It may have happened more than I knew, but the first time I remember hearing about someone abducting and murdering a child was in 1981. A boy in Hollywood, Fla., disappeared from the toy department at Sears while his mother shopped in another part of the store. Ironically, the department store was across the street from the city's police station.
The little boy -- whose murderer has never been arrested -- was Adam Walsh.
As a child growing up in Arkansas, I found his death and the potential for the same tragedy in my neighborhood unbelievable. I had never seen the underbelly of humanity. I had never come in contact with anyone who wanted to physically harm another person, especially a child. I was -- as most children are -- naïve.
I lived my life accordingly. My brother, my friends and I rode our bicycles miles from home, pretended to fight famous battles from various wars in the woodlands behind our house, and even felt free to roam the neighborhood at night without fear.
We were not only young; we were free to be young and free to be carefree.
It has taken the birth and care of two children of my own for me to realize with regret that my children will never experience the same freedom. They will not be free because they live in a nation that preys on its children.
Thousands of children have vanished from playgrounds, cradles, shopping malls, and even their own front yards in the past 10 years. The number of missing children this year in the United States stands at more than 3,000. And those who abduct and harm them are becoming more brazen.
Polly Klaas was kidnapped at knifepoint from a slumber party in a California home in October 1993. Morgan Nick disappeared while playing on a sand pile at a baseball field in Arkansas in June 1995. Amber Hagerman was snatched away while playing in a parking lot in Arlington, Texas, with a friend in January 1996. Recently, Elizabeth Smart was awakened by her abductor in the middle of the night and taken from her upper-class Salt Lake City home, and 5-year-old Samantha Runnion was abducted from her front yard in Southern California and murdered in July.
The nation's children also are in jeopardy even while they are in the womb. Barrett Duke of the SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission references statistics that indicate that more than 1.3 million unborn children are aborted each year. Other pro-life lobbyists estimate that number to be as high as 1.7 million.
Organizations such as Planned Parenthood bless the act of murdering the unborn in the name of convenience and even protect those who murder children after they have been born. In a recent case, Planned Parenthood of Storm Lake, Iowa, refused to cooperate when investigators found the shredded body of an infant in a local recycling facility. Police determined the age of the infant and then requested pregnancy test records from local pro-abortion pregnancy centers in order to determine possible suspects.
Planned Parenthood refused to assist in the case, saying that such records were "confidential." Their response -- callous but not at all surprising -- indicates that the death of a child is but a mere pin prick on their conscience.
Has our nation become equally accustomed to the abuse and murder of its children? I, for one, think it has.
In recent days the media have devoted much time to covering the abductions of a few children, but most go unnoticed. Children lost to predators only become "real" to most people when they see their faces on milk cartons or when a flier with a coupon for dry cleaning on the reverse side arrives in the mailbox.
When allegations of sexual abuse arose within the Catholic Church in America, bishops and archbishops sought to conceal the problem rather than be transparent. Only after church officials were dragged kicking and screaming into the public forum did they concede that the problem was widespread.
Even the Supreme Court has forgotten that laws are established to prohibit and protect. The court recently stumbled blindly into apathy for America's children when it upheld the right to publish "virtual child pornography," ruling that no children are harmed in the production of the images outlawed by the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act.
There is little doubt, however, that current computer technology will create realistic images of children in inappropriate situations -- and those images will incite inappropriate feelings in those who prey on the innocent.
And they are innocent. They are completely unaware of the depravity of those who would harm them.
Jesus spoke often about little children. He saw in them the best and most pure characteristics of humanity. He encouraged his followers to have childlike faith, warned against anyone leading a child into sin, and gathered children in his arms and blessed them. As a matter of fact, Mark 10:13 indicates that Jesus was quite indignant with his own disciples for keeping children away from him.
If our nation understood Christ's love for children, and even for the pedophile, no child would be abused or aborted. No child would be abducted or murdered.
The best hour of my day is between 8 and 9 p.m. Sometime during that hour -- as surely as the sun sets -- my oldest daughter will assemble a mountain of books and plop them in my lap.
"Let's read one of them, Daddy," she will say. "Okay, Libby, which do you want to read?" "That one," she will reply.
Her book of choice lately has been "The Three Little Pigs." The first time I read the revised edition of the book I noticed that the wolf was no longer a "big bad wolf." He was merely a misunderstood wolf who needed acceptance and validation. The little pigs even found a job for the wolf at the conclusion of the story.
Frequently these days, perhaps because of this book, I've begun to think of my childhood when we sang, "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" I watch the evening news and answer, "I am."
I do not fear that the wolf will harm me; I fear that he will harm my children. I realize how vigilant I must be in order to protect them because they are, as the psalmist claimed in Psalm 127:3, a gift from the Lord. The best protection I can offer them is to be resolute in prayer -- to pray that the Lord will place a hedge of protection around my little lambs.
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