Angela (00:04):
Welcome to ProGrace on Abortion, real Talk, no Politics. I'm Angela Wesley, CEO and Co-founder of ProGrace. We are a community of people who want to have the conversation around abortion. Now, it's not currently happening in our churches because there's so much tension around the debate and having a civil conversation is hard. The church is divided, but it's time to come together. And the way we'll do that is to model our approach after Jesus, not politics. If you feel like you don't really belong in either the pro-life or pro-Choice Camp and you think surely Jesus has a better way than welcome to the ProGrace community, a place you can belong.
(00:53):
Hi, and welcome to the ProGrace Podcast. Happy New Year. This is officially now the start to an election year, and what we're seeing so far is that it's shaping up to be a very divisive election year. And so the whole team here at ProGrace, we're very motivated and we have a sense of urgency to really empower this community to have new conversations and for us to be able to really be bringing hope. I think that's the issue when I watch anything about politics on the news is that it feels so hopeless. I watch what's playing out. I see people on social media, I see the divisiveness, and I wonder what can be done differently. And so it's just this passive hopelessness. However, we have tools and we have a message, and we have a posture that means we actually can make a difference. Now, it may happen one conversation at a time, but I think that's the way real change happens.
(01:55):
So I'm entering this election year with hope that those of us who have found each other and we've gathered together in this community, that we can come together and unite. Really we're uniting and saying we're going to be intentional to have new conversations, to have a new way of engaging in this. And so this podcast today is about that. It's about conversations and how we can get better at them. I would say in my way of thinking about a new Christian response to abortion, which is really what my passion is, that Christians would have a nonpolitical grace centered response to abortion that looks more like Jesus and a lot less like the political debate. And I believe the way that's going to happen is that first we need to think differently. So we need to reevaluate our mental models by looking at scripture, by seeing how Jesus interacts with this.
(02:50):
And actually one way that my mental model has been shifted over the years is through conversation. So it's been listening to other people's stories, listening to research about what it's like to experience an unintended pregnancy, having these conversations that's actually helped frame the way I think about this. Secondly, I think we need to be able to talk differently. And again, what is in our heart comes out through our language. So it makes sense that once our mindset has shifted, we're going to be able to talk about it. And there are also some tools we can use and we'll go through that today. Some actual tools we can use to talk differently. Now, it doesn't mean that we can still have our old mental models and think we're going to talk differently, but it's actually maybe they happen together. Like I said, so much of my change was in conversation.
(03:36):
So I just want to encourage us, we have a shift in mental model, we think differently, and then we go have a conversation where we talk a bit differently and then we may come back and our mindset has shifted again. So these two really do work in tandem, and I believe that as we are thinking and talking more like Jesus would if he were here, we can engage in this issue in a whole new way so we can engage each other in conversation across political lines. We can engage our church members who've had this experience. They can be free to talk about this experience and we can engage those in our community who need to see that we look more like Jesus and those who need to know that we're a safe place where they can come for help. So that is really the goal of all this is that we become a safe community.
(04:25):
And you can see from my theory of change of how all this is going to change what a key part conversation plays in this. And that's why I participated in the National Day of Dialogue at the beginning of January. And we are going to link resources in the show notes because the tools they provide are excellent in terms of having these conversations. We're also going to walk through later in the podcast some conversations that I had, a relationship that developed over several years, and then you'll be able to see these tools at work. I didn't know the tools at the time, I wish I had, it would've made things a lot simpler, but you'll be able to hear how in our relationship we did use those tools. So the big things we're going to walk through today are the ABCs of having conversations. This is from the National Day of Dialogue, and I was so grateful to have this model A is asked to understand the other person's perspective.
(05:19):
B is to break down our viewpoint on the issue, and C is to check our understanding of their perspective. And this is specifically when we're having dialogue about issues we may disagree on. And so our facilitator asked us, which one of the three do we overuse and we were unanimous. B, we all overuse. B, we all want to break down our own view. And really that is important, but it does no good if we haven't walked through A and C. A and C are where we can actually understand what someone else is saying, enter into their experience and then have a conversation where they break down their view and we hear them. Then when it's time for us to break down our view, they're more receptive to hearing us. It was really for us a flipping of not leading with B, but leading with A and C.
