A 7lb Baby

A few years ago the car company, Volvo, ran a magazine advertising campaign which showed one of their estate cars filled to the limits. It was full of toys, stuffed animals, large suitcases what appeared to be a pram or a buggy a folding traveling cot, boxes of nappies and anything and everything else you might associate with a baby and running underneath the picture was the Tag Line, "There is no such thing as a 7lb baby" 
Parents who read this blog no doubt will recall, when their children were young, the amount of equipment and planning that went into even the shortest of visits. It was like a military campaign making sure that everything that was needed was packed. Of course the main purpose of the advert was to sell a car that had enough room even for the most demanding of customers. I am quite sure the copy writers were not thinking of the bigger picture.
The truth is, there is no such thing as a 7lb baby, or a 5lb, 8lb, or10lb baby for that matter. In fact following the line of an earlier blog, it would seem that there is an indisputable law when it comes to babies; 'the smaller the child the more equipment needed.'
The baby you proudly take home from the hospital will in a few years time be the child you will be taking to school and the prams and buggies in the boot will be replaced by bikes and sporting equipment then a few years further down the line that child will be the teenager who will be asking you to take them to university or college or pick them up from the nightclub or from their boyfriends or girlfriends and then a few years later they will be asking for the car and so the journey goes on.
As a new parent struggling to get a nights sleep you are constantly reminded that the problems your young children present do not go away they simply change and you will still suffer from sleepless nights but now it will be because you are waiting for them to come home.
All this rambling from the parent of two 'grown-up' children is a rather long winded way of stating the obvious that every birth of a baby changes your life for ever.
As children we struggle to break free from what we consider to be the shackles of our parents and as parents we battle with the mixed emotions of pride as we see our children grow up and despair as they try to assert their independance and though there are times when we wistfully recall the days of innocence when we could gaze into our children's cot as they slept the sleep of innocents I am sure none of us would actually want our children to remain babies forever. Why then do so many of us struggle to let the child born in the manger grow up?
Like every other baby born the Christ child  can and should change our life for ever. Let us not fall into the trap of wistfully looking into the manger, making funny faces and strange babytalk noises but instead look into the eyes of a child who grew up to be our Saviour and as we look into the Saviours eyes at Christmas may we recall another time, a time to come...
         "The Lord turned and looked upon Peter...and Peter remembered"