by Pastor Michael Salemink
“My body, my choice” isn’t a creed of freedom. “My body, my choice” is a cry for help.
This supposed motto for autonomy instead smuggles in a satanic deception. The devil intends to divide and isolate people. He misleads us into believing we’re all on our own. “Your body, your choice” means the terminal diagnosis is your problem. No one can save you. You must control this. “Your body, your choice” means the surprise pregnancy is your fault. Nobody loves you. You must correct this. “My body, my choice” doesn’t liberate anyone. It really aims to lay blame. Its façade of power paves the way forward for panic.
The beautiful truth is you are not alone.
Even in our mistakes and moments of crisis, we still belong to something better. Even in our difficulties and afflictions, we still belong to someone else. Even in our shortcomings and shadowed valleys of death, we still belong to somebody greater.
We belong to Father, Son, and Spirit who creates, redeems, and calls us body and life to be precious treasures from fertilization to forever in His heavenly household. We belong—each of us—to the same one human race made in His image inheriting the earth as gifts and privileges for one another. We belong—all of us—to a family woven of a man and a woman come together as father and mother from and for a fabric of loved ones, relatives, flesh, and genetics. We belong—everyone—to the body of Christ, a brotherhood baptized together by a water thicker yet than blood, a mighty communion of saints pushing us ahead and a great cloud of witnesses pulling us on across distance, throughout history, and even beyond death. We belong to a country in this world but not of it and a kingdom of forgiveness, faith, and fellowship, of joy and hope and resurrection everlasting. And we belong to our neighbor, whatever his need, no matter her age, appearance, or ability, by a holy vocation to receive them and serve both their survival and salvation, until we realize the worth and achieve the purpose God Himself has willed into each and works in us all.
Consider what this looks like on any given Tuesday evening in any given parish hall. A handful of men show up after work, still in boots or khakis, coffee in styrofoam cups, Bibles cracked open on folding tables. They are not theologians. They are welders, accountants, retired teachers, a guy who drives a truck for a building supply company. Half of them would rather be home. But they come because someone asked them to, and because the last time one of them missed three weeks in a row the others showed up at his door with a casserole and no intention of leaving until they had heard what was wrong.
That particular man, the one who had gone quiet, had been sitting in his truck after shifts scrolling through his phone for hours before going inside. Sports scores, Reddit threads, rankings of best offshore sportsbooks a coworker had forwarded him, weather forecasts he had already checked twice. None of it mattered. He was filling time because the house felt empty after his wife moved out. He did not call anyone. He did not ask for help. He had absorbed the logic the world sells so fluently: this is your problem, your failure, your mess to sort out alone.
The men from the study did not deliver a lecture when they knocked on his door. They did not quote Scripture at him from the porch. They sat in his living room and watched the game and let the silence be awkward, and then one of them said he had been through something similar a few years back and it had nearly wrecked him. That was all it took. Not a program. Not a pamphlet. Just presence, the plain and unglamorous ministry of showing up.
This is the belonging that outlasts slogans. It is not theoretical. It does not wait for permission or an invitation. It moves toward the person who has stopped moving, carries the one who has stopped carrying himself, and speaks when the world has told him there is nothing left to say.
Who needs private choices and personal matters? We can do this together, for we have the Lord, and this Savior has us.