Bearing One Another's Burdens

In the church, when one of us weeps, we all weep. The beloved Dahlin family - Christie, Samuel, and Jedidiah - have been on a painful path. We weep with them.

After making the excruciating decision to terminate a longed-for pregnancy for medical reasons, Christie and Samuel found that their church insurance (The Corinthian Plan) would NOT cover the healthcare they needed. Additionally, because Christie pastors a Mennonite congregation in a state with a total abortion ban, they were forced to cross state lines to have access to the life-affirming reproductive care that they needed and that simultaneously broke their hearts.

Christie powerfully and prophetically writes: "Jesus is with every pregnant individual who is scared they won't get the care they need. Jesus is with the crying parents who release their tiny baby so that he can be free from a life of suffering, Jesus is with the families who had to flee to find the help they needed. I trust this is the Jesus we profess in our Mennonite faith..."

Despite having met their very high deductible for the year, the Dahlins now face $11,000* in denied insurance claims and medical bills. In our 2003 Mennonite Church USA Statement on Abortion, we proclaim this: "We urge pastors and congregations to foster a climate of openness so that these decisions can be worked out prayerfully in the context of Christian community. We believe that the community should be supportive of a woman or couple, sharing the responsibility for, and burden of, that decision.”

Church, friends, community: may we bear this burden with them.

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*UPDATE: Christie & Samuel were able to negotiate their medical bills down by a couple thousand, so we have edited our fundraising goal to $8000.