by Griffin Wacker, first-year support crew from Mobile, AL
I don’t even know where to begin with SLS 2018. I guess first and foremost I’d like to thank all the B4B peoples who prayed for our efforts in Chicago, along with everyone else who was praying for the conference in general. The grace that was being poured out to everyone there was almost palpable.
When our fearless leader, Sarah Wiese, gave me a big bag of wristbands and told me to give those out to people at the conference, along with any left-over t-shirts I had, I was a little intimidated. I’m good at talking to crowds. I’m good at talking to individuals after I warm up to them. I am truly awful at talking to strangers. It’s like trying to watch an alligator stand up on two legs. And that’s exactly what giving those out was going to require. Talking. To. Strangers.
We’ll skip all the details of the back and forth that went through my head of whether I should actually talk to strangers or just randomly throw t-shirts and wristbands in the crowd of 9,000 and hope for the best. Thanks to the grace of God I was given the courage to do the former. There are so many fruitful conversations that I could talk about; we’d be here for days if I told them all, so I want to focus on one in particular.
I was sitting outside of one of the conference rooms where one of the many talks were going to be given. I had gotten there a little early. There was a group to my left talking about the pro-life issues. I realized I was eavesdropping, so to mind my own business like my mama taught me I put some headphones on and started listening to music. I would still hear part of their conversations in between songs. Then my wi-fi got disconnected, so my music stopped playing. At that point in time a girl from the group asked this question to her friends: How can we as Catholics preach a pro-life stance, but then we don’t actually do anything to facilitate these women to be pro-life?
She was especially concerned with rural areas and other areas of low-income. It caught me by surprise for a second. “I work with Biking for Babies. We support PRCs. Of course there are organizations that facilitate women to be pro-life; everyone knows that.” That’s what I was thinking to myself, so I was going to leave it to her friends to answer. Continuing to listen to their conversation, their friends were saying true things, but they were kind of beating around the bush. They weren’t really driving the point home. I asked God in my head, “You’re making this my job, aren’t you?” It was almost sarcastic. I then looked down at my phone… And I watched it die in my hand…
I guess God can be sarcastic too.
So I politely inserted myself into the conversation. I asked her to repeat the question just to make sure I understood. I gathered my thoughts. And then I went. I started off expressing, that I used to have the same concerns. “Keep the baby” we say! “It’s the right thing to do!” And we’re not wrong; it is the right thing to do. But out of the dozens of people I talked to at SLS 2018, only about half of them had ever heard of the concept of a pregnancy resource center, this girl included.
I then started to tell her about these pregnancy resource centers and what they did for not only the children in these low-income and rural families, but what they did for the women in crisis pregnancies as well. She was taken aback. The first question she asked me after I told her PRCs exist was “Those places really exist?” She couldn’t believe it. It almost made me feel bad. Whenever I had talked to people about B4B before I just always made the assumption they knew what a pregnancy resource center was. Never will I take that for granted again. I smiled, reaffirming to her that there were places out there that facilitate a culture of life to women, especially in low-income situations.
Then I was blown away by her second question. “How can we get these places EVERYWHERE?!” That might have been the most excited I’ve ever seen someone outside of a wedding or the birth of a child. That’s the entire mission B4B is trying to accomplish! Maybe not to have a PRC literally everywhere, but certainly to spread a culture of life everywhere. I pulled out my B4B swag, gave her a t-shirt and wristband, and I told her about what we do.
Lesson one from SLS 2018: Trust in God, He’ll turn your weaknesses into something great. For example, my terribleness at talking to strangers into a fruitful conversation with one.
Lesson two: NEVER assume that people know PRCs exist. You could radically change the way they view the pro-life movement.
