July 12, 2024
“Zuzu’s petals! Zuzu—there they are! Burt! What do you know about that?!”—George Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life
A few years back, I let Nacho Libre get bumped to second place as It’s a Wonderful Life became my favorite movie. In this movie, George Bailey expends himself bettering his small community and raising a growing family on a tiny budget. Toward the end of the movie, a financial catastrophe has sunk him into despair, and he finds himself wishing he’d never been born. A bunch of people start praying for George, and God sends an angel, Clarence, to show him what life would be like if he hadn’t been born. Alongside the angel, George tours his town, but this time as a visible ghost. The town is immeasurably worse without him in it.
By the end of the movie, George is begging to live again, when his policeman friend drives up and begins calling him by name. “George! You all right?” Hearing his name, George begins to hope that he’s back in his present life again. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out petals from a flower from his youngest daughter Zuzu. Small as they are, those petals remind him that, yep, he’s alive. “Zuzu’s petals!” he shouts, laughing.
There’s something else that 1) is small, and 2) reminds us that we’re alive: an unborn baby. I want to suggest that if you and I can pause to see unborn babies—really see them—it’ll go far in teaching us what it means to be human and what it means to be truly alive. When we can’t see fetuses for the tiny, sacred human beings that they are, we’ll also end up seeing each other as significantly less than we are.
“When we can’t see fetuses for the tiny, sacred human beings that they are, we’ll also end up seeing each other as significantly less than we are.”
If we start caring about tiny humans only when they emerge into daylight, it’ll be a lot easier to stop caring about other less visible humans walking around us—or being pushed in a wheelchair, or aging out of their productive years, or taking up medical resources—each day. Unborn babies are tiny reminders, if we see them, that we humans aren’t visible ghosts but that we, all of us, are truly alive, surprisingly special, and not just valuable so long as powerful people find us useful.
As I’ve written elsewhere, pro-lifers in a Post-Roe world are receiving increasing hostility from the political left and shrinking political patronage from the right. This week, the 2024 GOP Platform cut their 2016 platform from 66 to 16 pages, and noticeably absent in the new “Make America Great Again!” platform were explicit mentions of the unborn, such as this one from the 2016 platform:
“We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”
“If we start caring about tiny humans only when they emerge into daylight, it’ll be a lot easier to stop caring about other less visible humans walking around us—or being pushed in a wheelchair, or aging out of their productive years, or taking up medical resources—each day.”
By contrast, the 2024 platform, in the words of CNN, “softened their language on the issue of abortion.” What remains is a rejection of late-term abortion, a commitment to let each state make their own laws regarding abortion, and an endorsement of IVF:
“We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”
Joe Carter of The Gospel Coalition helpfully narrates the GOP’s gradual-then-sudden evolution on this issue in “How the GOP Became Pro-Choice.” Carolina Lumetta of World describes in “How the GOP Cut 50 Pages from Its Platform in a Day“ both the frustration of pro-lifers with an apparently gutted platform and (a bit more skeptically) the rationale given for why 2024’s punchier platform is a winning strategy which will give social conservatives a chance at blue state inroads. I recommend both reads.
Whatever playbook the GOP or any other political party is running, the church runs according to a different manual. According to the Bible, God always makes room in his agenda for the smallest among us. God blesses all who fear Him—great and small alike (Psalm 115:13). Godly leaders hear the concerns of both the great and the small (Deuteronomy 1:17). Proverbs singles out ants, hyraxes, locusts, and lizards for being small, and yet extremely wise (Proverbs 30:24-28).
“According to the Bible, God always makes room in his agenda for the smallest among us.”
God chose the “fewest of all peoples” to be His chosen nation (Deuteronomy 7:7). He chose its first king from the least clan of the smallest tribe (1 Samuel 9:21). God’s Messiah would come from a small town (Micah 5:2). Jesus’ headline-gobbling feeding of the 5,000—recorded in all four Gospels—started with “five small barley loaves and two small fish” (John 6:9, NIV). Jesus paused to savor the extreme generosity he saw in a widow’s “two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents” (Mark 12:42, NIV). Jesus picked the smallest seed available, the mustard seed, to illustrate the bigness of God’s kingdom (Matthew 13:31-32).
God inspired the writer of Psalm 139 to celebrate the preciousness of the smallest humans. Just what’s so great about unborn babies? Read to the end of the quote, and you’ll see that what’s so great about the smallest humans is the intricacy with which God creates them and the bigness of God’s thoughts about them:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand—when I awake, I am still with you.” (Psalm 139:13-18, NIV)
Our God thinks much of the smallest of people. As His people, we the church are bound to the same agenda. Historically, the church has been given the spiritual gift of seeing the least visible people.
“Historically, the church has been given the spiritual gift of seeing the least visible people.”
Our superpower of seeing small will be viewed as a liability by politicians who want the church to be a big voting bloc wowed by larger-than-life leaders who make colossal promises. Yet we were never meant to be “big” in these ways. Our spiritual heritage was never best described as “wise by human standards . . . influential . . . of noble birth.” Rather, Paul uses words to describe us Christians such as “weak,” “lowly,” and even “despised” (1 Corinthians 1:26-28, NIV). We enter through a “small gate” (Matthew 7:14) and are small to the eyes of the world from that time onward. That is, until—surprise of all surprises—“Christ, who is your life, appears [and] you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:4, NIV).
So, let’s ask God to calibrate our vision so that we can zero in smaller and smaller, like He does. The more people we are able to see and value, especially the small ones, the more we will see of God’s image—and the more accurate image bearers we will be of this all-seeing God.
How do we follow Jesus in a volatile political climate? Check out Following Jesus in a Politically Divided World by John Whittaker and Daniel McCoy.
