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(LifeSiteNews) — The first week of Advent gave the first New England snowfall of the season to us prisoners in our Massachusetts jail.

The first New England snowfall I ever saw was nearly 50 years ago, and then, too, I was on a pro-life mission. It was the Advent season of 1975. Some friends and I travelled to New Hampshire to carry petitions for the pro-life presidential candidate Ellen McCormack so she could enter the Democrat primary there. Long story short: we succeeded, she ran very well, and she effectively ended the presidential ambitions of one Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind), himself an early prototype of a Joe Biden-style Senator. Bayh had killed all the Human Life Amendments introduced in that Congress. No one now remembers nor regrets the end of Birch Bayh’s political career. Bye-Bye, Bayh.

As I gaze out the prison windows at the surrounding snow-draped trees, I ponder the beauty and wonder of snow.  As an old man, I no longer like the cold, but the enchantment of snow, particularly in the Advent and Christmas seasons, still holds me.

“RESUME NORMAL,” blasts the PA announcer here, interrupting my reverie.

Normal? We’re in prison! (Did you know you can achieve reverie in here? Come get old with me.)

As an old man fortunate enough to have had children, I find the snow recalls soft memories of my life.  To all you young parents or young people hoping to become parents, let me tell you that whatever fond memories you have of snow in your own childhood (and we all do), they will decrease in your memory as you hatch and grow your own children. It is their wondering eyes and joy you will remember. When you sit, as an old man or woman, watching the snow, your memories of snowfalls will be of your children and the snow of their early years.

I remember my oldest daughter insisting, after a few trial runs on her father’s lap, to go down the hill on the sled all by herself.  As was to become usual, she did fine.

My youngest daughter, currently carrying my 5th grandchild through this Advent, was born in 1996 and will forever be linked in my mind with the blizzard of 1996.

I remember, too, my oldest son, in his early teens, returning home with a black eye after a local sledding mishap with his friends.

READ: As the West becomes more anti-Christian, we should celebrate examples of courage

Being a Baby Boomer, belonging to one of the most pampered, entitled and, therefore, discontented generations, I have not often found myself sitting peacefully in genuine contentment and satisfaction. The exception was when I sat with a hot drink in my dining room, knowing all my children were safe indoors with me, watching the snow softly falling outside the window.

Children look up with wonder in their eyes at the beauty falling.  They reach out their hands to catch it. They gasp and are startled that a bird can and does fly through the snow. They look down at the beauty covering everything they know. Snowfall is that rare time when the beauty of the ground surpasses the beauty of the sky.

All children share the same astonished wonder when they are told that each snowflake is individually different, unique and not the same as any other. Do we teach them that they themselves are like that?  Do they understand that God sends children like He sends snowflakes?  (Real snowflakes, not the “safe spaces” kind!)

“Every child is a unique and unrepeatable gift of God,” thundered St. John Paul II in the greatest speech of my lifetime. He gave it in October 1979 on the National Mall of Washington DC, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court sitting front row, only 2 blocks from the Court that would sentence me.

Are the children aware of the God who numbers the hairs on their head, fashions their eyes and lips, and stokes their very being?

Do they know that “Everything that was created, was created through HIM, and nothing was created except through HIM, and HIS Life was the Light of men” (John 1:3-4) ?

Do they know Him, Jesus? Do they know Him, in this season, as their little Baby Brother?

READ: Pro-life MP gives ‘beautiful’ Christmas message in House of Commons recounting Jesus’ birth

John Hinshaw is serving a custodial sentence for attempting to save the lives of babies in a late-term abortion business in Washington, D.C., an undertaking a court found was in violation of the FACE Act. Letters to John should be addressed:

JOHN HINSHAW
Register #93685-509
FMC Devens
Federal Medical Center
P.O. BOX 879
Ayer, MA 01432
Note: Guidelines for letters to FMC Devens stipulate plain white paper, lined or unlined, typed or handwritten, with white envelopes. Please include your return address on the envelope, and write it again on the letter itself so that John may write back to you. Please do not send cards, as they will not reach him.

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