The Four Fourteen Window

Children are the ultimate silent majority. Though they make up nearly half of the human family, they bear far more than their share of the world’s misery. Society’s ills spiral downward and inflict their cruelest blows on our vulnerable little ones.

In the last decade, more children have died in our global battles than soldiers. Every day, 35,000 of these precious young lives are snuffed out by preventable causes because we lack the heart and courage to fight on their behalf.

Every day, without influence, power or options, they suffer silently, their tears and fears known only to God.

- Wesley Stafford

Compassion International

The biggest little mission field in the world!

“Children are a gift from God; they are his reward, ”the psalmist exulted. Yet around our globe today, millions of innocent children are at risk physically and spiritually. This chapter is not easy reading. Persevere through it and you will be encouraged at what follows.

Children, defined as those under the age of 15, comprise over one-third of the earth’s population and over one-half of the population of Asia. In China alone there are an estimated 500 million children. Every hour 3,000 babies are born in China in spite of the "one child per family" policies. My strongest memory-image of children in that country is a little boy digging an irrigation trench with a huge man-sized shovel that was so big he could hardly manipulate it. This image is also the plight of many children in their daily living.

11-year-old Xia Hui died of cerebral shortage of oxygen when, after discovering that the boy had been playing truant from school, his father tied a rope around his waist and hung him from the ceiling.

Hu Dandan, a three-year-old boy from Jiangsu province, was kicked to death by his father because he could not remember a verse from a poem his father was helping him memorize.

According to one official Chinese newspaper, the majority of seven and eight-year-old Chinese children are beaten by their parents when they bring home bad grades.

The documentary, The Dying Rooms, was first broadcast in June 1995, exposing the horrific neglect which children in state orphanages are subjected to in the People's Republic of China. This film covered orphanages in five Chinese provinces and was the product of a covert investigation by a British film crew. The film team found baby girls tied to their chairs, legs spread over makeshift potties. Babies swaddled five to a cot were left unattended with a bottle of gruel perched precariously in their mouths.

In one orphanage, they found a baby girl about 18 months old, lying in a room by herself. She was fighting for breath, her eyes covered in mucous, her lips parched, her skin stretched tautly over her emaciated body. For several days she lay in her room, starving and in severe pain. No attempt was made to feed her or treat her medical condition and she died a slow painful death.

“Every baby in the orphanage was a girl,” wrote the film's director. “The only boys were mentally or physically disabled.” In some of the orphanages, death rates are as high as 20%.

China is by no means the only country where child abuse and neglect is rampant. Luz Neida Perez is a 13-year-old girl in the rural Colombian town of Planeta Rica. Her father sold her to a 61-year-old man in the community in order to buy medicine to help his ailing wife. The girl was sold into virtual slavery for slightly more than the going rate for a mule.

Theresa is 12 years old. She can be purchased for $50. If her fate is anything like that of tens of thousands of black Africans who have become chattel in Sudan's civil war, Theresa has been sold and bought. She is likely serving a master somewhere in northern Sudan, Libya or the Persian Gulf. If she was selected as a concubine, she will have been genitally mutilated to be acceptable in her master's culture and then she will have been bred.

In Samara, a city on the Volga in Russia, Sasha and Igor set up their stall at seven in the morning. There's stiff adult competition in the computer games end of the market, and unless they're early, they can’t compete. At 14, they run their own stall and keep the profits. A few stalls along, Andrei isn't so lucky; he works for a 16-year-old who pays him 50 cents a day. But Andrei hasn't much choice. "My mother works in a bread factory, she doesn't make enough money so I have to work as well," he said.

A recent report says that of the 28 million children in Russia, six million are not enrolled at school but are forced to work to feed themselves or their families as the country suffers the consequences of economic collapse.
As in any Russian city, by mid morning Samara’s churches and cemeteries are busy - they're the traditional begging grounds for war veterans and widows. These days however the professional beggars are getting much younger. Eleven and nine-year-old Masha and Misha say they have to beg since their parents are ill. 14-year-old Vlodya says "Of course my parents know I'm here. They told me to come!"

