We are all Rachels

This week my kids are away with their dad in Chautauqua, the upstate New York town where generations of families go for lectures, camp, and fun time together. I miss them terribly. My little Colin (he's going to be nine in a couple of weeks... Although he looks like he may end up being the size of a minor-league basketball player, I think I get a pass on calling him "little" until he turns ten) gave me this hideous looking Leggo creature and told me to keep it on my desk until he returned. Everytime I look at it, he said, I should think of him. And I do. But today I'm also thinking of two other kids. One of them was photographed right after he died of measles or malaria or one of the other totally preventable diseases that haunt the Congo, along with the curse of war. His photo was on the Times website yesterday. Beautiful even in death, he looked as though he was sleeping in the clinic set up to save children like him. A woman, possibly a nurse, touched his feet: they had attached an oxygen mask in an attempt to save his life, but by the time he had reached the clinic, miles from his home, it was too late. Today's photo, so reminiscent of the famous one from the Oklahoma City bombing, showed the limp body of a little girl in the arms of a frantic Lebanese man. Bent on destroying Hezbollah, the Israeli's bombed an apartment building where two families had taken refuge, killing more than 50. The vast majority of those killed were children. We say we love children here in America. We have endless books and websites on parenting. We have stores that make an industry out of dressing our kids, and independent schools that help them get into the best universities, and camps to keep them busy during the summertime. Yet we remain silent, or complicit, when other children in our world die of measles when a cheap inoculation could have saved them, or die because they were too poor to get out of a war zone. The most effective thing one could do, I decided, was to send a donation to Doctors Without Borders, the heroic organization working ghastly conditions to help families all over the world, or to another charitable group. Please, please...prayerfully do something so that other children will not die like they did. And, of course, we can also pray. We can pray for peace. We pray that in some other place, the place where they were created, their uniqueness is recognized by the God who does not take them and their beauty as lightly as we did. We pray that God will take away our hearts of stone, and give all of us, Christian, Jew and Muslim, hearts of flesh so that we will not walk by when another human being is being hurt. Here are a couple of websites for news or for donations: www.doctorswithoutborders.org or Middle East Christian Outreach...their website is www.aboutmeco.org