(06:11):
The way they did that was to put us in conversation groups. And I happened to be the active listener the first time, which meant I could only ask to understand the other person's perspective and I could only check my understanding of their perspective. I actually couldn't bring in B, I couldn't break down my own viewpoint. And so I asked a tough question of a total stranger. We had to ask a question about democracy. And so I said, why or why not do you have faith in our democracy? And then I listened and I found myself being drawn into this person's story because they grew up in a very different environment than I did in a very small town in a military family. And the way that they described their experience of our democracy was to me very interesting. And it was interesting because there were certain words this person used that really stood out to me because they were so strong.
(07:08):
And so I didn't even have to think about my view. That was one thing that was freeing about being the listener. I didn't have to think about what my view is. I was just curious as to this other person's view. And when I asked a follow-up question, I used the exact words she had used. And later she told me that that really helped her to feel understood that I used the same words I was listening. And those words actually did stand out to me probably because I wasn't formulating my own answer. I was really listening to her. And so by doing that, even more of her beliefs came out in her experience. And it was interesting because the woman who was being the coach who then didn't say anything, just observed and gave us both feedback, she actually had a very different view on that question I had asked.
(07:55):
And she also was drawn in to the experience of this person. Now for me, it just shows the power of story and the power of lived experience because there's really no way to understand why someone views an issue the way they do until we hear their story, until we hear their lived experience. And if we look at the ministry of Jesus, he did that so often. So well. I actually love the story. I was thinking for this podcast, the story of Hagar, and we'll put it in the show notes where the reference is, but she names God, the God who sees he saw her. And so he sees us, he sees our views, he sees our experiences that have led us to these views. And as we walk with him, he helps us see each other. And that's what I was witnessing in this group.
(08:44):
The next time I was actually the coach. So the person that was breaking down their view was the person who had been the coach and then the person who was the active listener. That doesn't matter. Anyway, I was the coach, sorry about that. And the question asked was about something again, about our democracy. It wasn't exactly the same that I had asked, but this person shared a completely different experience than the previous speaker. We were all the same people in the group. And her experience was growing up in an urban area and seeing some things where she used strong words to talk about hard things that had really happened. And the person doing the active listening who I knew had had a different experience really only said one thing. She really just said, wow, could you tell me more about your experience? Because I haven't experienced anything like that.
(09:43):
And as she was doing that, I found myself getting a little choked up because I knew from our conversations in between times that these two people had very different views. But now I was watching this person enter into the very different story of someone else and saying to her, wow, I didn't know that happened. I feel sad. She said, I feel sad that this has been your experience. And she really did. She's never experienced it herself, but by looking at it through someone else's eyes, she could feel sad about it. Now these are weighty issues that we were afraid to walk into, but just the power of asking to understand someone else's perspective and then checking our understanding of their perspective by saying, is this what you're saying? Or You said this word, tell me more about that. That was so powerful without ever breaking down our own view.
(10:41):
And then my last example is when I did have the chance to break down my own view and I was asked about democracy and someone kept asking me follow-up questions. It was interesting. I started saying stuff that I've just only sort of been thinking about, but I had the freedom to say that because I wasn't afraid this person was going to judge or try to shut me down. It was so freeing to have someone really asking to understand my perspective that it allowed me to think about my perspective more and explore it. And I probably went too far probably if I came back, I'd say I'm not sure I really mean that, but it was important for me actually in an election year to be able to say some of the things I thought about democracy in a safe environment. And so I really walked away with this passionate about these tools, which is why I'm sharing them with you and really believing that if we could incorporate this into our conversations about abortion, we could really have a new way to talk about it in this divisive election season.
