BABIES

The Election is right around the corner. The country, even the world, is caught up in it.  If you are like me, Tuesday cannot come soon enough. The political ads have consumed us so much so that we don’t want to hear them anymore and, in fact, probably do not. The fact is that whether our candidate wins or loses, life will go on in this great country of ours, as it always has. There will not be riots in the streets by the losers nor will the winners think they have won the lottery. No matter who wins or who loses the wheels of our democratic government will keep on churning. There are still problems to be solved, issues to be resolved, work to be done.

Yes, at the moment we are caught up in the election, almost making it out to be more than it really is as important as it truly is. In a very real way, other events will be taking place this coming Tuesday that outweigh the election and even give all of us reason for hope no matter who wins and who loses. In fact those events take place every single day of the year every time a baby is born.

Marian Wright Edelman, who is president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund, puts it this way: “When God wants an important thing done in this world or a wrong righted, He goes about it in a very singular way. He doesn't release thunderbolts or stir up earthquakes. God simply has a tiny baby born, perhaps of a very humble home, perhaps of a very humble mother. And God puts the idea or purpose into the mother's heart. And she puts it in the baby's mind, and then-God waits.”

She continues, and to the point, “The great events of this world are not battles and elections and earthquakes and thunderbolts. The great events are babies, for each child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged with humanity but is still expecting good-will to become incarnate in each human life.”

Perhaps because children are born every minute of every day we have become inured to just how important each child is in the grand scheme of things, especially in God’s grand scheme. During this election campaign, in fact, during every election for every office, the candidates tell us how bad things are and how they, if elected, will change things for the better. They are all Prophets of Hope. Yet as Edelman suggests, we do not need elections to remind us that hope never dies. That is the message each new born child brings into this world.

None of this is to minimalize the importance of the elections taking place this coming Tuesday and the responsibility each one of us has both as a citizen and as a Christian to vote. It is truly a moral obligation as much, if not more so, than a civil responsibility. But we also must not lose sight of the greater and concomitant responsibility we have to those babies born that day but every day.

Political rhetoric aside, babies are the real beacons and heralds of hope but we, you and I, not politicians, are the ones who must help them fulfill and bring to fruition the hopes and dreams instilled in them by God from birth.