What Life is worth

46 million children are aborted globally ever year.
6,000 children are infected with HIV/AIDS every day, adding to the 43 million suffering from the disease.
852 million people worldwide are dying of hunger; out of 100 children born in 2000, 30 will most likely suffer from malnutrition in their first five years of life, 26 will not be immunization against the basic childhood diseases, 19 will lack access to safe drinking water and 40 to adequate sanitation, and 17 will never go to school. In developing countries, every fourth child lives in abject poverty, in families with an income of less than $1 a day.
The most egregious consequence is that nearly 11 million children each year about 30,000 children a day die before reaching their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable causes. Of these children, 4 million die in their first month of life. In many of the world's poorest countries, child mortality rates have either not changed or else they have worsened. In sub-Saharan Africa, child mortality averages 173 deaths per 1,000 live births, and in South Asia 98 deaths per 1,000 many times the industrialized country average of 7 deaths per 1,000.

The numbers seem so numbing.

We complain about having when the have-nots are dying. We throw out our excess while for others, that excess exceeds all they've ever known.

What is life worth? When are we going to get back our humanity?
We say its not our problem - they live somewhere else, yet we live in a society that legalizes the death of more than 1 million unborn children every year and exports doctors to do the same in other countries. We live in a country that authorized the sterilization of American Indian women in the 1970s. We walk by thousands of homeless families everyday with $4 lattes in our hand and think about how they should get a job. We fight for the right to own guns when guns killed 5 times as many people in the last 10 years as died in the Vietnam Conflict.

What is life worth? When is God going to get fed up with this immoral life we are living? We look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomara and think it was because of the homosexuality, yet it was their contempt for life and hospitality that was a more grievous sin. Christ proved what he could do when we bring all we have to the table -- he turned water into wine, he took loaves and fishes and feed a multitude, he is willing to make miracles happen if we are willing to be the tools through which he can work.

What is life worth? Jesus thought enough of it to give it up for all of us. Maybe we shouldn't waste it scraping our excess down the drain.