I read, in a church bulletin twenty years ago, a good reminder. In 1809, a war-weary world was anxiously watching the march of Napoleon. Yet, during that same year, William E. Gladstone was born in Liverpool; Alfred Lord Tennyson in Summersby, England; Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston; Felix Mendelssohn in Hamburg, Germany; and Abraham Lincoln in Hodgenville, Kentucky.
Many in 1809 were focused on darkness and death, yet those babies’ lives’ would produce much light and life. When a woman announces she is going to have a baby, no matter what the circumstances of her world or her life, I am always choosing to view that baby’s birth and life with optimism.
