There's an amazing distance between those who seek to affirm the value of all life and those whose view on the value of human life is driven by some political ideology. The desire to know the good is lost if we only want to see the supposed good of the particular right we wish to defend. The real gift comes from allowing life in its apparently weakest and most fragile moments teach us lessons that we will never forget. These lessons can not be reduced to some teachable idea but are the grasping of some incredible value that makes the beauty of life evident and reveals its source. In the case of the below video, which you may have heard about because it went viral and was viewed some 7 million times, of a mother's inspiring video about her blind baby boy, the lesson we learn about is the incredible fragility of life and beauty in the innocence of a child. This made me rethink what it means to be a parent. I've never been so moved by a video before.
In the seven-minute video, which she made using her iPhone, the 25-year-old mother from Woodbury, Tenn., describes the triumph of witnessing 14-month-old Christian's giggles in the face of the constant stares and whispers they encounter in public when strangers see her baby. He was born with an an extremely rare condition called Tessier cleft, which means that he was unable to fully close his mouth, and that his eyes are also clefted such that they never even formed.
Now watch the video, and be prepared to cry.
When I went to view this video I saw a comment from an atheist who felt the mother was over exaggerating the difficulty of the child's condition and trying to turn her simple action of caring for the child into some great heroic act. What was this commenter missing? For one he must not be a parent. This video brings out the challenge that every parent faces to love their children with all their heart, to see their full value in crucial moments. Accepting into life children with such birth defects is an act of the will that teaches us what love is and tears down walls we never knew were there. It turns life into a search for beauty.
Now, contrast that to the below video from a film about the abortion industry. The life of unborn children at this woman's abortion clinic is just a tool to achieve some awful political and economic agenda.
