At Jesus’s last breath, a crowd of saints rose from their tombs in Jerusalem. Pastor John offers six reasons Matthew’s Gospel includes this event.

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Yesterday morning, I cradled my two-week-old son and read again the words of Pharaoh in Exodus 1:22: “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile.”

There was a time when fathers like me cradled their sons close to their chest, their arms a barricade against barbarity. There was a time when cruel men entered their homes anyway and battered those arms till they broke. There was a time when mothers and sisters wept and screamed. There was a time when baby boys floated face down in the Nile.

But then my mind turned toward a different kind of Nile, a blood-red river running through America and so many other nations.

For there is a time when men like me walk with wives like mine into buildings and say, “Please take care of this for us.” There is a time when doctors enter the realm where God knits life in order to sever the thread mid-stitch. There is a time when our world’s unseen river runs red with the blood of a million children. Yes, there is a time, and that time is now.

For all the differences between Pharaoh’s infanticide and today’s abortion, both end in a heap of dead children, their bodies discarded like trash. And much of the time, both arise from the same dark impulse: ungodly ambition.

Pharaoh’s Ungodly Ambition

Once, the mighty nation of Egypt was glad to give shelter to Jacob and his sons. Pharaoh received the patriarch’s blessing and offered his family the best of the land (Genesis 47:5–7). A man stood between the two peoples, Hebrew by birth, Egyptian by career: Joseph.

But in time, “there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). He did not know the man who once saved his nation from starvation; he only knew that man’s many children and nephews and nieces, those Israelites who had “multiplied and [grown] exceedingly strong” (Exodus 1:7).

Other rulers, recognizing the strength of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, made covenants and enjoyed the blessings God promised to the friends of his people (Genesis 12:3). But this Pharaoh was more autocrat than diplomat. His ambitions were too big for peace.

“Come, let us deal shrewdly with them,” he reasoned, “lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land” (Exodus 1:10). Pharaoh had cities to build, and he needed slaves. Pharaoh had a kingdom to expand, and he needed submissive subjects. Pharaoh had a throne to protect, and he needed no rivals.

First he tried harsh servitude, but Hebrew children kept coming (Exodus 1:11–12). Next he commanded the Hebrew midwives to commit murder for him, but they refused, and Hebrew children kept coming (Exodus 1:15–17). So he poured the poison of his ambition down the throats of his people: “Pharaoh commanded all his people, ‘Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile’” (Exodus 1:22). Kill the boys. Kill every last one.

America’s Ungodly Ambition

Of course, many pro-choice advocates would object to comparisons between infanticide like Pharaoh’s and abortion like America’s. But for those who believe the child inside the woman is just as human as the child without, the differences are smaller than they may seem. A few months and a few inches may separate the baby in utero from the baby in his mother’s arms, but he’s the same baby.

More than that, infanticide then and abortion now often share the same pharaonic spirit. Not always, but often enough, the boys and girls who die by the abortionist’s forceps die as the victims of ungodly ambition. In their book The Story of Abortion in America, Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas show how this ambition has engulfed both women and men, both abortionists and their allies, in our nation.

WOMEN AND MEN

Many women enter the abortionist’s office conflicted. Even “many writings regarded as pro-choice reveal pro-life yearnings,” such as the woman who wrote after an abortion,

Science tells me
Inside my bones
You are still whispering. (The Story of Abortion, 4)

But it’s also true that Lawrence Lader, the “father of abortion rights,” convinced many that “no woman could be free unless she had absolute control over her fertility.” Certainly Betty Friedan, a leader of second-wave feminism, was convinced, and she and others worked to make “abortion the centerpiece of feminism” (294), or what Lader called “‘The Final Freedom’ on the road to female autonomy” (292).

Lader published his book Abortion in 1966. In the sixty years since, women have been told time and again to foster ambitions bigger than motherhood, which inevitably casts children as enemies of feminine success. Some women swallow the agenda whole and shout their abortion; many others listen more quietly yet still choose autonomy over children.

But alongside the women who don’t want to be mothers are men who don’t want to be fathers. How many women, deeply unsure about what to do, have gotten an abortion under pressure from a boyfriend or husband? Back in the 1830s, a young New York pastor “noted that some New Yorkers blamed women for abortion, but it’s usually men who ‘offer physicians large sums of money [to fix] the problem’” (76). Men today, with ambitions of their own, continue to throw money and manipulation at unplanned pregnancies.

Surely, if every man in America esteemed fatherhood, if he received the title “Dad” as better than “President” or “CEO,” thousands more children would live beyond the womb each year. But male ambition also holds a blade.

ABORTIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES

In the mid-nineteenth century, Anna Lohman, known as Madame Restell, earned enough money aborting babies to spend “$20,000 per year on advertising (the equivalent of $600,000 now)” (116). A century later, abortionist Inez Burns became rich enough to invest “nearly half of her revenue in payoffs and bribes: $6,000 per week to downtown officials, $12,000 per month to San Francisco police, $5,000 ‘to every politician running for office’” (250). Though both women spent time in prison for their crimes, abortions proved lucrative enough to keep killing children upon their release.

Even today, when abortionists perform their services under the auspices of the law, abortion is a business with ambition. When an undercover video in 2015 recorded a senior Planned Parenthood doctor describe the correct ways to “crush” an infant to preserve his or her body parts for research, people like Terrisa Bukovinac woke up to what she called “the abortion industrial complex” (399).

And the complex is a large one, involving not just abortionists but also their allies. When abortion was illegal across the country, newspapers still “benefited greatly” from the advertising of women like Restell — as did the many politicians and police who took bribes along the way (111, 231). Such payoffs became obsolete when Roe hit the books in 1973, and they remain so even after Dobbs, since a woman wanting an abortion can travel across state lines if need be (often with expenses paid by her employer). But the benefits of being pro-abortion still extend beyond the abortionists. Many politicians, for example, build their ambitious platforms by promising as much freedom to abort as possible.

Bigger Vision

When we set the modern world next to ancient Egypt, resemblances emerge. No, America and other nations don’t have a singular madman commanding us to rip our neighbors’ children out of their arms. Nevertheless, a pharaonic spirit bristles beneath our ambition for career, autonomy, sexual freedom, money, office. And behind those ambitions is a trail of dead children every bit as real as the Hebrew boys in the Nile.

What did Pharaoh need? And what does our guilty nation need? Two things: a bigger vision and better blood.

We need a bigger vision. Pharaoh “did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), but, oh, that he would have known him! If he had, he would have known that Egypt owed its existence to the very Hebrews he so feared. He would have known that God once blessed Egypt for blessing his people — and that he was ready to do so again (Genesis 12:3). In his bloodlust, Pharaoh thought he was killing a curse; he was in fact murdering a blessing.

Doesn’t abortion share the same narrow vision? This undesired child looks like a curse, an intruder, a lifelong interruption. And abortion promises rescue. But as with Pharaoh, so with us: The thing we think will undo us is the very thing meant to do good to us. Those who abort children are like men who trample unopened gifts, children who burn their inheritance, women who flush jewels down the toilet, Pharaohs who slay their friends. Babies, like Joseph in Egypt, come to do us good.

Indeed, children are the friends, not the enemies, of the best ambitions. “Let your children live” is not a call to sacrifice ambition; it’s a call to get a bigger one. In the beginning, Adam and Eve received an ambition far larger than Pharaoh’s: Subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing. And how would they do that? Only by obeying the command that came before: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).

Though we live in the garden no longer, having children and loving children remains one of the best ways to make the biggest difference with your life. In Scripture, children are houses that last, arrows that win wars, crowns that adorn our aged heads. So let the Pharaohs of the world build as ambitiously as they want: The result will be a shack that falls swiftly. But the lowliest mom and dad who believe God’s promise are laying the stones of a cathedral.

Yes, we need a bigger vision. But we also need something more.

Better Blood

Yesterday morning, I cradled my two-week-old son and thought about a different boy. For there was a time when a boy was hunted by a Pharaoh-like king yet escaped. There was a time when that boy became a man and was betrayed for ambition. There was a time when the envy and fear of many cried out for his blood. There was a time when that blood ran from his hands like a river.

And there is a time, now and always, when that blood is enough to forgive every woman who has walked into an abortion clinic, every man who has pressured her to go there, every doctor who has fulfilled their desires, everyone who has benefited as a result — and all of us who have not aborted but have still prized ungodly ambition over children. Whatever blood stains our hands, the blood of Jesus Christ can wash us clean.

When Paul looked back on his work of establishing the Corinthian church, he thanked God for keeping him from baptizing too many believers. Why?

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ABSTRACT: Reading classic fiction is an exercise both in reading and in being read. Great works of literature — commonly identified as classics because of their enduring longevity, distinct quality, and moral insight — have the power to capture readers’ attention, enrich their imagination, and form their character. Reading and understanding these works is, therefore, not only a matter of analysis but also of immersion, both a looking along and a looking at that is best undertaken in conversation with fellow discerning readers.

Let’s say we want to start reading “the Classics.” And let’s say, being the aspiring discerning readers that we are, we first set out in search of a set of principles that might help us do so. We might begin by asking what we even mean when we say “classic” literature — assuming we mean more than “that which people with a sense of literary style read” — and why we feel the urge to read such literature. Much like the descriptor “Great Books,” which carries inside itself an implicit assessment distinguishing “great” from “good” or “fine,” the term “classics” carries inside itself unstated but recognizable criteria — like a work’s ability to endure over time or its distinctiveness. It wouldn’t take long to find at least three often interrelated categories by which we might accurately label a book “classic.”

