When you hold in your hands an only hours-old human being, your youngest son’s youngest son, you’re hushed before a miraculous little face that’s like looking into the past, into the face of your own long-ago baby boy, and of your husband, and your father, and all your people and your past, and a long line of generations of brave people who did the hard work of daily trying and and sacrificing and making and getting up and starting over again…
When you gaze into a newborn’s face — you’re gazing into a mirror — and who do you need to rise up to be — that you’d want to someday see them be?
And, as his baby eyelashes quiver, one eye about to maybe open, you realize you’re looking straight into the future too, and we are all the people who are creating a future that we ourselves might not live to face – but when you look into the faces of our children and grandchildren, you’re looking into the faces who will have to face the world we are all making – or failing – right now.
And if we don’t now take the time to do the bold work of beating the technology of human destruction into tools of human flourishing and creativity, then will it be our children, and our children’s children who are the ones beaten down?
We never just inherit the world from any older generations – we always are actually renting it from younger generations who are living under our roofs of hope now.
What if all of us chose to begin every day holding in our arms the weight of a newborn – would it change the way we feel the weight of our responsibility to make a world for our children, and our children’s children, that they’d be happy to make their home?
What if all of us chose to begin every day holding in our arms the weight of a newborn – would it change the way we feel the weight of our responsibility to make a world for our children, and our children’s children, that they’d be happy to make their home?
When you look directly into the face of the next generation, the future stops being an abstraction– and you realize we’re the adults who have to do whatever it takes to stop more destruction…
It’s up to all of us to do whatever it takes to stop all kinds of terrible things from going down.
Sign up, show up, stand up, lift up, look up.
Dig your hands down into some dirt. Feel where you came from and where you’ll return and go grow something with all the days in between. Grow risk and courage and possibility and sacrifice and go grow a vision, a voice, a virtuous life.
Grow gardens and plant acorns and sow unexpected seeds that reap an eternal harvest that outlasts you and all of time.
When you look directly into the face of a newborn babe, you’re looking straight into the image of God.
Root out fear, slash down whatever you need to, to make room for love and more outrageous love, and you change culture when you change your plans, because you love as well as you’re inconvenienced.
Live so your great-great grandchildren know you loved them, and you loved, which is sacrifice, all the wildly different people of the world, and you loved, without divided heart, God Almighty, and you loved the wonder of filling your lungs with fresh air and freedom and faith-stretching things, and this is not some hypothetical exercise, this is the hypercritical exercise you get to work out every day, along with your salvation, so your children and their children get to taste hope and abundant life.
When you gaze into the face of a child there in your arms, you wonder why would we ever bear arms or animosity against any and all human beings, who all definitely bear the image of God?
When you hold in your hands an only hours-old human being, gaze into their face, you’re cut to the quick:
When you look directly into the face of a newborn babe, you’re looking straight into the image of God.
When you gaze into the face of a child there in your arms, you wonder why would we ever bear arms or animosity against any and all human beings, who all definitely bear the image of God?
When you gaze into a newborn’s face — you’re gazing into a mirror — and who do you need to rise up to be — that you’d want to someday see them be?
I count those tiny new fingers, and pray to be one of the ones who can be counted on.
And I kiss each little fingertip.
Promises sealed.
How do you find a way to be the person you want to be — the kind of person you someday want your children & grandchildren to be?
What if there was more than a way through — but a different way to be?
What if you could discover a new way of being — that kept you in the Way Himself… and pointed all who come behind you to the Way too?
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way of life, a new way of being, a new way of being HOPE in the world, that rests fully in the hesed lovingkind ways of God — especially now?
