There is a quote, often attributed to the pop artist Andy Warhol in the late 1960’s that “in the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes” maybe when people first heard this statement, they would have thought that highly unlikely. World Famous is a massive claim and I think that even today, most of humankind will never achieve even fifteen minutes of world fame. I guess that with the growth in social media, huge numbers of people claim their fifteen minutes of fame today as day to day events in their lives are shared with thousands of people around the globe. It never ceases to amaze me that something can happen in Suffolk, and within minutes the news has spread around the world. There is a clamour today for the fifteen minutes of fame and it appalls me the people who record day to day moments in their lives and publish them on social media for the world to see. I can’t believe that thousands of people actually view a mum putting together lunchboxes for her children to take to school, but that is the world we live in today.
Two little girls caught the world’s imagination last week. Annie Jo Scott was born at 11:55pm on Saturday 31st December 2022 and her twin sister Effie Rose was born at 12:01am on Sunday 1st January 2023, just six minutes younger than her sister. Those six minutes were crucial, it is rare for twins to be born on different days, but these two little girls have birthdays on consecutive days, consecutive months, and consecutive years which is quite astounding. The fact is that these two little girls have had their fifteen minutes of world fame in the first few days of their lives. They are not alone, it is forty-four years ago that Louise Brown, the first so called “test tube baby” was born, IVF was a pioneering concept in 1978 and the birth of Louise Brown signalled hope for couples who longed to parent children but were not able.
Of course if we are thinking about miracle babies, we have just celebrated the birth of Jesus once again and if ever there was a miracle baby, sure he must be the ultimate. By January 15th he will be forgotten by many, as life moves on, but in the same way that Annie Jo, Effie Rose, and Louise Brown go on to live lives out of the spotlight for most of the time, I believe that we cannot consign Christ to anonymity, but need to follow his teaching and his example every day, not for our own fame, but so that the world might see him.