Classifying ‘Classics’

The most obvious criteria we might use when we say “classic” are longevity and influence on later generations. Even as late as the early twentieth century, studying the “classics” or the “greats” primarily meant “great works of Roman and Greek literature.”¹ But the term has widened to welcome all kinds of seemingly “enduring” literature, including the fat nineteenth-century novels of Alexander Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Charles Dickens, such that when one says they are now reading “the classics,” the book list is as long as the criteria for inclusion are vague.² Any story, song, poem, essay, speech, or sermon — or any smaller excerpted part of a work — might become a part of the shared vocabulary of a culture, and that for a variety of reasons: a whole range of technologies of reproduction (like printing presses), vulnerability of storage (did it survive the burning of the library of Alexandria?), historical migrations of people and routes of circulation (when did it move from Medieval Muslim Iberia into the rest of Europe?), language access (is it still stuck in Latin?), and the varied communities of readers (who kept reading it to whom?).³ These works often shape the works that come after them, such that identifying “classics” as defined by their relationship to earlier works and their influence on contemporary and subsequent generations really recommends a metaphor of a dynamic and expanding river rather than a moldering, antique catalog.⁴

Another criterion we often assume when we say “classic” is an aesthetic distinction in two ways. By distinction, we could mean its quintessential quality; a classic novel in this sense would be one that is a representative of the genre to which it belongs because it shares the same essential elements.⁵ The generic or shared features of a Chivalric romance, for example, would be not only wandering knights on a quest but also the strong likelihood that anything can happen — magical or otherwise. When describing Una’s rescue by the we-can-hardly-believe-it-they’re-well-behaved Satyrs, we would call the scene from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene a classic romance plot.

By distinction, we can also mean that a work is exceptional among others like it — one that stands out because it seizes our attention and stays with us long after we have finished reading. Perhaps it is something about the feistiness of Chaucer’s Allyson from Bath and her red stockings or the “pirateness” of Stevenson’s one-legged Long John Silver or Alcott’s depiction of vindictive selfishness in Amy March’s burning of Jo’s manuscript. As humans, each with an individual soul, we are drawn to plausible examples of “this-ness” — that stunning particularity of an action or trait. Seventeenth-century Puritan allegorist John Bunyan calls such things “burrs in the brain” because they stick with you and thereby contribute to the work’s ability to endure in memory — both individual and shared.⁶

In addition to a memorable atmosphere or moment, “classics” also often contain insight, moments when a character turns outside of himself to see the world more accurately, creating an opportunity for epiphany in the reader as well. This moment of turning parallels classical anagnorisis in tragedy, where a character like King Oedipus comes to see things as they truly are too late to remedy them (or so he concludes), or Christian repentance, in which, by the work of the Holy Spirit, one turns from self to God. Literary turns may be huge plot arcs or sudden pivots; they encompass everything from the transcendent shock accompanied by a bullet to the head in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” to the warm flash of memory in Anton Chekhov’s “The School Mistress.” When we read, we (subconsciously or not) grade a story’s world against God’s reality, just as we grade our own private fictions against that same reality, not in terms of the historicity of the details (did this actually happen in time?) but in its preserving the integrity of reality in all its stunning diversity and coherence, in the tensions between the world’s fallenness, the everywhere generosity of common grace, and the miracle of redemption. Albeit in a fictional frame, classics amplify and underscore realities that we have become desensitized to, with the end result that we can see more clearly — if often more painfully — the human condition.

Now, we can pause here to note that just because something is influential or memorable doesn’t make it a “classic” or “enduring” in the third — most serious but least common — moral sense of its being rooted in what is true about the nature of God and the world he has made. It is very possible for a work to endure as a “classic” in one sense (still popular) but not in the sense of making reality more legible.

The Priority of Principles

Happy now to have our definition of “classics” sorted, we feel ready to enumerate those principles to structure our reading. But if we continued on to map for ourselves a set of principles that might guide an approach to classic literature, we would soon discover that we had seriously hamstrung ourselves in our noble quest, since our very starting point assumed that reading is an activity that ought to be governed by making distinctions according to specific principles. In other words, we have assumed that discerning readers begin by identifying principles that they then apply to what they read.

Bound up with privileging an analytic approach to literature, our original question — what principles should the discerning reader use to approach the classics? — itself obfuscates a possible world in which the first task when reading literature is something other than identifying principles. The question justifies itself with ethical authority: The discerning reader would begin with principles — as opposed to, say, an average Joe reader who (shudder) does something stupid like diving headfirst into the book without first gauging the depth of the craggy pool below.

