Mirror Image

What Do You See?

It was 1994, and I had just given birth to my sixth child. The experience had been life-changing. Pennsylvania was in the midst of a Governors race, and as I looked at the two candidates, I knew that I could not support either of them. But neither could I just sit back and do nothing. So I decided to run myself. I had no party, no money, and no political machine. But I announced that I was going to try anyway. And people appeared from across the state to help. I began every presentation by asking the audience what they wanted their government to see when it looked at them. Did they want government officials to see creations of an almighty and eternal God to whom both the audience members and those officials would be accountable some day, or did they want those officials to see subjects of an all powerful State? Then I would work my way through the issues based on the two different answers to that question. One of the political reporters assigned to cover the campaign called me to ask me why I had to insert God into my talks. He liked my ideas and my enthusiasm, but he was uncomfortable with the God thing. So I asked him the same question that I had been asking every audience. I asked him what he wanted his government to see when it looked at him. There was a pause, and then he tried to change topics. Well, let me ask you this, he said, and began a new question. I interrupted him. No, I told him. I have responded to hundreds of your questions. You began this conversation with something that you thought was important. I agree. So I am not going to answer any more of your questions until you answer mine. There was a long silence. Well, I prompted. Im still thinking, he replied. Then Ill wait, I said.

Another long silence. Finally, in a voice that was almost angry, he told me that he wanted to be seen as a creation. Then I cant eliminate God, I said. That conversation made me realize that in that campaign, I was not talking just about issues. I was talking about an entire world view. And it was the world view that my audiences were responding to, not specific answers to specific political questions. We dont ever seem to talk about it, but defining the relationship that includes us, God and the government is really the crux of the divisions in this nation. Are we creations, or are we subjects? Our answer to that single question will determine our future. My own life has shown me that there can only be one answer that leads to freedom and happiness.

Reflections of Love
My favorite quotes from the Old Testament revolve around our creation. Genesis describes us as being created in the image of God. Jeremiah says that before we were even formed in the wombs of our mothers, our Creator knew us. And Isaiah says that our Father in Heaven called each of us by name. That means that our Creator called each of us into life with our own personal name. That name is the description of the image of God that we each bring to creation. It is an image that was not seen before we were called into life, and will now be visible forever. It is as if each of us adds to our collective understanding of God by bringing another image of His loving presence to the world and to each other. He knows that our minds are not able to comprehend His divine and eternal nature, so He introduces Himself to us in images that we can receive and understand. Each person we meet provides us with another image of Him. As we move through our lives, the collection of images builds a picture of Him in our minds and hearts. And although we are not able to see all of Him in this life, we each will see the exact picture that we need to fully become the image of love that He created us to be. At the same time, each of us brings our own unique image of God to everyone that we meet, helping them to fill in the gaps in their own knowledge of their Creator so they can realize their own eternal destiny. Its like standing in the middle of a 360 degree mirror, and slowly rotating from the beginning point of our lives to the ending point. As we turn, we see the faces of each of the people God has

placed in our lives in the mirror, and they see our face as well. At each of those intersection points, we not only see each others single face, we each get a glimpse into the circle of images that are contained in the others mirror. So each image in our mirror does not just touch us, it reflects into the mirrors of everyone we meet. The reflections are as much a part of helping us come to know our Creator and complete our growth as images of His love as the actual person we have encountered. If we closed our eyes to picture it, we would be looking at visual echoes of light that brighten our mirrors and make us better able to see every detail of what they contain. We may never meet the person whose reflected image we are seeing. We may not even be aware of the fact that the image that is blessing us is not the person in front of us, but a reflected echo of light from their mirror. The person in front of us was the messenger of the image of God that we needed to see, but she was not the message.

Echoes of Mark
I have been married for over three decades. I began my married life with the same expectations of motherhood that most women share. And so when I discovered that I was expecting, I announced the joyful news to everyone I knew. But things did not go as planned, and I lost that precious child. And then I lost another one. By the third time, I was not making large announcements. And it was a good thing, because the third time was not any more successful than the first two. The doctors told me to wait six months before even trying again, but they did not offer much in the way of encouragement. It seemed that motherhood was not to be in my future. The sixth month of that long desert was October. I was teaching in a parochial school at the time, and every day I walked over to the church and said the rosary in front of the tabernacle. I begged our Blessed Lord through the intercession of His Mother for a child, and I promised that if my request were granted, that I would do something to help other children. At the end of October I became pregnant. I was so sure that my prayers had been answered that I did not wait to share the happy news. People responded to my announcement by asking how far along I was. Two days! I replied. He was born on July 31st, which actually is nine months to the day from the last day in October. We named him Mark. It was truly one of the happiest times in my life. And of course, I completely forgot that I had made a promise.

