The last two weeks have overwhelmed me with the number of child abuse cases I have heard about. The volume and the acts have both taken life out of me and infused me with new mother life, making me more diligent to love my children the way God intends for me to love them. Even with my own resolve, I was moved to challenge others to examine themselves for even the slightest case of parental disdain for children, particularly their own. Read more about this in my latest EEW column, that begins below:

I warn you now. This article ain’t pretty. But how can it be, examining parental disdain for children that encompasses child hatred from gross sexual and physical abuse to cruel and even subtle mental and emotional abuse? The only way depths of sin can be extracted and discarded is if we identify and search for it, looking externally and internally. The ugliness of this wicked world and, sometimes and in some ways, in our homes, challenges us to look at the ugliness in our own hearts.

I cried like a baby when I heard the news: a 10-year-old girl weighed just 32 pounds, emaciated and malnourished, starved by the hands of her mother who locked the child in a closet where the child slept and relieved herself. Undoubtedly, the child experienced more than physical starvation, longing for her mother’s love, hoping someone would relieve her from pain and shame and confusion and wondering why this someone wasn’t her mother, why her mother was the one to do this to her. Even as I write I cry when I think of her; the 3 and 4 year old whose mother left them home alone so she could go party; the 4-year-old stepson of gospel singer James Fortune who Fortune scalded in a bathtub; and the victims of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach found guilty on 43 of 45 counts of sodomy and rape of young men entrusted to his care. All this, and the thought that Sandusky is apparently guilty of many more abuses, including sexually molesting his own son, has had me sad and contemplative for days. Read more here.

My One Thousand Gifts List

#641-650
An invitation to speak at the Mother’s Day luncheon for the LIFT Women’s Resource Center
A relatively stress-free evening alone with the children and the challenge they presented (like one of the little ones wetting his pants and flooding the bathroom floor while I was trying to cook dinner
My husband demonstratively enjoying my house burgers
A rich time of fellowship with God in spite of Nate interrupting me
Another year for my sister
Getting an unexpected box of food from my neighbor that I was able to share with someone in need
Charyse doing my hair
Giving clothes to Sharon for Caleb, my nephew
A flattering and encouraging critique consultation from Ms. Burke
Talking to Nichole on her way home from Chicago