You may be thinking that this is an odd topic for someone to write about, especially in a blog filled with “wifey” things. However, this is just the thing we as Christian women, married or not, should be knowledgeable about. We hear so many things in our media about local stories, elections, what the President ate for dinner in China, etc., but we never hear about the hardships of the world unless it may directly threaten the United States. As Christians, we are called to carry one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), but how can we do so if we don’t know what the burden’s are?
But again, why child soldiers?
I didn’t give this much thought after I heard about the Invisible Children’s project around eighth or ninth grade. Even then, I hardly understood what this organization did or stood for. I knew they were against Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, but that’s about it. He was a bad guy and they were fighting back.
It wasn’t until I was sitting on a shuttle on my way to see my husband that it became more real for me. I sat next to a man who said he had just returned from visiting his homeland in Uganda. We got to talking a little bit since there was nothing else to do for three hours. I don’t exactly remember how the conversation led up to this, but soon I was hearing about how he became a child soldier at nine years old through the time he was fourteen.
How oblivious was I to the world? Here are people like him, having to grow up in such a violent stricken place, and then here are people like me who hear about our own national problems and think they’re the worst of the worst. Sometimes I think we have horse blinders on to the rest of the problems in the world and all we can see is what’s right in front of us.
But listening to his story put a drive in me to learn more about this issue, whether it is still prevalent in our world today or not. I had a desire to learn what was going on beyond our nation’s borders and why it was happening.
So I used my capstone seminar class my final semester of college that focused specifically on developing countries to dig deep into this issue. The things I found were heart wrenching, still are heart wrenching. Because of the things I found, I knew from the bottom of my heart that God wanted me to share about these things. So I did my final project, presentation, and essay on this topic to share to my classmates. However, that didn’t seem enough.
After graduation, I still had this lingering desire to share about child soldiers. I prayed about what I should do for months. After doing the research I did, I found that even the organizations that are driven towards rescuing children out of that violent life struggle to do so because it’s so dangerous in those areas. Not only are there safety issues, but it’s extremely difficult to track whether a group is using children as soldiers or not. So what was I, a women married to a man in the military, to do about this?
All I could think about is that I simply need to share and tell of this news. Just as we as Christians are called to share and tell of the good news of Jesus Christ, I felt led to share the news of child soldiers.
So this is why I am writing on this topic. It is not easy to write about this, because it is heavy on the heart. But it does need to be shared. It is my hope and prayer that this news is spread so that the people who are able to fight back directly can receive extra help in the name of Christ.