Heaven, however, did not forget. It seemed that everywhere I looked, I was suddenly seeing some news story about abortion. It was something I had not paid much attention to before. Roe v. Wade had been handed down from the Supreme Court when I was still in high school, and high school students dont tend to notice such things. And then I had been busy going to college and getting married and having a baby, so while I would have told anyone who asked that I was against abortion, I was not involved in any action to stop it. And frankly, I didnt want to become involved. I saw the news with the pictures of people with picket signs, and I really just wanted to enjoy being a new Mom. So every time that my conscience prickled, I sent a small donation to some organization, and told heaven to leave me alone. And then Easter came. We had driven to my parents home to celebrate. It was a drive of about 5 hours, including stops. We had timed the trip so Mark would sleep, so we arrived at about midnight. Since I am the night owl of the family, I had driven the last leg, and was still wide awake. We got Mark settled into his crib, and my husband went to bed. I decided to read and have a cup of tea before retiring. I was sitting alone at the kitchen table, paging through a magazine when I came upon an article about abortion. It described the different methods used to kill the tiny preborn child. It was gruesome. The last method discussed was called a hysterotomy, in which the child is born alive and left to die. There was a picture of a beautiful little girl, lying curled up in a basin. She was dead. I thought of my own beautiful little boy, asleep in his crib upstairs, and something broke inside me. I woke my husband up and told him that I could no longer avoid my promise. That I had to do something. Jim is the kindest man alive, but he isnt the best when rudely jostled awake in the middle of the night. He peered at me owlishly, and said, Who are you? That calmed me down, and I explained about the article and how I felt. He asked me what I planned to do. I told him that I had no idea, but that I would do the next thing that came along and follow the thread until I figured it out. He agreed.

When we came home after the holiday there was a bulk mail flyer announcing that the local right-to-life group was hosting a meeting at a nearby hotel. The flyer said that a movie would be shown. I breathed a sigh of relief. All I was being asked to do was watch a movie. The night of the meeting came, and I sat quietly in the back of the room. I didnt know anyone, and I wasnt looking to make acquaintances. I was planning to watch a movie, and leave. But the movie hadnt come. An officer of the organization said that instead he would be describing a program that existed in Lancaster Pennsylvania. He also told the group that this was election night for the organization, and opened the floor to nominations. They had several volunteers for secretary and treasurer, but no one wanted to be President. Some of the members were in the hotel lobby, calling folks who hadnt come to ask them if they would accept the position. There were no takers. I raised my hand to ask what the organization did, and they elected me on the spot. I was not prepared for that reaction to my question, but I had said that I would do the next thing that came along, so I accepted the position. Then the gentleman gave his presentation. He spoke about a program that took requests for help, and then directed the people to the appropriate community organization. The program did a great job, and provided a necessary service. But what I heard was directions for a program that would reach young mothers with the support they needed to finish school, so the choice to give life would not mean a choice for poverty. I excitedly told the group that we needed to do this project. They looked at each other and then at me, and offered to do a study to learn about it. I told them that we didnt need a study, we needed a program. I also told them that we would be opening in time for the next school year. By this point, it was obvious that they thought their new president was crazy. They gently told me that we didnt have a building, or funding, or even a name, for this idea of mine. They also mentioned that since it was May, and the start of the new school year was only four months away, I might want to reconsider. Looking back, I can only describe what happened to me in that moment as being handed a set of blueprints and then directed to follow them. So I pushed forward, and those wonderful people helped, even though they were sure that I was headed for a disaster. They wished for success, but planned for failure. So, for example, they generously volunteered their time, but when the state incorporation papers needed to be filed, the only signature on them was mine. It was my idea, and my responsibility. The miracles of that amazing summer are too numerous to count, from the building that we bought for $1.00 and a rum cake, to the custom-sized steel door that was found in the ruins of a

