My blood is boiling. I try to breathe deep, see clearly, slow my heart rhythm in order to evaluate this situation fully.
Growing up in a home where there was literal singing, almost always, talk of joy and goodness, patience and saint-like acceptance of others…
My initial thoughts are to tame this perpetual anger inside me. I mean, adults shouldn’t rage, Christian’s shouldn’t feel negative emotions. Pain shouldn’t feel so close to the surface…
Or should it?
I know far too many people who justify their rage by pointing to Jesus turning tables (Matt. 21:12-13)…I don’t want to be one of those.
Yet, the reality is, Jesus has strong words for those who opppose who my heart aches for, children trapped in their home, during something like this pandemic, Coronavirus.
Matthew, Mark and Luke all refer to it being better if a “millstone is tied around the neck” and a person is “thrown into the sea”, than if one were ever to “harm a little child”. (Luke 17:2, Matt. 18:6, Mark 9:42)
And yet, I get that my own hurt, my own story, my own history with hurting children may sway my response to babies being locked up with abusive families…
During an epidemic crushing everything it sees.
- I hear the walls close. See the childrens faceless hearts in others homes, as they hunch in a ball, praying to be invisible as their daddy throws a chair across a livingroom.
- I can feel the angst through each child’s unseen body as they grip tight to their bedroom door, hoping their parent won’t find them.
- I can see the shaking fears, as children all over the country pretend to be asleep so the worries, fears and addictions of their parents won’t land on their little bodies.
- I can hear the babies left abandoned in their cribs, as parents tip up their drinks, laugh and entertain themselves with anything drowning their own inner failures.
Cries die as children silent themselves so their little bodies won’t be slapped wildly, their voices quiet because milk never comes. Cries useless, in light of the deafening music that never stops.
And I rage that I ache so desperately for these little ones. The unseen, the trapped children, in lock-down
around the world.
I have heard too many stories of children being left, abandoned, beated, abused, and neglected due to the selfishness of those around them.
And who will hear their cries now? Not a neighbor calling, a teacher reporting. Not a grocery store clerk that sees their bruising.
Who can intervene now when a child’s home becomes a prison cell, locking a child in, without any escape?
And how do they leave? When the streets are barren, the bars are closed, and angry men bring their volatile perversions inside their children’s bedrooms?
When kids can’t escape the back porch they are locked on, or leave through a basement, or climb a fence to stand bruised in front of a neighbor that can help them?
How will these kids survive?
“A rope tied to their neck and thrown into the bottom of the sea.”
God’s promise. And these consequences, remind me to have hope. Hope that eternity knows what’s happening. Hope that assures, Jesus never ignores the cries of a desperate and pleading people.
One that claims, before these children were abandoned or abused, neglected or left to be used by a neighbor or their own parent….
Jesus made a way.
He was setting up a solution that eased the pain, clothed a child, and opened doors to truth…long before sin robbed this earth like a slave.
I got a text the other day. A child was on the streets. He was older, but my heart ached to think of him having nowhere to turn.
Who would harbor him, when shelters were closed, group homes full, and even I was hesitant to let him in my usual open doors?
What was his history? How does he treat those around him? Is he already addicted? No, despite how my heart ached, I couldn’t take him.
Where was His savior when this wandering teen needed him? And where is the church when children cry and the sounds of walls aching with children locked inside, bleed with cries for help?
I hear today that many states have this plan to “help” kids in abusive home. “Offer supports” and just hope they don’t need care.
“Supports”?
When have “supports” ever helped?
I can think of a dozen original homes who have just learned to work a system more, the more stuff they’ve been given.
They have twisted and lied and been made to prostitute the truth for the sake of getting their child back.
When truth is, children returned to unfit families, rarely equals good. Too many children return in this broken system.
And although the goal and hope is to keep first families together. I want that. I really do…
The family structure that supports and stands with kids is often completely broken, dysfunctional and fragile at best.
Too many have become perfect actors, appeasing one another, for the sake of their own own agendas. While children have deep scars they hide or aren’t telling…
Meanwhile, children’s memories surface like night terrors, trauma looks like learning disabilities or stuttering, ADHD or a thousand others respones.
Kids physical responses to trauma mask themselves as eating disorders, STEMMING behaviors, and autistic-like disorders.
Yet, by the time love and safety and help gets to these children, their little minds are jumbled, their cognitive ability has been damaged…
Fixing a child who has been neglected or abused is like throwing a whole spool of twine down ten floors of stairs, and then asking someone to straighten it.
We use cognitive therapy, play therapy, behavioral therapy…and a thousand other “helps” to aide these kids in healing.
But truth is, a child’s first two years are crucial. What kids experience then, when their brains are forming….will affect that child for a lifetime…Regardless of what good happens afterwards.
And so, I ache, literally and physically ache for these hurting children, locked within their houses, while someone gives families like theirs, “supports”…
And we all turn our self-consumed heads away, as if nothing is even happening…
Because in most people’s minds, abuse only takes place in poor towns or third-world countries…
But likely, someone living right next door to me and to you, is suffering under a parent’s alcoholism, physical, mental or emotional abuse, or experiencing sexual harm…
Abuse is not always just something “out there”.
We take refuge, yet children speckling this earth will suffer, locked down in their homes, nobody seeing them.
And if you ask me, this is the worst tragedy, than any epidemic, labeled…
Coronavirus.
“See that you do not despise or think less of one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven [are in the presence of and] continually look upon the face of My Father who is in heaven.” Matt 18:10
