He Held The Hand Of His Daughter

The following is an excerpt from the blog of Jonathan Martin, a pastor in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can read his post in its entirety HERE.

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I have a dear friend who had an abortion in her 20s. She is one of the most powerful women of God that I know. She grew up in a family where she suffered severe sexual and psychological abuse. After she became a Christian and married a caring Christian man, she began to experience healing, and eventually would even go into ministry. But a few years into their marriage, she got pregnant and hit a wall. The old hurts and insecurities began to wreak havoc in her mind. She decided she didn’t feel like she could be a good wife, and certainly was not in a place to be a mother. So for a season, she ran away from her new husband, and without his consent, decided to have an abortion. Weeks later, when she came out of her season of depression, she was overcome with shame.

They stayed together, and ultimately would even have a thriving ministry. But she has a remarkable testimony about that dark season of her life: just before she was about to be wheeled back for the procedure, she says she had a visitation of the Lord. To this day, she claims it was not a dream, but a physical presence—she says she can still feel His right hand over her heart and His left hand holding hers. Wordlessly, He comforted her. That was all. She did not change her mind; she did not run out of the clinic, screaming.

Looking back, she tells me that if she had not had such a tangible manifestation of God’s presence then, she doesn’t feel like she could have survived the guilt and condemnation she felt later. She didn’t feel like Jesus somehow affirmed her decision.

Only that He held the hand of His daughter, and stayed with her when fear drove her to this decision she would later regret so bitterly.

That experience did not stop her from having the abortion. But it would ultimately convince her, when the healing began, that she really was seen and known by Jesus, even in her darkest moments, and yet completely loved.

When I told that story in a sermon a few weeks ago, the room fell silent.

I don’t think it was because the congregation didn’t recognize that as something God would do, but because they knew it was exactly like God, which makes it all the more interesting.

He did not come to condone my friend’s choice. But He did not come to condemn either. He came to enter the ambiguity and awfulness of that season of her life, and assure her that His love for her was real, no matter what choices she made. Doesn’t that just sound like Him?

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God rescued us from dead-end alleys and dark dungeons. He’s set us up in the kingdom of the Son he loves so much, the Son who got us out of the pit we were in, got rid of the sins we were doomed to keep repeating. —Colossians 1.13, 14 MSG