old building the day before we needed one to pass state inspection, to the cribs that were delivered the night before we opened. At each step, the exact needs of the moment were met perfectly. And we did open in September. I remained with the organization for more than twenty years. And in that time, we opened multiple locations in several states. At each one, young mothers received the combination of free day care for their little ones and support for themselves to help them finish school both high school and college and build lives free of welfare and dependency. Thousands of women and their children worked their way through the program. None of them knew that the images of God that were touching their lives were not mine they were the images of my son Mark, and a tiny girl whose life had been so horribly ended, that were being reflected to them through my mirror. I would never have made the promise to help other children if I had not wanted a child so desperately. Without Mark, I would not have had a reason to keep it. Even then, I ran away from that promise for nearly a year. It was the combination of the little girl in the basin and my own healthy and happy little boy that brought me to my knees. Marks life made me understand the horror of that little girls death. Without Mark, she would have been just a picture in a magazine. Marks echoes will continue to reflect in the mirrors of people he will never meet, and who wont even know of his existence. They will reflect in the generations that follow the women and children who used the program to build their lives. Women like the girl who became a mother at 14 and dropped out of high school. She openly stated that she didnt know who the father was because of the alcohol and drugs and multiple partners she had had. She told us that the baby saved her life because as soon as she knew she was pregnant she stopped the self-destructive behaviors doing for her child what she couldnt do for herself. She eventually finished college with us and her child grew up, became an attorney, married, and had children of her own. The lives of those little ones were changed because their grandmothers mirror was touched by the reflection of the image of God that I know as Mark. Changing Eternity Mark is not unique in the reach of his echoes. Each of us was called into life and clothed in our own image of our Creator. And since He is an eternal Being, the particular image of Him that each of us reflect is also eternal. Every mirror that we touch in the course of our lives will carry and share our reflection with every mirror that they touch long after we have left this world.

We dont tend to think of ourselves as being that important. We tend to think that there are people who matter and people who are just normal. But that is not the case. Every image of God matters, specifically because it is an image of God. Every single one is equally precious to Him, and every single one plays a critical part in helping the rest of us become fully the person we each were created to be. I sometimes think of it as a pebble thrown in a pond. The pebble hits the water, and begins to sink. The water ripples away from the spot that the pebble dropped. The pebble hits the bottom of the pond and comes to rest, but the ripples it caused continue to emanate through the pond, changing the entire body of water. The pebble doesnt see the impact it has made, but that does not lessen the fact that the presence of that single pebble moved the entire pond. We are like that pebble. We each send out echoes of light that will reach far beyond our own acquaintances, and will continue long after our personal journey has come to an end. Susans Pebble When I first met Susan*, she was in her early twenties and the mother of an eight-month-old. The baby looked like one of the Gerber babies that you see on baby food jars. Susan and her little one were alone in the world. She had no ties to her own mother or father, and she had severed all connections to the childs father because he had been violently abusive. She had decided that she needed to make some changes to her life to guarantee that her little one would not have to live through the same problems. She had started school, and was doing fairly well. But she had a nagging cough, and began to develop flu-like symptoms that lingered long past any flu. So she finally made an appointment with a doctor to find out what was wrong. No one expected the diagnosis that she got. The doctor said it was AIDS. It turned out that she had contracted it from the boyfriend. The prognosis was grim, and the doctor wanted to test the baby. The only bright spot in the situation was that the baby tested negative, and was perfectly healthy. I cant begin to describe how it felt to hold this vibrant young woman in my arms as she sobbed with sorrow and anger and regret. I had no words to ease her pain. I could only sit with her and listen as she worked her way through her feelings. When she finally calmed down a bit, she began to speak about her little one. She told me that she would place the child for adoption. I was stunned and asked why. She was a caring and attentive mother, and the child was thriving.

