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Conference Assistant and Event Hostess @ Bingham University
Abuja, Nigeria
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King Baldwin: The Dying King
<p>Imagine being a king while your own body is quietly telling you that your life has an expiration date.</p><p>Baldwin IV of Jerusalem was diagnosed with leprosy as a child.</p><p>And yet, at sixteen, he rode into battle and defeated Saladin at Montgisard.</p><p>Sixteen.</p><p>Most sixteen year olds are trying to figure out who they are..</p><p>King Baldwin was trying to figure out how to keep a kingdom alive.</p><p>And perhaps after that victory, he looked at the battlefield and thought:</p><p><em>Perhaps I’ll live to a hundred.</em></p><p>Only to grow older and realise that living till thirty might be a luxury.</p><p>Baldwin didn’t have the luxury of assuming he had time.</p><p>And yet, he still had a kingdom to run…</p><p><br/></p><p>He fought Saladin when he had to.</p><p>He negotiated when he could.</p><p>He maintained periods of peace with a man who could have been his greatest enemy. </p><p><br/></p><p>His body was deteriorating.</p><p>His kingdom was threatened.</p><p>His time was running out.</p><p><br/></p><p>And yet he was still king.</p><p><br/></p><p>That’s the part that I find unsettling mainly because he knew life was temporary, but he didn’t treat that as a reason to stop living.</p><p><br/></p><p>His illness became part of how history remembered him.</p><p><em><strong>“The Leper King.”</strong></em></p><p><em><strong><br/></strong></em></p><p>He lived an entire reign while knowing that his body was quietly counting down.</p><p>And maybe that’s why the brevity of his life doesn’t make it feel unfinished.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>Some things don’t need to last long to have existed fully.</p><p>Maybe knowing that something has an ending is exactly what makes us cherish what happens before it.</p><p>Life doesn’t become insignificant because it was shorter than expected.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p><strong>If it lived only for a little while, it still has lived.</strong></p><p>Baldwin lived for a little while.</p><p>But in that little while,</p><p>he was <strong>King</strong>.</p>
King Baldwin: The Dying King
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