Hungry for Change at Liberty University
by Nicole W. Cooley
I got my first collegiate baseball cap at Liberty University in August 2011.
But at Liberty, we weren’t actually on the campus. Despite requests by Student Government and CBR, the Liberty Administration repeatedly denied permission for our GAP display. First Amendment rights don’t exist at private schools.
That is very creepy, I thought. But then I saw the fine print at the bottom of his sign.
But we came anyway. We used the streets, sidewalks, and public spaces just off campus. We displayed GAP signs at the campus entrances and drove Truth Trucks around the perimeter of campus. Five Truth Trucks. For an entire week.
I lost count how many times students asked me, “Why are you here? Everyone at Liberty is pro-life already. Why don’t you go somewhere else?” Many were annoyed at our presence.
Over and over I replied, “I’m so glad you are pro-life. What are you doing about it? Do you vote pro-life? Do you sidewalk counsel outside of abortion clinics? We’re here because you are attending the largest Christian university in the United States. If we can’t get Christians to care about abortion, we have no hope of ending it.”
One conversation stood out. On the fourth day, a young man came up to me in tears. “Why are you doing this? I can’t get those pictures out of my head!”
I gently replied to him in the same way as I did the others, “We had to break your heart about abortion – otherwise you’d continue in ignorant apathy like the rest of America.”
On the last day at Liberty, we finally got a protester … or so I thought. A student stood along the side of the road with his sign which read, “Looking at dead babies just makes me hungry.”
That is very creepy, I thought. But then I saw the fine print at the bottom of his sign, “…for change.” Because he saw the pictures, he was hungry for change.
Amen! So are we.
Nicole Cooley is a CBR project director and a FAB contributor. This is the second in a series of “hat blogs” about memorable conversations gleaned from her experiences with GAP.
Tags: abortion, abortion debate, abortion victim photos, Liberty University, Nicole Cooley
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2015 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Abortion and the Church, Campus Debate (GAP). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.