She said that she did not want her childs earliest memories to be watching her die a horrible death. And she did not want to take the chance that her baby would be branded with the stigma of AIDS and therefore unable to be adopted later. She said that she knew that her little one was still young enough to be placed as an infant adoption, and the waiting list for such children was long, so the standards were high. We talked about that decision for weeks as she met with doctors to get more information on her disease and possible treatments. I had thought that she would change her mind after the initial shock wore off, but instead she became more resolute. She was determined that her little one would have the best that she could give, and she was convinced that the best that she could give was a stable home as soon as possible. Susan began the adoption process, and carefully selected the profile of the family that she wanted. After her child was placed in the adoptive home, she monitored the progress reports to make sure the transition was going well. And then she moved out of the area. She did not live to see her next birthday. I dont think I have ever encountered a more courageous, or a more selfless, response to adversity than Susans. Her only concern was that her child would not be harmed in any way. Susan died more than a quarter of a century ago, and in that time, I have often shared her story. I have shared it with those who thought that their momentary challenge was the worst thing that could ever happen to anybody, giving them a more realistic assessment of the difficulty of the task before them. I have shared it with those who didnt seem to understand what it meant to make decisions in light of their childrens needs instead of their own desires. Susans pebble completed its journey through our pond long ago, but the ripples she created continue, changing each of us. And we are all better for that change. The Perfect Image As I look at the reflections in my mirror, I am struck not just by who they are, but by when they appeared. Each person brought me the exact image of God that I needed at exactly the moment that I needed it. That means that our Creator did not just randomly call each of us into life, He chose the moment in which to do so. It was the moment in which our mirrors would be ready to receive the images of God that we needed to fulfill our destiny, and it was the moment in which we would be ready to give our own image of God to others. As we move through our life cycles, turning past each image in our mirrors, we view each image at the proper time and in the proper order. There is nothing haphazard about it.

So each of us is not only created with a unique image of God, each of us is created at a unique moment in time, with a unique mission that only we can fulfill. That makes every life meaningful and precious. Sacred The first time that I had to do a debate on the issue of abortion, I was nervous. The debate was going to be on live television, and I didnt want to embarrass myself or anyone else. So I studied and practiced, learning how to answer the hard questions. On the day of the debate, a group of friends got together and watched the broadcast. They had invited me to join them afterwards, to either celebrate or commiserate about my performance. At the debate, I remembered everything that I had learned, didnt lose my cool, and even got my opponent to agree with me that life was more important that property. In the course of the discussion, the issue of abortion in cases of rape, incest and the mothers life had come up. I responded vaguely, implying that in such instances, abortion might be a permissible option. I didnt think any more about that answer, and the moderator moved to other areas. Afterwards, I thought that the entire thing had gone rather well. I joined my friends and they echoed my thoughts. All in all, I was feeling fairly proud of myself. And then the phone rang. I answered, and heard a womans voice. How dare you? she said. Excuse me, I said. Who are you calling? Arent you the person who was just on television arguing about abortion? she demanded. Yes, I replied. How dare you? she repeated. At this point, I figured that she was in favor of abortion and so I asked her if she was pro-choice. No! came the unequivocal response. But I have something to tell you and I want you to listen. There was no denying the intensity in her voice, so I sat down and told her that I was listening. She told me that when she was a teenager, she had been raped. It was a violent attack by a total stranger, who was never caught.

Six weeks after that horror, she discovered that she was pregnant with the rapists child. Everyone told her to abort. She didnt. She had a son. When the little guy was nearly six, she developed cancer which spread to her uterus. The treatment included a hysterectomy, along with the conventional chemo and radiation. She said that the road to recovery was long and difficult, and she often thought about just giving up. But every day she looked into the loving eyes of her son, and she knew that she needed to keep fighting for his sake. As she told me her story, I began to cry. She finished with these sentences. If I had aborted when everyone told me to, I would have killed the only child that I could ever have had. That child saved my life. How dare you get on television and say that you think that every life is sacred except my sons? I didnt know what to say. I was so ashamed of myself that I wanted to hide. She was right. I HAD smugly told the world that some lives were more sacred than others and that somehow I had the right to say which was which. I promised her that I would defend every life from that point forward. It is a promise that I have kept. Keeping it has changed my life. I have spoken to children, now adults, who were conceived in rape. Many of them told me how they felt worthless because of how they were conceived as if they were bad seeds. They were all perfectly lovely people, but they felt that they somehow should apologize for even being alive. They only spoke to me about their feelings because they believed that I would see them as people themselves, and not just as the children of rapists. One of them said it was like having an invisible leprosy. One said it was almost unbearable to hear except in rape it made her feel as if she were the one who had hurt her mother. Many said that they believed that most people thought that they didnt deserve to even be alive. A number told me about how they were active in the community and in church organizations in atonement for the actions of their fathers and in gratitude for the love of their mothers. They all thanked me for recognizing that their lives had value and purpose, and that they were not their fathers re-incarnated. I have also spoken to the mothers who conceived in rape.

