I spent a Friday night recently sleeping with my youngest grandson.
Oisin (pronounced Asheen, as in machine, and the name of some Irish mythical warrior/poet) is two and, as I discovered, can’t sleep straight in bed. He has to sleep at right-angles or sideways to whatever way I reposition him on the mattress.
Nor can he sleep still, but has to snuggle and wriggle, push and kick like crazy.
True to the phonetics of his name with an ‘m’ on the front, he is a threshing machine and I had the bruised ribs and a sleepless night to prove it. It wasn’t the most ideal way of preparing to preach four times on the coming Sunday.
But I love him; truly, madly, deeply. And I can’t bear the thought of any harm coming to him.
What is it about kids that can soften the hardest heart, crumble the granite-will and melt the toughest of masculine exteriors?
It may be their ‘cuteness’. It may be their ‘innocence’. It is more likely to be their vulnerability, coupled with our deeply ingrained, may I say, God-given, protective instinct as parents and surrogates.
As sinful as I am, I don’t think I have ever wanted my kids, and I don’t want my grandkids, to be rich. I don’t want them to be famous. I want them to follow Jesus. And I want them to know the contentment of which the Bible speaks.
Shakespeare’s famous opening line in Richard lll speaks of the ‘winter of our discontent’. Let me rip the old Bard’s words out of their original context and place them in the context of the basic needs of children (may I say rights) and our heartache when their welfare is put at risk and compromised by abuse and irresponsibility and remain at risk by neglect and indifference.
As evil as I am, I could never imagining harming or allowing my children and grandchildren to be harmed. Each year Helen and I try our hand at strawberry farming and cherry-tomato farming so that there is usually a constant supply to harvest with the grandkids when they come over. They delight in us finding for them the plumpest tomato and the juiciest strawberry that they can eat at the farm-gate.
Could I ever contemplate asking one of the grandkids to hold out his hand and close his eyes and then flicking a funnel-web spider onto his hand instead of a juicy cherry tomato as he excitedly expected a good thing from his Grandy? The worst of us in our worst moments can’t imagine it. If we can get that much right, how much more can we be sure of the love of our Father in Heaven. (Luke 11:11-13)
As evil as Helen is, could she ever forget the child of the child that once suckled on her breast? Even in the rarest of circumstances a mother may do so, in contrast to God who will never forget his otherwise forsaken people. (Isaiah 49:14-15)
Many children live with gnawing levels of discontentment and suffer in dangerous levels of harm, both in the developed and the developing world.
In the townships of South Africa, many children born with a disability will be abandoned by their father’s, leaving a trail of abandonment; wife, and mother to raise his children in grinding poverty while he goes off, takes another wife, and sires more children, only to consign them to abandonment and wretched poverty at the first sign of difficulty or disinterest.
In rural Tanzania, girls as young as twelve and thirteen will give birth to a first-born, suffer a horrific fistula injury at childbirth and be ostracized and abandoned to a life of disability, suffering, humiliation and shame. Or a young woman will be a mother of three before she is twenty, left to struggle to find food for her hungry babies while her husband drinks and gambles away the pittance that would otherwise feed his family.
In suburbs across Sydney, many children live with the constant danger of physical and sexual abuse, witness and experience domestic violence and suffer the consequences of inadequate nutrition, sub-standard living conditions and insufficient parental care.
June 16 is designated as the International Day of the African Child.
On 16 June 1976, in Soweto, South Africa about 20,000 black school children marched to protest about the poor quality of their education and their right to be taught in their own language.
At the end of that shameful, bloody day, on the high veldt, up to 700 people had been shot in cold blood by South African authorities. The official death toll remains at 173. The fatally wounded body of 13 year old Hector Peterson being carried by friends seeking medical assistance symbolizes the savage brutality of that day.
In the shadow of this year’s Day of the African child hundreds of school girls remain hostage to the terrorist group Bok Haram, with the Nigerian Government and the International community seemingly powerless to rescue them.
In the Middle East, in Syria, and now, again in Iraq, children are dying and being displaced in large numbers.
Protecting vulnerable children (and adults) should be the highest priority of any caring and compassionate culture. It has always been the hallmark of true Biblical faith, of authentic spirituality (James 1:17).
This winter, let us help turn the coldness of winter’s discontent into the winter of our kid’s content.
The Archbishop of Sydney’s Winter Appeal
Feature photo: Wikipedia