(11:42):
And the last thing I'll say about why this is so important before I then play another clip that's an example of this, is that when we say we're a Christian, how we talk about a view or something that's happening in our society, people who don't follow Jesus, they put us together with him. They say, this person's a Christian, they're representing Jesus. We want to make sure I feel this very strongly. We want to make sure that when we're talking about something, we are talking about it through the lens of Jesus and how he sees other people's experience and stories, how he has empathy with the people he interacts with in scripture. He's always asking to understand their perspective and checking his understanding or going deeper with a question. We see him being curious and using questions so much. And yes, it's important that we get a chance to break down our view because our view also should reflect who Jesus is and how much he loves people and how much he values our experience.
(12:46):
But if people only hear us doing be breaking down our view and they never experience us asking and checking our understanding, they're not going to have a full picture of who Jesus is and they're going to miss this whole rich part of him that is the wisest asker of questions that I have ever seen or experienced and the best listener as well. So alright, right now we're going to jump in. We're going to play a clip from a series of podcasts with my dear friend Laura that I met. Oh gosh, it's now 15 years ago. But it talks a little bit about our journey that we came from technically opposite sides of the abortion issue and could have falling into a lot of misunderstanding, but use some of these principles to actually build a relationship. So as you're listening to this clip, see if you can hear any of the tools we've been talking about.
(13:40):
And then I will be back to talk more about this. Denise and I came from outside any of the pro-life, pro-choice abortion discussion. We'd both worked in nonprofit Christian ministry and for both of us at different times coming in, we were uncomfortable with both the dialogue of how people were talking about the issue and some of the ways we were serving women. So we began a journey of soul searching for us. We went to our faith, we looked at scripture, we read a lot of stories of Jesus, how we interact with people. We talked to pastors, we tried to talk to our staff and it was difficult, and I talk about this in other places of people thinking, oh, well you're not doing the typical what we've known as pro-life, so you must be slipping into pro-choice. That was our first taste of understanding how divisive this is and how there really have only been two categories to discuss this.
(14:31):
And we're like, wait, we still have the same faith and moral conviction about abortion and we still believe the scripture is accurate and want to follow it. We're just questioning how we've applied it. But even by doing that, a lot of Christians didn't understand us and we had had a long road, I would say by that point, trying to help our board understand and our staff understand we want to listen to women and this is our main place we landed at. The woman is equally as valuable as a child. And we would try to frame it and say sometimes in the political dialogue it can appear that pro-life just values a child and pro-choice just values the woman. I know that's not true with people on the ground, but that can be the political narrative that's happening. Could we create a third way of talking about this that says we're equally as passionate for the woman and the child.
(15:17):
What would that look like in our practices and our services? And what we realized is that would be meeting the woman exactly where she's at, making no assumptions about her or where she's at in this journey and really listening to her. So Denise and I were leading an organization in Chicago called Caris, which had been around for 20 years at the time. And we were well in 11, we must've been four or five years into working there. And we wanted to write a grant, a federal grant, which we knew nothing about we hadn't done before or since, as we talked about today. And so I posted on a website of CEOs looking for a grant writer and someone forwarded that to you, Laura.
Laura (15:59):
Right? Was I knew I would have to be honest about how I knew the organization. If you want to hire me as a grant writer, I have to say, oops, by the way, they're trying to shut you down. Are you still okay with that? Yeah, right. I think you need to know a little bit more about me and who I am because I might not be the right person to help you. So then I explained to you that while I was the policy director at the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, I spent five years actually trying to actively shut car down and work with legislators to try and pass legislation in Springfield that would stop crisis pregnancy centers from giving out medically inaccurate and misleading information and stop unethical practices and using ultrasounds. And you instead said, wow, that's really interesting because we're on a journey to change our practices.
(16:49):
And I said, really? And so in that first phone call you and I said enough to each other to start to pull the curtain back. And we said, well, okay, maybe we should keep talking to each other. And I still said this might not work. And you said, well, that's okay. It'd be really interesting to talk to you. I was like, yeah, I guess because my other experience of people working at places like Harris or Project Reality was if they talked to me, they were usually yelling at me. I would be in public forums that would be about can we start a school-based health center in a high school or can we promote comprehensive sex education in a community? And they would come to those public meetings and I would get up to speak as the policy director and be citing research and this and that about adolescent health and they would be shouting at me from the back of the room and saying I was going to go to hell. And
Angela (17:43):
I was, no, no, really seriously, someone said that.
