The most vivid experience of that anguished prayer and its answer that I can recall came in the life of a young couple. ... They were a bright young couple, handsome, with everything going for them. They had the world in their hands. But then they played loosely with love, and she became pregnant before they were married. Without counseling with anyone, they decided to have an abortion.

Later they married, and everything went beautifully. They were so successful in their vocations. Then they decided to have children. When I met them she had been pregnant twice, but she had lost both the babies about eight or ten weeks after conception. And now she was devastated with anxiety because she was carrying the third child, and she was overcome with fear that she would lose that child also.

I never will forget the occasion when in torrents of tears, years of guilt poured out of her. It was guilt over that past sin, and fear--anguishing fear, a kind of hellish fear--that God was punishing her in the loss of those two previous children because of her past sin. And I will never forget, either, the restoration of their joy when out of that remorse and repentance they claimed the forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ. They renewed their commitment to him and allowed the door to be shut to that past.