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On Easter Sunday morning, a fellow church member said to me, "I just wish that Terri Schiavo could be completely healed today? Wouldn't that be a miracle?"

Of course, such a divine intervention and miraculous restoration would have been wonderful. But it did not happen, and God may very well have had a good reason. Perhaps He had a greater miracle in mind.

What miracle could possibly be greater than Terri Schiavo being healed? After all, no one could have denied the value of Terri Schiavo's life if she had suddenly sat up in her hospital bed on Easter Sunday morning and announced, "I'm back!" Based on the predominant medical view that said she would never recover from her "persistent vegetative state," how could anyone have questioned such a miracle? Her very "quality of life" would have told us that she deserved to live.

But do any of us really believe this is God's standard for measuring the value of a human life? Would it not be a much greater miracle for us as a society to begin to value the Terri Schiavos among us just as they are?

Such a reversal of our societal thinking will require a shift in the worldview of our leaders. Now that they have opened the door just a little, will members of Congress, as the people's elected representatives, finally begin to exercise their constitutional authority to rein in our tyrannical judiciary? Or will they buckle to perceived public opinion concocted by the so-called mainstream media through phony push polls designed specifically to elicit a particular response?

There is little doubt that the Terri Schiavo case has moved us another hundred yards down the slippery slope we have been on for three decades. The right to kill is now entrenched in the law of our land, a law created by judges elected by no one and accountable to no one. And yet, who among us now has the right to decide who lives and who dies? Is there a person out there who thinks that actor Christopher Reeve should have been starved to death? After all, Reeve also was unable to feed himself. What made him more valuable than Terri Schiavo? Were they not both created in the image of God?

Terri Schiavo can become the mirror held up before our faces to show us the selfish people we have become, the poster girl for our own narcissism. Her tragedy can be the turning point. But that will require a soul-searching this nation has so far been unwilling to accept. It will require that we go back to the source of life and consult His rules, rather than making up our own. It will require us to reexamine the culture of death that began on January 22, 1973, when Roe vs. Wade unleashed a holocaust of abortion on this nation.

American civilization is peering into an abyss of our own making. As the largest generation in the history of the country enters into its retirement years, with people living longer and health care costs skyrocketing, the Terri Schiavo case is pointing us straight down the road toward euthanasia.

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