December 5, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – When multi-Grammy award-winning singer and producer John Elefante started writing the lyrics for his song “This Time,” he had no intention of writing a “pro-life song,” and certainly didn’t have any dreams that the song would ever save anybody’s life. He just wanted to write a good track for his new album.
John, the former lead singer for the rock band Kansas, a prolific record producer, and a born-again Christian, told LifeSiteNews.com in a recent telephone interview that when he sat down to write the lyrics, he already basically had the rest of the song recorded.
John felt that the soaring melody lent itself to lyrics that told a story. And so he said closed his eyes and prayed, saying: “Lord, just give me something, really, really powerful for this song.”
When he opened his eyes, he started writing.
“She sat cold in the waiting room, frightened and alone,” he wrote. Then he went to the microphone and sang those two lines. Then he wrote another two lines: “Watched the clock tick down, knowing that her baby would soon be gone.”
“I started just writing a couple lines at a time,” he says. “The story started culminating and coming together.”
But this wasn’t a story that John was making up. What he was writing was the true story of the day that his adopted daughter, Sami, came within a hairbreadth of an abortionist’s scalpel.
“I only had really two major facts about that day,” John says. Firstly, that his daughter’s birth mother went to the clinic for her abortion appointment, and secondly, that she changed her mind at the last minute and called her mom on the phone.
When John finished writing the lyrics, he says he didn’t think that he had just written an “anti-abortion song” or a song about adoption. “I didn’t think any of that stuff,” he says. “It didn’t cross my mind. I was just like, ‘Thank you Lord for a beautiful piece of music that describes how my daughter came into the world.”
It wasn’t until he received the mixed version of the song back from his audio engineer that he realized that he had opened the proverbial can of worms. The way the song had been mixed strongly emphasized his voice and the lyrics, and listening to it, he says, “It hit me that this was going to be a controversial song.”
And in that moment, he again prayed. “Lord,” he said, “if this song can save one child, just one, only one,” he would be happy, “because I know You gave me this song for a reason, and You gave me this experience for a reason.”
‘She’s going to keep her baby!’
John's prayer has been answered…and then some.
After he released his song, he was urged to create a music video to accompany it, something that he was able to do thanks to a partnership with the pro-life organization Online for Life. The music video dramatizes the lyrics, showing a young girl in an abortion clinic, and what happens when she has a vision of her unborn daughter growing up.
So far, he knows of at least three cases where mothers were convinced to choose life for their babies after watching the video, which has been viewed nearly 400,000 times on YouTube.
One woman who works as a corrections officer wrote John telling him how she had been responsible for driving an inmate to an ultrasound appointment. While waiting for the woman to finish she checked her e-mail and stumbled upon the music video.
Later, while driving the woman back from her appointment, the corrections officer noticed that she looked agitated, and asked her what was wrong. The woman responded that she wasn’t sure what to do about her pregnancy and was considering abortion.
“Well I felt as if God had just hit me, show he[r] the video!” the corrections officer wrote. “We watched the video together and right there she promised me she was keeping the baby and is going to share with other prisoners and thanked me. I told her thank God! And you for following Gods will.”
In another case, a woman wrote on YouTube saying that she had sent the music video to her 15-year-old cousin, who was considering abortion. “My cousin said she just watched it and she said she cried and isn’t going to abort, she is going to keep it,” the woman wrote.
In a third case, John was contacted by a 20-year-old girl whose family was threatening to disown her unless she aborted her baby. However, John and some fellow supporters pooled their resources together and found her a place to live with a loving family, helped her out financially, and purchased health care for her.
Recently John was interviewed on the Huckabee Show, and the girl was present in the audience. “She going to keep her baby!” says John. “She’s had two ultrasounds already. There’s no way in the world she’s going to abort this child. No way.”
Then there are the 300 Facebook messages, and 600-plus e-mails that John has received from viewers of the video, who have shared heart-rending stories about how they learned that they lost siblings to abortion, or how their mother told them that she wanted to abort them.
“These people pour their guts out on how hard it was for them to deal with,” he said.
‘God works in mysterious ways’
While John has been pro-life ever since his conversion in the early 1980s, a conviction that was cemented after learning how close his daughter came to being killed, he has had little experience of talking about the issue of abortion before a wider audience.
He describes himself as an “accidental voyager” in the world of pro-life activism: a journey that has landed him interviews about abortion with various news outlets, as well as speaking engagements on behalf of crisis pregnancy centers.
“The doors just swung wide open one by one,” he says, adding that he’s simply grateful that God has been able to use his particular talents to spread the message of life to people who might not otherwise be willing to listen to it. “There’s something that a song can do that words sometimes can’t, and the music and the visuals in a song that people actually would listen to. And I think that’s what struck a nerve here.”
“This is where God put me,” he concludes. “As we know, God works in mysterious ways.”