Welcome to the world, Master Windsor

I’m writing this from Colorado in USA having flown here yesterday with the family to start our summer holiday. When we left UK the only thing on the news was the fact that Kate had gone into hospital that morning in early stages of labour. By the time we arrived in USA, the Royal Baby had been born, and the world’s press have gone into overdrive.

One little child, born to a young married couple – sounds so ordinary, and yet because of the circumstances of the family he has been born into, there is nothing ordinary in the life ahead.

It set me reflecting however: how many other babies were born yesterday, but born in, and into, very different circumstances?

Some born to a mother working as a prostitute in some seedy part of a city, just trying to earn money to stay alive, and for whom the presence of another mouth to feed just deepens the spiral of desperation

Some born to mother living on the streets, addicted to drugs, glue or alcohol, who steals to support her habits, and who will abandon the baby immediately in a nearby rubbish bin

Some born to loving parents, but who are living in poverty, and where the child will grow up with little chance of education or hope for any sort of future other than a subsistence lifestyle at best, or living off handouts from NGO’s at feeding stations

Some born into a country at war

Some born into a society where the girl child is treated as a social outcast, or seen as a cheap form of child labour, and has no chance of accessing education, or making any decisions about her future

Some born to a mother serving time in prison

Some born HIV +ve

And I could go on.

So many different circumstances and so many different futures, but they are all human beings, living on the same planet, breathing the same air, and with the same colour blood running through their veins. Some will have access to all their rights, and some will feel as though they don’t have easy access to even their basic human rights, but in the sight of God they are all equal and therefore, in our eyes also, they should be seen as all equal.

Approximately 370,000 babies are born each day. Yes some will grow up rich, some very rich; and some will grow up poor, some very poor, but all deserve an equal crack at life.

And those of us who have been blessed with much have also been given the responsibility to share those blessings with those who have little. There is no single right or wrong way of doing that, but it is for each of us to find our own way – whether through what we do ourselves, or through supporting the work of others, or a combination of various. But what we can’t in all conscience do is to sit by and do nothing – that’s when the world and humanity deteriorates, and there’s already too much evidence of that.

Welcome to the world Master Windsor, and welcome to the world all other babies born on that same day; and to each of us reading this blog my challenge is this: as people who were born into the world before them, what can each of us do to help make the world a better place for those coming into it now?