Mother's Day Miracles: When Grace & Hope Collide

This May, we watched something really special happen at Caris. It was the perfect ProGrace expression of Mother’s Day as churches and individuals used our Hope, Help and Honor campaign to lavish love, acceptance and beautiful gifts on women who have faced an unplanned pregnancy.

Not the Hallmark version of Mother’s Day, is it?

Our culture presents an idealized version of motherhood by celebrating moms who seemingly have it all together, managing the demands of their lives perfectly. We don’t see many people celebrating women facing unplanned pregnancy who are choosing to parent, even though they walked through situations so challenging they literally thought their only choices were between abortion and overwhelming struggle as a mom.

God’s heart for women and children to thrive includes every single mother and every single child. It doesn’t matter if we think the pregnancy was planned or not. It doesn’t matter how complex or difficult the circumstances around each pregnancy are. He has a plan and that plan involves hope for the future of both the woman and the child.

As these groups of church folks caught a glimpse of God’s heart and embraced a ProGrace response, they decided to break the mold of the typical church celebration of Mother’s Day. They hosted a spa day for women from a Caris Connection group, they wrote letters of encouragement to pregnant women and they even threw a baby shower for Caris clients.

To see more pictures from our Mother’s Day celebrations visit us on Facebook.

I am so excited about what happened this Mother’s Day, because I believe events like this are key to seeing God shift the whole abortion issue in our society. Why?

They paint a vivid picture that there is hope.

The reason so many women think their only options are abortion or overwhelming struggle as a mom is because that is the only narrative our culture offers them. But when they find a community of people who will celebrate them, accept them and offer them practical support, they get a new perspective. Women start to imagine a future of possibilities – both for themselves and for their child. This picture enables women to see another path available to them besides abortion or struggle. They see a pathway of hope.

They say loud and clear, “The local church is a safe place for you to come and receive support.”

Three-fourths of women who have abortions cite lack of emotional support and practical resources as the primary reason for their decision. At the same time, people in local churches are willing and able to offer the type of ongoing support that would make a life-changing difference. The problem is, the vast majority of women we survey say they wouldn’t think to go to a local church for help out of fear of being judged. So the church needs to make the first move. We need to demonstrate that we are communities of safety, support and unconditional grace. When churches do that, we see remarkable transformation as women become part of the church community for the long haul.

They represent that God is changing the heart of his people towards grace.

The irony for me has always been that even as Christians have been protesting abortion for decades, we have been part of the problem of why it happens. Shame, fear of disapproval, and the need to keep  pregnancy a secret are all major drivers for many women who have abortions. So before we point the finger at women who terminate a pregnancy, we need to point the finger at ourselves. We need to take the log out of our own eye and see the way we have been a part of the problem if God is ever going to use us in his solution. That is at the heart of ProGrace: aligning ourselves with God’s heart and God’s path for transformation, both of which are found only in grace. When we do that, we become vessels for God to usher in grace that can turn the abortion debate upside down.

Angie Weszely
@angieweszely