God loves life. When we put our hands out to accept it He will fill them. God goes to unending trouble to create life and to preserve it. Life springs up in the most unlikely places under the most hostile conditions and somehow it endures despite our best efforts to snuff it out.

A personal example: anyone who knows me knows that I'm a pretty open-minded person. I know what God saved me from so the last thing I want to do is heap judgment on anyone else. Even after I had kids and had an emotional reference point for the value of life, I still left plenty of room for exceptions, if you will. What about rape? What about extremes of poverty that would doom a child to a hand-to-mouth existence (yes, right here in America)? What about being born to parents who should be in a treatment facility, not raising children (like mine)? My point was, like most things in the world of Christian thought, it's not as simple as we want it to be.

14 months ago, Hannah and I adopted our fourth child, James. James was created under some pretty rough conditions. I won't go into the details...you don't want to know. Suffice it to say that he was the product of all three of the things I listed in the paragraph above. His birth mother pretty much did her level-best to kill him and somehow, miraculously (and I don't use that word lightly) she failed. James was doomed from conception. Were everything to proceed naturally he'd have ended up in the State system at best; that's if he didn't end up growing up in the culture he was conceived in. I hate writing about it. I hate thinking about it.

Something changed over the last year or so. I'm super-hyper-ridiculously conservative about life issues now, and anyone who knows me would howl with laughter to see the word "conservative" used anywhere near the article "I". The thing is, when I thought through my old framework on life, through all the caveats I placed on my values, I realized that the statement I was making was one of importance. I was really saying that one life is more important than another based on the circumstances of its creation. That fit neatly into an open-minded assessment of the issue except that Jame's beautiful little face kept popping up. He was exactly the life I was talking about when I made those qualifications. He was not, in fact, doomed. God had it all worked out. He's pretty important to me.

I think that every single life is important now no matter how it comes to be. The circumstances of creation are not up to me, nor are they necessarily relevant. Life is important because it exists, and that's pretty much that. That said, the Church should be focusing on issues of life and not picketing abortion clinics. We're famously good at treating the headache while brain cancer kills the patient. We need to spend our time on the issues that lead to abortions: poverty, lack of access to health care, good education and relevant social services and so on. A void where hope should be leaves people with little motivation to transcend the limitations of their particular culture.

If we're going to put out our hands, then we have to accept every life God puts into them. That certainly means the lives he gives us through physical conception and birth, but it also means adoption. If we're serious about the idea that no one should ever be left with abortion as the default choice because they have no idea what to do with a baby, then we have to be willing to adopt any child that pops up anywhere under any circumstances for any reason. You won't get any time to think about it. You won't be ready. You won't have everything you need. Your house will be too small. It won't matter.

Mother Teresa, all 5' of her, stood before an American President, shook her finger in his face and said, "If you don't want your babies, then give them to me. There is no unwanted child. Mother Teresa wants your child." That is what it looks like to really love life.