To me, at least, one of the most interesting aspects of the Roe vs. Wade case was that the original Jane Roe later came to oppose abortion and sought to defend the value of unborn children. If her turn from vehicle to opponent with regards to abortion was not enough on its own to arrest the mischief that she had (perhaps unwittingly) made, and the harm that was caused through her, it must be remembered that she does not bear the weight of the horror of that mistaken Supreme Court decision on her own. Nor indeed should she bear much of that weight on her own. Like any human being caught in the grip of greater circumstances, our own individual deeds and decisions become bent and deformed and twisted in the face of the way that we are manipulated and made into something that we are not, mere symbols and emblems of things

Earlier today I saw a particular sad photograph from some of the protests being made by the various Molech worshippers among us who cannot conceive of life worth living unless they are able to murder the innocent unborn human beings inside themselves or others. It seems as if some of them do not conceive of life being worth living, and so it is no big thing of them to celebrate and enjoy the death of others. One young woman, for example, held a sign that she regretted that her parents did not abort her. The response of pro-life people was uniformly not to rejoice the despair felt by this young woman, who is obviously suffering and in considerable torment, but rather to remind her that she is loved and that she has not removed herself from God’s love and grace. And this is precisely the correct response to have.

One of the greatest hindrances to repentance is the mistaken belief that one has done too much and gone too far to find a way back to grace. And while this is not the place to talk about the unpardonable sin, so long as one can conceive of oneself of having done wrong there is always a way to repent of what one has done and to change one’s ways, and to ask whatever help and assistance is necessary to restrain oneself from evil and turn oneself to practice what is right. The woman known to the world as Jane Roe did not bear the weight of sixty million murdered children on her shoulders–she repented and sought to preserve life where it was possible. That burden lies elsewhere. If someone was pressured and pushed into murdering an unborn child, we cannot undo that deed, but one can repent, one can own up to the horrors of what one has done–if often through fear and coercion–and tell that story and give others encouragement and support that one could have used for oneself and did not feel at the time. The evils and horrors of our lives can be turned to the good, even if the natural consequences of those deeds remain.

There are obvious consequences of this sort of belief about the near-universality of the availability of the way of repentance being open to human beings. One of these consequences is that there is truly no such thing evil that has been established in this world. What is evil can always be changed and erased. No corrupt law or practice is final and established and secure. People can always repent and change their ways. The laws of this world can always be changed, the evil authorities that rule over our society and institutions can always be removed through death or repentance or some other means. Those who seek to enforce systems of evil can therefore only seek to rule people through fear and cowardice, by trying to convince them that an evil has lasted or long enough or has too many people in support of it to be changed, but that is a lie, like so many Satanic untruths spread by the enemy. To live in truth is to be set free from such fears, and to be able to feel the peace of grace being granted to us, and to be granted to others through our gracious words and deeds. So long as one can turn around and change one’s path, to head into the light instead of deeper into the darkness, there is always a way home, so long as one can own up to what one has done and to change what one does in the future.