I was so excited. We were getting ready for a new outreach at a street festival in Central Pa. It was an event we’d never attended before in a community that we’d struggled to reach out to. Now we were finally going.
Then I saw the forecast: rain. My heart sank. It was an hour-long drive on a Saturday morning for a festival that may not happen, and I considered staying home. But the organizers didn’t cancel, so I went, silently hoping that I wasn’t wasting my time.
In the short time before the rain started, a mother approached our table and told us about her daughter who was pregnant and worried. The mother (a grandmother, really) said her daughter hadn’t been able to find support for her and her baby. Desperate, her daughter was seriously thinking about having an abortion.
We told the mother about pregnancy resource centers and gave her information to pass along to her daughter. She was grateful — so much so that she stopped back to talk a second time. The rain forced us to pack up just a short time later, but as we left, I realized that we had been there for a reason.
Time is an interesting thing. We think we need a lot of it to make a difference, but that’s really not the case at all. It reminds me of situations when people are near the end of life, maybe an older adult or a preborn baby with a terminal diagnosis, and someone suggests abortion or assisted suicide. It’s assumed that they can’t contribute much because their time is so short.
It can be easy to underestimate the impact of a person’s time, whether in small ways like a few hours of pro-life outreach on a rainy Saturday morning or in big, dangerous ways like abortion or assisted suicide.
I’m glad I didn’t give into those thoughts. If I had, that mother may not have found a glimmer of hope on that rainy Saturday morning.