Celebrate the Child

Real quick blog post, since I'm running up against a deadline: 9 500-word articles by tomorrow.

From time to time, I go through my music from A to Z, to delete clips I no longer want or to delete copies in my iTunes files. Right now I'm on the C's.

As I've been blogging for the past week, I've had several of those weird coincidences happening to me. As I've said, this kind of thing happens to me quite often, but for some reason, in the past two weeks, it's been occurring more often than normal. Perhaps it's just that I'm noticing it more, or that I'm recording them here. Another one just happened!

Like I said, I'm on the C's. "Castle on a Cloud," from my "Les Mis" soundtrack came up. That song is the child Cosette singing about her fantasies to get through her miserable little life, full of abuse, starvation, and humiliation. The very next song on the queue: Michael Card's "Celebrate the Child," which is about the Christ child.

There can't be two songs more different in their themes and sentiments than those two songs. The first is about how a child has been mistreated and devalued, and the other is the profound value of another child. "Celebrate the Child" implies that because Christ is precious, all children are. "Castle on a Cloud" is about darkness; "Celebrate the Child" is about the Light coming into the world. Christ teaches the opposite of what many characters in "Les Mis" believe and practice: that all life, no matter how weak and lowly, is precious. As Christ himself said, "Suffer the children to come to me."