Laura (17:47):
Seriously? Yeah,
Angela (17:47):
They did. You're going to go to hell
Laura (17:50):
And not to listen to me. This happened to me at a health department hearing in one county close to Chicago. It happened to me at a town hall meeting in a school in a nearby community. And then it happened again, a few other forms, but these were public meetings where people were expected to come up and everyone knew it was controversial, you weren to share your opinions. And they asked me, the government entity said, can you please come and share information about the current laws just to educate the audience so they understand current legislation, get yelled at. And I would get asked just to give my understanding of the law and our position on the law and get yelled at. And I knew that was part of it. This
Angela (18:36):
Was just
Laura (18:38):
The drill so to speak. But that's awful. But that was my experience of people who were also running carrots. So when you called and talked to me, I can't
Angela (18:46):
Believe you continued to talk to, because I don't know if you've ever told us that, not the level of, I've never heard you say that Christians said to you that because of your interpretation of the law, you're going to hell that is abhorrent and I am so sorry and shows a lot about your character that you would still want to even take a phone call from a Christian who you would've associated with those same people knowing that they had said that to you.
Laura (19:14):
But I knew, and I still know that no one of any one group represents the totality of the group. And I was raised Catholic, so I certainly came up in a very religious family and in a church that's pretty intense about what it believes and how it judges people. So that part, it wasn't that you were calling me and you were a Christian that I thought would be a reason we couldn't work together. I thought it was because you were the COO of Carris, an organization that I knew to be doing medically inaccurate and unethical practices. So how could we work together if that were to be true? But you told me the opposite. You said, we came to understand these practices were not the way we believe women should be treated and we're changing them. And I thought, wow, that's pretty amazing.
Angela (20:05):
So I wonder if we can stop here real quickly. I just want to highlight something you said, no one person represents the totality of any group they're associated with. That's beautiful. Really, it really is. And it's our heart in this podcast of having new conversations. I think the reason that happened to you is that there wasn't one person on each, I'm quote unquote side, I'm using quotation marks here that could just sit down and have a conversation and realize that at the end of the day, we're all people. I think so much of what gets elevated is we misinterpret what that other group is really even saying. If you had said, well, I don't know for sure, but I would hope that if you had said, here's where the places we think this is medically inaccurate, people would've had a reasonable conversation. Well, here's the studies we're using to get this information. Can we do some more digging and talk that have been the most productive thing? But it's really sad that there's just this trigger, I'm all right and you're all wrong. And that shuts down the conversation
Denise (21:02):
And not only does it shut down the conversation, but we think we have license then to treat people with hatred and with anger and with disrespect, and that gets us nowhere. It's really powerful,
Laura (21:18):
Really powerful. But I think you have to understand that you were taking a tremendous risk by doing what you were doing, and that took as much courage and maybe more so than, I mean I was just a consultant that you were calling up to say, can you do this piece of work? You were leading an organization that was your life work and was connected to your beliefs, and that's huge. So it took a lot of courage for you to look at what was going on and say, this isn't right. This does not fit with what I thought I would be doing, and it's not right for the woman. And that's really what I heard right away from both of you was that you went right to, if we do what's right for the woman in this situation, we'll be doing what's right for everybody. And that's the common ground because I really believe anyone who is someone who feels really strongly about reproductive rights and maternal and child health, they are all about how do we help the woman? And that's the common ground
Angela (22:18):
That we can all have
Laura (22:19):
That sometimes people start to get wiggy when they start talking about what's going to happen to the pregnancy. And then we get into all of the divisions and the debates, and that's really important. We do need to talk about what's going to happen to the pregnancy and what that means. But if the starting point is we believe that the woman is the center of our work, then we can find common ground. And I heard you guys say that from the get go
Angela (22:45):
Around the woman you heard the value for the woman. That's awesome. So we will circle back. I'm going to probably say that when you say the practices were medically inaccurate.
