From my place at the piano, I could see my friends face as she watched her sleeping baby boy. The love glowing on her face made me smile. After a long dearth of little ones in our church, having four children under age two is so much fun. All the members of our small church adore them. They get passed around, cooed at, kissed, and admired. Their parents oversee all of it with that special look of love softening their eyes.

It saddens me to think of how these precious little people are often viewed by our society. People focus so much on themselves and their careers that children become distractions, nuisances. Parents only half-jokingly ask friends if they’d like to keep their child. And that’s the better half of societies opinion of children. Plenty more people worry about overpopulation and consider large families irresponsible.

These thought processes affect so many things. It degrades the value of life. It creates the mindset that abortion is okay. After all, a baby would interfere with a woman’s promising future. Abortion might even be the responsible thing to do because of overpopulation. Those orphans in Africa? They’re starving because of overpopulation.

I’m not saying people purposefully think that way, but take the negative sentiments surrounding children a little further and that’s what you get. It’s sad.

The very fist gift of Christmas was a child. A baby. A little one that came into the world just like every other baby.

Each and every child, born and unborn, is a gift from God. Not a roadblock to their parents’ climbing of the corporate ladder. Not an irresponsible addition to an overpopulated world, but a gift. A precious, wonderful gift. Perhaps if cultural thinking about children began to shift, fewer little ones would be left without adoring parents.