Staff Retreat Testimony

Created Equal recently had a staff retreat, and I was asked to give my testimony at it.  I reckoned I may as well post it here since I had it all written out anyhow.

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Well, I’m supposed to get up here and tell y’all my testimony, but I have one of those testimonies where there’s not much to tell. It doesn’t take long to explain the circumstances of my coming to salvation, but it’s no less miraculous than one of those amazing testimonies we hear about from people who were saved out of a life of outright, outward rebellion against God. I was not necessarily living a life of outward rebellion against God before I was saved, but I still was living in rebellion, as any unrepentant sinner is. I needed a Savior. Now, God is so precious to me, and He has taught me a lot about His faithfulness. God is truly my best friend, my comfort, and my guide, and my source of joy.

I was saved when I was nine years old. I don’t remember any crazy thing happening around that time that specifically caused me to see my sin and need for Jesus, but I do remember thinking about Jesus and what a servant He was. As a nine-year-old girl, that was the thing that most impacted me about Jesus, and I wanted to be like that. He was so humble and always thought of others before Himself.

This is why I gained the reputation in my family for being the “nice one.” And that, of course, helped to boost my ego throughout the years, so that has been something to constantly keep a check on. Still, the Lord has been faithful to me and He continues to sanctify me and teach me more about what it looks like to live for Him.

As with every Christian I’m sure, the process of learning to trust Him and His plan has been up and down. Often, I am utterly amazed at how many blessings He freely gives to me, that He really doesn’t have to, and I have thought before, “Wow, for all the blessings He gives me that I don’t deserve, it would be perfectly reasonable for Him to strip me of all good things for the rest of my life, and He still would have given me more good than I deserve.” That doesn’t mean I take the hard times well though, haha.

Still today, He impresses on me His great providence in my life. I’m no scientist, but when I think for any space of time about everything God created, it causes me to pause and praise Him for His wisdom and utter genius. This is one reason I love to be outside so much! His creation is such a clear picture of His creativity, His genius, and His love for us. It doesn’t take a scientist to see that there is design in every bit of nature, both in the world around us, and in our own bodies.

I was thinking about this recently: to believe in the Big Bang Theory is so silly, because there’s no reason everything would happen to fall into place the way it did. Order does not come from chaos. Our eyes didn’t have to be on the same side of our bodies as our feet face. Heck, they didn’t even have to face frontwards! They could have been under our chins, or on top of our heads so that we’d have to bend our neck every time we want to look at something other than the sky! All the parts of our bodies didn’t have to work so well together, but God graciously made them that way, with such intricate detail that we can’t begin to understand.

It's a big comfort to me to remember that, just as He put such intricate detail into the design of each of our bodies and into every created thing, so He also put the same level of intricate detail into all the events of each of our lives.

What’s more, He didn’t HAVE to give us His beautiful creation! It’s a gift to even have beautiful days, and it’s a gift to have the ugly days too (weather-wise), for that would still be better than being stuck inside all the time. We deserve eternal hellfire and He instead gives us this time on earth to soak up His common graces.

In the same way, Jesus didn’t HAVE to die. I know, in a sense He did, because it was the will of the Father and Jesus wanted to do His Father’s will. But I mean, there was nothing, absolutely nothing in us, that obligated Jesus to die for us, and yet He did, not grudgingly, but with a heart overflowing with love for us.

This Spring, I got to go to a Good Friday service at Jeff and Maria’s church (the couple I live with), and the thing that stuck out to me was the physical pain He went through. I know the pain of being separated from the Father was the worst pain of all, but even just the physical pain He went through, when He didn’t have to, is crazy to think about.

Not only did He not have to do it as He would have been completely righteous to let us all die in our sin, getting our just punishment, but we actually hated Him and He still died, He still, in a sense, wanted to die, because He wanted us. Unfathomable.

What a silly thing to fret and worry when God has given us His greatest treasure. If He never gave us anything else “good” in this life, we would still be the most blessed people on earth. Likewise, even if we had all the worldly good things you could think of, but we do not repent and accept His sacrifice for ourselves, we would be the most worst off among anyone on earth.

I hope to live with that kind of sacrificial attitude that Jesus had, that I would take all the hardship in the world if that’s what it takes to follow my dear Savior. I believe it was during my first summer with CBR in 2020, or sometime around then, when I was so freshly heartbroken over abortion (to a degree I hadn’t been before), that I told the Lord, “I will follow You wherever You call me.”

I think Mark has talked about how everyone at Created Equal or in the pro-life movement in general made sacrifices to be here. Well, my biggest sacrifice would be leaving my family. I love my family a lot, and it was hard to leave them for what I knew would be a longer commitment that I’d ever left them for before, but, I can rest in the fact that I'm following God's call on my life right now, and I know that He has me in His hand at all times, and He always provides exactly what I need no matter what. He continues to show me His faithfulness, His love, and His patience with me on a daily basis. Following His lead will always, always be the best decision.

So, as for my “journey” to entering a career in pro-life work, it all started, I suppose, when I was about 12 years old, and I learned about abortion for the first time. I was taking a co-op class in which we listened to a lot of lectures by the author George Grant, and one of them evidently dealt with abortion. I'm surprised I didn't know what abortion was considering how old I was, but I know I had to ask my mom what it was.

