Mirror Image v2

8/13/2019 Mirror Image v2

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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, Iknew 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 Iannounced 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 seewhen 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 someday, 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 thatquestion.

One of the political reporters assigned to cover the campaign called me to ask me why I had toinsert God into my talks. He liked my ideas and my enthusiasm, but he was uncomfortablewith 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 conversationwith something that you thought was important. I agree. So I am not going to answer any moreof your questions until you answer mine.

There was a long silence.

Well, I prompted.

Im still thinking, he replied.

Then Ill wait, I said.


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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. Iwas talking about an entire world view. And it was the world view that my audiences wereresponding 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 thegovernment 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 ourfuture.

My own life has shown me that there can only be one answer that leads to freedom andhappiness.

Reflections of Love

My favorite quotes from the Old Testament revolve around our creation. Genesis describes us asbeing created in the image of God. Jeremiah says that before we were even formed in thewombs of our mothers, our Creator knew us. And Isaiah says that our Father in Heaven calledeach of us by name.

That means that our Creator called each of us into life with our own personal name. That nameis the description of the image of God that we each bring to creation. It is an image that was notseen before we were called into life, and will now be visible forever. It is as if each of us adds toour collective understanding of God by bringing another image of His loving presence to theworld and to each other.

He knows that our minds are not able to comprehend His divine and eternal nature, so Heintroduces Himself to us in images that we can receive and understand. Each person we meetprovides us with another image of Him. As we move through our lives, the collection of imagesbuilds a picture of Him in our minds and hearts. And although we are not able to see all of Himin 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 theirown eternal destiny.

Its like standing in the middle of a 360 degree mirror, and slowly rotating from the beginningpoint of our lives to the ending point. As we turn, we see the faces of each of the people God has


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placed in our lives in the mirror, and they see our face as well. At each of those intersectionpoints, we not only see each others single face, we each get a glimpse into the circle of imagesthat are contained in the others mirror. So each image in our mirror does not just touch us, itreflects into the mirrors of everyone we meet.

The reflections are as much a part of helping us come to know our Creator and complete ourgrowth as images of His love as the actual person we have encountered. If we closed our eyes topicture it, we would be looking at visual echoes of light that brighten our mirrors and make usbetter 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 awareof the fact that the image that is blessing us is not the person in front of us, but a reflected echoof light from their mirror. The person in front of us was the messenger of the image of God thatwe 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 expectationsof motherhood that most women share. And so when I discovered that I was expecting, Iannounced 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 thethird 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 thetime, and every day I walked over to the church and said the rosary in front of the tabernacle. Ibegged our Blessed Lord through the intercession of His Mother for a child, and I promised thatif 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 Idid not wait to share the happy news. People responded to my announcement by asking how faralong 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 hadmade a promise.


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Heaven, however, did not forget.

It seemed that everywhere I looked, I was suddenly seeing some news story about abortion. Itwas something I had not paid much attention to before. Roe v. Wade had been handed downfrom 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 ababy, so while I would have told anyone who asked that I was against abortion, I was notinvolved in any action to stop it.

And frankly, I didnt want to become involved. I saw the news with the pictures of people withpicket 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 toldheaven 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 aboutmidnight. Since I am the night owl of the family, I had driven the last leg, and was still wideawake.

We got Mark settled into his crib, and my husband went to bed. I decided to read and have a cupof tea before retiring. I was sitting alone at the kitchen table, paging through a magazine when Icame upon an article about abortion. It described the different methods used to kill the tiny pre-born child. It was gruesome.

The last method discussed was called a hysterotomy, in which the child is born alive and left todie. 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 insideme.

I woke my husband up and told him that I could no longer avoid my promise. That I had to dosomething.

Jim is the kindest man alive, but he isnt the best when rudely jostled awake in the middle of thenight.

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 Iplanned to do. I told him that I had no idea, but that I would do the next thing that came alongand follow the thread until I figured it out.

He agreed.


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When we came home after the holiday there was a bulk mail flyer announcing that the localright-to-life group was hosting a meeting at a nearby hotel. The flyer said that a movie would beshown.

