Loving Someone Else’s Children Like Your Own Will Save Your Soul

If you are willing

It seems we’ve lost our way, that we’ve forgotten how to love each other. The future we used to be willing to give our very lives for, doesn’t seem to matter to most because the children are not ours, and we have forgotten how to love them.

There were times, not long ago, when your kid belonged to every parent in the neighborhood. People felt responsible for them. The whole village was invested in their future. If your children weren’t safe, none of ours were either.

Now, a dead kid dies as if in a bubble. Alone, inconsequential, to a packed house of dry eyes, because your neighbors think, “It’s not my kid” or “My kid would know better” or “If you’d taught your kid some respect…”

The death of a child used to break the heart of the whole world. The very streets would weep. In today’s America, any child but your own is just road kill. A nasty carcass in the road to be swerved around. Just something you don’t want to wash off your tires later.

Our souls are poisoned. Our souls are poisoned with the virus of me and mine. I don’t care what happens, who dies, who goes hungry, who suffers, except when it is me or mine.

But if we could learn to love, remember what it was like to love all the children as if they were your own, we could save ourselves, cleanse our souls of this poison. An underfunded school on the other side of town threatens the future for all of us. A child who goes hungry or doesn’t have access to medical care, would be ours, not just theirs.

If we could fill our hearts with love that is not bound by the restrictions of blood or even geographic commonality, we could be free. We could know the joys of a heart that has reached its higher purpose, far beyond the mere pumping of blood.

We could fill our hearts with the song of a child’s unbridled laughter, and dance to it.

We have become wicked people in the absence of love for all the children. Our nation was burning long before heartbroken protesters set flames to department stores. It used to be our country. Now it is just mine, ours, not yours. Just like the children. They used to be ours.

The children are examples of the uncorrupted soul. To save our own souls we have to engage in the conscious act of loving them all. We have to believe that they are all our children.

If you love all the children you will be free. If you love all the children, you will never again think one of them deserved to die. If you love all the children you will never again make a joke of their suffering. You will never again think their lives don’t matter or their futures don’t matter or even that their parents don’t matter.

They are all our children. If they are lost along the way, it is because we have all failed them. If their spirits are broken, if they don’t know what it is like to be loved, it is because we were not there for them when they needed us most.

We can save ourselves through the act of loving them all. We must.

They are all ours.

Another story of mine that you will like.