There is no escape.

Forever on the run, we flee a prison of our own making for a swamp of our own choosing. Shackled together but lost without the other. And not until we yield to our fate do we finally see…

We were always free.

The unforgiven want nothing more than to be unchained from the fanaticism of faith: It’s a cultish patriarchy that enslaves women to childbirth and the superstition of the unseen.

But that the heart of the unbearable begins to beat* in weeks isn’t religious zealotry, it’s science – settled science. And they respect science, just not the Author of science, and it matters. Unborn lives matter.

^{* …and often of a type different than the mother’s, the heart beats the baby’s own.}

Still… even as the unbelieving can no longer deny that what is dependent on them for life is life, they just as emphatically declare clear title to dispose of that life by right of ownership. Not the ownership of their own life but the ownership of the life that is not their own. The life within.

They’re the forensic stuff of a bedside whodunit. Dirty, smudgy, lusty – we leave pawfuls of them everywhere, clues that we’ve been there.

Fingerprints.

Unique and never duplicated, they faithfully identify us (or betray us) but do not belong to us. Etched before we were born, we bear the signature of the Artist. Created then redeemed: We are not our own.

Slavery hasn’t been abolished, it’s been modernized. Or feminized. To be “with child” is to be the hapless heiress of human property. Slaves could be put to death for cause. The unborn for convenience.

But in their hell-bent desire to be liberated from the Creator of life, the defiant freely choose the enslavement of sin. And death.

Captives and captors are forever bound. The chains of bondage that shackle the body of the slave deaden the soul of the enslaver. Neither can ever be truly free.

Not until the undead grant value and worth to the unalive.

“Stand therefore in liberty… Christ hath made us free”
^{Galatians 5:1}

Not Nothing
We were told we had a choice. But not that our choice had consequences. We were told love was free. Or maybe we just wanted it to be.

Without Exception
The only lies we get drunk on are the lies we tell ourselves. But the mirror lays bare our nakeness.