Estimates vary widely concerning the total number of children living on the streets in the Russian Federation, but most people agree that they number at least one million. In Chita, Siberia alone, where winter temperatures can sink as low as -40 degrees, there are at least 1,000 street children. They sleep under cardboard boxes in the market square, in the garbage cellars of apartment blocks, or underground on the pipes that carry heating from the centrally controlled power stations right across the city. Most of these children are "social orphans", who have run away from home because their alcoholic parents beat them, or refuse to let them into the apartments until they bring some food with them.

A candid article in the official Vietnam News said an inquiry by police and local authorities in Bac Can province, north of Hanoi, had found 82 children being used as cheap labour in 30 mines. The newspaper said teenagers aged between 13 and 17 were working in dangerous and filthy conditions, each hauling as much as four tons of rubble out of the mines every day. Many of the children were coughing blood due to the arduous work, and were locked up at night by mine owners, who feared that their cheap labour force would escape.

A young girl in rural Nepal begins her day very early by taking care of the animals before working all day in the rice paddies and then care for the animals in the evening. She will work over 12 of her 14 waking hours.

An estimated 250,000 children are combatants in Third World conflicts around the globe. Many are shorter than the weapons they carry. In a tribal area of Burma, 12-year-old twin brothers, Luther and John Htoo, are unquestioned leaders of a jungle military base called “God’s Army.” They are fighting against the Burmese government for Karen autonomy. The adults believe the boys offer divine protection.

In Cambodia, approximately 40 percent of all prostitutes are children. Even items on the Internet advertise that in Cambodia “a six-year-old is available for US$3.” Many child prostitutes are in brothels against their will. Some are even supplied by parents for badly needed money. In other cases, the children are kidnapped and then sold to brothels where they are forced to serve up to ten customers a night.

Five-year-old Andreas lives in Mozambique. Witchdoctors cured his father’s illness and he decided to donate his son to them. This meant Andreas' life belonged to the witchdoctor and he would end up a witchdoctor too. As a sign of his devotion to the Amandlose (ancestors of Satan) he wears a charm around his neck.

Usually girls are donated, but if a family does not have any girls, a boy is given instead. In the case of a girl, she later becomes the wife of the witchdoctor. The boy ends up working for the witchdoctor.

Countries projected to have the youngest of the world by the year 2010 are: Palestine, Uganda, Oman, Somalia, Niger and Yemen. Over 46% of the populations of each of these countries will likely be under the age of 15.
Countries with the largest numbers of children by the year 2010 (in descending order) are: India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, USA, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia and Iran. Over half of the world's children will live in these ten countries.

Here are some other sobering statistics about present conditions to consider:

• 40 million children are aborted every year in the world. (United Nations)
• 10.5 million children under age five die each year. Two-thirds are preventable. (UNICEF)
• 5.6 million children die per year of malnutrition and starvation daily. (UNICEF) 
• At least 2 million children die annually because they have not been immunized against preventable diseases. (Children At Risk [CAR])
• As of 2005, 2.3 million children are infected with the AIDS virus and an estimated 15 million have lost at least one parent because of AIDS. (UNICEF) 
• South of the Sahara in Africa, AIDS has orphaned 12 million children under 15 years of age.  (UNICEF)
• Over 50 million children annually are unregistered—beginning life with no identity. (UNICEF) 
• At least 1.8 million children are sexually exploited—many girls as prostitutes. (UNICEF)
• 130 million girls are affected by female genital mutilation/cutting. (UNICEF) 
• There are over 100 million street children. (CAR)
• 246 million children are ensnared in child labour. (UNICEF) 
• More than 2 million children have been killed in wars worldwide in the past decade. Over 6 million have been disabled, maimed, blinded and brain damaged, and more than 20 million children have lost their homes in this period and more than 1 million orphaned. (UNICEF)
• The average American 13-year-old has witnessed 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other acts of violence on TV. This is based on the average child watching three hours of television a day. (American Psychological Association) 
• 750,000 British children have no contact with their fathers following the breakdown of marital relationships. (Family Policies Study Centre, Survey of Lone Parents)

BUT...