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 bedescribing a program that existed in Lancaster Pennsylvania. He also told the group that this waselection 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 theywould 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 notprepared for that reaction to my question, but I had said that I would do the next thing that camealong, 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 agreat job, and provided a necessary service.

But what I heard was directions for a program that would reach young mothers with the supportthey needed to finish school, so the choice to give life would not mean a choice for poverty. Iexcitedly told the group that we needed to do this project. They looked at each other and then atme, 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 beopening in time for the next school year. By this point, it was obvious that they thought theirnew president was crazy. They gently told me that we didnt have a building, or funding, oreven a name, for this idea of mine. They also mentioned that since it was May, and the start ofthe 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 ofblueprints and then directed to follow them.

So I pushed forward, and those wonderful people helped, even though they were sure that I washeaded for a disaster. They wished for success, but planned for failure. So, for example, theygenerously volunteered their time, but when the state incorporation papers needed to be filed, theonly 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 webought for $1.00 and a rum cake, to the custom-sized steel door that was found in the ruins of a


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old building the day before we needed one to pass state inspection, to the cribs that weredelivered the night before we opened.

At each step, the exact needs of the moment were met perfectly. And we did open inSeptember.

I remained with the organization for more than twenty years. And in that time, we openedmultiple locations in several states. At each one, young mothers received the combination offree day care for their little ones and support for themselves to help them finish school bothhigh 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 theywere the images of my son Mark, and a tiny girl whose life had been so horribly ended, that werebeing reflected to them through my mirror.

I would never have made the promise to help other children if I had not wanted a child sodesperately. Without Mark, I would not have had a reason to keep it. Even then, I ran awayfrom that promise for nearly a year. It was the combination of the little girl in the basin and myown healthy and happy little boy that brought me to my knees. Marks life made me understandthe horror of that little girls death. Without Mark, she would have been just a picture in amagazine.

Marks echoes will continue to reflect in the mirrors of people he will never meet, and whowont even know of his existence. They will reflect in the generations that follow the womenand 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 openlystated that she didnt know who the father was because of the alcohol and drugs and multiplepartners she had had. She told us that the baby saved her life because as soon as she knew shewas pregnant she stopped the self-destructive behaviors doing for her child what she couldntdo for herself. She eventually finished college with us and her child grew up, became anattorney, married, and had children of her own. The lives of those little ones were changedbecause their grandmothers mirror was touched by the reflection of the image of God that Iknow as Mark.

Changing Eternity

Mark is not unique in the reach of his echoes. Each of us was called into life and clothed in ourown image of our Creator. And since He is an eternal Being, the particular image of Him thateach of us reflect is also eternal. Every mirror that we touch in the course of our lives will carryand share our reflection with every mirror that they touch long after we have left this world.


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We dont tend to think of ourselves as being that important. We tend to think that there arepeople who matter and people who are just normal. But that is not the case. Every image ofGod matters, specifically because it is an image of God. Every single one is equally precious toHim, and every single one plays a critical part in helping the rest of us become fully the personwe each were created to be.

I sometimes think of it as a pebble thrown in a pond. The pebble hits the water, and begins tosink. The water ripples away from the spot that the pebble dropped. The pebble hits the bottomof 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 doesnot 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 ownacquaintances, 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 onewould 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 todevelop flu-like symptoms that lingered long past any flu. So she finally made an appointmentwith 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 shehad contracted it from the boyfriend.

The prognosis was grim, and the doctor wanted to test the baby. The only bright spot in thesituation 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 sobbedwith sorrow and anger and regret. I had no words to ease her pain. I could only sit with her andlisten 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.


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She said that she did not want her childs earliest memories to be watching her die a horribledeath. And she did not want to take the chance that her baby would be branded with the stigmaof AIDS and therefore unable to be adopted later. She said that she knew that her little one wasstill young enough to be placed as an infant adoption, and the waiting list for such children waslong, so the standards were high.

We talked about that decision for weeks as she met with doctors to get more information on herdisease and possible treatments. I had thought that she would change her mind after the initialshock wore off, but instead she became more resolute. She was determined that her little onewould have the best that she could give, and she was convinced that the best that she could givewas a stable home as soon as possible.

