I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live (Deuteronomy 30:19, NKJV).

            I recently saw a newscast about a teacher who was horrified when high school students posted pictures of themselves with dead animals, mocking the animals and using them in grotesque poses. That same week I saw a video of junior high students bullying a grandmother who had volunteered as a bus monitor, taunting her and making cruel statements that brought the poor woman to tears.

Heartbreaking? Sure. Shocking? Not so much. Not when you consider that today’s children have grown up in a society that for the most part does not value life or honor the One who gives it. Today’s youth has no memory of a culture that didn’t actively promote abortion or that wasn’t sliding more and more toward legalizing euthanasia. They watched as Terri Schiavo was starved and dehydrated to death by court order, and we wonder why they see no need to place a high value on God-given life.

But it isn’t just our children who have been blinded by what I think of as a “spirit of abortion,” meaning the bent toward doing away with any life that negatively impacts or interferes with someone else’s desires. If we aren’t careful we can all fall into it. When I served as my mother’s primary caregiver for the last twelve years of her life, there were times I was stretched to the ends of my physical and emotional endurance. Had it not been for the Lord’s strength to renew and carry me through, I could easily have succumbed to that same thought process that drives women with “inconvenient pregnancies” to sacrifice the most helpless among us for their own purposes and desires.

God’s Word to us is to “choose life”—in any and all situations. It may be the harder choice sometimes, but God has promised that when we make that choice, both we and our children will be blessed.