Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Using Children

   "The FBI figures 300,000 minors in America are employed as prostitutes each year. Staggering. One for every thousand people. An advocacy group called Shared Hope International estimates their average age is 13. Thirteen years old on average. Try to wrap your mind around this. The Department Of Justice says there are pimps in America earning money off girls as young as 5 and 6. Last year, the U.S., together with Mexico and the Phillipines, ranked as one of the world's worst places for human trafficking. Worldwide, millions of children live in slavery. UNICEF says as many as 2 million more are trafficked each year, a great many for sex. The UN's International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that at any given moment, at least 40.3 million people, including children, are in forced labor, bonded labor, and commercial sex servitude. Four out of five are female. Half are children. The slave trade, the ILO believes, is a $150 billion business, saturated in unchecked greed, sleaze and abuse. And shamefully, it is the fastest growing industry in the world. Somewhere in here, the imagination of many of us reaches its limit. Unexposed to such grotesque realities, we can barely conceive of them. Yet this is only one of literally countless ways that people put other people through indescribable torment. Cruelty. Tyranny. Corruption. Thievery. Poor resource management that results in starvation, poverty and disease. Racism. Religious persecution. Violence of every stripe. Full-blown war. The human mind can only take in so much. And in this information-saturated age, news of people mistreating their fellow human beings come in such a torrent that we can easily grow numb to it. These blights are painfully endemic to the human condition, resilient against virtually all efforts to stop them." - J. Hilliker

Friday, August 23, 2019

To Believe And Know

"BLESSED is the man that trusteth in the Lord and whose hope the Lord is.  For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.  The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?  I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings." - Jeremiah 17: 7-10.