Have you ever seen a baby born? I’m sure we all have, whether on television or in real life! We’ve noticed the striking similarity of all babies born in the world, regardless their skin color, their nationality, their nation’s economic status, or the timing of the arrival. All babies born in the world come without anything. They come sans clothing, food, shelter, shoes, or material goods of any kind. They all come via some parentage, but many are even separated permanently from that human connection. What we should find most striking in this comparison isn’t that we come at all, but that we all have made it as far as we have! 

 

We have much to ponder when we consider this fact:  perhaps we don’t have all that we would want to live by our own standards when born, but in some way we have all we need, otherwise we would surely all come bearing something more than just ourselves. Perhaps we’re truly meant to find our way into various compassionate communities (for example – family, friends, neighbors) where we are taught to be good members of that community and to be responsible for one another? It is only when we start to believe we won’t be given all we want, that we start to think we’re deserving and entitled to more than we need.  Our desire to have that which isn’t our’s easily or naturally morphs from a noble motivation to attain and achieve some personal goals as well as dreams, into instead a raging fuel which ignites our lust, jealousy, greed and thus, tyranny.  

 

Whatever it is we amass from birth with integrity, through our own efforts, with a lack of malice is ours rightfully. God blesses us each differently, each uniquely according to His desires. What is ours is ours, what is someone else’s belongs to them. It is not our place to deem His motives, but to make righteous our own! And we have each other, lest we forget that the hands we rely upon to take us from our bare-naked infancy to sustainable life, are our fellow humans. Why do we then learn so easily to repudiate these essential components of community into which we are surely purposefully born, all the while choosing often to be self-serving and self-involved instead?! We’re meant to be for each other without taking from each other. We’re meant to coexist without coveting. We’re meant to weave together as one patchwork of variation (language, color, beliefs, etc.) without repudiation! Perhaps what was inside of you when born actually matters more than anything on the outside anyway?!