It’s September in Birmingham and this year it has meant rousing heat variegated with flooding rains. One minute I’m overwhelmed with the sweltering heat of the afternoon as I get into my car to run an errand on my lunch break.
The next minute, I’m running for cover as cool torrential showers completely saturate me before I make it to safety. This moody mix of heat and floods so appropriately mirrors the intensity of the fervent civil rights battle in this southern city.
For nine months, the parking lot at Planned Parenthood of Alabama has been empty
It’s been nine months since there has been an abortion performed in Birmingham. As Planned Parenthood moves forward with their re-opening, our pro-life community advances plans for
Birmingham has had its share of history in the civil rights movement. I’ve known men and women who have given their entire lives to praying for Birmingham’s healing, restoration and reconciliation from the civil rights abuses of the not-so-distant past. I look at them and see the real need fifty years later, for that same healing.
I see how far we’ve come toward reconciliation and unity; that it is still actively being established in our churches, neighborhoods, and communities. Change has come.
Then I think of my generation’s civil rights movement. It was the unspoken civil rights issue of my parent’s generation, ironically named “The Baby Boomers.” It is the civil rights movement of the unborn people.
My mom was just 21 years old and a newlywed when abortion was legalized. She was transparently honest with me recently as she confessed, “…I didn’t think it was really horrible. Others were very upset. But no one protested in my area of influence. I was away from my mother and I really wasn’t tuned in. I’m sorry. That is why it got passed without a fight.”
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I felt the grief in my mom’s words. She takes ownership of her generation not being “tuned in” and not realizing the gravity of what had occurred during Roe. v. Wade. The change was unspoken, the real truth was hidden and people weren’t aware enough to put up a real fight. When she did discover the truth, and the Truth embraced her, she decided to teach her children. I imagine countless other moms and dads decided to teach their children in the same way, and so my generation was born. We come heralding a justice not of this world, but a justice from Heaven.
We have not yet begun to understand the ramifications of the murder of millions of innocent unborn people. Civil rights are “rights to personal liberty established by the 13th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and certain Congressional acts, especially as applied to an individual or a minority group.” Unborn people have not had rights to personal liberty for over 42 years now.
People are given personal liberty because they are people. Unborn people should be given personal liberty because they are people.
Birmingham is holding on to, and fighting for this truth. In the sweltering heat of injustice, we are praying for a rushing, overflowing flood of God’s truth to be seen, heard, and demonstrated.
God’s truth is this: that all people are made and created in the image of God, Himself. Every person is equal to another. All human life is equal. There is no greater life or lesser life.
We are praying that this truth will shatter the exhausting heat of injustice and it will wake up our people and revive them. We are praying that it will overturn the boiling, inescapable cauldron our nation has become for its innocent unborn people.
We’ve become blinded by the scorching heat of injustice. We walk around seeing mirages—our own rights valued above the rights of others. We have seen life and death in the womb as a choice to be made in favor of convenience. God is ready to pour down His truth, mercy, and righteousness so that our man-made delusions will be washed away and people will see, hear and walk rightly; they will begin to walk justly.
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted Amos 5:24 in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” I believe Martin Luther King Jr. was praying that scripture over Montgomery and over Birmingham. I believe he was praying that over the south and over our entire nation.
Through his prayers, God has raised up an entire generation praying that same prayer. Oh that the truth and mercy of God would roll down like waters and that His righteousness would come like a mighty stream so that the innocent may live and be free!
Birmingham is in her ninth month without the murder of unborn people—an unprecedented miracle in the past 42 years. Birmingham is praying for life so that you and your children may live. Join us and contend with us for God’s Life in our nation. And agree in prayer over our nation for Amos 5:24: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
LifeNews Note: Natalie Brumfield works as a curriculum writer and volunteer coordinator for the children’s ministry at her local church in Birmingham, Alabama. She’s on the leadership team for the Birmingham Prayer Furnace as a prayer leader and serves as a weekly counselor for Sav-A-Life, a local pregnancy test center. Reprinted with permission from Bound4Life.
