When holding difficult discussions, I find it important to employ Grace to navigate the complexities and contradictions.

What is grace? Grace isn’t a concept that only peoples of faith can call upon in times of difficulty and strain. Though peoples of faith equate the origin of their grace to their creator and savior, agnostics, atheists, and other categories of peoples have access to grace as well.

Dictionary.com’s definition of grace:
Noun
       elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action
      a pleasing or attractive quality or endowment

       a manifestation of favor, especially by a superior

When peoples of faith talk about grace, they are referring to favor by a higher power that gives them security, strength, and ability to face their challenges. When we talk about it in other cases, we can assume it comes from a person’s inherent higher intelligence and virtue that we all have access to; the ability to reach deep down inside, find peace, and act out of graciousness.

Why would we need Grace specifically to navigate such a conversation as abortion?

The conversation and moral issues surrounding abortion aren’t exactly clear cut, and the implications for or against abortion reach further into how the future looks than most may be able to comprehend.
 

If you want to know, straight out, what my stance on abortion is – it is: I wish it didn’t have to exist, period. I wish it wasn’t needed and that it didn't have to be an option.

But we really can’t end the conversation there.

So let’s roll up our sleeves, employ Grace, and find the solution of all solutions. This issue is very personal to people. So it really comes down to finding it in our own hearts to be overcome with Grace for the answers.

Life is sacred, despite how we have seen it treated. People go hungry, unhoused, in pain, and without help. Beautiful nature is destroyed and trashed by carelessness. There are broken homes, broken hospitals, broken governments, and broken prisons. How is it that our sacred life and sacred home has been treated so far from it?

It’s likely because we forgot that fact, that life is sacred, that it is our human birthright to live with dignity, self respect, and natural abundance.

I’m not really sure when things went so wrong in our history that led to the proliferation of struggle and the very unsacred and unnatural. Honestly, maybe things were never really 100% totally right, but some forms of progress have led us to forgo what was.

My personal and professional belief is we were never supposed to be so disconnected from our sources of food, for example. Disconnect us from our own ability to grow for ourselves on the abundant earth, and that disconnects us from one of our preordained sources of nourishment.

This writing isn’t about gardens and farms though.

Allow me ask these extreme questions bluntly:

            Is it more just for a child to potentially grow up in an abusive, poverty-stricken household and live through a lifetime of unnecessary strain, or for the unbirthed to be aborted painlessly in a matter of minutes?

             Is it more just for someone to potentially become another financial strain for social programs to solve, or for the unbirthed to be aborted painlessly in a matter of minutes?

On the other side of the coin…

          Is abortion just another form of birth control that should be normalized and recklessly utilized whenever?

         Is the beauty of human creation taken so lightly that our society sees the act of abortion as nothing more than another run-of-the-mill medical procedure?

Let’s employ more Grace than this, friends.

If abortion weren’t truly necessary in some cases to prevent the addition to future social issues, not to mention medical issues and at times the mother's life, then it likely wouldn’t exist. Maybe someday we can get to that point. But we aren’t there yet. We don’t have the infrastructure to take on more than we have. It truly comes down to a matter of minutes versus a lifetime.

Otherwise we need more remembrance and healing of our own sacred selves, so we can treat human life and creation with more reverence and respect than it currently receives.

But – we must have Grace for the matters at hand. This is an issue that reaches us personally, and many of us hold it close to our chest.

As a legislator, I would carefully and conscientiously be pro-choice – but, not without a healthy dose of Grace and prayer, or without a larger plan to instill more of what is needed in our societies to prevent the need from occurring in the first place.

For the faith community: God may have made our lives sacred, but human error has created for the unwanted systems that are unlivable and unsustainable. We cannot be irresponsible by bringing in more before solving the errors of our current unsustainable support systems. Let’s put our efforts towards that.
 

GRACE isn't always 100% politically correct and GRACE isn't always 100% strictly dogmatic. GRACE requires more from us.r E

Can we find it in our hearts to have more Grace for the topic of abortion?