The Attempted Abortion

I’m having an unexpectedly difficult time with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Certainly, the video was traumatic, and it was thrust in my face before I even knew what I was looking at, but I’m no stranger to traumatic injuries. Of course, any political assassination of any figure is disturbing, no matter what side of the aisle they are speaking from, but there is something deeper, colder, and darker about Kirk’s death than any other political figure I can think of, including (God forbid) a president.

Many honoring tributes have been paid to Kirk, all of them well-deserving. He championed freedom of speech and open discourse among political opponents – a necessity for any functioning democracy. He believed truth was not a matter of feelings or perspective, but an unalterable, transcendent reality. Not only did he promote, but demonstrated, the goodness of healthy families with a mother and father as the foundational building block of society. And he was a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, working diligently to see His kingdom come as faith worked out through our fingertips.

All of that being said, I am not one to be overly emotional, particularly concerning political figures, and especially ones I didn’t listen to all that much. Yet the feelings of violation I have been experiencing feel familiar; there is a smell about them I know I have smelled before. After some walking, seething, and mumbling to myself, I found the source of the smell buried in a back closet of my mind. The last (and only) time I felt this way was when I saw an aborted fetus.

As a veteran ER nurse of fifteen years, I have seen some stuff. Amputations, deaths, blood, vomit, and all sorts of decay are on my resume – I soldier on through it all, unflappable and as stoic as a Spartan hoplite. Dysfunctions and mutations of the human form do not bother me. My palms have compressed the chests of many mostly-dead humans, and I have been at the bedside when the doctor ceases resuscitation efforts on two-month-olds. None of it lands on as deep a level as the time I had to collect a single aborted fetus a woman passed in an LA emergency room. That was the smell.

On the face of it, not a big deal. Certainly not as traumatic as a dead toddler. Or so my head would tell me. But I was terrified, and I approached it like some alien being or fallen saint. I really didn’t even want to look at it, and tried devising some way to avert my eyes while cautiously placing it in the assigned receptacle. I made myself; I needed to see it.

Some features were discernible, but mostly it looked like a collection of loosely organized tissue. What turned my stomach was not the visual aspect, but the meaning: it was the loss of a future. All the laughs, cries, victories, defeats, sunsets, love, and loss – that tragically beautiful tapestry of life that God weaves for each individual – were flushed out from life by the whimsy of a woman who had, by that time, already forgotten about it. Not only that, but all the children that would come from this life, and its children, were snuffed out with as much reverence as a sneeze. In my gloved hand, I was holding the future.

Somehow (and I don’t really know how), I feel the same way about Kirk’s assassination. All the future he was building and that we were following him into was aborted by some nobody, sniping from a distance, and fleeing the scene. All the promise and life and liberty and truth were shot in the neck with as much dignity as a back-alley abortion. And presiding over the deed, like a silent black cloud – the dark muse of all progressive creative destructions – the love of Death.

Progressivism loves death. From late-stage abortion to assisted suicide, it is a cult of death. The Pill, with all its generations and formulations, is antenatal, chemically inducing sterilility and eliminating the preconditions of life. Fruitful marriages are exchanged for ephemeral mirages. Fruitful bodies are hacked and maimed into submission to feelings, turning boys and girls into asexual carbon units. All while demanding the murderers – those who have demonstrated their qualification to be put to death – be released from their holding cells to plague new victims. It was this progressive suicide by abortion that Kirk stood against.

But Death’s problem is that it is so proud as to never learn its lesson. The end is not death but resurrection. Life wins. And it not only wins in some distant future, but it wins all the way there. “The Kingdom of God”, as someone once said, “is a series of victories cleverly disguised as defeats.”

Paul told us the same:

I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard^f and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.

Philppians 1:12-14

Death is not destiny. Our task is to continue on in Kirk’s wide swath he hacked through the jungle. Grasp more firmly the plow handles, dig your boot heels into the fertile soil, and sing with the Lord His prayer, “Thy Kingdom come.” This is what Kirk did. Get married, have babies, love your wife, respect your husband, vote, speak, love the good, hate the evil, feast, drink wine, and sharpen your mind and whet your tongue to speak the Word of truth.

The attempted abortion of the Kingdom of God in America, orchestrated by the Chaos of those who love death, will be looked back on as a moment where the fallen glory seeded the landscape and new sprouts cover the land with a green not of this world. Death will be swallowed up by life.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that ‘kirk’ is Scottish for “church,” and the Church, like Kirk, will never die.