The adjectival ethics of “the discerning reader” anticipate the need for something before reading. In other words, you’d read this article as a bit of “reading-before-reading” to pack principles fit for a Boy Scout’s backpack so you don’t die out there. Isn’t the exploration of worlds, especially ones framed by complex fallen human longings, a fraught task? Wouldn’t preparation be prudent? And dangers aside, isn’t understanding undergirded by guiding principles?

I will be the first to affirm that literature is powerful, disruptive, even mercifully devastating. German novelist Franz Kafka finds in literature the power of an “ice axe” to break the “frozen sea” of the soul.⁷ But if we primarily fear stories’ potential weapon-grade power, that fear will move us toward safety in reading, away from literature that is “not safe” but still formatively good. Let me ask instead: How can a good story jump out, daze you in a flash of recognition, and whip you away from the world, the flesh, and the devil, if you’ve waddled into that story, padded in so many layers of analytical criteria that the story cannot get close enough to actually touch your heart, soul, mind, and strength?

What about the excellent question “Isn’t understanding undergirded by principles that make legible a story’s parts?” Yes, of course, knowing the parts of a story — how stories are made, what they are made from and with, and to what end (more on these categories in a moment) — will, by all means, lend insight. Nonetheless, starting with a regimen of assessment threatens to cut against the nature of stories themselves. It is in the nature of stories to be immersive first; they so often begin in medias res, “in the middle of things,” because that rush of narrative disorientation simulates the story’s immersive quality. Even stories that borrow the language of careful orientation, like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), with its opening lines “Marley was dead: to begin with,” are mostly bluffing about disclosing the story’s inner workings from the get-go;⁸ that very narratorial sense of “order” is mostly a ploy to heave-ho, shove off, and get you in “there.” You can figure out where precisely “there” is later. Unlike IKEA furniture assembly, stories, as made things, are designed to be the kind of thing you should want to take a wild, running jump into.⁹

Immersive Reading

Analytical orientation is often a second-order priority in reading classic literature, second to entering into the world of the story since stories are little worlds that reveal themselves over time.¹⁰ Inseparable from the activity of reading is the reader’s labor of recognizing how the story has framed the passage of time and how the characters will change in it. The thickest definition of reading includes not only the sensory and neurological work of translating the words into plots, but also the labor of coming to know a new world, with its formative pressures for the characters, and then letting it shape you as you come to know it. In other words, reading is sustained attention — a willingness to enter the world of the story so that we can think with the story.

This immersive disposition toward reading is a way of knowing that C.S. Lewis defends in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed” (1945).¹¹ Using the metaphor of a beam of light, Lewis argues that there are at least two epistemological modes: the analytical (which he calls “looking at” something) and the experiential (which Lewis describes as “looking along” something).¹² In addition to distinguishing these ways of knowing from one another, Lewis defends the latter against the creeping domain of the former; he complains that it has become intellectually commonplace to privilege the analytical mode and “browbeat” the experiential as less essential and therefore secondary: “We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along.”¹³ Here Lewis defends the two epistemological approaches as complementary insofar as each offers the other an additional way of coming to know beyond its own criteria.

Praising careful observation while reading, my colleagues love to retell the story of Louis Agassiz and his tenacity in examining a fish at his professor’s command.¹⁴ Certainly there is something to applaud in the substantive efforts made to “Look at the fish!” analytically and then to translate such observations into a kind of knowing. But it is also true, as Lewis reminds us, that there is something inherently lacking in giving attention to the fish this way, not because of any failure of effort but because looking at the (dead) fish is only one mode of inquiry and not, therefore, a comprehensive one.

If the glory of the fish fully alive is its swimming, it stands to reason that the little fish cannot be fully known dead on a table or in a yellow jar of preserving alcohol.¹⁵ Agassiz’s efforts are ominously reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s defense of her own short stories: “In most English classes the short story had become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle.”¹⁶ How differently might we come to know a fish — and, by analogy, a story — by entering its natural element, imaginatively placing ourselves inside “the beam.”

Formative Stories

When we give ourselves to a story, it has a way of shaping us in the act of reading. A brief early modern literary example of one of Lewis’s favorite works might help us more clearly understand immersive knowing as a design feature and not as a flaw or a failure. In most editions of The Fairie Queene (1590), editors append a letter Edmund Spenser wrote to explain to his Elizabethan friend Sir Walter Raleigh that he had framed The Fairie Queene to delight his readers so that they would be formed toward virtue.¹⁷ Everyone loves the romance tales of the knights of King Arthur, he reasons, so setting knights to wander through his books would draw his readers into a process of formation that would happen to them while reading. Spenser’s project of formation relies on a prior assumption that his readers will get sucked into the story. To long for holiness in the Spenserian project is to get carried away in the quest of Redcrosse Knight only to encounter yourself at the end.