Susan began the adoption process, and carefully selected the profile of the family that shewanted. After her child was placed in the adoptive home, she monitored the progress reports tomake 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 toadversity 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. Ihave shared it with those who thought that their momentary challenge was the worst thing thatcould ever happen to anybody, giving them a more realistic assessment of the difficulty of thetask before them. I have shared it with those who didnt seem to understand what it meant tomake 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 createdcontinue, 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 theyappeared. Each person brought me the exact image of God that I needed at exactly the momentthat I needed it. That means that our Creator did not just randomly call each of us into life, Hechose 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 weneeded to fulfill our destiny, and it was the moment in which we would be ready to give our ownimage of God to others. As we move through our life cycles, turning past each image in ourmirrors, we view each image at the proper time and in the proper order. There is nothinghaphazard about it.


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So each of us is not only created with a unique image of God, each of us is created at a uniquemoment in time, with a unique mission that only we can fulfill. That makes every lifemeaningful and precious.

Sacred

The first time that I had to do a debate on the issue of abortion, I was nervous. The debate wasgoing to be on live television, and I didnt want to embarrass myself or anyone else. So I studiedand 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 hadinvited 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 myopponent 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. Iresponded vaguely, implying that in such instances, abortion might be a permissible option. Ididnt 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 theyechoed 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 tolisten.

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 totalstranger, who was never caught.


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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. Thetreatment included a hysterectomy, along with the conventional chemo and radiation. She saidthat 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 keepfighting 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 everhave had. That child saved my life. How dare you get on television and say that you think thatevery 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 andthat 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 havekept.

Keeping it has changed my life.

I have spoken to children, now adults, who were conceived in rape. Many of them told me howthey felt worthless because of how they were conceived as if they were bad seeds. Theywere all perfectly lovely people, but they felt that they somehow should apologize for even beingalive. They only spoke to me about their feelings because they believed that I would see them aspeople 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 tohear except in rape it made her feel as if she were the one who had hurt her mother. Manysaid that they believed that most people thought that they didnt deserve to even be alive. Anumber told me about how they were active in the community and in church organizations inatonement 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 werenot their fathers re-incarnated.

I have also spoken to the mothers who conceived in rape.


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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 griefand 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 tobe 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 felteven more isolated. For everyone around them, the situation had been dealt with, and it was timeto 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 makeme forget the rape. But it didnt. It just gave everyone around me an excuse to stop me fromtalking 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 evermade. Some of them hated the child inside. Many cried daily. Some of them had to leavefamily 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 rightdecision. 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 theimage of God in both of our mirrors. And he had been created at exactly the right moment to bethere to give his Mom the strength to face and conquer a deadly disease, and to give me thecourage 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.


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Partners in Procreation

When Mark was three years old, Jim and I were blessed with another child a daughter. Shewas followed by three more sons, bringing our nest to 5. All were delivered by C-section, as aresult 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 myuterine walls, so the area that was able to stretch to accommodate a baby was limited. Thatmeant 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 doesnot 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 tothe local hospital for X-rays before beginning treatment. At the X-ray department, the nursetook 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 surprisedperson in the room.

When a woman is pregnant, all of her health care is handled by her gynecologist. So I calledhim, 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 notgoing to kid you. Nobody might survive this.


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In some ways, his words made no difference. I had been pregnant before, and this time didntseem different from any of the other ones. I had the same morning sickness, which lasted thesame 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 tookon extra significance. Every little pain triggered doubt.

There was nothing that I could do, or avoid, that would change the situation. Either my uterinewalls 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 aboutthe 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 alove that you could never have imagined, and seems to have no limits. Each child opens the doorto his own room.

For fathers, that door opens on the day of the birth. But for mothers, it opens on the day that thewords, 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 understoodhow 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 abrand new 360 degree mirror. The new image did not yet have a face that I recognized, but themirror 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 hismirror.

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 lifethrough the womb of our mother.

In cooperating with His call and bringing the new image of Himself into the world, we mothersgive 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 thembecause We just love them. Without questions and without limits. There is no measuring


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stick to our love. It is unconditional. No child has to be good enough for his mother to lovehim.

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 imagesof God to the world, and ensuring that the person who bears each new image understands thatHis Creator knows him to be priceless and beloved from the first moment of his existence. Andwe 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 containedthis precious life.

