AND HE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW

Note: The following was written by the late Joe Wall.   Joe was an ardent defender of life for well over 40 years and spent many hours in prayerful witness outside abortion mills, particularly the Northeast Women's Center. 

By Joe Wall

It was a cold winter morning. A recent snowfall covered the ground; an icy wind whipped across the wide boulevard cutting the face of the man pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. He was engaged in his usal Saturday morning occupation, a rosary vigil at an abortion chamber.

This chamber, the Northeast Women's Center, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was on the third floor of the small office building. He had spent several hours every Saturday praying the rosary for the unborn babies being brought in to be killed. He prayed too for their mothers, usually frightened young girls. He had tried and tried to interest others in coming to the vigils. Sometimes, he was successful, and two, three, four people would join him. But, all too often, as on this Saturday, he was alone.

The loneliness, even more so the apathy, the heartlessness of his fellow Catholics, was beginning to wear him down. As he walked back and forth, fingering his beads, frozen to the bone, he wondered if it was all worthwhile, if anybody cared, if his efforts really made a difference.

This morning, particularly, an almost unbearable sense of defeat and depression weighed him down. Fighting it, he knelt in the snow, on the lawn between the building and the sidewalk, to say his next rosary. He hoped that, somehow, this added bit of hardship would help. Oddly enough, it did and, after finishing the rosary, he arose with a lighter heart. He completed his vigil that day and went on to continue them for many years thereafter.

What he didn't know was that as he knelt there in the snow, praying, a young woman was watching from a window on the third floor. She was waiting to be brought into the procedure room for her abortion. Sad to relate, she did have the abortion that day. And, as often happens, she found herself pregnant again a few months latter. Once more, she was face with an agonizing decision. The memory of that day at the clinic came back to her; she could not forget the sight of that lone man kneeling in the snow, praying for her and her baby. She decided that if a stranger could care that much for her baby, so could she. She would let the baby live.

That day, by his presence and the simple act of kneeling in prayer, he had saved a child's life...and he didn't even know!

This is a true story. Longtime pro-life counselor Jean Neary told it to me on a radio show twelve years later. She had heart it from the young woman who had come to her for counseling during her successful pregnancy.

To learn the other side of the story, I didn't have to question the man who had knelt in the snow that day so long ago, as it was me!