A Call to Prayer (Day 3 from Cleansing Thoughts)

        Several months later, after I had returned home, the reality of what I experienced that day came like a flood into my mind. Sometimes when praying, I like to have a reference point, something I can see or touch to help me stay focused on what I am praying for. The images of the children of the children filled my thoughts, but they had no faces. There were no candles lit. These were the babies lost to a present-day Holocaust on the abortion tables across our country. Children marked for extinction because we claim our freedom of choice. Mankind has not learned from the past; they have only found another way to eliminate what stands in their way. The choices we make have caused an endless number of babies to be thrown aside, not even to be recognized as human life. Never given a name. Most never to be remembered. The words of the Jewish poet filled my heart, "Unto every person, there is a name bestowed on him by God." These little ones were known by God when they were conceived in their mothers' womb. Psalm 139:15 and 16 (NKJV) states, "My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me when as yet they were none of them." It is interesting to note that in this passage of scripture, two Jewish publications translate the text using more of a human approach uses the phrase "Your eyes saw my unformed limbs"; and the Complete Jewish Bible, "My bones were not hidden from you," and "Your eyes could see me as an embryo." (Tanakh is an acronym for the Old Testament. T for torah, which means "Pentateuch;" N for neviim which means "prophets;" and KH for ketuvim, which means "writtings.") The value of human life appears more evident when read in this text. My heart cries out to these little ones yet unborn and so rejected. No value placed in them. No name recorded to be read in the halls of remembrance.

    I sat for what seemed like a very long time in the silence of my prayer closet before the images of the Yad Vashem filled my thoughts once again. I remembered standing before the Wall of Remembrance, where once a year, the survivors and their families gather to take part in a memorial ceremony. At one point in the ceremony, a siren is blown, and for a period of two minutes, throughout the entire country, the people unite. All work is halted. Cars and busses pull to the side of the road. Everywhere, people stop what they are doing as an entire nation stands in silence, showing reverence to the victims of the Holocaust.

    A sculpture I could not bear to look upon pressed its way into my memory; it was the "Memorial to the Victims in Camps." The artist was creating a mental picture of these victims in the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the concentration camps. Only, this fence was made of twisted bodies that appeared to be screaming soundlessly to heaven with their sharply angled limbs forming the wire and their hands fashioning the knots. Suddenly, I remembered a conversation I had, had with my dad after I returned and had shared with him what I had seen. He told me he was with the medical team that first liberated the camp of Dachau. From what he shared with me, what I saw depicted in this sculpture was more of a vision of reality than just an artist's view of the tragic event.