Restoration: Being Made Whole After the Reality of Abortion

By Karen L. Elias

Having grown up in the church, Karen knew all the rules. But love and curiosity got the better of her, and with a weakening spirit due to lack of prayer and proper accountability, she chose sex. This decision led to her becoming pregnant, and because she wanted to hide her sin even further, she chose abortion. This book unashamedly describes the reality of what postabortive women go through and highlights steps to being healed after the brokenness that abortion leaves behind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512789232

Karen L. Elias

From her heart, Karen L. Elias believes that all you have been through can be used to help someone else. This belief has led her to write “Restoration”.   Karen L. Elias grew up in Church and has been involved in ministry since her teens. She has worked with children and youth, but her passion is dance. She has traveled to various parts of her home island of Trinidad and Tobago as a dancer, as well as the USA and Italy. She’s known for her expressiveness - her brother describes it as “she dances as if she belongs to the music.” Her life in Church didn’t keep her from slipping into sin and paying the price but she now uses those experiences to help others.   As a lifelong member of the Church, Karen has seen the good, the bad and the indifferent. This has led her to become passionate about young women so she uses this passion and her teaching ability to mentor them. She’s also volunteers with The Elpis Centre, a Pregnancy and Family Resource Centre in Trinidad, as an Abortion Recovery Peer Counselor. Working with other post-abortive women has only increased her drive to not only see young women whole and healed, but to warn them of the grave consequences of any type of sin.   Karen has dedicated her life to spreading the message of hope and healing. She uses her words, her voice and her movement to share God’s promise of restoration.

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Copyright © 2017 Karen L. Elias.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8922-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8924-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8923-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017908355

WestBow Press rev. date: 09/06/2017

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Let It Be Known

2 Clearly Understood

3 All of Me

4 Once You Pop …

5 Warned but Still Powerless and Desolate

6 Terminated

7 Trying to Be Raised Again

8 The Road to Restoration

9 In Him

10 And by Means of Him

11 This Person Stands Here before You

12 Restored, Well, and Sound in Body

Acknowledgments

A t the beginning of 2016, I stood and cried in a church service. A family member had broken my heart, and all I could do was cry and let it out before God as I forgave my family for being human and moved on. Yet somehow as I nursed my broken heart, my mind ran back to another time when I had cried and let out my pain before God. It was the morning I sat in church while bleeding because I had aborted my baby. People must have thought the Lord was really working on me that day—the Spirit was moving! But it was my own guilt and shame.

Now here I am in 2016, crying still but in disbelief of how far I have come. All I can say is God is awesome. He is great, He is merciful, and He is forgiving and faithful.

I owe my life and this book to God. He is the Author and Finisher of my faith and the reason I can release this with only confidence that it will bless somebody, even if it’s just one body. In Him, I brave the reality of the stigma attached to abortion so people can know His grace and find their way to wholeness.

Big thanks also go to my husband, Kyle, who is the spitting image of the love of Christ. Kyle loves me with a measure that only godliness can bring.

And thanks go to my parents for always knowing that I had ability; to my family for being the best family a girl can ask for; and to Lenor, Rebecca, Rebekah, Denise, and Kim. You ladies are my heartbeat. Thank you for simply being used by God to be a shield around me.

Preface

I n your adult years, you have a tendency to look back at your childhood and reminisce about childhood thoughts. We think a lot as children; probably if we remembered this more often, we’d realize the real mental capacity of children now. But we sat for hours, as children, thinking. Imagining. What would life be like as an adult? Staying up late. Eating what we want, when we want. Getting married. Having twins. Living in a big house and driving a nice car. We figured we’d buy all the snacks we wanted in the grocery store and that no one would tell us no, because we would be the adults. And we wouldn’t tell our children no, because of how we felt when our parents told us no.

Oh, to be a child again. But reality strikes in our reminiscent state to the harshness of the adult world that we created for ourselves. The sunshine of childhood quickly vanishes, and the cold truth prevails of the choices that led to the life far from the one we wanted. For most, we wonder, How did I get here? For here is nowhere near where we imagined ourselves to be. Whether it is good, bad, or indifferent, life takes drastic turns, and we’re left to toil the ground we directed ourselves to.

Interesting statement: toil the ground we directed ourselves to. The truth is we’re still working.

Life has not ceased, and fruit still yearns to bear. Change is imminent; it’s the type of change that we have control over. The ground—unfortunately not. My ground? I’ve yet to find a word to describe it.

Somewhere between environment and Christianity, I pride myself on being a creature cut from a different cloth. It has only been of recent times that I have accepted that I don’t think like normal people do. The box—I don’t fit in! I shrug my shoulders at those who feel I should try.

Here, I bethink childhood actions. (You’ll find that I do this from time to time.) I remember as a little girl thinking, Wow! My mind knows the song before I can learn it! My mind fascinated me. For some strange reason that I still cannot decipher, I managed to convince myself that the person living in my head (yes, I believed there was a person living in my head; please do not have me admitted) knew all the words to a song before I knew it. She would be singing loudly in my head word for word while I was only hearing it for the first time! She was amazing! And I have yet to understand how I came up with that notion, but it kept me quite occupied while I played.

From young, difference engulfed me. I think my parents had a grasp of it, but being soldered into rules and routine by identical careers of strict armed services, difference had no place. To this day, I’m still expected to at least attempt fitting in the box. One day, they’ll realize I can’t.

Out of the box has its consequences though; it’s not all splashes of colorful freedom. For me, that consequence was curiosity. What’s that like? is a giant of unthinkable proportion. Amid life’s regulations, birthed in the weekend routine of churchgoing, what lay beyond the unexplained No! You can’t do that! always won my attention and, sometimes, affection. I could probably excuse it as unexplained, but even when there were ample, aptly dissected reasons for the no, I would still desire to see for myself. Some call it the burn to learn way of life. I would stick with calling it curiosity.

Curiosity has led me down paths of least resistance and paths of intense life training. I don’t mind my experiences, because they have afforded me timeless instruction. Although fear grips me most times to share with wider audiences these instructions, a few smaller groups have indeed benefited from my labor. You’ll find out more about that later.

1

Let It Be Known

A friend used to say to me all the time, If more than one person says the same thing, then most likely it’s true. Although that statement may be relative to the environment, most times it rang true to me. Then again, another side arises. What if no one says anything at all? How will we know what is true? Worse yet, what if more than one person says too little? What is said is misconstrued and leads to lies, confusion, and destruction. I don’t mean to sound like a drama queen, but this is possible and unfortunately common.

In addition to growing up in a Christian home, I grew up