God's Answer to the Culture of Death.

I’ve spent all week thinking about the baby who lost his life after a Down syndrome diagnosis. I wrote an article about my thoughts. I read the commentaries on social media. A few lines from the father of the aborted child stuck with me, playing on repeat: “Down Syndrome isn’t a ‘blessing,’ it is objectively sh*tty from a health perspective.”

"What shocked me most of all was that this story has become mainstream news… A couple’s abortion is suddenly newsworthy in 2026…?"

"There are over 1,000,000 abortions every single year for a myriad of reasons, this is happening on a DAILY BASIS and is the most common outcome for Trisomy 21, yet this one blows up and people are surprised…? The reason this blew up is quite simple: IT’S BECAUSE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT." (People)

It was all hard to stomach. Are we really treating human beings like this, as optional, disposable, inconvenient? What made it worse were the people who rushed in afterward to bless it, the ones using Christian language to insist this was no sin at all, that abortion isn’t wrong, that God never spoke to any of it. Twisting the faith into a permission slip for the very thing it has always stood against. By the end of the weekend I was feeling the weight of it all.

So yesterday morning I walked into the grocery store praying. “Lord, how do I keep loving my neighbor while I’m this angry about the truth?” It is admittedly hard to feel like you are showing love (or making a difference) when all you’ve got is righteous anger, arguing for a child’s right to be born against people who claim it is their right to not be inconvenienced. I finished my prayer, grabbed the few things I needed, and headed to the checkout line.

And then I got my answer. A man mopping the floor near the register. You could tell he had a disability. It showed in how he moved and how speech did not come easily to him, but he was at work like anyone else. A stranger ahead of me, a man I had never seen before, called over to him, “When will you hear back?” Then slowly, deliberately, stuttering through the words, the man with the mop answered, “The applications close this week.” The stranger slapped him on the back, gave him a thumbs up, and yelled as he walked out, “You know I’ll be praying for you.” They both smiled.

I’ll be honest… it hit me like a ton of bricks. I choked up, unable to speak, and even shed a few tears as I walked out of the store and back to my car. I had half expected God to answer my prayer by telling me to stop the arguing and go be kind to somebody. He didn’t. What He gave me instead was encouragement. Even when I did not know quite what He was saying, He had seen me, and He had answered. Here was an example of Christ’s love out in the world, a bit of light after a long stretch of darkness, and it reminded me of all the people who live intentionally this way every day.

The longer I sat with it, the more I understood what the heaviness had made me forget. The arguments matter. Defending the faith matters. Pushing for policies that would make the choice this couple made illegal matters. That work stops bad people. It punishes and deters them. It strengthens the good people committed to the cause and influences the impressionable. Arguing, advocating, and legislating hold the line. They build the walls that keep the evil out, and I am not about to neglect them. But if we really want to transform a depraved world that has been captured by this culture of death, it is going to take something the walls cannot do. It is going to take truly transformative examples of love, the image of God reflected out into the world, like these two men in a checkout line. That kindness is what changes a heart. It is what transforms a whole community from the inside. I had spent all week building walls, and I was grateful God blessed me with a reminder of the other half of the work.

The contrast between the two paths before us only grew starker the more I thought about them. The way of the world, which celebrates the performative cruelty of a couple broadcasting the destruction of their child to a monetized audience, while crowds line up to comfort them and praise their bravery for being so transparent and honest. And the way of the Kingdom, the one that gets missed, that never makes the news, happening in a million small conversations like the one I witnessed, every single day, carried out by faithful Christians doing exactly what God called them to do.

Of course society fixates on the spectacle (I overemphasize it all too often myself). It is hard not to when the displays are this abhorrent, this deserving of condemnation. But God reminded me that morning that He is at work in ways we will never see, in thousands of unseen places where His light shines and hearts change, just like mine did in that checkout line.

The couple believed a life like the one at the register was worth less than their own, and through their actions they made that statement out loud.

The truth is that every day, who we choose to love, who we serve, who we welcome into fellowship, says what we believe about who is worthy. It reflects the values of our Creator, the One who loves us equally and values each of us uniquely. I am thankful that on a heavy morning, two strangers in a checkout line reminded me that God's secret weapon against the culture of death has always been the stubborn love of His ordinary people.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.