Luke 8:52 And all were weeping and mourning for her, but he said, “Do not weep, for she is not dead but sleeping.”
I recently attended a conference that gave me new hope for those who have left the faith.
The speaker, OB/GYN doctor Bill Lile, summed up his approach to medicine in a few words: “a patient is a person no matter how small.” When treating pregnancies, he views both the mother and unborn child as patients under his care. Consequently, he cited hundreds of fetal operations, including blood transfusions, spinal bifida, even open-heart surgery, where intervention spared children’s lives while still in the womb.
Most fascinating to me was Dr. Lile’s work in abortion reversals. He belongs to a network of 500 physicians who have conducted over 4,000 reversals on women who regretted taking mifepristone, the abortion pill. If the women take a dose of the hormone progesterone within 72 hours, the abortion can be prevented. In other words, progesterone serves as an antidote to mifepristone.
I started thinking about this in spiritual terms.
Like me, you probably know sad stories of friends or family who have turned away from God. These situations can make us feel so grieved, so hopeless. It’s like they took a spiritual dose of mifepristone. They killed “Christ being formed within them.”
But don’t lose heart! If the lives of babies in the womb can be spared, maybe spiritual death can be averted as well. I’ve started praying for spiritual doses of progesterone to reverse the deathly consequences of those who left the faith. If it can happen in the natural, why not the spiritual?
It makes me recall the story when Jarius asked Jesus to heal his dying daughter. While Jesus was on the way to Jarius’ house, soldiers came and reported her already dead. No reason to bother Jesus anymore. But Jesus encouraged Jarius to have faith. And when they arrived at the house, he told the mourners not to weep because the girl was only sleeping. The crowd scoffed at him, but not for long. Because Jesus reversed death and brought this little girl back to life.
So no matter how spiritually dead someone might seem, let’s not give up hope. Let’s keep praying they get a good dose of spiritual progesterone!