In the final stanzas of Book I, when the evil Duessa’s plot to sabotage Redcrosse’s marriage to Una fails, Spenser is certainly writing about the Knight of Holiness and the impotent record of his past sins. But the knight is also a shiny medium, a literary sleight of hand through which Spenser draws the reader toward holiness; through Redcrosse Knight, Spenser demonstrates to you that although in this life you are beleaguered by a foe seeking to work you woe, no such foe can ultimately triumph if you belong to Christ through faith. The very work of lavishing your attention on Redcrosse’s wanderings draws you into the story far enough for the story to read you.

Now, granted, not every story — not even every classic — invests in your sanctification. But it is in the nature of stories to capture a span of time in a set of characters’ lives in which some development is mounting — some pressing revelation or change — and that orbit includes the reader if, and only if, the reader will join imaginatively and volitionally in the action, only if they let the story “get them.”

Lessons from the Toolshed

But I must pause. I have been unkind to my kind editors who asked me to write on principles that might guide discerning readers through classic literature. Of course, discerning readers will seek out and welcome principles as they read; all of us bring a catalog of principles to our reading, visible or invisible as they may be. If we pause for just half a second, we recognize that the complaint, “Oh, good grief! Just leave me alone and let me read,” privileges immersive reading to the exclusion of analytical reading. And those still reading this article — yes, those discerning readers — will notice we have been picking up a nice little catalogue of principles for our own reading for many paragraphs now, including the need to distinguish between reading immersively and reading analytically; to recognize that stories are designed to make themselves known by immersing the reader in their own unique worlds; to respect that the maturation of the reader is tied to the willingness to “be gotten” and taken along with the story’s own movement and transformation.

I would not burden readers with principles that would confuse them into mistaking reading primarily as an analytical activity. I’ll gladly echo Lewis that a discerning reader’s first distinction is to read, not by making distinctions from outside the story, but to enter through the wardrobe into its vibrant world. Of first order, I submit, discerning readers must maintain a “bothness” in their reading, lithely bouncing between reading immersively and analytically. Whether they prefer losing themselves in the whole of a story or neatly researching the parts before they get started, they will not grumble or cast suspicious sidelong glances at the other way of knowing; they will show readerly hospitality, welcoming both analytical and synthetic ways of reading. Lewis lauds this attentional ambivalence; after all, “One must look both along and at everything.”¹⁸

Bunyan makes a similar argument toward the end of his opening poem, “The Author’s Apology for His Book,” intermingling the good goal of looking along and looking at his spiritual allegory:

Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowest not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same lines? Oh, then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.¹⁹

Bunyan here offers four overlapping levels of reading: reading to read yourself, reading what you can’t make sense of, reading to discern your spiritual state, and reading with head and heart. For defining the bafflement that comes with immersive reading (looking “along” the story), I know no better description than “read thou knowest not what,” or, as my three-year-old loves to exclaim when confounded, “What in the world?!” But Bunyan’s disorientation is accompanied by substantial orientation: learning to read your very self, your own heart, which Jeremiah reminds us can be so deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). Bunyan argues that his Pilgrim’s Progress enables two readings at the same time. While the dreamer invites the reader to follow Christian as he moves along the allegory’s idiosyncratic path, the story is also full of commentary — sermon forms, catechisms, footnotes, at the same time swiveling your attention to other parts of the allegory and zooming your attention out of the allegory into other texts.

In a potentially exhausting feat, Bunyan zips his readers through multiple positions in the text at once. While I am sympathetic to the effort, I am suspicious of the final success of being able to read “along” the allegory and read “at” it at once. When we happily embrace Lewis’s admonition that we must look both at and along, we will still find ourselves bound by our own limitations as readers. Self-aware readers recognize that they cannot easily (if at all) travel “along” the beam of a story and look “at” the beam of the story at the same time and in the same way.

Habits of Reading and Rereading

Weighing how much attention to give to analytical reading versus immersive reading is a question of prudence, determined both by what your goals are in reading a particular book and the resources you have available as you read. That Bunyan makes a concerted effort at simulating two ways of reading confirms the double good of Lewis’s reading “at” and “along,” but when I assign a text like Bunyan’s, I invite my students to read “along” the allegory in their first read. We then look “at” it together in our class discussion. After swimming about in a story’s “you know not what,” you can switch to an analytical mode most easily by discussing with others who want to make sense of the work alongside you.

