My daughter, Eliza, has forever changed my view of what it means to feel vulnerable. As Elizabeth Stone says, “Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Since Jeremy and I welcomed her into our world three years ago this month, we have felt a new kind of tenderness, that is the most amazing joy and also a tremendous risk of the heart. Her presence in our lives has often made me think of how Jesus told his friends that children were onto something- they can teach us about the Kingdom, they are the Kingdom.
The events of the past few months, with the growing humanitarian crisis at the southern border with children fleeing violence from Central and South America has made my heart ache anew for children all over the globe. How would we come out as people of conscience if the measurement was how we have treated our children? Perhaps we avoid asking the deeper questions because it hits too close to home.If we asked about what these children were fleeing, we would hear about their brothers and sisters being gang raped and dismembered, we would hear about soul crushing violence. And when we asked about why there is such violence we would hear about drugs. And when we ask about the drugs we would hear where they are going and we would have to look at ourselves in the mirror and accept that these children are being sacrificed on the altar of “our” demand. They are being killed for money and drugs in places ruined with corruption and weak political leadership. They are coming because it is the only hope.
Our political leaders are fond of dealing with the symptoms of significant problems, instead of daring to face the deeper structural issues that would unearth challenges to trade agreements, drug policy, immigration laws and more. We have asked the world to take in refugees from Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, but when a moment emerges, where we are called to keep child refugees safe, at the very least, many voices scream, “Send them home!” The truth hurts, but what if the only way to begin to restore right relationship, to atone and be at-one again with the messes our consumerism has made, is to begin to accept responsibility to do right by these children?
Here is a place to start if you are moved to join the effort to respond to this crisis. Our children need us. I think of the moms and dads and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and cousins and all of the people whose hearts have left them walking across miles, on trains, through deserts and pain, I think of all of people whose hearts are waiting at the border.
Nichole Lamarche is the Organizing Pastor at Silicon Valley Progressive Faith Community.
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