PJs Face

Jim and I decided to begin sharing PJs story before we knew how it would end. I was doing agreat deal of public speaking at the time, and I began to talk about what it was like to live theultimate exception.

The message was always the same. I didnt talk about the baby as much as I talked about what itmeant to be a mother. I told audiences all over the country about how each of us first knows thatwe 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 travelingdate, as I was entering the final month and I needed to stay close to home from that pointforward. 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 alwayshas 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 seehow I was doing. He told me that he had been present when Andy (child number five) was bornand 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 havesurvived.

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.


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When PJ was about 2, I was speaking at a conference in Texas. After the final session, a youngman stopped me to ask if I had had a boy or a girl. I told him that I had delivered a son, andthanked 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 forMothers Day that year was for him to attend my presentation. He had left his faith because hecould 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 thatalthough he tried, he could not dismiss them. They became the seed that led him back to hisfaith. He wanted to thank me.

I was touched that he took the time and trouble to share his story. But the person who hadchanged his life had not been me. The person who had changed his life had been a child whoseface 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 amothers reflection in his mirror. I could not have shared something that I had not seen. It wasPJs 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 themwould keep walking without ever knowing that their lives had once touched. Yet not only didPJs image change the life of that man, his reflection will touch the life of every individual whothat man and his restored faith touches.

The echoes of light contained in the image of God given to PJ will reflect forever. And that istrue 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 girlwhose life never had the chance to feel Gods love. Her image is part of my mirror as well, but itis 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 awayfrom the camera. I only could see a partial profile. So the place where I should see her face inmy mirror is empty.

I wonder how many other mirrors have empty faces where her face should have been. And howmany echoes of her unique image of Gods love will also be missing. I wonder how the lives ofeach 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 causedby her loss. But that is unusual.


17/19

Darkness, by definition, means that we cannot see. Most of us will never know what we havelost 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, thedarkness 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 theloss of even one, seemingly insignificant, life. In the story, the hero was nobody special. Hehad never left his own small town. He had never had two extra pennies to rub together. He hadnever been renowned for anything. He was just an average husband and father and businessman, 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 hedecided that his life was not only meaningless, but a mistake. He wished that he had never beenborn. 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 thathe had fallen into. The incident was one the things that families talk about when they gettogether a Hey, do you remember when? story.

But in the mirror of his younger brother, the incident WAS a big deal. That younger brothergrew up, joined the Navy, and saved a ship with hundreds of sailors on board. Without themovies 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 herowasnt there to save the brother.

The movie stops its cause-and-effect analysis there. But if the story were true, the effect of theolder brothers absence would have continued past the lives of those sailors. Because it wasntjust 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 weresupposed to touch with encouragement or support. It was the achievements each of them weredestined 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 hispresence. 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. Andwe need every single image to become fully the person we ourselves were created to be.

Founded on Truth


18/19

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 ofus is a creation of God. That self-evident truth is the reason that we have endowed andunalienable rights.

Sadly, we have not always acted on that truth. As we look back over our history, it is easy to seethat 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, wehave tried to deny that there is a Creator at all. If there is no Creator, there can be no endowedand unalienable rights. If there is no Creator, there is no image for us to reflect. If there is noCreator, 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 aunique and priceless creation of a loving and eternal Father, or none of us is. There is no middleground.

The value of every life is rooted in the truth that each is an image of God Himself. I dont knowwhen it became extreme to value life, but somehow it has. Somehow the definition of life hasmoved from creation to political issue. We argue over which lives are worth how much underwhat 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 arejust someones property. And property, by definition, is not free.

Its not an accident that the same document that declares our endowed right to lifesimultaneously speaks of our Creators endowment to pursue happiness. We are not just to beallowed to live, we are to be accorded every opportunity to become fully the image of love thateach of us was created to be.

Because in the end, our lives are not political pawns, they are images of a Fathers love. And itis only when we see ourselves and each other through the lens of that love that we will truly befree.

America has been the beacon of hope to a beleaguered world exactly because it has been thenation that began by saying that we, her citizens, are creations. That self-evident truth is nowours to guard and protect.

The question is, Will we?


19/19

Mirror Image v2

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Transcript of Mirror Image v2