But notice, a temporal catch remains: You would like to proportion your attention to moments of revelation in the story and work backward — making sense of the other moments in the story in relation to that moment, because, whether you recognize it or not, you intuit that a good story puts narrative details to work in service of something beyond themselves. You and I find it deeply satisfying if pages of character description aren’t merely for description but are picked up again to serve the story’s eventual climax, its own moment of revelation or clarification.²⁰ So you’d like to be able to read the compounding details of the story in light of the eventual revelation, but in a first reading you can’t. Such proportioning is only possible in the act of rereading or in following someone else’s footsteps. As the adage goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.

In this regard, reading in sequence is a way to develop patience with the ambition to read “the classics.” Give yourself to reading; then turn and analyze it together with others. Fostering this two-part habit of reading is a gift for understanding. Discussing with others after an immersive reading draws you not only closer to the text and its insight but also closer to others. When two or more read together, both are made more themselves and are more intelligible to themselves by their interaction with one another; one’s good is bound up in another’s. Attention, while directed at some object of study, actually radiates in multiple directions at once.

The others with whom you assess the “what in the world” that you just read might be other books or parts of books: introductions that make sense of the whole work by a generous editor, reader’s guides, appended letters or prefaces (often written after the fact) by the author. These works accompanying a literary work cannot replace the experience of reading along the text; they are designed to facilitate that second mode of reading: the looking at. And they are often full of tools you might take with you into your next reading. If you were interested in reading Russian short stories, and you wanted to practice interpreting immediately after you finished a story, I’d turn to George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, in which he experiments with sharp pivots from looking along to looking at Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. If you want strategies for reading poetry, you’ll find yourself both thrilled and frustrated by Abram Van Engen’s Word Made Fresh since he refuses to gratify readers’ lust for meaning until he can moderate their attention. He sends you into a poem to first ask how the poem works on you before helping you name how the poem works internally.²¹

Over many, many rereadings, then, the analytical mode and the experiential mode become harder to distinguish from one another and become something like a contemplative mode sustained and enhanced by palimpsest memories of earlier ruminations. The classics endure in part because they cannot “be gotten” (fully comprehended) or “get you” (form you) all in one go. With every reading you bring a fresh attentiveness that will cause treasures both old and new to stand forth. Discerning reading is less an activity of technique and far more a habit of attention to be generously given to a story over a long life. So, yes, take up and read, but bound up in that reading, embrace the embedded echo: Take up and reread.

What makes the gospel come alive? John Piper opens 1 Peter 1:13–25 to show that God calls dead sinners into living faith.

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What’s the relationship between our good deeds and God’s reward? When he empowers us to obey him, he loves to celebrate the beauty of his grace.

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Have babies and don’t kill them. That’s a decent summary of the direct commands we have from God before the law is handed down in Exodus. The first and most repeated is the most familiar:

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. (Genesis 1:28)

Adam and Eve’s primary work was to fill the earth with images of God. They were of course to be faithful, worshipful, affectionate reflections of God and his glory, but then they were to love each other in a way that multiplied that image a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a millionfold. Be fruitful. Have babies. It’s one of the great choruses of Genesis, repeated to Noah and Jacob (Genesis 9:7; 35:11), and then later to the people of Israel (Jeremiah 23:3).

A second command is like it, however, and comes with it because of sin. When God repeats the command to Noah, encouraging his family to multiply, he adds a severe warning he hadn’t given to Adam and Eve:

Whoever sheds the blood of man,
     by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.

And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it. (Genesis 9:6–7)

Have babies and don’t kill them — these are twin commands for guarding and nurturing the sanctity of human life. And in the United States, we wickedly defy both.

Has Life Won Since Dobbs?

We can’t even obey the first (and more delightful) command: Go and have babies. The fertility rate in the United States fell this year to the lowest level ever recorded. In 2007, just twenty years ago, we gave birth to more than four million babies. Last year, we had 700,000 fewer. In America, children are not a heritage, a reward, an arrow in the hand of a warrior (Psalm 127:3–4). No, too often, they’re treated like bulky, messy, expensive luggage.

I wish plummeting fertility were the worst news. Tragically, we also break that second great command — not to shed the blood of man and destroy the image of God. Every year, we kill a million babies in this country. This silent, hidden population is larger than Washington, DC — and we kill that many boys and girls every year.

Didn’t we overturn Roe v. Wade? Yes, and praise God we did! And yet the abortion scene has actually gotten worse since the Dobbs decision. As I write, thirteen states have near-total bans on abortion: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Hallelujah! And yet I live in one of the 37 states where anyone can legally get an abortion for basically any reason within a given period. Six states limit that “freedom” at 6–12 weeks. Four more set limits between 15–22 weeks. Eighteen have limits at or near viability (24–28 weeks). And nine states plus DC — a total population of 45.5 million — have no gestational limits at all. That means a child can be legally killed anytime up to and including the moment of birth. Stop and make yourself think about that.

Have babies and don’t kill them. We’re still a country who avoids babies and kills millions.