They didnt know that they were repeating each other, but they were. They told me how difficult it was to be victims of a crime that everyone wants to run away from. After the initial outpouring of support, many of them told me how they felt isolated in their grief and their pain. Friends and family urged them to put it behind them and move on with life. If a pregnancy was discovered, most of them were urged to terminate. Some of the women followed that advice, and some did not. The ones that terminated told me that right after the abortion they felt relief. They were going to be able to follow the advice they had been given and get on with things. But in the following weeks, that was not what happened. The problem was that now they felt even more isolated. For everyone around them, the situation had been dealt with, and it was time to stop thinking about it. But that was not the case with them. As one young woman hauntingly put it, I felt like somehow the abortion was supposed to make me forget the rape. But it didnt. It just gave everyone around me an excuse to stop me from talking about it any more. I was more alone than ever. Many of them felt that they had been hurt twice once by the rape and once by the abortion. The women who had their babies all told me that doing so was the hardest decision that they ever made. Some of them hated the child inside. Many cried daily. Some of them had to leave family because no one would support their choice. All of them also told me that when the birth happened, they knew that they had made the right decision. They told me that it felt like they had taken control of their lives back from the rapist. Some of them parented, and some placed their children for adoption. Whichever plan they followed, these women believed that their children were worth the effort. As one said, Did you ever really meet a baby that you didnt like? The woman on the phone that day changed my life because her son changed hers. He was the image of God in both of our mirrors. And he had been created at exactly the right moment to be there to give his Mom the strength to face and conquer a deadly disease, and to give me the courage to face and conquer a tempting lie. Because it is a lie to say that every life is sacred, except. The truth is that every life is sacred. It was a truth that I was going to need to completely embrace.

Partners in Procreation When Mark was three years old, Jim and I were blessed with another child a daughter. She was followed by three more sons, bringing our nest to 5. All were delivered by C-section, as a result of some complications during Marks birth. When I saw the doctor after the fifth birth, he told me that I had a great deal of scar tissue on my uterine walls, so the area that was able to stretch to accommodate a baby was limited. That meant that what could stretch was being pulled to its limits, making it very thin. His words were, I could see the baby through the uterine wall. He explained that another pregnancy would be extremely dangerous for both mother and child, because while the scar tissue would not stretch, it would split open. And since scar tissue does not bleed, no one even would know there was a problem until it was too late. He told me not to become pregnant again. Period. He asked what method I would like to use. Jim and I are Catholic, so we used NFP. When child number five, Andy, was two, I contracted bronchitis. I saw a doctor, who sent me to the local hospital for X-rays before beginning treatment. At the X-ray department, the nurse took out the form and began asking the normal questions. When she got to the pregnancy question, I said that I didnt think so. Everything stopped. Think? she said. I told her that I was off schedule, but since I was sick, I hadnt thought about it until that minute. She immediately ordered a pregnancy test. When it came back positive, I was the most surprised person in the room. When a woman is pregnant, all of her health care is handled by her gynecologist. So I called him, and told him that I had bronchitis. What are you calling me about it for? he asked. Then there was a long pause. You arent pregnant, are you? When I answered that I was, he scheduled an appointment. On that first check up, he confirmed that I was indeed with child. And then he said, Im not going to kid you. Nobody might survive this.

