When your child is sick, you don’t really sleep. You listen even as you doze. "Was that a cough? I’ll just check on her again." You lay down on the floor next to his bed. I remember the night when we thought one of our children had spinal meningitis: the high fever, the stiff neck, the frantic rush to the emergency room. Don’t lecture any parent about responsibility for their children when they are sick. Parents worry all the time about their children’s health. They have to in this American society, because apparently nobody else is worrying.
It is a sick society that would cause a frantic parent to pause in that rush to try to get medical help for their child and have to think about whether they will have to choose between paying the mortgage or paying for the hospital visit. Half of all bankruptcies are caused by catastrophic illness in an uninsured or underinsured family. Wouldn’t you sell everything you own if your child had cancer to buy the best treatment, just to see your baby live and grow? What kind of a society makes you face that choice?
“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” All three Gospels record Jesus reprimanding the disciples for keeping children away from him when their parents were trying to bring them to him for a blessing. The kingdom of heaven belongs to children, Jesus taught. The King James version uses the older “suffer the little children” to mean “permit them or allow them to come”, but in this case it could carry an additional meaning of how absolutely abhorrent it is to see children’s suffering and keep them away from the blessing of medical help. Truly if, as Jesus said, you have to become like a child to receive the Kingdom of God, what does it say about you if instead your willful ignorance of children’s needs causes them to suffer? It says you are not worthy of the kingdom of God, that’s what it says.
We have the money to pay for health care insurance for every child in America and instead we are choosing to spend it on making war and still more war. That is truly sick, morally sick, perhaps even fatally sick because when you can see the suffering so many children without access to adequate medical care and do nothing, you are lost.
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