Minefield for the Unborn

Since the Dobbs decision, pro-life bills have gone just three for seventeen on state ballot votes. The legal losses have been more and greater than the wins. The biggest current fight is being waged over abortion pills. Just this May, the Supreme Court ruled to allow distributors to send the pill into states with abortion bans. A state like Louisiana, where abortion is almost completely banned, still expects to see one thousand babies killed each month.

The United States, even in 2026, is still one of the most dangerous places on earth for an unborn person. Clarke Forsythe, in his excellent book Abuse of Discretion, writes,

The United States is an outlier when it comes to the scope of the abortion “right.” The United States is one of approximately ten nations (of 195) that allow abortion after fourteen weeks of gestation. . . . When it comes to allowing abortion for any reason after viability, however, the United States is joined only by Canada, North Korea, and China. (126)

The US is one of only four countries in the world — only four — that refuses to protect the unborn even after viability. And what defines viability? “Having reached such a stage of development as to be capable of living, under normal conditions, outside the uterus.” The US and Canada are half of the nations worldwide that will not defend a baby even when that baby could already survive outside the womb. The other two are North Korea and China.

For nearly fifty years now, the United States has made the womb a minefield, and millions of our sons and daughters have become the innocent casualties of our lust for sex, for freedom, for power, for self.

In a World That Kills Children

Abortion is a horror so evil and so persistent that even Christians can grow numb to the nightmare. We at Desiring God feel the need to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves in our day, and so we developed a series of articles to expose the ongoing monstrosity and awaken concerted prayer and action for the unborn. We are killing our children by the hundreds of thousands, and God has been telling us, since before the first abortion, that the killing must stop.

We’ll spend most of our time looking at infanticide in the Bible. Abortion was not new with Roe v. Wade. The world under sin has been killing children for thousands and thousands of years. Where does abortion rear its evil, ugly head, and what does God say about it when those murders happen?

We’ll force ourselves to watch Pharaoh throw baby boys in the Nile — and then see that our nation is more like Pharaoh than we think. We’ll examine child sacrifice to false gods and the demonic nature of the abortion industry. We’ll remember when King Herod’s jealousy and rage executed the little children in Bethlehem. With a couple of other stops on this tour of horror, we’ll land again on the battlegrounds now and learn what it might mean to fight for the unborn in our day.

Greater Danger Than Abortion

In the Christian fight for life, we really are fighting for something higher and greater than human life on earth. We battle for these babies, yes, but we’re not content to end abortion or sex trafficking or racism.

John Piper and Tony Reinke recorded a special episode of Ask Pastor John the week the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The conversation celebrated the decision as right and good, but it also included some real caution about what it might actually mean for the unborn in America. The caution was warranted. Near the end, Pastor John set the highest priority in our pro-life cause:

Far greater than the danger of abortion is the danger of hell. Rescuing people for eternal life is more crucial and more loving than rescuing babies from abortion. In other words, we care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering. . . .

We are Christians before we are pro-life. We are Christ-exalting before we are life-exalting. We want to save souls, the souls of mothers and fathers, as much as we want to save the bodies of the babies. The aim for us is not just the end of abortion, but the eternal joy of forgiven sinners.

Amen. Even as we focus on the terrors of child-killing, our greatest prayer is that souls would be saved and transformed by Jesus. A land experiencing revival is an undeniably safer land for the unborn. That pursuit of eternal joy doesn’t limit the real progress we can make on the ground today, with God’s almighty help, but it does guide and energize the long battle ahead.

So, let’s take up arms against evil and pray that God does more than we can ask or imagine to save the unborn from both death and hell.

The hostile army ignored God as long as they could, but when he looked down at them, they panicked. Then his people’s newfound fear of him erupted in song and dance.

Watch Now

“How’s your 401(k) looking?” “What’s your five-year plan?” “We’re heading out West this summer.” “Everybody’s working for the weekend . . .”

We hear each of these phrases in our daily dialogue (or on our eighties radio station), and, with rare exceptions, we receive and respond to each without question.

But when I consider both the word of God and the wisdom of historical Christian thinkers, they give me pause. Just as C.S. Lewis looked askance at his society for basing its “whole life” on lending at interest while so many ancient civilizations deplored it (Mere Christianity, 85), I feel unrest in my heart when I see myself basing my whole life on my non-eternal future. Whether we focus on our retirement plans, our five-year plans, or just the next moment to grasp for fulfillment, both Scripture and our historical and theological influences call that focus folly.

Our Non-Eternal Future

We’ll start with Lewis himself in The Screwtape Letters (speaking from the perspective of a man-tempting demon):

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. . . .

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. . . . It is far better to make them live in the Future. (75–76)

Martin Luther is said to have put it more starkly, four centuries earlier: “There are two days in my calendar: this day and that Day.”

