{"id":1725,"date":"2014-09-01T23:34:32","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T23:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/?p=1725"},"modified":"2014-09-01T23:34:32","modified_gmt":"2014-09-01T23:34:32","slug":"world-magazine-interviews-wrwfs-reggie-littlejohn-on-her-faith-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/world-magazine-interviews-wrwfs-reggie-littlejohn-on-her-faith-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"WORLD Magazine Interviews WRWF’s Reggie Littlejohn on her Faith Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/h2>\n
\"Reggie<\/a>

Reggie Littlejohn<\/p><\/div>\n

Reggie Littlejohn shares her personal faith journey here, speaking as a private individual<\/em><\/p>\n

Q&A: God used Reggie Littlejohn’s suffering to shape her into an advocate for China’s voiceless<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Marvin Olasky<\/p>\n

Reggie Littlejohn is the founder and head of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a leading opponent of forced abortion in China. Here are edited excerpts of our interview.<\/p>\n

How did you startle your parents when you were 16 and refused to go to church anymore? <\/strong>I grew up in a Christian home and at age 16 decided there’s no God. So I wrote my parents a letter, sat them down, had them read the letter aloud, and told them I was no longer going to church.<\/p>\n

And how did they take that?<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m sure they prayed over it, but they allowed me to not go to church, so I did not go during high school and college.<\/p>\n

In college an ancient literature course had some effect on you?<\/strong>\u00a0I had to take an ancient literature course for my major and we had to read the Gospel of John. I had never read a book of the Bible start-to-finish before.<\/p>\n

You grew up in a Christian home, but never read a whole book of the Bible.<\/strong>\u00a0No. When I read John, I saw who Jesus was\u2014and this was not whom I was rejecting. So that moved me from being an atheist to being an agnostic.<\/p>\n

Because you appreciated it but still did not believe it?<\/strong>\u00a0Right.<\/p>\n

You married at age 27?<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah, and he had something to do with my conversion in the sense of believing in God, because falling in love with him and looking into his eyes I just could not believe that he had simply evolved from blue-green algae. It was just not possible.<\/p>\n

You worked as a litigator for eight years in the San Francisco area and toward the end did pro bono work for refugees from China who were victims of the one-child policy. What effect did that have on you?<\/strong>\u00a0I remember sitting behind my desk in my beautiful law firm surrounded by freedom and civilization thinking to myself, Right at this moment, on the other side of the world women are dragged out of their homes, strapped down to tables, and forced to abort babies up until the ninth month of pregnancy. I was utterly appalled.<\/p>\n

You had some sleepless nights about that?<\/strong>\u00a0Many. It haunted me that this was happening. Typical of any associate, I had a sleeping bag in my office. At one point I did not leave my office for 10 days, just working flat out. I was driven.<\/p>\n

Haunted and driven, you also had a miscarriage.<\/strong>\u00a0I was heartbroken. I called my mother and asked, \u201cWhy would God allow me to become pregnant with a baby who would be loved and cared for wonderfully in this world\u2014and then take that baby away?\u201d My mother said, \u201cWe will never know the answer to that question, but God does everything for a purpose. And I believe if you offer your suffering up to Him, He will use it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then another miscarriage.<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s not the same as having someone break into your home, drag you out, and force you to abort a baby, usually without even anesthesia. But I know what it is like to lose a baby, so when I heard about forced abortions, my heart went out to these women in a way that it might not have if I had not miscarried my own babies.<\/p>\n

Then you had medical problems.<\/strong>\u00a0I had bilateral mastectomies and caught this hospital super bug, the MRSA staph infection. My hair was coming out in handfuls. My kidneys, my liver, my immune system were all affected, and I was disabled for five years. I went overnight from high-powered litigation lawyer to lying on my back and begging God to spare my life.<\/p>\n

How did that suffering change you?<\/strong>\u00a0I went from being a driven person to someone completely helpless. God had to do that to me because I\u2019m so stubborn. If He hadn\u2019t, probably I\u2019d be a partner in a law firm right now and continuing on that path. Since I was not committing adultery or murder, since I wasn\u2019t stealing or lying, since I represented Chinese refugees on the side, I thought I was an exemplary Christian.<\/p>\n

What changed your mind?<\/strong>\u00a0I saw in reading the Bible over and over again that almost my entire life was based on a violation of the first commandment, \u201cI am the Lord your God\u2009\u2026\u2009you shall have no other gods before me.\u201d Obviously I was not worshiping statues of Baal and Molech in my living room, but I was idolizing money, power, prestige, my boss, my house, my car. Everything I idolized, God took from me. I was left with complete dependence on Him. And He turned me from a life of focusing on making lots of money as an attorney to saving lives in China.<\/p>\n

How did you go deeper into that?<\/strong>\u00a0In 2008 I was one of thousands of people to receive an email about a conference on Chinese and North Korean human rights. I wrote the president saying, \u201cHow come no one is speaking about the one-child policy?\u201d The president emailed me back: \u201cDon\u2019t you realize the coercive enforcement of the one-child policy is a thing of the past? It\u2019s all voluntary now.\u201d And I said, \u201cOh, is that so?\u201d I started hitting him with document after document, to the extent where he finally said, \u201cI surrender. I see now that forced abortion is happening right now in China. Would you be our expert, the first person ever to address the European Parliament on the issue of the one-child policy?\u201d<\/p>\n

And that led to your setting up Women\u2019s Rights Without Frontiers, with a laser focus\u2014just China\u2019s one-child policy\u2014and a name that can appeal to people on the left.<\/strong>\u00a0Yes. This is a women\u2019s rights issue.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read in the conventional media that China\u2019s one-child policy is over. What\u2019s the reality?<\/strong>\u00a0Headlines like \u201cChina Abandons the One-Child Policy\u201d are an ongoing, intense frustration for me. China is heading for a demographic disaster, so leaders are slightly modifying the policy: If one member of a couple is an only child, the couple can have a second child. The exception is very narrow and will affect only 5 million couples. Even under this exception, those couples who can have two children will need to have a birth permit for their first child and their second child. If they don\u2019t have one, they are still at risk of forced abortion.<\/p>\n

No birth permit, no child\u2014legally?<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

What about your own family, which has grown recently?<\/strong>\u00a0Well, we have two new Chinese\u2014I call them daughters, because they are daughters to my husband and me, although we cannot legally adopt them\u2014but they are the daughters of a famous dissident. The Chinese Communist Party persecutes the children of dissidents, but we were able to get them to the United States. They\u2019re now 11 and 19.<\/p>\n

Are they reading whole books of the Bible?<\/strong>\u00a0Every night we read about half a chapter of the Gospel of John and discuss it\u2014a Bible study at the dinner table every night, and church on Sunday.<\/p>\n

View the original article at WorldMag.com. Republished with permission:\u00a0http:\/\/www.worldmag.com\/2014\/06\/complete_dependence\/page1<\/a><\/p>\n

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Reggie Littlejohn shares her personal faith journey here, speaking as a private individual Q&A: God used Reggie Littlejohn’s suffering to shape her into an advocate for China’s voiceless By Marvin Olasky Reggie Littlejohn is the founder and head of Women’s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[111,49,7,157,155,154,156,8,20,1,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-girls-allowed","category-chinas-one-child-policy","category-forced-abortion","category-gospel-of-john","category-mastectomy","category-miscarriage","category-mrsa-staph","category-one-child-policy","category-reggie-littlejohn","category-uncategorized","category-womens-rights-without-frontiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1725"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1784,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions\/1784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}