Thus Far and No Further

Thus Far and No Further
Psalm 8

The crying of babies and sucklings is hard to listen to yet hard to avoid. In the area that is now South Sudan, one in seven children dies before his or her fifth birthday. In Darfur, countless young girls have been raped and abducted. The media report that the rebellion of southern Sudan against the north led to the enslaving of children in the south; internecine strife also involved the impaling of children on fence posts. If boys did get the chance to grow beyond infancy, many ended up as boy soldiers. Elsewhere in Africa, girls were captured and drafted into rebel armies where they were also raped. In the United States, it is said that a case of child abuse is reported every ten seconds and that four or five children die each day because of abuse. Then there are the babies that are conceived but do not get as far as birth; in the United States, it is said that over three thousand abortions are performed every day...