By Karen Willoughby, Managing EditorPINEVILLE – Hope was the theme, though suicide and abortion were the topics discussed at the first chapel of the semester at Louisiana College on Jan. 18.
“You are the hope for our lives,” adapted from Romans 8:24-25, was repeated in the worship led by Andy Jordan and the LC Praise Band, in special music presented by Ryan Hess and Juliana Andy, and by a very personal testimony by LC President Joe Aguillard, as well as the chapel service’s special guests.
Following a concise sketch of his academic and professional prowess and entertaining slides from “thereifixedit.com,” Aguillard said, “Jesus Christ is the only hope. It’s not in duct tape and it’s not in diplomas.”
He couldn’t fix it when his daughter Julie tried to kill herself not once, but four times, he said. “No daddy can fix what only God can do,” Aguillard said. He encouraged his listeners in Guinn Auditorium on the LC campus to “find your hope in Jesus Christ.”
Then Julie Aguillard – today a registered nurse in Shreveport – spoke.
“Nothing was ever enough,” she said about her life as a teenager. “I always felt ‘less than.’ … I didn’t want you to see what I saw on the inside.”
She tried liquor, cocaine, meth, and then came up with a new solution to her pain: suicide. The first three times it was an overdose of pills. The fourth time she slashed both wrists and her jugular vein before texting her father to ask him not to let her mother find her “like this.”
Aguillard called his wife as he raced home – Julie said she still can hear her mom’s “blood-curdling screams” when she came into the bathroom – and when he got there, fell to his knees in prayer binding Satan – “You cannot have my daughter” – even as he tried to soak up with bath towels the spurting and gushing blood from bone-deep cuts.
“After my dad prayed, the blood started to clot,” Julie said. “No way I should have lived. … Now I have God’s love stronger than any alcohol I put in my body, the Holy Spirit deeper than any needle I put in my arm, and His power mightier than any razor blade I ever ran across my neck. And because of that, I have hope today.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Samuel Armas and his parents walked onto the stage. Samuel, now 13, was the child who at 21 weeks gestation, weighing about 15 ounces, was photographed when he reached out his hand from his mother’s uterus and clutched a physician’s finger.
That photograph, taken by a freelance photographer for USA Today, on assignment to cover fetal surgeries – Samuel’s was to correct spina bifida – quickly found its way around the world as a celebration of life. His delicate fingers proved that a pre-born child was more than just “tissue” to be tossed away if the mother so chose.
“I think He wanted me to spread the word that abortion is wrong,” Samuel said in a television interview clip shown during his time on the Guinn Auditorium stage.
“We don’t know why the Lord chose to use us this way,” Samuel’s mom Julie Armas said during a pre-chapel press conference in the President’s office. “We have always been pro-life. … That finger opened a lot of eyes about abortion.”
Though still suffering some effects of spina bifida – he wears leg braces and walks with a rolling gait – Samuel has become an athlete, his father, Alex said. Samuel’s wheelchair basketball team was first in the nation last year.
He plays on an able-body baseball team.
“Through all the years … and people we’ve gotten to meet, he’s humble,” Julie Armas said.
“God chose us and did a miracle with us,” Samuel said. “It feels good to me that the picture saves babies’ lives, because a life is a life no matter what the disability.”
Perhaps a dozen students responded to Aguillard’s invitation at the close of chapel that those listening pray for the hope found in Jesus. Some were joined by friends who perhaps knew of the hurt they had been enduring.