When Broken Bones Go Untreated

A reflection on suffering and complacency.

Nov 26, 2023

A couple of weeks ago, our family visited my sister in San Diego; we stayed in an Italian-style inn on Coronado island. Each morning, I took red stone steps from our room to the open air patio below where I was greeted by blue tile fountains and green palms hidden from the street by an enclosure of cream stucco. In San Diego, it stayed sunny all week. Cool mornings warmed into the seventies during the day, and I shed my sweaters and jeans for the memory of summer. It felt like paradise, but it wasn’t.

Not even two hours after we landed, a cyclist hit my two-year-old on a pedestrian path—a long sidewalk along the edge of Coronado, a path made for walkers and kid bikes and four-person slow-driving trolleys. My son darted across the sidewalk as a biker rounded the corner at full-speed. I heard my husband yell his name or maybe it was my sister—all I know is that I turned to witness the impact, the sight of my slight blonde boy spinning away from the wheel, colliding with cold concrete.

There’s nothing worse than seeing your child in pain, helpless, with you there, powerless to stop it. But later, once I was reassured of his safety, my thoughts turned, and all I could think about were the kids on my social media feed—bloodied and shaking and powdered with the ashes of their homeland. I saw a mother pulling her two children, both strapped into car seats, down a dusty road. I saw premature newborns lying on hospital beds instead of in incubators, their bodies wrapped in foil or surgical cloth or incontinence pads in efforts to keep them warm. I saw kids, not much older than mine, taking their last breaths without the presence of a mother or father holding their hands or brushing back their hair. I can only imagine how they called out for their family and how no one came. There’s nothing worse than witnessing your child in pain, except the reality of your child in pain, all alone.

I think of my worries for my son whose injury, thankfully, was only a broken collarbone. How I fretted in the waiting room, in the x-ray area, in the open-air cubicles of the ER. (California, y’all.) But my child had access to care—to food and water, to medicine and slings and even toys to distract. And I cannot fathom being the mother of a child in these pictures: children whose broken bones go untreated, whose bodies shake from pain without relief, whose growing minds cannot comprehend what’s happening to the world around them.

We are back home now, and this week we spent Thanksgiving at the beach with my family. The water was calm, the color of sea glass. The days were mostly overcast, but the last day was blue sky scattered with cotton cloud. My children ran carefree along the sand, building castles and driving cars and making sand angels. If they saw a boat in the water or a helicopter in the sky, they treasured it as a rare delight. We see the helicopters often in the summer, and they wave gleefully at Marines that you can see from the open side door. Marines who wave cheerfully back.

As grateful as I am for a safe place for my children to roam and play, I can’t help but think about the many other children who have nowhere to run. Nowhere to escape into the imaginings of the mind. Children who do not delight in seeing a plane overhead. Children who, instead, run to shelter when they hear the zip of aircraft passing by. Children who huddle with their families, or whatever remains of them, hoping the shelter of the building can keep them safe. Children who already know the likelihood that the building will fall, crushing them under its weight.

God is the God of Israel, but He is equally God of the Nations. Historically, in the Scriptures, God has sided with the poor and the oppressed. God made a covenant with the family of Abraham, Israel, and He set them apart to be a holy priesthood, a light to the nations. Americans have long supported Israel, at least in part, because of a scriptural understanding that the people of Israel are God’s people. But we are all God’s people. Made in His image. And I believe God cares deeply about and is grieved by the suffering in Gaza.

To have compassion on the Palestinian people is not the equivalent of supporting Hamas. To acknowledge that Palestinians lived, prior to Oct 7, under the rule of Israel and to advocate for greater freedom, is not equivalent to being an anti-Semite. There have been tragedies on both sides of this conflict, but we are not currently witnessing a fair war. That said, we would also be wise to remember that our fight, as Christians, is not with flesh and blood but with the prince and principalities of darkness. And darkness is closer than we might imagine.

Hamas is clearly a terror organization that must be held responsible for its crimes; at the same time, we in the global West must also take responsibility for our part in fueling terrorism. We do not have clean hands—our involvement in other nations affairs has often created hostility, and in the midst of that hostility, in the midst of corruption and poverty and bleak futures, radicalization often rises as a solution, albeit a flawed one. Too often we have rushed into a situation, trying to help or change it, without realizing the full extent of the problem. We have knowingly and unknowingly created more division and added fuel to a fire that was already burning.

I am grateful for my home, for the freedoms I have as an American. I am grateful for the men and women who have sacrificed their lives for the cause of American freedom. I am grateful for clean water and warm showers and plentiful food to eat. I am grateful for my middle-class American life. And yet, I am aware and growing ever more so that my middle-class American life is one of great privilege—both within my own nation and in the world.

Jesus once said, “To whom much is given, much is required.” And I think that means that we cannot continue to live our lives in complacency. We have to realize that our purchasing of cheap goods means the lack of a living wage for the people who produced them. We have to know that the parts in our iPhones, on which I am currently drafting this Substack, come from cobalt mines with inhumane conditions. We have to recognize that our pets often live better lives than many people in the world—people crowded into refugee camps or on the run from genocide, hunger, or war. Because these things don’t always make headlines, we know almost nothing about the extensiveness of the problem. And we have to become informed. Because how we live directly impacts the world.

These things are not my fault nor are they yours. We are, in some ways, enslaved to our culture and the corporations that engineer it. But we are not powerless to change our world. Our continued vote for unchecked capitalism, our continued purchasing of unsustainable goods, our support of businesses that use unfair practices, our continued silence against injustice—these actions only further perpetuate the problem. I am not a saint preaching from the pulpit; I am a human in the thick of life, trying to balance my own daily needs and desires with those of my neighbor. But I hope to leave the world better for my children, and I am committed to taking small steps to make change.

For me, that looks like forgoing paper towels and learning to compost, growing my own vegetables, serving my children real food to eat, and teaching them to enjoy nature and take care of our planet. It means introducing them to people who are different from us and letting them grow up in friendship. It means parenting in a gentle way, and being mindful of the words that I speak to them because our words can have lasting impact. It means being open and honest with their questions about the world, instead of giving easy answers. It means writing about things that matter to me and sharing resources that both inspire and convict. These are small things, and I can do more. But I cannot do nothing.

Today, and every day that follows, may we learn to love and have compassion for our fellow human beings—both friends and enemies. May we seek not convenience, but fight hard to make this world a better one.

Jenica

Joy & Jubilee

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