What would you do with $100?
What would you do with $10?
You get a gift, win a contest, you come into some legit but unexpected cash.
What do you do with it?
Answers can be posted here or on my Facebook link to this post.
Thanks.
The story circulates and re-circulates but the video never should: two men taped themselves abusing a child a decade ago and this week it goes viral on Facebook?!
Why would anyone “Like” that?!
Why would thousands repost it?
While I am glad people have reported the video, I would prefer it had not been viewed or more than that, made.
No one should do that to a child. And we are no longer a civilized nation if we promote child abuse on social media or do nothing to stop it.
Anyone who helps who spreads child pornography should face charges.
But of course, they won’t.
Where is the equal sign for children?
Last April I made a commitment to write about child abuse every day in remembrance of National Child Abuse Prevention Month. It was spiritually and emotionally painful.
This year I have committed to write about recovery. I don’t think most kids have happy, stress-free childhoods, but some experience more grief and trauma than others.
And then there are the five each day.
In the United States of America 5 children die each day from the fatal effects of child abuse. Beautiful little children like Toryn Buckman.
Imagine if it were 5 celebrities, 5 soccer moms, 5 athletes, 5 politicians. Any other group of people in this country gets killed off in groups of five or more a day and we would have a national crisis. It would be national news. It would be a scandal. Advocates would call for change.
But not children. Children in our country are second-class citizens. They have no voice. We have to be their voices.
When I contacted elected officials and bureaucrats to ask them to assist abused children to a man they said the same thing–this is not my issue.
Is it yours?
He says, I want to live here forever
Can we live here forever?
And I understand what he means–
We are close to heaven
Close to sanctuary
He doesn’t know
What happened to his sister
He doesn’t know
That everything
He does is a reminder
Of how very young she was
The ghost
Hurt my babies.
Resurrection
To rise from the dead
To lose your life
Then find it again
Rebirth
Renaissance
To walk out of a disaster and into
Life
Everlasting
The beginning and the end
Only this time
The end is a beginning
Home.
Yesterday an atheist told me he thought it was “arrogant and offensive” to believe in Hell.
Funny, I thought, hell is hard to miss. It has left clues to its existence scattered throughout history.
Genocide is hell.
Pestilence is hell.
Racism is hell.
War is hell.
Abortion is hell.
Child abuse is hell.
These things are not hell in it’s entirety, just clues to it’s easy reality.
Here’s how I would put it–somewhere there is a garbage dump where my personal trash goes. Every week on a certain day a big noisy truck comes and takes away my garbage, my neighbor’s trash, the neighborhood garbage, the city refuse.
I have never seen the landfill, don’t even know where it is located exactly, but the trash, the cans, the truck, and my municipal payment for “garbage collection” all suggest somewhere there is a dump for our foul-smelling discards.
Hell means “garbage dump.” It seems to me the arrogant and offensive thing is to disregard the trash, the stink, the truck, and the brave Man who comes and takes it all away and refuse to see what is clearly apparent–I do not take away my own garbage. Someone does it for me.
Make no mistake. It has been years and years of faithful service and I have never taken the Trash Collector for granted.
How could I? I need him so.
This has happened more than once.
I sit next to an adult and give them a version of my reasons for writing and they share their story.
This one involved mental illness, alcoholism, a tragic death and an injunction against talking about the truth. Children were made to bear witness to a terrible story and then could never talk about what they had experienced.
Mind-bending. And the norm. Most adults not only do not allow children to verbally process traumatic events, they often suppress these stories.
Incredibly destructive. No matter how tough, embarrassing or difficult the event, every child deserves a voice–a safe place to tell their tale of woe.
Otherwise the wound itself is exacerbated by the additional loss of trust in the grownups whose job it was to protect us.
Imagine human values were marsupial–clinging to each of our heads.
One man would walk from his house to his car with animal lust clinging to his shiny pate. Another would shuffle to the mailbox as pride monkeyed with his ears.
Sure, some people’s resident animals would be symbiotic–well-mannered love, or the singing bird of truth, but far more would stagger about assiduously nursing their prejudices, manipulations, and vice.
Now imagine you are a child–astounded and a little afraid. All these nattering animals clinging to the necks of grownups! You eye them warily. Maybe dare eventually to raise a question or two–who are they? Why do they stay?
When you do. When you do the parents, aunts, uncles, neighbors look at you blankly-what are you talking about? There are no animals here.
Do you believe in God?
Does He believe in you?
Do you know His love?
And what are the rules of Love
In the house of God
We commonly call
Heaven.
Revelation 22:12-14,21 (NIV)
“Behold, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done. [13] I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. [14] “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. [21] The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.
You will forgive me if I sound like a broken record. I am haunted by two things–the brokenness of history and the voice of Jesus.
There are times in every culture and in the current of human events when a lot of people get things very wrong. And when they do they are self-righteous and smug.
Some painful examples–
Joseph Stalin was treated as a valuable leader and friend by the west while he was making deals with Hitler and starving and torturing his own people. The men who decried his behavior and warned of his psychopathy were suppressed.
For years the US allowed an entire people group to be raped, tortured, pillaged, and sold like cattle and justified this abuse in the name of God.
Oh, wait…that happened several times, didn’t it?
The Holocaust? That was a lot of quiet Germans.
And let’s face it, America’s entire foreign policy for the last few decades….
We back thugs and look the other way when they hurt people.
Humans are broken
History is broken.
We can’t fix it
We need a Savior.
But when he comes he will indeed raise the dead.
Carrying Light 