New Baby
Sometimes when I’m out and about and encounter a parent/parents with a newborn baby I “ooh” and “aah” about the beautiful child – what newborn isn’t the cutest baby in Canada? – then I ask if its their first one and how it’s going, and whether they are getting any sleep, etc.
Inevitably, particularly if it is their first, they talk about some of the difficulties, especially the lack of sleep. When I ask “Are you going to keep her?” there is always a sharp look at my face before a huge knowing smile erupts on theirs. (So far none of the parents have said they are going back for a refund.)
I then share two pearls of wisdom that were given to us when we had little ones:
- having a baby is more wonderful than you can ever imagine, and more difficult that you could ever have imagined;
- never forget – “the days are long, but the years are short.”
No one can deny that when babies come into life they immediately and effortlessly transform their environment and the people around them.
A baby changes the way people around her live, especially in a healthy marriage and family. The presence and needs of the little one call forth love, care, sacrifice and time from the family around her. All of this is only amplified when the baby is colicky or has other health issues.
Some wise thinkers have posited that we never truly understand love and joy, and never really reach maturity until we have held a baby (our own or a friend/relative’s) in our arms and realized that we would do anything even walk through fire/die to protect this child, that this baby matters more than me.
Parents/families raise babies, but just as surely are raised by them. When my 18-year-old cousin and his new wife were expecting, my aunt commented wryly but sagely: “They are just going to have to grow up together.” Adults need babies to remind and train us to be who we were created to be: loving, caring, sacrificing, selfless grown-ups.
Poet Carl Sandburg once wrote: “A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby.”
So much power and influence in such a cute, little, vulnerable package!
I hope I haven’t insulted you dear readers with my obvious lead-in to the real focus of this article: Christmas.
Not cute, tinselly Christmas, but meat-and-potatoes, sleepless nights, dirty diaper, real Christmas.
The true meaning of Christmas is that a baby has been born into our human family, bringing even more joy and disruption than other babies. Isn’t it odd that infinitely creative and powerful God would reach out to humankind not with manifestations of bedazzling power and spectacle – shock and awe – but in the birth of a vulnerable baby to peasant parents? And in the very un-cute confines of an animal abode with the first invited visitors being grubby, farm-smelling shepherds?
The power of the Christmas narrative is both in its utter ordinariness (babies are born all the time) and its uniqueness (every baby is special but this was no ordinary-special baby).
As Sandburg says every “baby is God’s opinion that life should go on … A baby … represents life”. Babies bring new life to a home, family, community, world. But the goal is not to keep them little and cute, but to raise them to themselves be thankful to welcome babies into the world. And in the process we grow into mature people who experience the true love and joy we were created for, by allowing ourselves to be changed by this new life from self-focus and selfish living.
We love the delight and happiness of baby Jesus being born at Christmas just like we love the delight and happiness of a new baby in the family. Unfortunately – actually, fortunately – the delight and happiness are soon overshadowed by the challenge and change these babies evoke in us if we truly invite them into our living.
The baby Jesus was and is “Immanuel,” God’s presence on Earth and His invitation to profound new living.
At Christmas we delight and marvel in this baby laid in a manger, but if we leave Him in the creche to be dragged out each Advent, His impact on our lives will be minimal, not unlike those parents who won’t or can’t allow their baby the room in their lives to help them learn better how to live.
The baby Jesus, no less than the grown-up Jesus, was sent as a gift by God to you and me, to transform our lives from cutesy happiness to life-conquering love and joy.
And, like every baby, it’s a gift of grace no one can earn (even though mothers do the most labour) or deserve.
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is giv’n! So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heav’n. No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.