My friend (and work associate) is having a baby!  Her baby is due in January – new year; new baby.  Sherry will make a wonderful mother and she’s been waiting a long time for this opportunity.  I won’t tell you her exact age; let’s just say she’s in her 40’s.  Many women would be apprehensive about starting motherhood after 40 but Sherry seems to be embracing it with all her heart and soul – mostly soul.  Her husband has four grown daughters but this is Sherry’s first child and it will be a girl, too.  She just had the ultrasound last week to confirm that she is indeed carrying ‘Petite Chérie’.  This is not going to actually be the baby’s name but it is the name that I’ve given her – Little Dear One.  What could be more fitting?  Sherry is LOVED by everyone in our office and it stands to reason that her baby girl will be loved by us all as well.  She will be our ‘Petite Chérie’. 

I love babies!  What a ingenious way for God to start people.  Yet proof again of God’s supreme plan for Creation.  If we were born as our adult selves no one be nearly as excited about it.  Congratulations – here’s your middle-aged, balding, more than-slightly overweight son.  Or here’s your pre-menopausal, daughter with ‘crows feet’ and a bad dye-job!  No thanks! 

But babies come to us pure and unspoiled.  They have ‘sweet baby smell’ and make gurgling sounds and they are completely helpless AND completely adorable.  I know why Sherry wants a baby – because babies are God’s reminder that the world deserves another chance.  ‘Petite Chérie’ will change our world (or at the very least, Sherry and Rodney’s) one heart at a time.  She will be loved and she will love and serve God and mankind.  She will be a joy to all around her because of the tremendous example she has in her parents. 

‘Petite Chérie’ means Little Dear One and that is what she will be!  I hope that I will get to see her grow up; but not too fast.  I want to relish her first steps and her first words even if it will be vicariously through Mama Sherry.  I pray that in the future she will know how much she was wanted and how patiently her mother waited for her.

I also pray that she has the same patience with her parents when someday she wants to hurry things along a bit too fast.  Be still Dear Little One your time is at hand!  You’ve been waited for so long; please let us “baby you” for awhile.

Peace,

Denis