Respect Life During Lent

Let’s be simplistic.  Lent is about repentance.  It’s about taking a biblically significant time frame, 40 days, and during that time measuring our own personal response to the call from Christ to just love one another.  Now that is worthy, but simplistic.

If we really want to measure our response, we would have to look a little deeper than just loving one another.  We would have to look at how we love the orphan, the widow, and those who are desperate for love.  We would have to look at how we love the most desperate, the most unloved, the most vulnerable, and the baby in the womb.

If we are honest with ourselves when we do that, we will have to admit we have done a less-than-poor job in loving those children.  If we had done a great job, the 50 million of them would not have been slaughtered since Roe v. Wade.  We can’t all walk the sidewalks in front of abortion clinics to protest this evil.   We can’t all stand along the roads and highways with signs of protest on Life Chain Sunday.  But we all can pray and we all fast.

Today, as Catholicism itself is under an ever-increasing attack from forces that refuse to respect our freedom to believe in the sanctity of life, we need prayers and fasting more than ever.  So consider this, please: this Lent, pray for the sanctity of life.  This Lent, fast to unite yourself to the child in the womb whose hunger for life must not be denied by the butcher’s tools of the abortionist.  This Lent, use your prayers and fasting to increase the strength of your faith in Christ who, when He said, “Bring the little children to me,” didn’t mean in the waste bags of abortion clinics.

This Lent, pray and fast to simply Respect Life.

                                                                                                                            — Deacon Mike Balchus