The first of many, I hope?!

It has been since Queen Victoria that the royal family has sat with four generations.  I hope that this occasion will renew our appreciation for children and for the vocation of parenting.

Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge, 3rd in succession to the British throne. Surely everyone in the empire is delighted: his great-grandmother, the Queen; his grandfather, the Prince of Wales; his parents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge; and even the British public (though surely a few naysayers and anti-monarchs are complaining).

I hope for many more children from the Duke and Duchess.  Wouldn't it be grand if they filled the palace with children!  Perhaps it will take a highly visible couple like these royals to remind us commoners that children a good, a gift from God and a blessing.  Our own birth rate among Lutherans is abysmal.  It is as if have all become environmental extremists who believe that death is preferable to life when it comes to humans.  We are not the enemies of creation (unless we exercise poorly our role over the good earth God has given us to have dominion over).  Children are not a blight upon creation or enemies of conserving the good earth.  People are God's joy and delight and He calls us the crown of His creative work.  It is for people Christ was incarnate, suffered, died, and rose again.  It is for people God has called us to pray "Our Father".  Let us honor the Lord, be fruitful and multiply, bringing these babies to know Him in baptism and to love Him in faith.  It seems that we have forgotten this fundamental fact.

Prince George.... he may become king but I hope that first of all he is one among many siblings -- if only for the symbolic value his birth signifies to a world of people who have forgotten that children as gift and blessing from God.