Laura (22:55):
So in talking to the two of you, I started to realize how much common ground we had because I completely agreed with your approach that a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy needs support. And for some women, they actually need professional counseling or at least something beyond what you get in the doctor's office when you're going for an appointment. And I understood how the abortion debate and the political divide about this topic was actually preventing people from entering into the best way to provide practice to the women, keeping the women in the center, not the debate. Well,
Angela (23:34):
Here's the thing, we didn't have, by the time we met you, we had not worked in this space. So the only conflict we had had was more with from the extreme pro-life position, to be honest, that were questioning if you apply this, if you don't tell her not to have an abortion, and if you don't do this, you're really not towing the line. And we were like, that's not how Jesus acted. And we had had more of that. We had not had interaction with a pro-choice person. So we were a bit, I'll admit it, we were naive. You're laughing because you're like, people think, well, we were, but sometimes that's good. We weren't colored by anything. But I think for me, and we can talk about this, when I heard your view on abortion, I was like, wow, we agree on so much about this.
(24:26):
And I think that's a fallacy when we are going to have to end this and we'll start another one. But I want to get to what our common ground is. But I think that's a fallacy. I would say that some pro-life people have a pro-choice people is there's this perception out there. Well, some people use the word to be pro-choice is to be pro-abortion. And that's just not true. And that's this fallacy. And so I can speak to my view and you can speak to your view, but as we're talking over lunch, we really have, we're pretty similar. We disagree. There's definitely a line, but we have more in common than we disagree on Absolutely in how we view
Laura (24:59):
It. I think that's true that we do. So for you to continue to talk to me, I think you had to decide what was it that you were going to get from having this conversation for me? How really was I going to help you? And for me, I had to trust that in fact, this was going to lead to women being helped in a better way that I could not reach myself because these are women who are going to places that I will never work in. I will not be an employee there. I won't be a participant in that. So that's the reason they have common ground and you all are trying to transform inside your churches and inside these centers, which is way harder than what I'm doing. I'm just talking to you guys, right? I mean, yes, on your behalf. I'm talking to other people who are reproductive rights advocates and maternal and child health experts, and they do not trust you because they haven't met you. Although the women we talked to in 2011 in Chicago certainly trusted you and came in and spoke to you quite a bit. I think it's harder now,
Denise (26:10):
Whatever vantage point we were all coming from a little bit different. We still both, all of us had to lay down our perceptions and our stereotypes and what we think we knew about the other sides for sure. And enter in with almost like a blank slate of maybe we don't know anything and let's learn and find out. And we really have learned a lot from that, haven't we?
Angela (26:40):
Yeah, we have. Well, and again, this of we can stereotype a whole group and we do it all the time in our country, but when we sit down and meet a person and open up our ears and listen, it changes everything because that's more the truth of what's going on. And like you said, not one person represents the totality of what we see displayed.
