MK Gantt Ministries

It was like I didn’t exist. At least it seemed that way until I was about 13 years old, when I merged into life. There are no family photo albums, no scrapbook full of achievements, no memories of family get-togethers. There was one photograph of me in a cowboy suit, where I looked to be about 6 years old. Somehow, it had gotten torn in half and buried in the bottom of a pile of legal papers belonging to my mom. At some point, long after I was married and had children of my own, my mother taped the torn halves of the photo with scotch tape and found a photographer to restore it. It was, she said, the only memento of my childhood she possessed.

My life as a child was primarily composed of long rides on a Greyhound bus, sneaking out of apartments late at night because the rent was due, usually leaving most of our belongings behind, and getting used to a new school –– sometimes as many as three schools in a single year. 

Fleeing her abusive father and the demons of her own personal failures, my mom was always on the move; always running. She first ran from her father. Even after he died, she seemed to continue to flee from him, and yet, she could never seem to truly escape the wounds he had inflicted on her body and heart. She ran from a broken childhood, losing her mother at age 7, physically and emotionally abused by her father, and the moral failure that led to my being born in the winter of 1948; no name listed in the space marked “father.”

I lived for almost 7 years in a foster home while my mother was in the wind. I was cared for physically, if not emotionally, and spent most of those years being referred to more often than not as “the boy.” It’s interesting because there were two other foster kids in the home at the same time I was there. They had names: Edward and Martin. I was “the boy.”  That was really alright I guess, because I really had no idea who I was. I had no memory of a mother or father and only a fleeting image of my grandfather as he walked out of the house after dropping me off, and nothing else.

I had no father, no mother, no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, and no uncles. It was as if I never existed. 

Except I did. 

Because of her pain, it was like I didn’t exist to my mother. I don’t blame her because I understand her need to flee her abuser and the shame he inflicted. I didn’t exist to my father because he either could not or would not accept any responsibility for me. I didn’t seem to exist for my grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who did exist, but I didn’t know them or have any recollection of them. 

However, the Word of God declares that before I was conceived, He knew me. Even before I was knit together in my mother’s womb, God knew me, He knew my name, and He had plans for me. Those plans began to unfold right around my 12th year when we settled in a small town in western North Carolina.  I encountered a godly Youth Pastor who became my surrogate father and mentor, and he began to unfold for me the reality that to the mind and heart of my Heavenly Father, I not only existed but was a precious treasure to Him and an integral part of His plans.

I share this brief narrative because I want to make a point: We are a nation filled with young people who are desperate to be seen. They don’t know who they are, why they are, and a growing number of them don’t know what they are. Since 1972 and the legalization of abortion, millions upon millions of precious human lives have been slaughtered on the altar of convenience.  In the name of “women’s rights” and “women’s health care,” millions of amazingly complex, peculiarly unique, and unimaginably valuable human beings have been torn limb from limb from their mother’s womb. In acts of unspeakable violence, we have as a nation eclipsed the inhumanity of all of the Hitlers, Stalins, and Maos. We decry their violence as cruel and sadistic, while at the same time doctors who swore an oath to do no harm have committed atrocities beside which the gas chambers of Auschwitz pale.

The slaughtered innocents are not the only victims. We forget the emotional and mental anguish heaped upon those who were not aborted, but are often classified as parasites or products of conception. Devoid of the wonder of their very existence, they are wandering aimlessly through life screaming, “Please SEE me!” Their identity in the Creator God who fashioned them, Who knit them together in their mother’s womb, Who crafted them for amazing achievements –– has been stolen. That wondrous sense of purpose and divine identity has been usurped by make-up, clothing, piercings, body art, and designer genitalia. Instead of embracing the divine spark that marks the most wonderful of all God’s creation, our children have been swallowed up in a dark abyss where they flirt with death instead of celebrating life.

The mothers of these children, for the most part, have been cunningly deceived into believing their babies aren’t really children. They are just clumps of cells.  They really don’t exist as a person. And so, because it’s not convenient to be pregnant or because it will throw my career aspirations off track, because I’m too frightened, too young, too poor, or too something, we can mark it as inconvenient waste.

Mom, I do exist.  Please, please –– feel my legs move, listen to my heart beat, watch me suck my thumb. Feel me react to loud noises and recoil from pain.  I am a human being.  I am attached to you by an umbilical cord upon which I depend for my very life. I am attached to you, Mom,  but I am not you, and YOU do not have the right to terminate MY life.  I am me, and I exist. 

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I knew your name, and  I consecrated you.” Jeremiah 1:5

This nation is guilty of many sins; great and heinous sins. There is none uglier than the slaughter of our own children. We are a nation in decline; financially, morally, and even militarily, and I believe a convincing case can be made that would lay our decline right at the door of the abortion clinic. We have bowed before Molech, the god of death, and he is sucking the life out of us as a nation. We have a nation of children, who are a generation that has watched more than one third of their number butchered in slaughterhouses we call clinics; and now, they will debate our future.

I suspect that the euthanasia of their parents will be on the discussion table because sooner or later, WE will become inconvenient to them. As they say, what goes around comes around. Or if you prefer, “God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man (nation) soweth, that shall he also reap.” 

A generation that has been aborted by its parents will have no qualms about aborting their parents.

It will be as if we never existed.