Being Human – The Necessary Prerequisites

I’ve thought quite a few times that being Pro-Life requires far more than promoting alternatives to abortion.

Acting on behalf of life, in favor of life, extends to a lot of other issues.

Extreme poverty. Living wage. Health care. Clean water. Disease prevention.

Sometimes I think “being Pro-Life” even extends further to much more routine actions, tasks a lot closer to home.

To not sleeping enough. To driving recklessly. To putting crap into our bodies. To not wearing seatbelts or adequately scraping our car windows. To not acting in the best interest of or protection of or promotion of … life.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about how there are, similarly, both huge, global ways and small, routine ways of being human, of sharing existence with other people, of striving for the kind of peace the book of Proverbs or the Sermon on the Mount or the disciple John encouraged between people.

There are giant, socially-and-politically-manifested issues like human trafficking, which I’ll be spending this year chipping away at on my blog. (You can join the efforts here.)

And then there are really tiny, ordinary, close to home ways of honoring people and valuing togetherness.

The sorts of pre-requisite behaviors that say–not just in the blogosphere, or twitterverse, or voting booth–that I, as a person, value human relationships.

It’s the way we hold our own needs in relationship to the needs of others.

It’s the way we choose (or don’t choose) to be aware of the impact we have on others.

It’s the way we intentionally look (or don’t look)  to bless and invest in those whose lives are linked to ours.

It’s the tone of voice, the choice of words, the face time, the generosity, the inclusiveness, the partnering vs. competing, the every day honor, loyalty, and gratefulness questions.

It’s the humility a friend recently (and rightly) called me out for failing to show.

This is why, as I venture into the subject of brotherhood and big over-arching issues like Human Trafficking, I know that my biggest responsibility–before and as I examine the world–is to examine my own soul and to reconcile the ways in which I fail to show brotherhood in much less revolutionary and vigilante ways every day.