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PUEBLO, Colorado, May 18, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Sarah Nelson, 22, was going through a challenging chapter in her faith journey in 2001 as she served in leadership at a successful megachurch in Denver, Colorado. She and her fiancee Brandon loved their church and the fellowship it provided, but Sarah could not shake off the feeling there was something missing.

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At her Christian church, one thing that was impressed upon her was that abortion was wrong. For as long as she can remember, Sarah had always considered herself “very pro-life and absolutely against abortion.”

One day, while praying for an end to abortion on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade which legalized the killing of babies in the womb in 1973, Sarah suddenly experienced the voice of God saying to her:

You have the spirit of abortion.

The young woman remembers being stunned. ‘How could this accusation be true,’ she remembers reasoning vehemently with God, when she was clearly against the horrible crime of ending an innocent life in a mother’s womb?

Again, Sarah experienced the convicting voice of God:

You have the spirit of abortion in you because you do not value children as you ought. You see them as a burden and something that would inconvenience your life.

As Sarah pondered the word she had received, it dawned on her that God was entirely right. She had believed that it was wrong to kill children through abortion, but she now realized that a deeply rooted contraceptive mentality within her had prejudiced her to not really value children or to even desire them.

“Up to that point, I had had no exposure to the perspective of contraception as a moral evil,” Sarah told LifeSiteNews. “Growing up, I was extremely familiar with the fact that as couples were counseled for marriage in church, it was the assumption across the board that to be a ‘prudent newly wed couple’, you must contracept, and preferably for at least two years in order to establish a ‘stable marriage’.”

“Rarely were children talked about in terms of ‘abundance and overflowing joy’. In some circles it was strongly suggested that couples limit their family size for the good of God. Many couples saw two children as plenty.”

“I was not really open to having children, nor had I been encouraged to be so from my church leadership. From this flowed the natural conclusion that contraception was fine. And if contraception was fine, then I could see how the logic worked that allowed abortion (God forbid) to be fine because it got rid of an ‘inconvenience’”.

“I was horrified as I suddenly and instantly knew the horrible truth: being closed to life through contraception actually leads to the reality and horror of abortion.”

It was with sadness that Sarah realized that she had become a victim of the logic of contraception without even realizing it. “And sadly, this was where I had been up till that day,” she recounted.

As a consequence of her humbling experience with God, Sarah turned to the Catholic Church for answers and eventually became Catholic along with her now-husband Brandon. They now have two children and are hoping for more.

To this day, over a decade later, it fills Sarah with sadness that many of her friends cannot see what she calls the “real beauty of sexual union and the beauty of being totally open to the gift of life”. Nonetheless, she and her husband will hardly let an opportunity pass by to challenge their friends to think about the dimension of gift that is inherent in sexual union and that entails an openness to life.

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“The gift God has given us, the ability to procreate with him, why would we not want to be part of that?,” the couple often asks their friends.

Sarah says that she will be forever grateful for the day that “God opened my eyes wide to this truth and I truly became pro-life. I’ll never forget that day. It is very much seared into my memory.”