Many of us grew up singing the lovely Christmas lullaby “Away in a Manger,” and some of us remember hearing this lovely tune as we went to sleep.  It’s a song that reminds us that Jesus himself loves all the little children.

We live in an ugly age, when children are trafficked and often forced into sexual and other slaveries.  An August report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general showed that close to 300,000 little ones have been literally lost at our southern border.  Where they came from should little concern us if we have any of the compassion of Jesus.  What is disturbing about this reality is that most of the sympathy expressed for these lost kids is reduced to a short mention of the three hundred thousand as part a longer list of what has gone wrong over the past several years.  There is no doubt that these children make a great talking point, but mostly missing is any in-depth analyses of how we actually lost the kids and even less about what we are doing to find them.  Perhaps for many in the legacy media the open wound is simply too sore to touch.  God truly help us if it’s not politically convenient to underline their plight.

This month, Greta Van Susteren interviewed Lt. Chris Olivarez, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, who gave the picture of a horribly desperate situation just in Texas, where so many of these kids have crossed.  So often they have been mere commodities, elements to make a crossing easier for others with precious little regard for the little ones themselves.

Olivarez stated, “As of May, the whereabouts of 291,000 migrant children who arrived in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors are unknown because they were set free and never given a date to appear in immigration court.  Another 32,000 who were given hearing dates did not show up.”

Olivarez went in to say that his agency has no way to check out the legitimacy of the “sponsors,” their identity often scribbled on a piece of paper.  Since the ultimate fate of these children is a federal matter, all that his agency can do is look for signs of abuse and report that to the border officers.

“All we can do is document what we see, document everything these children have with them, and then turn them over to Border Patrol.  And from there, we don’t know exactly where they end up.”  Olivarez went on to say that letting the children go is one of the hardest parts of his job.

We personally spent 42 years in mission work overseas in six different countries in South Asia and South America.  Our kids, who were born in India and Nepal, grew up without any close extended family.  Because our kids had two loving and responsible parents who looked for substitute grandparents and uncles and aunts, they grew up surrounded by a loving and caring community.  One of our daughters in a time of personal crisis here in the U.S. actually traveled to South America to get counsel from her adopted grandparents.

My heart aches over the hundreds of thousands of kids who have been made pawns in an evil system.  I fear that many if not most of them are growing up without an ounce of the love and care they so badly need, and the reality is that many are experiencing a hell on earth instead.

I grew up in a 20th-century culture that was still reading a 17th-century Bible.  I knew that Jesus loved the little children, but I could not understand why they should “suffer” coming to him; “suffer (allow) the little children to come to me,” says Jesus in the King James Version.  That was almost a prophecy of what so many little kids are truly “suffering” today, and for most of these poor kids getting close to Jesus is the farthest thing from their hellish reality.

The stark warning of Jesus about causing one “of these little ones” to fall was primarily aimed at his precious disciples, whom he called his “little ones.”  They were at risk before the world’s hatred and aggression.  But the warning has been properly applied to children who are always vulnerable and at risk without the care and protection of responsible adults.  Christ’s warning that those who cause the little ones to fall should have a millstone tied to their necks and be thrown into the sea can be contrasted to the laughable “responsibility” of the government agencies that have let hundreds of thousands of kids slip through their net.  And it’s not the border guards we are talking about, who have been inundated with millions at the border making it impossible to apply even a semblance of control over a flood of humanity.  I am not asking here that we vote for this or that candidate to start to rectify a horrendous human tragedy (not to speak of the gangs and terrorists slipping through) I am asking if anyone has thought of what it will take to rescue hundreds of thousands of “little ones”?

Did our authorities do anything to follow-up on where these kids were sent?  Did they record the data on those slips of paper that identified the supposed “sponsors”?  Is anything effective being done now to find these “little ones” and shelter them from the forces of evil out there?  At the very least, if they are in the care of someone who has not permitted them to be trafficked or enslaved, but is not giving them the same level of love and care that natural parents would, we should be incensed.

We tell the ugly stories of the boarding schools where Indian kids were forcibly removed from their natural parent’s care to be “educated into” the dominate culture.  Almost every day in my community, I drive a part of the “Indian School Road,” where one such gulag used to exist.  When a construction company applied to put in a new housing tract on the former property of that school, it was required to bring in forensic anthropologists and look for any graves of those children.  Those of us living close to the project were thinking of millstones.

This is an issue that goes so very far beyond politics.  Just a few years back, the cause of the “DREAMers,” kids who grew up in the U.S., most often in their own family setting but without proper documentation, was used politically to draw on the heartstrings.  And understandably — they were kids who knew no other homeland but this one, who mostly didn’t speak the language of their parents and certainly could not know the nuances of the culture to which they were legally attached.

Now I ask, where are the voices that were raised in righteous anger over the DREAMers when we now have 300,000 who most likely cannot dream at all?  Those heartstrings are not just sadly out of tune; they have not been tightened at all.

Our Jewish-Christian heritage teaches us that all that happens here on Earth is preparing us for the afterlife; we believe our moral duties and compassion toward the most vulnerable among us will have eternal consequences.  If we who are citizens of both this country and the one to come have any sense of the love and compassion of Jesus, where are our moral courage and even outrage over this lost generation of little ones in our midst?  How can we even consider that we might be “fit for Heaven” if we don’t start to take care of business here on Earth?

Image via Pxhere.

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