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It is really interesting going back and reading something I wrote 14 years ago. I can hear the heart behind it, but I can also see how much has changed in me since then.
What I was really wrestling with back then wasn’t just abortion. It was judgement.
Over time, I’ve come to see that we, as humans, have a tendency to point to the failures of others as a way of confirming our own goodness. In a Christian sense, we can dress that up as righteousness, but often it’s something else entirely. It’s comparison. It’s self-preservation. At its worst, it becomes a way of weaponising faith.
Because if everything in us was laid bare, every thought, every motive, every failure, how would we measure up then?
I’ve often thought about the contrast between Judas and Peter. Both failed. Both betrayed in their own way. One publicly, one more quietly. One is remembered with a kind of finality, the other with restoration. But the truth is, neither of them sits under my judgement. I don’t see what God sees. I don’t understand motive, timing, or the full weight of a life.
The longer I live, the less confident I feel in drawing hard lines around other people’s lives, and the more aware I am of how limited my perspective really is. The question of the value of human life hasn’t become simpler for me, it’s become bigger. Bigger than a single decision. Bigger than a single moment. Bigger than what I can see or understand.
I still find myself forming quick conclusions. I still catch myself measuring, comparing, deciding where things sit. But I think of that moment, where what looked like a clear judgement was only ever a fragment of a much larger story, a story I could not see.
And that has changed something in me. Not what I feel, not even what I wrestle with, but what I do with it.
Because the more I see, the more I realise how much I don’t see, and how careful that makes me with what I do with it.
