All of us have seen the familiar drawings of the stooped old man with a long white beard wearily leaning on the Grim Reaper’s scythe as he shuffles off the stage to make way for the ebullient baby the cartoonists use annually to symbolize the new year.
I wonder, who first came up with those archetypes? Whoever it was, we did him one better last year.
Hardly four hours into 1995 our youngest son awakened us from a deep Sunday-morning sleep to tell us our ninth grandchild, Peter Joseph Shelburne, had arrived safely, although somewhat noisily, into this world. We welcomed the New Year with a real live baby!
“You all certainly are doing your part to obey the command to ‘be fruitful and fill the earth,’” one friend goaded me when he heard our latest grandkid count. I think he’s bought into the sociological lie that too many babies is the Number One threat to the planet.
I did not take time to point out to him that some of the
most densely populated areas on earth, such as
This world will never have enough right-thinking, God-fearing, productive inhabitants. We will always have more than enough ignorant, shiftless, unprincipled ones, but reducing birth rates won’t cure that problem. If anything, efforts to control population aggravate the situation.
My good lady and I are convinced that the birth of Peter Joseph is in every way a blessing to this world. If Peter grows up to be anything like his parents and his aunts and his uncles, Earth will be a better place because he’s here.
Sooner than you know, students hungry for knowledge may sit at his feet, patients may yearn for his healing touch, troubled souls may beg for his legal expertise, readers desperate for words of insight and hope may pore over his writings, and his own offspring may raise families who follow his example of faith and love.
“Children are a gift from the Lord,” the ancient psalmist sang. We agree.
Thank you, Lord, for Peter Joseph.