I can’t stop crying about Jakelin Caal, the little 7 year old Guatemalan girl killed by border patrol agents.

I’ve been crying for the children I knew would die on the border since I heard about the migrant caravan a few months ago, but it came and went in waves. Now, I can’t get this girl’s face out of my head.

She looks like the students I’ve had throughout the years. She looks like my little siblings when they were 7. She looks just like a kid I teach every week, a class about adventure. We sing and dance and stretch and read story books while laying down on the carpet. She wears usually wears a deep pink t-shirt or a white t-shirt and too big, bedazzled jeans. Her favorite animal is a bat and she likes to watch TV before she falls asleep.

I am, by no means, perfect at my job. I lose my patience and am dismissive when I should be taking things my students say seriously.

I am trying to slow down. I am trying to ask god to teach me to edify the christ-light present in each of them.

I keep thinking of this 13 year old girl I worked with last year when I worked at a foster care facility. She had a sharp wit, a foul mouth, and would scream so loud she would literally make herself pass out from migraines. She was one of those kids who genuinely made the adults in her life crack up. I think she’ll be a comedian someday.

She was in foster care because her dad, who she loved and spoke of often, was deported.

How can we respect the divinity of children when we crush them from the start?

There are so many problems with the way we treat children. We treat them like they are weaker and have less to bring than adults. We squelch their autonomy. Hell, even the way we compliment them is diminutive, the way we talk about their purity and innocence and wonder.

Anyone who’s worked in a third grade classroom would know language acquisition, flexibility, and speed are much more common gifts among children then purity and innocence.

I want a world where teachers and caregivers can foster children’s gifts and recognize their christ light. Where we can nurture the dreams they’ve built for them before the realities of adulthood crush their imaginations.

But how can we foster that light when, not only are children’s basic needs not being met, their vulnerability is being weaponized and politicized? When protecting borders is more important than a little girl’s actual life?

Childhood is an oppressed intersection we need to look at. And like all intersections, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It interacts with other intersections. Children are considered disposable. They are both intentionally considered political pawns, leveraged to control the behavior of their parents, and mindlessly caught in the wake of the United States violence against already marginalized groups– from children of parents incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses to the children being detained at the border, to the children being killed by the US backed war in Yemen, (I could go on and on).

Protecting children isn’t about their purity or innocence and wonder, or some other objectifying, saccharine bullshit we say about children.

It’s about defending the very real christ-light in these very real young people.

It’s about materially supporting people we have a responsibility to. About decreasing their suffering and guiding them in the healthiest, most fulfilled lives possible.

I think about what jesus said about children.

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble!¨

It is better to tie a millstone around our neck than to perpetuate and be complicit in systems of racism that kill children.

I pray that we repent, but if not, I know god’s judgement falls upon us.