All too often, prolifers have reason to feel as if our efforts have been futile. With Dobbs v. Jackson, we took one step out of the pro-choice hole our country has dug for itself, but since then it seems we’ve slipped three steps back.

We’re barely two years past our first substantial jurisprudential victory in the abortion battle, but it took us over fifty years to win it. After Roe v. Wade, we needed to reverse the pro-choice momentum that accelerated in the 1970s and continued at least as far as Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. We spent a generation promoting pro-life legal philosophies among promising jurists. We got bruised in the treacherous politics of Supreme Court appointments, failing on multiple occasions to win crucial support from justices. And we stretched far to gain the appointments that finally overturned Roe, removing the legal impediment to establishing a regime in which all human life is protected in law as well as in fact.

Our victory has won us little respect. Pro-choicers pretend to unforeseen grievance, as if we hadn’t spent decades explaining our own grievance with Roe and the pro-abortion mindset behind it. Since Dobbs, state voters have largely sympathized with the aggrieved pro-choicers, and former allies have distanced themselves from us. Prolifers are now regarded as liabilities by both major parties, tempting us to give up on pro-life politics or give in to the logic of despair.

Our frustration is not unprecedented. The Roman Lectionary for this past Sunday presents us with a poignant episode from near the end of the prophet Elijah’s earthly life. Elijah has just won a major victory against the prophets of the false god Baal, but the result is not popular acclaim and an easy life. Instead, the queen threatens to have him assassinated, driving him into exile.

Elijah runs the length of the Holy Land to escape, then leaves his servant behind and travels another day into the desert. He begs God for death, exclaiming, “Enough! I can’t do better than my ancestors.” He then lays down to sleep in the sparse shade of a shrub, perhaps hoping to die.

But Elijah doesn’t escape so easily. An angel touches and awakens him with an order to “Get up and eat.” He eats the cake and drinks from the jar of water the angel has provided, but then he lies down again.

The angel of the Lord resumes touching Elijah, once more ordering him to get up and eat, this time adding something like “Or it’ll be enough, indeed!” I take the point to be that God, who can do this all day, does not expect to let Elijah retire quite so easily. The Lord can be as stubborn as he needs to be in order to counter Elijah’s discouragement.

Now renewed in strength, Elijah goes to Mount Horeb, also called Mount Sinai, where God entered into the covenant with Elijah’s ancestors that made them the people of God. From there Elijah will experience a new epiphany and receive his last commission as a prophet, which is to prepare his successor for the labors of the next generation.

Prolifers discouraged or frustrated by the apparent futility of their efforts might take heart from the example of Elijah. We may see no progress—or worse, we may see regress—through the course of our lifetimes, but our calling, from which there is no retirement, is rooted not in our own success, but in the dignity of our  humanity. We have received our lives from God as a sacred trust of eternal significance.

Our response must be gratitude coupled with good stewardship of what we have received. And true gratitude and stewardship require us to recognize that it is not only our own lives that we have received as a sacred trust, but also the lives of others. God stubbornly insists that every human being, and therefore every unborn child, is a gift to be treasured, even when others would scorn us for our refusal to scorn the unborn.

Like Elijah, let us recall our own Mount Horeb, the covenant of human dignity and solidarity upon which is founded our pro-life identity and mission. And recalling what it means to be pro-life, let us be strengthened for our own journey.