In some ways, his words made no difference. I had been pregnant before, and this time didnt seem different from any of the other ones. I had the same morning sickness, which lasted the same 24 hours each day. I had the same emotional roller coaster. But there was this constant nagging uneasiness in the back of my mind. Every tiny twinge took on extra significance. Every little pain triggered doubt. There was nothing that I could do, or avoid, that would change the situation. Either my uterine walls would take the strain and stretch, or they would not. We all just had to wait. It is really different to live through a life of the mother pregnancy than to just talk about it. When you live through it, you realize that a pregnancy is as much about the mother as it is about the child. Someone once asked me what it is like to become a parent. I told them that it is like discovering that there is a room in your heart that you didnt know was there before. The room is full of a love that you could never have imagined, and seems to have no limits. Each child opens the door to his own room. For fathers, that door opens on the day of the birth. But for mothers, it opens on the day that the words, Youre pregnant are spoken. Most of us dont look inside the room, we just feel the love that comes from it, and respond. But in that pregnancy, I was given the chance to look inside. And for the first time, I understood how incredible the vocation of motherhood truly is. When I looked inside that room, I realized that I was seeing a brand new image of God, and a brand new 360 degree mirror. The new image did not yet have a face that I recognized, but the mirror that surrounded that image did. The face was mine. I was looking at my own reflection in the mirror of my tiny child. It was the only face in his mirror. And I realized that the first image of God that each of us is given is the face of our own mother. She is the first reflection of love in each of our lives. Our Creator calls each of us into life through the womb of our mother. In cooperating with His call and bringing the new image of Himself into the world, we mothers give our children, and this world, an irreplaceable gift. The knowledge that we are loved. We mothers love our children before we even see their tiny precious faces. We dont love them because We just love them. Without questions and without limits. There is no measuring

stick to our love. It is unconditional. No child has to be good enough for his mother to love him. And that is the foundation of how we know that our Creator loves us unconditionally. Procreation is not just about human reproduction. Procreation is about introducing new images of God to the world, and ensuring that the person who bears each new image understands that His Creator knows him to be priceless and beloved from the first moment of his existence. And we mothers are the ones entrusted to first send that message. That is why we are the first face in the mirrors of our children. And that was the reflection I saw when I looked into the new room in my heart that contained this precious life. PJs Face Jim and I decided to begin sharing PJs story before we knew how it would end. I was doing a great deal of public speaking at the time, and I began to talk about what it was like to live the ultimate exception. The message was always the same. I didnt talk about the baby as much as I talked about what it meant to be a mother. I told audiences all over the country about how each of us first knows that we are loved unconditionally by God because we are loved unconditionally by our mothers. In May of that year, I gave a Mothers Day talk in the Midwest. It was to be my last traveling date, as I was entering the final month and I needed to stay close to home from that point forward. The crowd was large and receptive, and full of good wishes as I left. A month later, on June 15, my son PJ was born. His given name is Paul Joseph, but he always has been PJ to us. He was a bit over 7 pounds at birth and completely healthy. I remember lying in the recovery room after the delivery. The anesthesiologist stopped by to see how I was doing. He told me that he had been present when Andy (child number five) was born and he had seen the condition of my uterus. And he had been present that morning for PJs birth. He said that, given the condition of my uterus when they opened me up, I should not have survived. God must really like you, he said. Oh, He does, I replied. For the next few years, I was often asked, What did you have? The question always referred to PJ.

When PJ was about 2, I was speaking at a conference in Texas. After the final session, a young man stopped me to ask if I had had a boy or a girl. I told him that I had delivered a son, and thanked him for asking. He told me that he had been at my Mothers Day talk in the Midwest shortly before the birth. He had only come, he said, because his own mother told him that the only thing she wanted for Mothers Day that year was for him to attend my presentation. He had left his faith because he could not believe that a loving God would have allowed the world to become so ugly. He told me that when I spoke about unconditional love, the words pierced his heart. He said that although he tried, he could not dismiss them. They became the seed that led him back to his faith. He wanted to thank me. I was touched that he took the time and trouble to share his story. But the person who had changed his life had not been me. The person who had changed his life had been a child whose face had not yet seen the light of the sun. If PJs image of God had not been present within me, I would not have seen the image of a mothers reflection in his mirror. I could not have shared something that I had not seen. It was PJs life that healed that mans pain, not mine. I was the delivery agent, but PJ was the gift. PJ is now a young adult himself. And if he were to pass that man on the street, both of them would keep walking without ever knowing that their lives had once touched. Yet not only did PJs image change the life of that man, his reflection will touch the life of every individual who that man and his restored faith touches. The echoes of light contained in the image of God given to PJ will reflect forever. And that is true for every one of us since every one of us is a unique image of God. Echoes of Darkness From time to time, something happens to remind me of the little girl in the basin the little girl whose life never had the chance to feel Gods love. Her image is part of my mirror as well, but it is an image that is dark and filled with sadness. In the magazines picture, her tiny body was curled up on its side, and her face was turned away from the camera. I only could see a partial profile. So the place where I should see her face in my mirror is empty. I wonder how many other mirrors have empty faces where her face should have been. And how many echoes of her unique image of Gods love will also be missing. I wonder how the lives of each of the people deprived of her image of God will be harmed. In a way, I am lucky. In this one instance, I was given the opportunity to see the darkness caused by her loss. But that is unusual.

