Almost 11 years ago I gave birth to my second son. He was a perfect little bundle of joy and compared to my older son his birth was easy. We sat and cuddled him beaming with joy and pride. However he had a slight whistle when he was breathing, gradually this got worse. He was whisked away and put in an incubator. Next to all the tiny premature babies, his massive 10lb figure looked to healthy and out of place. He was vulnerable though and they watched turning up the oxygen as his saturation fell. Eventually the identified the problem as a tension pneumothorax. They put in a chest drain, but this did not work either. So in the middle of the rush of post pregnancy hormones they took my precious child to another hospital. Both my husband and I followed. The problem however was sorted and one of the scariest 48 hours of our lives was over.
As the anniversary of his birth comes round again, we found ourselves anxiously watching monitors again. Hoping and praying that the medication will work and his breathing will normalise. It is a sudden awakening to just how lucky we are to have been given the gift of three children and how fragile that life is. Watching your own child struggle to breathe, whilst watching others washing up on a beach with their life extinguished is of course a difficult thing to see. The death of those children is tragic and wrong. The simple fact though, is that they were not the first. They are not the only children to die, they are just the first that washed up near our doorstep.
Our country now so suddenly moving to help these vulnerable people, is a good thing. Though slightly ironic that at the same time our politicians are debating on whether we should be allowed to kill our own people. We seem focussed on one set lives and one issue. Why are we so determined to fight for these lives, when we have watched others raped, masssacared, be-headed, tortured and bombed? Why fight for those when we want to kill those who become a burden in our country and those unborn lives that might make our own lives difficult. Why are some lives more important to us than others, why do we want to fight for some and destroy others. The answer is we want to do what makes us feel better. It makes us feel better to offer a home or throw some material things in their direction. It is a short term solution to a long term problem. Absolutely we should welcome them in and give them homes and love, but it is not going to stop people drowning trying to get here. It is not going to stop people suffocating lorries as they are trafficked into Europe. It is not going to stop those that can not leave Iraq, Syria and all other tormented countries from dying. We have to solve the whole problem and protect as many lives as we can from the Evil that is creeping not very subtly into the world around us.
When Christ knocks on our door he is not in just the most emotive headline story, he is in every vulnerable life. We have to be able to see him in every life, not just the convenient ones. Welcoming Christ in is not meant to be comfortable or easy it is meant to be hard. Every life is a gift from our Eternal Father, from the unborn one to the terminally ill one, each one needs our love and our protection. Can you see Christ or are you going to ignore him?
