You Were Conceived. You Are Here

The threats to human life since the beginning have not changed. The list includes fatal forces since the time when Eve doubted God's honesty, Adam followed her lead, and death was added to the human story.

Ambition, jealousy, rebellion, and deception were among the early themes against the good life, beginning with Cain who killed his brother, introduced murder to the human record, and eliminated an early branch of the human tree.

After Noah and his family survived The Flood, as the story goes, diseases, natural disasters, jealousies, envying, hatred, wars, and threats of war led to more displacement and death. Yet, the human race survived.

New life was conceived under an array of settings and circumstances including formal marriage commitments, adulteries, or rapes. Conception occurred through lustful couplings between strangers, intimate moments along journeys headed in opposite directions. Some parted not knowing the other's name or hopes, and not caring.

The human race continued, each new life born along a broad spectrum of survival conditions. Some newborns had families; other were abandoned or left with only their mothers or grandmothers. Some grew up in gangs, others on the streets or in forests, as hard as that may be to imagine.

Some were rescued by ne'er do wells, as labled by communities, those men and women that shared their meager spoils. I have learned likely details from Pillars of the Earth and other historical stories. Some once knew wealth, others only knew poverty or other dire hardships.

The human race survived and shared these conditions everywhere. All of us arrived through such lines in a historic array of cultures and conditions. No one has a record of the far distant situations of the Who's Who of ancestry across the eons of human time.

And does it matter? Somehow, down the centuries it came down to our biological mothers and fathers and ultimately to mothers who gave birth to us. Most important to us personally is that they carried us, regardless of their situations, preferences, advantages or lack thereof, their moods and selfish or sacrificial decisions and actions. That's the way I see it.

For my beliefs, each person at every stage of heart-beating life is a living soul. Each mother is, thereby, blessed to have the chance to influence the future in the closest and most personal of ways. How new lives react has varied and will continue to do so.

Hope works against rebellion and despair. Life can get very messy, yet life throbs for breath and a future.

I love to read an array of biographies, and I notice how they affirm this view of history. Children born in hovels later have been honored by royalty. Children unwanted have contributed to others' well-being. Even children wounded by doctors' aborting instruments of death have survived. Life is conceived and born on the equal plane of...life.

Written on my birthday, 2014, and honoring life, yours and mine.