There is Light

I am not a perfect mother.  I have almost as many failures as I do success.  But all three of my children know that when they need comfort or laughter or love or a soft place to land that they can come to me.  And I look around preschool, and I see many other equally lucky children.  Children who don’t know hunger or violence.  Children who are able to find trust in the world because they learned it from those entrusted to show it to them.

And then I read articles like this.  Read it if you want, but if you want to spare yourself the gory details, it’s just about a little boy (one year old) who was taken from this Earth way too early by the exact people who were supposed to show him how to live in it.

Ordinarily when I read stories like this, I quickly look the other way mentally.  I don’t allow myself to process it fully because the horror is just too great.

I look at my babies, and I am reminded of the terribly broken world they have inherited.

We live in a world where millions of children are literally starving to death.

We live in a world where people who desperately want children can’t have them and those who don’t want them use them and abuse them.

We live in a world where the greatest threat to young children is their own caretakers.

And it doesn’t make sense to me.

There isn’t a whole lot of light in this world.  We’re all tainted.  We’re all imperfect and broken.  The darkness of our sins can sometimes dim the light of our spirit.

And then we are given the blessing of light and innocence in our children, and as a society, we can’t always even let that shine.

Daily, I want to take my girls and TJ and hide away somewhere in a cave far away from here.  Far away from people who use and abuse and exploit little ones.  Far away from the lessons they will learn from this imperfect world.

But each time I remind myself that this world is theirs.  They inherited it.  It was a gift from their creator.

It’s not perfect.  Often, it’s not beautiful.  But it is theirs.  And I have to trust that there is some divine plan for them within it.  I pray there is.

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