Darkness, by definition, means that we cannot see. Most of us will never know what we have lost as a result of the emptiness in each part of our mirror that contains darkness instead of light. But just as the light from each image of God in our mirrors echoes through the generations, the darkness will reach beyond our own lives as well. The old Hollywood movie, Its A Wonderful Life, gives a partial picture of the price paid by the loss of even one, seemingly insignificant, life. In the story, the hero was nobody special. He had never left his own small town. He had never had two extra pennies to rub together. He had never been renowned for anything. He was just an average husband and father and business man, trying to do his best with the life he had. In the movie, he had one of those moments when it seemed that everything was hopeless, and he decided that his life was not only meaningless, but a mistake. He wished that he had never been born. And he was given the chance to see what the world would have looked like without him. When he was a child, he had saved his younger brother from drowning in an ice skating accident. It hadnt been a big deal at the time. He had just pulled his younger brother out of the pond that he had fallen into. The incident was one the things that families talk about when they get together a Hey, do you remember when? story. But in the mirror of his younger brother, the incident WAS a big deal. That younger brother grew up, joined the Navy, and saved a ship with hundreds of sailors on board. Without the movies hero, the lives of every one of those sailors would have been lost. As the movie explains, the brother wasnt there to save those sailors because the movies hero wasnt there to save the brother. The movie stops its cause-and-effect analysis there. But if the story were true, the effect of the older brothers absence would have continued past the lives of those sailors. Because it wasnt just the sailors who would have been lost to darkness. It was the future generations of each of their families. It was the lives each of those sailors were supposed to touch with encouragement or support. It was the achievements each of them were destined to accomplish. It was the echoes of other images of God that they were created to share. The particulars of the story in our movie are fiction, but the cause-and-effect it illustrates is fact. The darkness caused by one persons absence is just as important as the light reflected by his presence. Each of us is equally affected by both. Every image of God matters. Every one is a unique creation with a name and a purpose. And we need every single image to become fully the person we ourselves were created to be. Founded on Truth

Here in America, we used to believe that. In fact, our founding document began by declaring that it was a self-evident truth that each of us is a creation of God. That self-evident truth is the reason that we have endowed and unalienable rights. Sadly, we have not always acted on that truth. As we look back over our history, it is easy to see that the times when we tried to deny it are the times that this nation suffered the most distress. We are in such distress right now. Instead of affirming the self-evident truth that each of us is a unique image of our Creator, we have tried to deny that there is a Creator at all. If there is no Creator, there can be no endowed and unalienable rights. If there is no Creator, there is no image for us to reflect. If there is no Creator, then we can not be creations When we cheapen the value of one life, we cheapen the value of all lives. Either each of us is a unique and priceless creation of a loving and eternal Father, or none of us is. There is no middle ground. The value of every life is rooted in the truth that each is an image of God Himself. I dont know when it became extreme to value life, but somehow it has. Somehow the definition of life has moved from creation to political issue. We argue over which lives are worth how much under what circumstances. The sacred value of every life, however, is not just another issue. It is the very floor upon which freedom stands. If we dont have an unalienable right to our own existence, we dont have any rights. We are just someones property. And property, by definition, is not free. Its not an accident that the same document that declares our endowed right to life simultaneously speaks of our Creators endowment to pursue happiness. We are not just to be allowed to live, we are to be accorded every opportunity to become fully the image of love that each of us was created to be. Because in the end, our lives are not political pawns, they are images of a Fathers love. And it is only when we see ourselves and each other through the lens of that love that we will truly be free. America has been the beacon of hope to a beleaguered world exactly because it has been the nation that began by saying that we, her citizens, are creations. That self-evident truth is now ours to guard and protect. The question is, Will we?