Choices

Here is something I read on Facebook.

Choices

by Abby Johnson: ProWoman, ProChild, ProLife

Everyone has been talking about Michelle Williams after the Golden Globes. I said a couple things on Twitter, but honestly have been trying to get my thoughts together. This is really a very small piece of my entire thought.

Just a decade ago, I would have been standing and cheering at her speech. But these days, I listen to her words and they feel so vapid…so shallow. But I know she means what she says. She stood before a crowd of people and proudly proclaimed her “choice” and how that “choice” had made way for her career. She traded a child, a “choice,” for a small golden statue that will sit on a shelf with her other statues that all ultimately mean nothing.

And as her words were ringing hollow in my ears, they were heavy in my heart. I had traded much for something similar. It wasn’t a golden statue, but a wooden plaque that I had once held so dear. An award. I had worked hard for it and, yes, I had sacrificed so much to receive it…a healthy marriage, two children who I chose to kill by abortion, the innate call to motherhood, my morality, my femininity, my faith…so much had been traded and compromised.

Yet here I stand today…a mother to 8 living children, an educated woman on the verge of receiving her doctorate, married to an amazing man, strong, healed, confident, and uncompromisingly pro-life.

I realize now how much of what I believed was a lie. But it really felt SO profound at the time. It was a “man’s world,” and I was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to work like a man. If it meant trading in motherhood for a 60 hour work week, then so be it. If it meant stifling who God had intended me to be as a woman, then it would be done. If it meant giving away my femininity in order to subscribe to secular feminism…a worldview that taught me to hate men and to see them as thorn in the progression of women’s “equality”…then I was ready to make to trade. It really did seem so sacrificial. I was sacrificing for the “greater good of women!” I can’t even tell you what I thought the “greater good” looked like. But it had to look something like childless women, self serving women, women who saw men as an adversary.

While I was able to regain some of what I traded, two things would forever be lost…my two aborted children. Was this plaque worth their lives? No. Of course not. But it would take some time for me to realize the error of my negotiation. You can always be redeemed, as I have been, but you can’t always be free from your consequences.

So today, I pray for Michelle Williams. I pray that she one day re-negotiates her trades. And I pray that when she comes to grips with her consequences, if that day comes, that she falls apart right into place. I pray that she finds God in her brokenness and that He makes her whole again. ❤️