Pop Views

You can group the reactions my wife and I got when we began announcing that our fourth kid has been conceived into the following categories:

ONE: The Concerned Grandparents

Blank stares with large scripts on their foreheads that state:
"We hope you can handle a fourth kid."

TWO: Business associates going for their first TEN MILLION.

"What? You're over-populating the world!"

THREE: Our Focolare friends

"Que bono. That is a gift from God!"

Yes, my wife is about three months pregnant and I can certainly claim that that kid is destined for greatness because he had weathered all natural obstacles to his conception when his legal age was still zero. Indeed, nowhere in my life has my views on population control been appropriately challenged but now. The concerns are all valid. Just imagine the tons of diapers I would have to buy on top of what I've already bought for the first three. What about the milk, the clothes and the educatonal plans? A minimum wage earner would have gone insane.

But everything has to answer to the bottomline: What is it in life that really matters?

Is it the economic difficulty that goes with raising a family? Is it the statistics on population growth and the diminishing world resources? Or is it simply that God, in all his infinite wisdom, has decided to assign us to mentor another one of his angels and experience the joys and pains of fatherhood for the fourth time? After all, as Einstein put it, God doesn't play dice with the universe.

I look at my three kids Juancho, Hans and Tressa, my wife Ces and I imagine how my fourth kid will look like. And I manage a smile with the thought, we are blessed.