Forty Days for Life
September 22nd to October 31st 2010
Open your mouth for the speechless, In the cause of all who are appointed to die.
Open your mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. Proverbs 31.8-9
We have a daily pro life witness and sidewalk counselling effort in front of the Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood abortuary at 38th and Pontiac in Denver. The vine street irregulars--aka the ladder day saints--moved to 38th and Pontiac from 20th and Vine when Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood moved there in August of 2008. We have continued the daily pro life witness and sidewalk counselling effort which began in 1989. ( And sidewalk counsellors were out there for years before that. See the Letter to Pastors on the www.radicalchristianpress.org web site. )
We are there Tuesday through Saturday for about 3 hours from 8:30 am. Thursday we start late: 9:30 am. Saturday we start early: 7:30 am. It is a fellowship of people from various churches which have been called together by the effort to rescue babies from abortion by Sidewalk Counselling.
We use leaflets and signs and graphic posters and miscellaneous props to witness to abortion customers going into Planned Parenthood. We call out to them and get up on ladders so that we can look over the high fence. We have rescued hundreds of babies through the years and we have the pictures to prove it. We rescued two babies last week. On December 26th 1999, three babies were born on the same day to three women encountered by our sidewalk counselors in front of the Planned Parenthood abortuary. At the same time, we rescue their mothers from a life of inconsolable grief: Rachel mourning for her children and would not be comforted. As Father Paul Marx once said: God always forgives, Man sometimes forgives, Nature never forgives.
Abortion is driven by a major demon and prayer and fasting are appropriate to cast out demons. But it is a seriously defective spirituality which ignores the basic call to Christians to Bear Witness to the Truth. In John 20.21 Jesus says: as my Father has sent me, even so send I you. Then he says: Receive ye the Holy Ghost, and breathes upon them. Just before that, in John 18.37 Jesus declares the mission he has now handed on to us: for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. The 25th chapter of Matthew spells out what we have to do if we don't want to be numbered with the goats on Judgment Day: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Matthew 25.40. Who else can he mean, if not the least of these appointed to die this morning at the abortuary ?
We offend God when we pray to Him to do what we have neglected to do. We thereby shrug off the mission that Jesus gave us and try to hand it back to God. You do it, I'm too chicken. We encourage the false faith of State-Dependent Christianity when we promote the false hope that we can stop abortion by anonymous one-fingered voting for doomed initiatives and hopeless or hopelessly compromised candidates for political office. Christians have to vote right out in the open, every day, with both hands and both feet. We have to abandon the false faith in the Moral Majority and the easy road and join the minority building Christian society through Do-It-Yourself Christianity.
Almost 50 years ago, in the spring of 1961, I joined the Freedom Ride to Mississippi. Ending racial segregation was a major moral cause for Christians in the 1960s and society changed when people bore witness to the truth and relied upon nonviolent direct action. Which meant relying upon the Power of the Spirit and Do-It-Yourself Christianity. Opposing abortion is the major cause of our time and we must oppose it the same way. By finding the Courage to Bear Witness to the Truth.
