Pro-Life

As I was reading "Red Letter Revolution" today I came across an interesting subject that has had me thinking for the past few weeks.  What does it mean to be Pro-life?  I looked in up in Webster's Dictionary and it said to be antiabortion, but that just didn't sound right.  When I looked up the prefix pro- it said it meant favoring or supporting.  How can they take the word "Pro" and add it to "life" and give it a negative connotation?  To me, logically it doesn't make sense, but in the way a majority of people do use it as they are against abortions.

In the book it brought up a couple interesting thoughts.

The first is that many Americans are Pro-life from conception to birth.  As I begin to think about it, I would tend to agree.  In fact, I would say that while in my heart I am for life, my actions haven't always been as such.  How many people do we know that have very little and have a hard time making it through life?  How many children are there in foster care that are just longing for someone to really take care of them and love them like a parent?  How many people don't get to live a life, rather they just struggle through trying to make it through another day?  Are we not for their life as well?  Yes, maybe they aren't dying physically (or maybe they are), but God called us to take care of the poor and the weak, yet so many of us just ignore the issue altogether.

The second thought was that we should be Pro-life from conception to grave, not conception till we decide they did something too wrong to receive grace.  According to the Bible, most of us have committed a crime that would result in death.  We all deserved death, yet Christ took that upon Himself and allowed us to continue to live.  

I have been against the death penalty and killing in war for quite some time.  While I know there are times when defensively we can protect ourselves and it could result in death, our desired result should never be to kill.  Christ came to bring life not death.  If we are to be like Him, we should be looking for restoration rather than justice.  I believe in prisons and that people should go there to be restored and reformed but never sent there as a death sentence.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thought, the whole idea of being Pro-Life.  It is interesting how something that means we are for something we often turn into meaning that we are against something else.  Why not try to be a positive in a world that has so many negatives.  Maybe that is just another place the church has failed?  We have taught people what we are against, rather than what we are for.