Laura (27:03):
So in my beliefs about abortion, we're much more grounded in my work at Chicago Women's Health Center where I was for 12 years and I was a health educator, I was a prenatal health worker, I was also a social worker. And one of the things we were known for was our ability to talk to women wherever they were in their life and help them with their reproductive health needs in an open, non-judgmental, welcoming way. It also was we provided services regardless of ability to pay. So we saw women of all different income ranges. And I sat with women many times having done a pregnancy test with them and then counseled them on how they were feeling about the results of the pregnancy test. And I saw all different reactions to finding out that you're pregnant, whether it was planned or not planned. And also when I was in the prenatal program, I also saw what happens when the pregnancy didn't go well. And there were times when women made the decision to have an abortion for health issues and it's very real and it's very traumatic for all sorts of reasons. So abortion was never something that I've ever seen any pro-choice person say, yay, let's make sure women have lots of abortions and it's clean and easy
Angela (28:23):
And done. I thank you for point shattering that stereotype because that's a wrong stereotype that I see portrayed in our culture of pro-choice people. So say that again. I think it's important enough
Laura (28:34):
To say it also was very unsettling to me whenever people would have that reaction to us. Because as the Chicago Women's Health Center, sometimes people would protest our work, even though we did not provide abortion services, but we provided reproductive healthcare, we were clearly pro-choice. We would certainly support any abortion provider doing their work that were doing it well. So I think what was very troubling about this was this stereotype that somehow we just wanted to make sure there was a lot of abortions or that we celebrated it when a woman decided to have an abortion, which is really antithetical, I think, to being a feminist, which we all are and supported that this was about trying to help her understand what was the right decision she needed to make now that she knows that she's pregnant and whether that's to have prenatal care and to have the baby and raise the baby herself, whether that's to place the baby in another family to raise, or whether that's to have an abortion. That was up to her to figure out. And it was our job to just support her and help her what she needed. And also see it wasn't just about the pregnancy, that her life was so much bigger than that.
Denise (29:47):
What's so fascinating listening to you is you're almost saying the exact same thing that we would say in terms of how we help women. Again, just we are so similar in so many ways, even though we have some differences. But the way that you almost sounded like you were reading the ProGrace
Laura (30:13):
Website. Well, I think sometimes in these things where people get so heated and divided, you do lose the ability to hear where the commonality is. And people have been put into categories where they're all bad. And so then how do you ever hear the good of it? But I do think when it comes to understanding each other and talking across the divide, part of what I needed to understand from the two of you was where would judgment come in? Yes. Because knowing that with your faith abortion is wrong, you would still say as Christians that it's wrong to have an abortion. So that
Angela (30:52):
True, we would frame it differently. Yes. And so let's speak to the stereotype that I think pro-choice people have of Christians that I've heard. So we would say that abortion is never God's best solution for a woman or a child. I mean, we really feel that strongly. We think there are lots of things in life that are not God's best plan for people. He gives us choice. We choose that so we don't elevate one of those things over the other, if that makes sense. And we also don't believe in saying that the person should feel judgment for something that we think isn't God's best. And I think that is really hard for maybe people not of our faith to understand at the core of our faith is this understanding that none of us are perfect, only God is perfect. That's why Jesus came to be the sacrifice. And he extended what we call grace, which is why grace is in our name, which means that he leveled the playing field with everyone and said that by understanding that we're accepted and loved, that's actually how we make better decisions.
(32:01):
I always love revisiting this experience with Laura. It actually reminds me to continue to take a step back and listen to other people. And when I was re-listening to this podcast, I heard so much of the ABCs in it. First we asked Laura, what has your experience been with our organization? We asked that. And then we had to listen to some really hard things you heard her describing in the podcast, not get defensive, not break down our view, but just keep going with that and checking our understanding of what her experience had been. I would actually say I probably do as well of checking my understanding. The fact that I say in the podcast, I don't remember you saying that. I'm guessing. I was so floored by what she was sharing that I was trying to think of what to say now going into a conversation, I trust that I would be able to sit back a little more, even if it's hard to hear and dig in more and check for the other person's perspective.
(33:00):
And she did this with us. Laura did, because she had to ask, what does your work look like now? Now this is easy for us to do, to develop a perspective and then stick with it because she had a perspective of what the work of our organization was. But she asked, what is it now? And I think that's so beautiful because that opened up conversation. It signals a willingness for her to trust us. If she had just jumped to be and broken down her view, she would've just lectured us on what she thinks of organizations like ours and left it. But she was curious. And I would say too, there was a personal dynamic here happening. We were face-to-face when this was happening. And I feel we've lost some of that after the pandemic. And I just think whenever possible, that's so important because there are a lot of things happening when we're face-to-face that can either heighten barriers or break them down.