But Scripture is even more direct when it assesses our orientation toward the non-eternal future. James calls a sense of certainty about tomorrow arrogant and evil:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13–16)

Jesus tells those who smugly store up for the future, rather than for heaven, that they are fools:

[The rich man] said, “I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” But God said to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:18–20)

And of course, in Matthew 6:25–34, our Lord tells us repeatedly not to concern ourselves with tomorrow — not about what we will eat, drink, or wear — any more than the lilies do.

Alongside Lewis and Luther, the scriptural calls to attend to the present are accompanied by equally stark mandates to focus on the glory that awaits us after death. Peter calls us to set our hope fully on the grace to be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:13). The writer of Hebrews makes clear that we exiles on earth are seeking a heavenly city (Hebrews 11:16). And these are among dozens of summonses to set our gaze on eternity.

Holding the Present and Eternity

We are left with two significant dilemmas. First, we need to learn how the present and eternity can take up more of our mental, emotional, and conversational bandwidth. Second, we need to learn how the non-eternal future properly fits into our thoughts and conversations.

So, let’s get practical. How do we remain in the moment and hold eternity in front of us on the daily?

1. Don’t bank on tomorrow.

Psalm 90:12 tells us to number our days in order to get a heart of wisdom, but our minds usually run to the seventy- or eighty-year life expectancy referenced earlier in the psalm (Psalm 90:10). Even in moments when I vigilantly consider my vaporishness, I think about my life ending in my eighties or so. But shouldn’t my day-numbering also recognize that tomorrow is not remotely guaranteed? Shouldn’t the infamous “What if I were hit by a bus?” scenario ring true? Wise people attach “Lord willing” to any plan, especially beyond today, and they mean it.

2. Count your blessings (really).

Yes, it sounds like a Facebook hashtag or a country song, but it’s a powerful way to remain present and remember the presence of God. I have spent many holidays with my senior pastor, a rather hyperactive septuagenarian. But year after year, I watch him hold back his kinetic energy, sit back in the middle of a chaotic meal full of longtime friends, children, and grandchildren, and simply drink it in with a grateful grin. That’s not just a holiday-worthy practice. Anxious future planners forget to do it at all. If it helps, pull out your journal and record what you’re thankful for.

3. Put your phone away.

See 30 percent of the Christian books written in the last ten years for evidence.

4. Plan your planning.

There is clearly merit and necessity to planning for days beyond today (and before heaven). Farmers consider the coming winter. Meetings must be scheduled out of consideration for others. Bad husbands leave anniversary and birthday plans until the day of (gulp). But most of us are caught in a vicious habit of considering tomorrow while missing the sweetness of today. While a handful of impromptu future plans may be necessary each day, consider relegating the lion’s share of your calendaring to a set time in your schedule (alongside your spouse if you’re married). I’m tired of sunsets and movies and games with my children being interrupted by intrusive thoughts of oil changes or flights to be scheduled.

5. Let anxious thoughts die.

Future thinking is complicated, and this isn’t meant to be a definitive commentary on clinical anxiety. But Matthew 6 is clear enough that we shouldn’t worry about tomorrow. It’s one thing (and wise) to make a plan; it’s quite another to ruminate anxiously on the uncertain execution or outcome of it. Setting a regular doctor’s appointment is good stewardship, but fretting over possible outcomes is a “respectable” sin. If you find yourself dwelling in hypothetical doomsday scenarios, don’t call yourself a worrywart. Repent of your fear to the God who knows your needs.

6. Don’t let hope wither.

Of course, we should, in some measure, anticipate the immediate future. It would be a sad existence if you constantly remained stoic about a long-distance friend coming to visit, never sending a “Can’t wait!” text or the like. But your hopes about their visit or your vacation to Banff next month are but a shadow of the fully guaranteed new earth that comes on that Day. If you should hope for the former, how much more so the latter, when real rest is coming (Hebrews 4:9). Beware of truncating your hopes about eternity.

Savor the Substantial

We naturally dwell in the future. I was recently sharing a meal with some extended family members, and one of them exclaimed, “I’m so excited for you to be with us at Christmas! Then we can plan what we’re going to do next summer!” We eventually laughed about the absurdity of that statement, but in reality, it was an unfiltered example of our inability to sit in the present. The unfulfilling “next thing” simultaneously keeps us from experiencing the substance of this moment and prevents us from placing our hope where actual fulfillment lies.

It goes without saying that this endeavor is complicated. Poor planners are often inconsiderate (I know from years of experience). Ministries and marriages require meticulous thought, often months in advance. But the Scriptures are clear that we have lost something sweetly substantial in our focus on the uncertain. The wise learn to dwell on what is ours in truth, whether in the now or the new life to come.