By John Ensor

Around the world countries often celebrate what is called the International Children’s Day. In China June 1st is called Children’s Day and it’s a big holiday. No work, lots of family parties, and it’s a big celebration of life, which is a little ironic given the fact that they had such a barbaric one child policy for over 35 years and forced abortion. Even though it’s ironic, still we’ll accept and enjoy the fact that they’ve set aside a day on their calendar to celebrate and value children and family. Children’s Day in places like Columbia is honored or celebrated on April 27th. In India Children’s Day is November 14th. All over the world many countries have a holiday that honors children. It isn’t all on the same day. This holiday was sort of manufactured by the United Nations. I’m not a very big United Nations fan when it comes to the value of human life. But I can appreciate the fact that they started this tradition some 40 years ago in which they started promoting the International Day of the Child and it has been picked up by a number of nations.

In my own view, I would love to see us as Christians do for Children’s Day in what earlier Christians did with the pagan Roman festival that celebrated the winter solstice, the moment in which the sun began to shine longer each day around December 25th. We call that Christmas today, but it started out as a pagan Roman holiday. Then Christians slowly began to usurp it and to fill it with new content to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ as the Son of Righteousness that comes and starts to expand throughout the world. So they saw this festival, which was just a Roman pagan festival around the winter solstice, as a way to redefine it and celebrate the expansion of the Son of Righteousness. I would love to see that happen with Children’s Day. I would love to see in China, Colombia, India and other places around the world, Christians turning Children’s Day more into an opportunity to teach and promote the Christian worldview of children: that they are made in the image of God, that they are endowed by our creator with human rights, and they deserve special protection. The weak always deserve special or extraordinary protection, simply because the weak, by definition, cannot protect themselves so they need protectors. So the Bible says to defend the rights of the needy and the poor, and of course the neediest and the poorest among us are going to be children, even unborn children are the most vulnerable. Just to continue the parallel, it was in 274 A.D. that this Roman pagan winter solstice festival became popularized. Within 60 years, the Christians had redefined that day into what we now know as Christmas. The first use of the word Christmas is actually found in 336 A.D. and has been popularized ever since.

My grandson is visiting today and he’s part of a celebration of children in this family. So as you join with us at PassionLife, just know that one of the things that we’re doing in places like India, Colombia, China, and elsewhere is trying to teach the value of life and tack it to Children’s Day so that like Christmas, it comes around every year. There’s a point in time in which the church decidedly and intentionally teaches the value of life as it begins at conception.

Thank you so much.