The following pro-life story is from the newly released, PROFOUNDLY CATHOLIC pro-life book, God Moments III: True Love Leads to Life (Joseph Karl Publishing, 2013).The entire book is available online in English FREE as a PDF here:
God Moments III: True Love Leads to Life
This story was written two years ago on the 2011 Feast of the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple, also my birthday.
My mother told this story to our family at the birthday party she hosted in honor of the gift of my life the day I turned 46.
Her obstetrician, who had a very large statue of the Virgin Mary in his office, walked into the room and proclaimed the news that my mother, who was 24 years old at the time, was pregnant again.I was baby number three. My brother was almost three years old, my sister Belinda was about eight months old, and my mother was anemic and exhausted.
Belinda’s birth less than a year before had been premature, and she had to remain in the hospital until she weighed five pounds. Our mother was discharged without her baby, who remained in the hospital for another two weeks.
As a result of their separation, she was not able to nurse her newborn daughter, and the loss of that precious opportunity to bond caused her great sorrow. However, because she was unable to breastfeed, her fertility returned quickly, and those very circumstances led to my being created.
This is a perfect example of how things can look so dire and impossible to us, while at the same time God is up to something more wonderful than anything we could ever have planned.
The Irish-Catholic obstetrician picked up on my mother’s anxiety about being pregnant again. He pointed to the five-foot statue of the Virgin Mary nearby, and said that it was her will.
He then asked my mother if she had observed the couple that had left his office before her visit; they had been unable to conceive.
When I was born, my mother asked the doctor about my weight; I was a healthy six-pound baby. My children listened intently as she recalled the doctor telling her that she had another little girl.
God love my parents for not viewing children as something to be planned according to their schedules. They understood that children are always planned by God. My brother, sister, and I were blessed to grow up with siblings close in age, and we were each others’ friends and playmates.
How things have changed in one generation. Today, children are often viewed as a right, to be rejected or sought after at all costs, depending upon what we want at any given moment. Modern, faulty thinking tells us that children must be planned, or delayed for unjustifiable reasons, or frozen, or discarded in a variety of different ways.Married couples greatly offend God by using artificial contraceptives, do not welcome children at all, or will accept one or two, maybe. Unfathomably, abortion is legal in the United States, and fifty million children have been killed in the name of freedom in this one country alone. Pharmaceutical companies and the abortion industry profit enormously when we buy their lies, as do their representatives and stockholders, and humanity is left to pay twice.
We have children if we want, when we want, and how we want, and then half of all marriages end in divorce because it pleases us to seek further happiness elsewhere, leaving our children without two full-time loving parents the way God intended.
Michele and daughter Alyssa on election day
The love of God should find its first expression within the family through humility, love, sacrifice, and service. How we insult our most loving and generous God with our ingratitude, arrogance, selfishness, and lack of charity and chastity!How many people are even willing to acknowledge publicly that they include God in their family planning, and make it a point to be generously open to life? How many are persecuted by others for living it?
Yet when we include God and His laws in our planning, He, we, and others are happiest. We are happiest when we seek to do God’s will, because He always knows what is best for us.
Our lives are the best they can possibly be only when we surrender our self-centered choices and accomplish God’s will instead.Thank you, Mom and Dad, for giving of yourselves so generously and lovingly. As a parent now myself, I know that truly living your faith nobly and heroically was not easy.
Thank you for not demanding that I be exactly what you had in mind, exactly when you wanted.
Thank you for not putting me on your wish list after a big house, a new car, careers, trips, acquiring more money, or other meaningless goals.Thank you for accepting me into your lives and for loving me in imitation of Christ.
“The absence of planning does not justify killing.” ~ True Love Leads to Life
Because my parents were not materialistic and chose to love sacrificially, my three children had the opportunity to be created.
Because my parents had their focus on eternity, Joseph Karl Publishing exists today to defend human life and dignity, promote Catholic faith formation throughout the lifespan and around the world, inspire, foster forgiveness and healing, encourage the faithful, and guide precious, immortal souls to Christ.
Because my parents chose life, my children and I are able to accomplish the work God has assigned to us, to let others know that they are loved and valued beyond measure and that their lives have great purpose.True love leads to life, and many, many, many other beautiful things. Value and peacefully defend every person’s right to life, from natural conception until natural death.
My birthday wish on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ (when this story was written) is an end to legalized abortion and euthanasia in the United States and throughout the world. May every single person be so properly loved and valued that no one would ever even consider having an abortion.
“Nothing less than heroic patience in suffering, united with the Passion of Christ…nothing less than heroic chastity in resisting the allurements of a world intoxicated with sexual immorality; nothing less than heroic charity in loving those who ignore us or oppose us or deride our loyalty to Christ as psychosis—can obtain the ocean of divine mercy that alone can restore the rights of God over the human life, which begins at conception and is destined to continue into eternity.” ~ Father John A. Hardon, S.J. 1
If anyone reading this has been victimized by abortion and is in need of help and healing,
please see a holy Catholic priest, make a sacramental confession,
and allow the Divine Physician to heal the damage.
He will.
God is so in love with you!!
____________
Sources:
1. John A. Hardon, S.J., The Catholic Church, the Divinely Ordained Protector of Human Life. Copyright © 2000–2012 by www.therealpresence.org. All rights reserved worldwide. Used with
permission.
Images taken in church taken at Ss. Cyril and Methodius Slovak Catholic Church, Sterling Heights, Michigan, U.S.A., in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Image of little Micheley taken by my father, the late Joseph A. Bondi. Image of baby Michele taken by the baby photographer, at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brookline, Massachusettes.
