A Life Wasted

Mission

The nurse seemed to sense that I was ready to hand her the baby so she had moved up next to me. She didn't say anything, and did stand at a respectful distance, but I knew that all I had to do was turn towards her and she'd take the baby out the room and everyone could finish grieving without her powerful presence. I looked down at Mary to see that she was watching me intently. I think Mary wanted me to pray for the baby so I tried to but couldn't make myself do it.  But I couldn't hand her to the nurse either. I was captivated by her beautiful face. Drawn in by the peace she so clearly felt.

This next part is hard for me to understand and even harder to explain. I've told this story two ways because I'm not really sure which one is the truth. I'll tell it both ways here. I'll start with the way I told it first.

While looking at Cierra's face tears streamed down my eyes. As soon as my tears began to flow God spoke to me and said, "How can you grieve so much over this one when millions are murdered in the womb and you do nothing." That was it. One simple sentence that changed my life. At first I was convinced I had heard God. And since He was rebuking me of doing nothing, then I deduced He wanted me to do something. Before the day was over I was convinced that I hadn't heard the voice of God but rather my own over active imagination. Two years later I was convinced that I hadn't heard anything that I had made it all up. Even now I am unsure over which is true, or at least which is the truth that I believe. I just don't know. What I do know is that the voice in my head troubled me so much that I didn't even tell Mary, my most trusted confident. I didn't tell anyone. What I did do was act on what I was told.

We buried Cierra in Todd's parent's family plot. It was the first and only funeral I have ever attended. When we got home after all the funeral I went to my office and began researching abortion issues. Before this I really knew nothing about the subject. If someone had asked me if I was pro-life or pro-choice I would have said pro-life, but mainly because that was Mary's position. I really didn't understand the issue and barely had an opinion on it. I certainly didn't have an informed opinion and the opinion I held was a dispassionate one. I had never discussed the topic with anyone, never protested, never read an article on the subject and never performed a search on it.

Searching for it now I had no idea what I was looking for, so I started by looking up the abortion laws. After some research I figured out that abortion rights were guaranteed nationally by Roe v. Wade which was decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1973. I read everything dispassionately because my heart wasn't into it. It wasn't until I read an opinion piece that questioned why there was so much fuss over a worthless glob of tissue. Having so recently held my beautiful granddaughter that statement upset me. It was the first I'd felt any emotional involvement in the abortion debate.

From the start my plan had been to start a movement. When that voice criticized me for not doing anything my only thoughts of how to rectify this shortcoming was to figure out what could be done to change the laws. Learning that it stemmed from a United States Supreme Court decision didn't scare me at all. It just meant that it would be harder, but that just meant more of a challenge. After a little research I searched for available web sites. All of the names I thought of at first were already taken so I decided to worry about the name after I'd started building the web site. For me, names and ideas were generally driven by either research or it often came to me as I began working on it. I call it "stumbling forward." Most people wouldn't move forward until they had the perfect name, but I knew the name would come if I kept moving in the right direction. Even stumbling is good as long as you do so in the right direction.

So for the next week I ignored the program I was supposed to be writing for my tool and die customer and built a web site with the not so modest goal of over-turning Roe v. Wade. My plan was complex, involving a Constitutional Amendment based on Article Five's never used second provision of a Constructional Conviction from the states. So my web site centered on the various state legislators pro-life v. pro-choice balance. Since I only needed three quarters of the states to vote for the pro-life Amendment, I ignored the liberal states like New York and California and focused on the many conservative grass roots states. Unlike a presidential election where the big population states overpowered the smaller ones, in a Constitutional Convention every state's vote counted equally. So Montana was equal to California. I soon realized that there were far more small conservative states than there were big liberal ones. When you count the states with population totals as a factor the conservative vs. liberal numbers are too close to gets a three quarters vote, but when you view it under the Fifth Amendment's requirement of each state having an equal vote it was a different matter. As large and complex as my plan was, I believed it had the possibility of success.

I know this is an arrogant position, but it is how I've always viewed problem solving. I've never believed I couldn't do something just because no else has been able to do it. I still believe anything can be accomplished if you come at it the right way. It was with this attitude that I worked on the still nameless web site, slowly building a mountain of data on state legislators and preparing for the day when I would contact all of them at once.

Up to this point everything I was doing I did in secret. Mary knew nothing about it. I'll admit this is odd because I knew Mary would love the idea and would want to help. Two things prevented me from telling her: she knew I was behind on my software job and she'd see that I had ignored it to build the complex web site, and she and I still weren't getting along that great. The preacher thing was still a big problem between us. She still went to his church every time they cracked the doors and I still got mad about it.

It was on one such Sunday that my plans took an unexpected turn for the worse. It was a Sunday morning and Mary and the kids were gone to church. With them out of the house I went in to fix something to eat and turned on the TV while I was scrambling eggs. Face the Nation was on and the guest was Pat Robertson. Recall that I once worked for Pat Robertson and hold him in high regard. So when my breakfast was ready I sat in the living room and watched Pat's interview. The subject was the Republican Primary elections, focused on possible presidential candidates. I don't recall which candidate Pat was endorsing, but the interviewer questioned his support because of the candidate's week pro-life position. Pat Robertson said that his position on this matter didn't matter because abortion would always be legal in this country. He said that after twenty-six years of legal abortions it had become a right engrained into the American psyche. Pat said it would never again be illegal and anyone who thought otherwise was misinformed.

What most people don't know about Pat Robertson is that he's a Yale Law School graduate. I've been around the man enough to understand just how brilliant he is and how in tuned he is with the law and politics. Those words from any other person would not have deterred me, but coming from Pat Robertson they devastated me. If Pat said that the abortion laws would never change then I believed him. I know now that I shouldn't have been so easily deterred, but at the time I didn't give it a second thought.

I went to my barn/office and deleted all the research and web design work I had created for my planned legal campaign to change the abortion laws. A heart beat after hearing Pat Robertson's statement I changed gears. I wasn't giving up, just changing strategy. With a fresh Zip Drive (the olden days equivalent to a thumb drive) inserted I searched for the location of individual abortion clinics and saved the data directly to the removable Zip Drive, being careful not to save the data anywhere on my hard drive. If I was going to save babies like Cierra I was going to have to do it in the streets.

That Sunday morning, I went to war.

*I had a reader ask a question and wanted to clarify for everyone. There is a lot more to this book. Dad tells about his time on Americas Most Wanted; a huge manhunt in the US. You get to see how his mind was working during this time and if/when he had a change of heart. I will update on here once a week, but it is complete on Amazon in case you can't wait.

Thanks so much for reading! We finally finished the entire book and it is available on Amazon. We are dropping the price to $2.99 for the first 100 sales, to say thank you to all of our fabulous Wattpad readers! http://amzn.to/2cU2R8e

Proceeds will go to my momma. Mom is the reason dad continues to write. We never thought this would be the book that would gain interest, but we are so blessed that you have all stuck around. Dad's story is really starting to get into the tough stuff. I will admit that the next few chapters are hard for me to read. Hard for me to share. But I know who my father is now, and I hope you will all stay long enough to see him as well.

~Rebecca