(33:54):
And I would say that Laura's posture definitely broke down barriers. And I believe that Denise and mine did as well. We wanted to learn, and you could tell that in person, but still she had to ask the question of what we were doing now and be willing to believe it, be willing to suspend her own view or experience to hear us talk about it and to check in to find understanding. And then I would say too, I don't know if you caught this, but really towards the end is where we really start breaking down our own views. I know we allude earlier in the tracks to common ground. Common ground can only be found when we do break down our own views. But by asking first and even checking our understanding first, we can then find those places of common ground so that when we break down our own view, we start with the places of agreement.
(34:46):
I think just even there's something in human nature that knowing that someone agrees with us about something can really shape how we view them. In fact, if I can go back to one thing that people were afraid of when we started this at the National Day of Dialogue, they said, I'm afraid that if someone has a different view than me, it's hard for me to think positive things about them as a person. We've been conditioned to think if this person thinks differently than me, there's something wrong with them or they're bad. And we may think different on certain things. And obviously Laura and Denise and I still think differently on certain things, yet there's so much more that we agree on. There's so much more common ground to be found. And I just think there's something to that when having these conversations. We're listening for places where we do agree so that when we come together, we can start those places.
(35:38):
And it doesn't really break it down in the podcast. And it was interesting that Laura asked us our view on it. It doesn't break it down. We didn't always go into our view, but we did go into it enough that we could understand where there were points of difference. And then one of the point in our relationship, she said, I kept waiting for where we would hit that point of difference. That was too much, and we would have to not be talking to each other anymore. And we never hit it. Now not because our views aren't different, but I believe because we use those A and C so much in person, in a context of trust and really, really listened to each other and checked our understanding and valued the experience, we valued each other so much as people. And we had understood each other's stories that when we got to the place where we disagreed, it was okay to disagree.
(36:32):
It didn't assign a value judgment to that person. And I would say it also didn't change our own views. That was another fear I heard in the National Day of Dialogue that if we have these conversations, we're afraid it might interrupt my own moral view or challenge what I'm thinking. I would say for me, it expanded it. This has actually expanded my view of God, of how he listens, of what his word means, of how he sees the big picture. And we can tend to, as people just have a myopic focus that misses a whole group of people. He never does that. And so I would just end with this, if this feels scary, please just look at some of the tools and try having a conversation like this with someone first. See how it goes, and then you can take it from there and practice it.
(37:21):
Because my experience is this will only encourage you and make you more excited about the possibility, the hope that we can have these conversations. Really that's what we need this year. We need that hope. I know a lot of people are disillusioned with the way the church responds to this and other issues. I'm actually entering the year with hope. I see so many Christians who are passionate about communicating God's full heart in this issue. If you don't see Christians like that, I encourage you to follow us on social media and become part of the conversation because we are gathering and mobilizing a group of Christians so we can be encouraged by each other because the real hope is that the church could act like Jesus. And then another hope is that we could do that right in the midst of a divisive political season where this issue rises to the surface again and people feel like they can't talk about it.
(38:21):
And lastly I would say is we're out there talking about this. Remember the numbers are that about one in four people will experience an abortion before the age of 45. So add to that, the people who were the partner of someone who had an abortion or a family member or someone close to, there's a good chance that as we're talking about this, the person we're talking to may have had this experience. And what I've found is that when we talk about it like this with grace and with a listening posture, that's when people open up, they open up and share their experience. And that to me shows we're on the right track. If we can talk about this in a way that so values people's experiences and God's desire to listen and really understand and the way we want to listen and understand, that shows us that we're on the right track. And that can make any more different. That can make way more difference, I should say, than whoever ends up winning the White House or our legislative elections. What we do as people, what we do as the church, can actually bring more change to our society. So thanks so much and please let us know what you think of the tools and we'll see you next time.
(39:33):
If you've been inspired to take some next steps, we have compiled a downloadable resource with some of our most valuable and practical tools for having hope-filled conversations. This resource can be found on our website grace.org, and we'll link the specific page in the show notes. We'll also have links in our e-news, so make sure you're subscribed. I would love to hear how these tools were helpful as well as your experience in having these conversations. So please reach out to let me know what you think, either on social media or by email [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.