So then I knew what it was, but I didn't do anything about it for a while. However, when I was probably 14-16 years old, I went with my mom to an abortion clinic, and we shadowed a woman, Patti Smith, who did sidewalk counseling regularly. To be honest, it was a rather intimidating experience for me, not to mention I was too young to drive myself and it was an hour away, so I didn’t go back to an abortion clinic for several years or do anything overly pro-life.

However my sister Rebecca did end up going to the abortion clinic pretty regularly for a little while when I was around 16? Her commitment to doing that regularly really convicted me that I needed to be doing something as well. She probably doesn't even know this, but she is a big reason I ended up going to the abortion clinic later on and doing sidewalk counseling semi-regularly.

I say sidewalk-counseling, but I really didn't do much other than just stand there for the majority of the time that I went out there. I would stand, pray, hold a sign, talk to the other people who would go out and sidewalk-counsel, but I didn't feel comfortable calling out to the women until a couple years after I started going.

But God was growing me, slowly making me more comfortable with it, and I knew I had to keep doing something about abortion. I think it was Spring of 2019 that I started going out to the abortion clinic, and it was Fall of 2019 that I first volunteered with CBR.

There was a lady who went (and still goes) to my home church, who knew that I was interested in pro-lifery, and she told me in the Spring of 2019 that Joanna Keilson, who I used to go to church with, worked for CBR, and she let me know that they were coming to North Carolina in the Fall.

Joanna is a few years older than me, about the same age as one of my older sisters, so I never talked to her as a kid, and so I had no idea that she worked for a pro-life organization, but I got in contact with her and we coordinated for me to come volunteer with CBR for their NC tour. It was then that I learned about their internship, and I was immediately interested. So I went to Knoxville the following summer!

That summer of 2020 was a huge time of growth for me. Obviously, that was just a crazy year for everyone, so there's nothing different there, but regarding pro-life stuff, I was growing and learning so much that I felt like my brain was bursting, much like a bag of popcorn feels when all the popcorn is popped inside. Except my brain felt like the popcorn was spilling out of it…in a good way.

That was the summer I decided for sure I wanted to do pro-life work full time, and I started looking into who I wanted to join to do it full-time. I knew I wanted to stick with the educational route, but there was the question of whether I would stay with CBR or join another organization. My best friend's dad is the one who first told me about Created Equal and I started looking into it, although, not like super investedly, but just kind of loosely you know.

A funny thing is, when I had my first big exposure to pro-life work, that Fall of 2019 with CBR, I did not even realize that using victim images is controversial. Okay yes obviously, I knew it's controversial in the world to the pro-abortion side. That was no surprise, but I honestly didn't know that within the pro-life movement, a lot of people really disagree with it. It was just so common sense to me. I was naive enough to think that anyone who truly hates abortion and wants to see the end of it would be a proponent of using victim images. Haha, I laugh at that now.

I remember when I was raising support for my first summer with CBR, there was a couple from my church who I asked to support me. I gave them my presentation (over Zoom of course), and unfortunately, the husband had to take a phone call during my presentation, so he missed my whole spiel about why we use victim images. It didn’t help that he already had a negative opinion of using the images, and he missed my whole reasoning for it, so when he came back and I was basically done, he was still of the opinion that it is not loving to use the images and for that reason, we should not use them. That was one of my first experiences with Christians, especially Christians who I've grown up with, who I've known my whole life, not agreeing with this method of pro life outreach.

One thing that I really was and - I hope still really am - passionate about, is equipping Christians to stand against abortion. I regret to say that since I've been here and have been in the full swing of a full time pro-life career, that has not been my focus as much. Of course I still think that Christians need to be in the fight against abortion, and it only makes sense that Christians would lead that fight.

One challenge that I've had is getting my home Church to be more active against abortion. There's always that balance that needs to be kept of remaining faithful to the call and getting others in the fight as possible, while also remaining humble, not self-righteous or arrogant, which is an ongoing battle for me.

My mom is someone who I look up to a great deal, and I'm so happy and proud to say that because of her, my church has actually recently become more involved in the fight against abortion! Some of you may know about an organization called Love Life. My mom is a volunteer with them and she does sidewalk-counseling with them about once a week at the abortion clinic in Raleigh, and because of her, my church is getting more involved now too!

My mom initially started going out to the abortion clinic in 2020, and I think at first she was a little discouraged because, as you all know, we don't see many results from sidewalk counseling at the counseling at the abortion clinic.

But, here are two reasons I don’t think she should feel discouraged that also make good lesson for us. For one, my mom has seen a few baby saves since her time going out there regularly, and for two, she's really the reason that my church has gotten involved and hopes to stay involved in this way. Who knows the ways that God will work in the individuals from my church back home to want to do even more, to want to get more involved or even start a career in pro-life work!

Because of my mom faithfully pestering the session pastor/elders at my church, more people are being impacted, and God only knows the ripple effects of that. Sometimes it feels lame to me to say that there are ripple effects we don’t even know about. Like, can’t we please point to the things we DO know about instead of just guessing? 

But I know that there truly are so many ripple effects that we will never know about, because I know in my own life, God has used those little things that other people have done to make an impact on me, that they had no idea affected me but God still used them.

God is using me because of a conglomeration of little things other people have done. And so I am uber confident that God is using my mom to bring other people into this fight and to save babies in that way. And it's such a good reminder for us, that we may have no idea the impact we are having on other people in our lives! It might not even be from the things we say out loud!

Another thing I would add though, is that even if what we do is not necessarily impacting those around us in our lives, as long as we are staying true to God's guiding hand in our lives, as long as we are obeying him, then we can be confident our work is not wasted.