• Children are important to God. Children are mentioned 1,957 times in the Bible.
• Children are an enormous People Group. They comprise 1.8 billion (i.e. 1/3) of the world's population. They are the largest of all People Groups.
• Children are a forgotten People Group - Mission strategists tend to only target the 10/40 Window.
• Children are a suffering People Group. In the past decade 2 million were killed in war; 4.5 million were left disabled.
• Children are a receptive People Group. 60 - 85% of Christians in North America make a decision for Christ between the ages 4 and 14 years. This age group makes up 25% of the Christian church today.

Because of this, some missiologists with a heart and burden for the world’s children have coined a new term for them called THE 4/14 WINDOW, indicating a focus on those between the ages of four and 14 who are highly susceptible to the best and worst in today's world. In too many places, the 4/14 window is dirty, broken, and often seems painted shut. This window of opportunity is also referred to as the biggest little mission field in the world!
Children from families of the Suffering Church also suffer for reasons of faith—much like their parents.

In a simple village school in central Vietnam, a class of 12-year-old children were talking excitedly about a teacher who had come to their village, and with some people from a nearby church had organized the most interesting story-telling times they had ever heard. They had learned about Jesus and some of the children had decided to become Christians.

These children were telling others about their discovery with such enthusiasm that it attracted attention.  One of the teachers reported this "dangerous" activity to the local security police.  The police arrived at the school, gathered the offending children together and told them that they must cease and desist from talking about this "foreign superstition".

Subdued for a couple of days, the children soon resumed their "Jesus" talk. It wasn't long before the police again showed up at school and picked out the three "ringleaders." These children were taken to a police camp and held incommunicado for an entire week!  Pleas by their very concerned parents fell on deaf ears!

When the children eventually were released, they told harrowing stories of their treatment.  For being enthusiastic in their talk about their new faith, they were interrogated for hours about the identity of the teacher who had told them the stories, and lectured to about the stupidity of the "superstitions" they had believed. They were deprived of food and water for long periods of time.  The 12-year-old boy who was the strongest and most resistant to the questioning was taken into the bathroom where his head was held under water until he almost drowned.

Though unsatisfied with the limited amount of information they got from the children, the police eventually released them to their families and told them that because they persisted in the religious faith, they would never be permitted to attend the public school again.

In Pakistan, Khushi Masih and his wife lost their three daughters ages 11 to 15. The family’s Muslim landlords forcibly took the three sisters from their one-room rented home in Rawalpindi. When Khushi Masih tried to register a case with the police to recover his daughters, he was told they had converted to Islam and could no longer stay with their Christian parents. Masih’s lawyer said, “Probably the abductors wanted these girls for illicit relations but they are using religion just to get custody.”

Children are also included in that great company of Christian martyrs. In early 1999, Christians on the spice island of Ambon, Indonesia were holding a children's camp. An extremist Muslim mob approached the camp with their machetes waving.

The entire camp was made to stand out in the playground. One 15-year-old boy, Roy Pontoh, was singled out. The Muslim extremists asked him, "Who are you?" He replied, to gasps of amazement from all who watched, "I am a soldier of Jesus Christ." His left arm was then chopped off in a single stroke of a machete.

His continuing responses of love and devotion to Jesus enraged the mob further, who sliced his stomach so that his intestines gushed out.  A third time they asked him, "Who are you?" and he gasped his final words on earth, "I am a soldier of Jesus Christ." At that he was beheaded, and his body thrown into a gutter.  His younger brother witnessed the martyrdom, and ran away.

In the face of these horrifying and harrowing experiences, there are many faith-building stories that come from Christian children who suffer for their faith - some great examples of witnessing to the faith! This is the focus of this little booklet along with how we can minister effectively to these little ones in restricted areas.

Sometimes a thunderbolt will shoot from a clear sky; and sometimes, into the midst of a peaceful family – without warning of gathered storm above or slightest tremble of earthquake beneath – will fall a terrible fact, and from that moment everything is changed. The air is thick with cloud, and cannot weep itself clear. There may come a gorgeous sunset, though.

- George Macdonald