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Do you remember, from your childhood days, the neighborhood football game when everyone wanted to play quarterback? Sometimes you’d stand around and argue and take forever getting started. Usually the way it was resolved was that the one who owned the ball got to call the plays. But finally everyone had to agree to play a different position, otherwise you could not even have a game!

Then if you stayed with the sport and gave yourself a little time to grow up, you discovered that it can be just as much fun to throw a good block as it is to throw a good pass. And a guard can get just as much satisfaction out of running with interferences as a halfback can out of running with the ball. We can’t say one is more important than the other; you’ve got to have both or you can’t play the game. So it is with life – different players, different positions, different talents, but each one essential to the over-all objective.

Also I’m sure we have been hearing and reading lately about a scientific technique called cloning. I don’t understand much about it, except that it has to do with genetic engineering. The idea seems to be that someday scientists will be able to control the hereditary process so that a child is an exact copy of the parent.

Well, it seems that the great Giver of Life didn’t see fit to do it that way. He made us all individuals – separate, distinct, and different, no two of us alike. And I seriously suspect it will always be that way. At least I hope so, because much of the beauty and charm and vitality of life is found in the variety of the people. A world of billions of people, all of them made in the image and likeness of God, and yet each one is unique. Every time God makes a baby, He breaks the mold and throws it away. Isn’t that great! You are not a copy. You’re an original that has never been copied; so there’s no one else in the world exactly like you.

We do not all have the same. Some of us have more; others have less; but all of us have something. Each of us has an endowment held in trust for our Lord. Each of us has little piece of God’s great gift of life and a little segment of time to see what we can do with it.

October is Respect Life Month. Let us think more seriously on how we can share our life with others and thereby make the world a better place for all.