I just finished watching this video and find myself totally speechless.
As I sit here at my nice desk looking out the window onto the safe neighborhood I live in, I can’t stop thinking about the children, the nine and ten year-old children out there, who are forced into a world of brutality and slavery that was never meant for them. While I danced around outside at the age of ten dreaming of what I could be when I grew up, these children are living in the midst of true evil, wishing to die over having to live their lives paralyzed by fear. Their reality is like nothing I can relate to. They have seen their families killed right before their very eyes. They have been forced to take the lives of innocent people with their own hands. They don’t know what freedom or carefree living is. And they have lost all hope of ever knowing a world apart from the one they were forced into.
They are soldiers of Joseph Kony’s army.
They are the children in the rebel army known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), with Joseph Kony as leader. The LRA has “terrorized northern Uganda for almost 20 years from the late eighties, killing and maiming more than 10,000 people, abducting 20,000 children to use as soldiers and sex slaves, and forcing at least 2 million civilians to live in camps.”
And it is still going on.
Between September and December 2008, it is estimated that the LRA killed 800 people and abducted 500 children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A genocide of mass proportion, and with no end in sight, is continuing on today throughout all of central Africa. But in its midst, a voice of awareness and activation is resounding. This is what living out Kingdom is all about — actively getting our hands dirty in what is going on in this world today and choosing to play a part in seeing real change come to manifest.
Click here to watch the video that is putting a voice to the invisible children who are
unnumbered,
unknown,
and unseen.
* Below is an excerpt from the film. The above image is from invisiblechildren.com.
