive suffering, so that love can win.