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In our world today, hundreds of millions of children are not received as Jesus would receive them.
In the "developed" West, the number of abortions exceeds 200 per 1,000 live births.
In the Third World, some believe that 100 million children--18 percent of all children under the age of 15--live or work on city streets. Latin America has the greatest number of street children. Brazil alone has as many as 7 million. A growing number of street children in some countries are being tortured or killed by hired death squads in an effort to "clean up" the business districts.
Other children whom society does not want are hidden away under subhuman conditions in institutions such as those discovered after the downfall of Romania's Ceaucescu.
Where they are not killed or hidden away, millions of children are exploited for their labour. What was banned in England over 150 years ago continues today in other countries. An estimated 300 million children under the age of 15 are being exploited in the same way as English children were during the industrial revolution.
Asia has the largest number of such children. In India alone, more than 120 million children under 14 years old--half of India's child population--work in industries ranging from agriculture to stone quarrying.
In defiance of its own labour laws, Pakistan's government maintains a workforce of 50,000 boys and girls aged four to 12 at state-run carpet-weaving factories, where their backbreaking labour earns them about $4 each month.
Children in electric lightbulb factories in Indonesia work from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. six days a week for $3 a week.
In Bangladesh, children as young as eight spend up to 10 hours a day cutting cloth for shirts and blouses that end up in Canadian department stores. During the first three months, they are paid nothing. After that, wages start at $9 or $10 a month.
In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, small boys are employed in tanning factories at 50 cents a day, applying poisonous, skin-burning chemicals to animal hides to cure them for leather-making.
Many other children are exploited as sex objects. Some estimate that as many as 10 million children could be caught up in the sex industry: child prostitution, sex tourism and pornography.
Bangkok's nongovernmental Centre for the Protection of Children's Rights estimates that as many as 800,000 girls between the ages of 12 and 15 are serving as prostitutes in Thailand's 60,000 brothels.
Thousands of other young girls--some as young as six years old--and boys of all ages also serve as prostitues. Their pictures are often shown in European and North American travel brochures aimed at pedophiles and sexual deviants of these wealthy societies.
In some poor Third World cities, young girls are given hormones to induce maturity.
Although most severe in Asia, the sexual exploitation of children is also widespread elsewhere. It is estimated that there are 500,000 prostitutes under the age of 20 in Brazil, and 150,000 in the United States.
In our world, almost 40,000 children die from hunger, malnutrition and disease every day. Chronic hunger is an everyday reality for millions of children. Their malnourished bodies find it difficult to overcome the six preventable diseases which are the major killers of children in the Third World: diarrhea, measles, pneumonia, whooping cough, diptheria and tuberculosis.
Moreover, according to MARC estimates, 78 percent of this world's young people--1.4 billion of the 1.8 billion--are growing up in non-Christian settings or are being raised in non-Christian homes.
Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poet, wrote:
We are guilty of many errors and faults,
but our worst crime is abandoning the children,
neglecting the fountain of life.
Many of the things we need can wait.
The child cannot.
Right now is the time
his bones are being formed,
his blood is being made
and his senses are being developed.
To him we cannot say "Tomorrow."
His name is "Today".
Jesus said, "Whoever welcomes a little child like this in My name welcomes Me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea. . . . See that you do not look down on one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven. . . . Your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost" (Matthew 18:5-6, 10, 14).
Richard Navarro is a member of North Langley Community Church in Langley, B.C.
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