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If you’re reading this and you’re one of the few who follow my musings, you know I try not to write too much about the dark things that hound us. I just finished watching a video that moved me to tears. I had a strong debate with myself about whether I should write about what I watched. My heart won the argument. I’m writing about this to deal with my emotions. Self-serving, I know, but my intentions are good.

A few days ago, a four-year-old child by the name of Maleah Davis went missing in Houston, Texas. Of course, the normal amber alert and other efforts were activated in attempts to locate her. Her dismembered body was later found on the side of Interstate 30, over three hundred miles from Houston near Fulton, Arkansas. Arkansas is the state in which I live. Authorities say Maleah’s body had been dumped on the side of the Interstate, and sometime afterward, run over by a mower, performing regular highway maintenance.

I won’t get into any more details reported in the news about circumstances surrounding this precious little girl’s “far-too-early” exit from her young life. The preceding details may be too much, as scant as they are, for you. They certainly were hard for me to write about. However, I guess I should say that there was CCTV footage of Maleah’s mother’s boyfriend carrying a laundry basket from the apartment in which they lived, containing a garbage bag. Enough!

Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr. composed a song in 1939 titled, “God Bless the Child.” The lyrics start with:

” Them that’s got shall have
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own”

I’m not exactly sure what the lyrics to this song mean fully; however, I do feel strongly that little Maleah wasn’t blessed, and she didn’t have her own; her own opportunity to live a full, blessed life. Our children are among our most precious of God-given resources. They provide sunlight in our lives today, and they are inheritors of the future. When we abuse them, misuse them and cut them down, preventing the harvest of all they have to offer the world, we commit the most heinous examples of what inhumanity looks like.

God bless you Maleah, and may you rest in peace. I wish that had been so on this side.

I’m old and blessed…hope you will be too.